Abstract
Maria Smith recollects her early life growing up in Jefferson City, Missouri, attending Catholic schools and later studying Political Science in college. Smith decided to go to law school soon after, later reconnecting with her faith. Smith highlights the need to find community in her life, which eventually led her to Cleveland’s Near West Side. Smith and her husband were involved in the Witness for Peace where they lived and worked in Nicaragua during the Contra War. They would eventually live in Brazil for a period of time before returning to Cleveland where she was involved in various community organizations like West Side Community House, May Dugan Center, and Cleveland Nonviolence Network.
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Interviewee
Smith, Maria (interviewee)
Interviewer
White, Bali (interviewer)
Project
Near West Side Housing Activism
Date
8-12-2024
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
92 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Maria Smith interview, 12 August 2024" (2024). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 544015.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1336
Transcript
Bali White [00:00:00] To hit record. Hi, everyone. I’m Bali White, here with the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project. Today I’m here with Maria Smith. We are at the IRTF offices, which is the InterReligious Task Force on Central America and Colombia. It is August 12, 2024. How are you?
Maria Smith [00:00:21] I’m fine. Thank you for interviewing me today.
Bali White [00:00:24] Of course. So, could you introduce yourself, when and where you were born?
Maria Smith [00:00:29] Sure. My name’s Maria Smith, and I was born July 15, 1958.
Bali White [00:00:37] Okay. Are you from Cleveland originally?
Maria Smith [00:00:41] No, I was born in Jefferson City, Missouri.
Bali White [00:00:44] Okay. And what was your hometown kind of like? Was it, like, a small suburban area?
Maria Smith [00:00:49] So, Jefferson City is the capital of Missouri. [crosstalk] It’s one of the hardest ones for school kids, and it’s right smack in the middle of Missouri. At the time that I grew up, it was much smaller than it is now, and it was basically a lot less diverse than it is now. There’s a historically Black school there called Lincoln University. So it was– Lincoln University was going through a pretty significant transition when I was there, but I was fortunate to still be able to experience the richness of the intelligentsia that was teaching. There was a lot of very talented, super intelligent African American professors that couldn’t go anywhere else because of segregation. So there was basically- There were the white people, there were the Black people, and the Black people, basically were the faculty and their family at Lincoln University and then the townies. I think there’s a lot in literature about that kind of dynamic of people that are those that aren’t part of the intellectual class in a setting where there’s a university. But fortunately, Lincoln was– Everything they had was open to the public. So I was able to experience probably a richness of cultural events that people in a small town like that could never experience. So I saw Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Leroy Jones, saw tons of music groups, James Brown, Fifth Dimension, Temptations, Ebony magazine, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but it was like the magazine, Black magazine. It used to have its fashion show there. Every year or so, my mom would take me to the Ebony fashion show. So, yeah, it was interesting because it was- I was born there, then my parents moved away. My father was in the military. And so I think when I was two, they lived in Washington, DC. When I was three, my dad was stationed in Panama. So from the time I was three to the time I was five, I lived in Panama. We came back kind of mid school year. So I finished. I did half of kindergarten in Panama and half of kindergarten at Lincoln University’s lab school. And then my dad got stationed to Leavenworth, Kansas. And so we left, and I did first grade almost the entire year of first grade in Leavenworth. And then because the US was involved in the conflict in Southeast Asia, my dad got stationed in Asia, and he couldn’t take family. So my mom chose to not stay on the base. You could wait for your spouse on base, but my mom chose not to wait for him to return on base. Instead, we went back to Jefferson City, where she had a sister. And so that was the beginning of me staying there. She decided that – my brother was six years older than I was – and my mom decided that she did not want to deal with him having to change schools over and over. And she thought there was a reason why people were called army brats. She did not want us to be like that. So she decided to settle down in Jefferson City. And as a result, my dad ended up spending from the time I was seven, like six and a half. When we moved back to the time that I was 15, he was stationed in various countries in Asia, including Vietnam. I later found out that what I thought was his second tour of Vietnam was actually, he was stationed in Laos. It was illegal to be there, and they whitewashed the record, so he wasn’t allowed to tell anybody. He told me, like, just a few days before he died that he was stationed in a Laos, not in Vietnam. The second time. And when he passed, I was able to go through his military documents. And the first time he was in Vietnam, it says Da Nang, Da Nang Province, Vietnam. The second time, it says Vietnam in quotes. So. And I found a Bronze Star in the back of his closet in a box. And so that’s what he meant by they whitewashed the record because it doesn’t say that he was in Laos, but they gave everybody that was in his company these Bronze Stars for their service because the government was lying. So anyway, that’s part of my family background.
Bali White [00:05:56] Could you kind of touch base a little bit on your religious background?
Maria Smith [00:06:00] Sure. My mom, my grandmother was a Catholic convert, my paternal grandmother. And she was, like all converts to something new, very zealous. And she wanted my father to convert. So my father started religious instruction, and my mother started religious instruction. My mother completed her religious instruction. My dad never did. So my mom raised both my brother and I as Catholics. And the first year that we were back in Jefferson City, I went to the lab school, Lincoln lab school. But the second year, because of things that were happening in Jefferson City, she sent me to Immaculate Conception, which is the Catholic school. So for most of my life in Jefferson City, when I went to school, I was the only black kid. So when I was in immaculate Conception, Jefferson City very segregated, like any city, any town, any place, I would walk home from Immaculate Conception, and 900 kids, literally 900 kids would all go one path, and then there would be this one fork in the road where I would go the other way, and because it was into the black neighborhood. But anyway, yeah, I was raised Catholic, and it always had a lot of meaning to me, and. But I was always very critical of it also. So, like, when I was ten, I realized, wow, if I were male, I could be a priest. I would like to be a priest. But I realized that was not going to be an option. When I was 16, the religion class that I had, I went to Catholic high school, the religion class that I had, one of the things that we had to do was to visit the Carmelite nuns. I don’t know if you know it. I don’t know if you’re Catholic, but Carmelites are a cloister. And so we would visit the Carmelites, and we would take them food or whatever offering, and they put it on their lazy susan, and you can’t see them right there behind the screen. And I decided that I wanted to be a Carmelite, and I told my mom that, and literally, she blew a gasket. She was like, I’m not sending you to Catholic school to be no nun. She was very angry, so I kind of put that to the side.
Bali White [00:08:54] So what year did you graduate high school?
Maria Smith [00:08:57] 76.
Bali White [00:08:58] 76. And did you, you go to college after, correct?
Maria Smith [00:09:01] Yep.
Bali White [00:09:01] Where did you attend?
Maria Smith [00:09:03] University of Missouri.
Bali White [00:09:04] Okay, and what were you studying?
Maria Smith [00:09:07] Political science.[crosstalk] Originally, I was going to be a journalist, and I had gone to a program for minority students to study journalism. Mizzou. The University of Missouri has a huge journalism school that would attract students from all over the country, very, very competitive, on par with Columbia, whatever, Northwestern, any of the schools that are known for journalism. And I realized that I did not want to have to deal with the deadlines the journalists deal with. And I also realized that I was interested in the content of the news, not writing about the content of the news. So my second interest was wanting to be a lawyer. So I changed my major to political science. What I didn’t know was being a lawyer means that you have multiple deadlines every day,[both laugh] all kinds of things. But what you know, you never know what you don’t know. So.
Bali White [00:10:15] Where did you attend law school?
Maria Smith [00:10:17] University of Virginia. Which is also kind of an interesting story. So I went to Mizzou because that’s what I could afford. I had been accepted. No, I had applied to, you know, I was getting all these mailings from all these schools, Mount Holyoke, Northwestern, all this other stuff. My brother, who’s six years older than I am, was like, mom and dad can’t afford this. They’re old now. They were younger than I am now. So I ended up at Mizzou. I don’t ever remember applying for it. I think the college counselor, At Helias High school is going to, which is Helias High, they changed the name of it. Now it’s Helias Catholic High School. But I think they applied for me because I really don’t remember that. But Mizzou is huge, and it was really big to me. I think at that time, it had probably about as many people as were in Jefferson City. So it was a big, big experience to go to school. That biggest, 25, 26,000 students. There were only about 400 black students at the time. There were more internationals than there were blacks. And so again, even though I wasn’t the only black, I still was in a significant minority because of the history of racism in, in Missouri and education.
Bali White [00:11:52] So did you, did you feel like you had, like, a sense of community there?
Maria Smith [00:11:57] No, I didn’t. I had a childhood friend who was my roommate. She wasn’t my roommate my first year, but she was my roommate my 2nd, third and fourth year. No, it was a big, it was a big, big place. I was student government senator one year, maybe two. It’s been a long time. I’m not trying to embellish. I know it was one year, and because Tim Kaine was the president of the student body at that time, and someone who’s become a good friend of mine, Jim Fander was the vice president. The next year we had a clown government, and I don’t remember the name of the guy who was the president. But the University of Wisconsin also had a clown student government, and they declared war on University of Missouri. It was really funny. Lots of pranks back and forth. But this part of what factors shape who I am today? They definitely my parents. My mother was a force to be reckoned with, and she has a much more interesting story than I am and won’t try to tell it. My father also much more interesting story. But because racism in the United States had impacted their lives so severely, it also impacted mine. And, you know, it’s kind of like, I’m trying to think of an analogy. I can’t really think of an analogy, but all the major things in watershed things happened during that period of my life that you could see the macro and the micro kind of working in sync with the Civil Rights movement and the changes that were going on and the war, the Vietnam War, the whole articulation against the Vietnam war. Doctor King being assassinated. I was nine. I would have been ten that summer. And Doctor King assassins, April. So I hadn’t had my 10th birthday. And then that summer in June, again, I wasn’t yet ten. Bobby Kennedy was killed. So there was just a lot of outside things that I was able to observe, and they all became a part of, you know, my curiosity, my wanting to be engaged in the making of my own world, not just having it made for me.
Bali White [00:14:54] Absolutely.
Maria Smith [00:14:55] Yeah.
Bali White [00:14:56] So after you graduated college and you went on to law school, what area of law did you focus on?
Maria Smith [00:15:05] So I don’t know what law schools are like now. I can only kind of get an inkling from the law students at clerk at the Legal Aid Society. But you don’t really focus in law school.
Bali White [00:15:14] Okay.
Maria Smith [00:15:14] It’s just a general curriculum. The first two years, you’re trying to take all the kind of courses that are going to be on the bar exam and things that you need to know in order to practice law. And I really– When I went to law school, I was– I remember saying to one of my history professors at Mizzou, brilliant guy, had gone to Harvard, told lots of interesting stories. He’d also, I think he had gotten his PhD from American University. And anyway, he would tell stories about– Because, you know, the DC, that DC area, Maryland area is so hyper South, really, that people would– He would need rides, so Black people would allow him to drive their car so that they could get where they were going, and then he would get the benefit of a ride. But anyway, I remember asking him, when I was applying to law schools, I only applied to three or four. It’s all I could afford, which was going to be my biggest handicap, that I was Black or that I was a woman. And anyway, he was like, they’re both pretty bad [laughs] because now law schools are more than 50% women. But at that time, it was Mizzou. Had I applied to Mizzou, Northwestern, and the University of Virginia– The only reason I applied to Virginia was because one of my professors wouldn’t write my letter of recommendation unless I added another law school to it. And he recommended Virginia. I wanted to go to Northwestern because that’s where I wanted to go as an undergraduate. My brother had crossed that out, and obviously applied to Mizzou because I was there. Kind of lost my train– Sorry. So, yeah, you don’t– You just– You take general– It’s just– It’s three years general classes and, you know, I took some civil liberty classes and stuff like that. The lawyer that had represented [Fred] Korematsu in the famous Korematsu case, Washington. I took one of the seminars. I took a Women in the Law seminar. I took an environmental law class. I did abysmal. And it was all about these scrubbers and everything like that. Probably the lowest grade I’ve ever gotten in my life. It was very hard. It was hard because I’d never been– I don’t know if you know anything about the University of Virginia, but University of Virginia, basically, are the kids of the aristocracy of the US. And it’s probably worse now, but it was bad then. Goody Marshall was Thurgood Marshall’s son, was the head of BALSA [Black American Law Students Association at UVA]. My first year was his third year. Bobby Kennedy was in the second year. He was the second year. He had taken off a year to work on his uncle Ted Kennedy’s campaign. So he would have been in Goody’s class, but because he had taken off that year, he was the class ahead of me. And then when I was a second year, Michael Kennedy was in the class behind me, and Janet Rehnquist was in his class. I had a roommate. Well, I had two roommates and suite mates that kind of knew who all these people were. And one of my roommates, who wasn’t at the law school, she was at the Darden, the business school. She would read the Sunday New York Times. They had this, like, wedding section on Sundays. And so you can see at that time, it was like, who’s who in the US getting married to who’s who. So she would point out these people that were in my class, and they’re engaged and stuff like that. And my other– My other roommate, who had gone to UVA as an undergraduate, grown up in a really, really impoverished part of Virginia, in the coal-mining part they called the Tri-state area. She also, even though she had grown up in this very deprived background, she also was in tune to, like, who was the senator’s kid and who was it? So I got kind of an education of that labor law class with Bobby Kennedy, that was never there. I had a seminar class with him. Again, he. No, no, no. He was in my friend’s seminar class. And again, she said he was never there. But we were definitely in the same labor law class. The year that he was in the labor law class, the labor law class that I took semester, he wrote an article about whitewater rafting. So he was whitewater rafting when we were labor law class. [laughs] Anyway, I diverged. Sorry.
Bali White [00:20:30] So can you— What year did you take the bar exam?
Maria Smith [00:20:34] So I took three bar exams. I took Virginia right after I graduated in 1983, and I took the Missouri bar in February of ’84, and I took the Ohio bar in October of, July of 1984, and the results came out in October of ’84.
Bali White [00:21:00] And then I guess that leads me to the next question of what brought you to the Near West Side?
Maria Smith [00:21:06] Yeah. God has a weird sense of humor. When I was in law school, I had terrible depression. It was horrible kickback depression. And I basically was– I had had the depression as a child. I didn’t know what it was called. I didn’t know what it was called, depression. And so I was basically one of my roommates who– Washington psychology major as an undergraduate. She told me my first year, she said, you know, you could go to the counseling center here. So I went to the counseling center, and I had this counselor, psychologist, PhD counselor named Chris Reppucci. She’s still alive. I’m Facebook friends with her. I saw her in October of 2001. But anyway, I told her my story and she was like, you have depression. And I’m like, I just thought I was worthless. I mean, I had no idea, you know, I didn’t know anything about that stuff. And so anyway, so I struggled with this depression the whole time. Never go to law school if you’re depressed. Not the way to make your way through law school. But I didn’t want to let my parents down. We were all working. It was really hard. It was expensive. I had given up a three-year full ride at University of Iowa that had gotten offered to me. Another long story that I’m not going to go into. But I knew that I just had to make it through. I couldn’t drop out for a semester and get my head straight. So I was on the verge of just committing suicide. I was studying for the bar. I was in Charlottesville. Charlottesville is super hot during the summer, and I didn’t have a car, so I was walking everywhere. So there was a table out in the lobby in Charlottesville, where everyone’s studying for the bar at the law school. And basically, I hadn’t been able to be involved in anything since law school was so hard. But in undergraduate, I had been involved in anti-apartheid demonstrations and stuff at information on campus, at Mizzou. And so there’s a table of people out with inviting people to go to the Catholic Church for a talk on Nicaragua. Catholic Church was St. Thomas Aquinas. And so I was just like. I was very angry. I was like, what are we talking about, Nicaragua? We should be talking about South Africa and apartheid, Indian apartheid. So anyway, I said, I’m gonna go. I’m not gonna study for the bar tonight. I’m gonna go up there. So I walked up this talk, and I realized that it was the first time I had been in a Catholic church. I went to Catholic grade school and Catholic high school. So, basically, as a Catholic, I don’t know what Catholic schools are like now, but in those days, you went to mass, at a minimum, three times a week at school, plus with your family. And I realized that, like, I hadn’t been to Catholic mass in almost seven years, when it had been such a part of my life before, and I wanted to be this nun and all this whole thing. So I’m sitting in this church, and, you know, I’m contemplating whether I should commit suicide or not. And I basically had planned I was gonna put my head in the oven and turn the gas on. And so I’m like, well, before I do that, I may want to just check out whether there really is a God. And so I had such anger at the Catholic church. I saw this Dominican. His name is Jack Rossi. I’ve also been in contact with him a couple of times over the years. But anyway, I saw Jack Rossi, and I said, I’m going to come back the next day. I’m going to sit in the back of church during mass, and after mass, I’m going to talk to him. So I did that. And he actually was the one saying the mass, which, you know, does not always work out that way. Never occurred to me that I could make an appointment to see him, talk to him, nothing. I just, like, kind of buttonholed him. And so we go over the rectory to talk, and he says, I tell him always, basically an argument that Sigmund Freud puts forth in Civilization and Its Discontents about God being all of religion, being anthropomorphic and the whole bit. And he says to me, I have a little book for you, equally small. And it was “Thoughts and Solitudes” by Thomas Merton. So I took the book, and I said, okay, yeah, I’ll read it. So I went back. It’s like, 99 degrees in Charlottesville. Walk back, suffocating, hot, get home, decide to study for the bar a little bit before I go to bed. I decide I’m going to read a little bit of this book that he gave me. So I started reading this book, and I feel these, like, weird sensations, like someone had taken a bucket and they’re just pouring something inside my head. So it’s like, wow, this is way too strange for me. I’m gonna go to bed. So I go to bed, get up, get ready, go to the bar review. In between, I’m reading this little booklet that he’s given me because it’s broken up into courses. So, like, you do contracts, you do evidence, whatever. So in between these transitions, I’m reading this little booklet, and again, I had this sensation, and I was like, it really feels like that priest is praying for me. So I decided again to march up to this church and ask him, like, are you praying for me? What’s going on here? And so I see him, and he’s like, well, you know, no one can tell you what you’re experiencing, so you have to answer that yourself. On my way back from church again, it’s like a hundred degrees, suffocating, humid. I’m almost at my, where I was staying, it’s like a townhouse. I’m almost there, and I feel this, like, whoosh, this very, very strong, as if it were a strong wind gonna knock me down. And I say, God, here? I have on a skirt. [laughs] And after that, I had had eczema on my face since I was, like, 15. My eczema healed. I decided I wasn’t going to kill myself, and I just decided to dig deeper into Thomas Merton. So Thomas Merton was a contemplative. And so I started reading, like, Desert Fathers. All of his writings about being contemplative renewed my wanting to be a contemplative. Went up to see Jack Rossi again, and he was like, you know, I told him all the things I was mad at the church about how they treated me as a child, the whole bit. And he gave me a book by Dorothy Day. Hadn’t really heard of Dorothy Day. You would think after a Catholic education, I would have heard of both of them, but I hadn’t. And so that’s how I learned about Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. I learned about them at the same time. And so both of their writings are about community, which at the time, I felt like I had not experienced. In retrospect, I realized that I had experience not in, not at Mizzou, not in the Catholic school, that I had gone to a certain extent of community, but community. But yet I was marginalized within that community. But then within my– The Black, again, in the Black community again, I was marginalized because I was like the only Black kid that was going to these white schools. So I had a sense of what community was like. I had had an experience of community, but my experience was always, always kind of on the margin for one reason or another. I’m sure that’s how trans kids and LBGTQ kids feel like they’re never quite in the center because the dominant culture is different than where they are. But their writings, like Merton’s writings, resonated with me because he’s talking about the major issues of the day, the militarism, particularly, he writes about. But yet he’s contemplative, which told me that I could follow that path of being a contemplative and still be engaged with the major issues of the world, which was important to me at the time. And Dorothy Day’s writings were important to me because she was just out there critiquing everything that was wrong with what, you know, all the critiques that she had known. She was a little weak on the racism stuff, but she’s not terribly off the mark in the societal critique. So those were the things that kind of braided my experience. So when I had this mystical experience, which happens to so few people, I mean, so many seekers want something like that. And I. I don’t know why it happened to me and not to somebody else. I’m grateful that it did save my life and probably the lives of my parents, because they would have been devastated, you know, my brother. Everybody would have been like, why? But when I had that experience, I decided that I did want to be a contemplative. To join a religious order, you have to pass a battery of emotional psychological tests, and you also have to show that you know how to live in community. So I figured that I wasn’t going to be able to pass this emotional test real soon after having clinical depression for most of my life. So I was trying to get my head straight. And I also didn’t know what to expect in terms of living in community. I had this friend. She was a– I had been her aide. She had contracted polio in the 1950s. Her name was Cornelia Kelly. Her husband was Hubert Humphrey’s lawyer. She was the reason why I ended up going to Virginia, which I won’t go into that. Anyway, I was talking to Cornelia. She was a devout Catholic. And so I told her what I experienced, and she said, I think you need to get this little booklet it’s called The Response, meaning God calls, you respond, right? And in that booklet, the response, it was all these Catholic organizations that you could volunteer for a year. She was big on that. So I got the little booklet. I didn’t know that one of my high school classmates and a high school teacher had moved to DC and they were the ones publishing this little booklet. I didn’t know that until much later. But anyway, I get the little booklet, and I’m flipping through it, and I find there’s an organization. I think it’s The Daughters of Charity in San Antonio. They have a volunteer service organization. There was a Franciscan retreat house in Malibu, and I had written to both of them. They were all willing to take me. And then as I was looking through, trying to find things about community, there was a Marianist voluntary service community that had its little paragraphs, had a lot about community, what it means to be community. So I said, God, I really want to go to Malibu. San Antonio would be great. I’m a freeze bunny. I wanted to get away from winter, but I’m going to go to Cleveland because I want to make sure that I’m doing this for you and not for me. Now, I had a law school classmate that was from Cleveland, and he had spent his whole time in law school talking about how great Cleveland was, and I never even heard of it. I was like, oh, my God, what’s this about Cleveland? You go someplace else? He had an offer to go to a law firm in Atlanta, which was the happening place for African Americans at the time. Andrew Young was the mayor. He had kind of a midsized law firm. He could have made partner. And, you know, snap finger. And he was like, nope, nope, nope. I’m going back to Cleveland. So when I got here, I called him, was like, hey, Craig, I’m in Cleveland. He goes, I’m like, where are you working? He’s like, I forgot a little part. But he used to say, I’m going back to Cleveland. Work for the people. And so I was like, where are you working? Well, he was at one of the largest law firms in the country, probably the world. And I’m like, oh, those people. [laughs] You had to go back to Cleveland, work for those people. He’s really cool. He understood. But one of the things he told me was like, where are you? And I said, I’m on the west side. He goes, well, I won’t come visit you. I was like, why? He goes, I don’t cross the river. And I’m like, what’s that about? And he goes, it’s not safe. When I started dating Charlie, he was like, I hear you’re dating this white guy, but you better pay attention to where he takes you because it’s not safe for you to be every place in Cuyahoga county with that guy. He’s like, don’t go to Little Italy. Don’t go to Parma. And I’m like, I have no idea where I’m going [laughs] in any of these places. But anyway. So Cleveland’s changed.
Bali White [00:36:16] Oh, yeah. So what would you say your first impression of the Near West Side was when we got here?
Maria Smith [00:36:22] How dirty it was. I never lived any place that was this dirty. It’s a lot cleaner now, but in those days, the buses were dirty. The exhaust was black. Sooty. It was– The houses were raggedy. Yeah. I never seen anything quite like that before. I lived in that house back there. There were long lines, people for the meal here. People would urinate out behind the window. We would be washing the dishes, and someone would be in the backyard urinating. I had never seen anything close to urban poverty. I had been to– My dad was from Boston. I’d been to Boston and seen a little bit of it, but it’s different when you’re visiting than when you’re living in the middle of it. And I was older also. I was a little bit more aware of the disparity between wealth. I liked the neighborhood. I liked it a lot better then than I like it now. I mean, they had all kinds of Puerto Ricans. And the library, it still was a remnant of some of the immigrant communities. So the library had a big section on Hungarian literature because there was still, like, a little pocket of Hungarians that lived in the neighborhood or had contact with the neighborhood. They had a church that’s now the Walsh Academy, and it had been turned into– Trying to think of the name of it. San Juan. San Juan Batista. And it had been kind of a Mexican-American parish and then Puerto Rican parish that had transferred from being Hungarian. I think that most of the Hungarians went to St. Emeric after that church kind of transitioned. But, yeah, it was poorer. A lot poorer, but a lot more activists, a lot more. You know, I think what I compared it to was– And I think I wrote this in on the email. It was like being in Seneca Falls. There were all kinds of people coming back from Central America. There was just a lot of, lot of– It was epicenter of activism in Cleveland.
Bali White [00:38:59] So that kind of brings me to the next topic, is Cleveland’s Catholic Worker. So could you kind of talk about when and how you got involved with that?
Maria Smith [00:39:11] I got involved with that through my husband, who was part of the– Charlie Hurst, who was part of the kind of little core group that was like, wouldn’t it be cool to have a Catholic Worker? He had been involved in antiwar protests and anti-nuke protests at other places that had Catholic Workers either in them or had organized it. And so that’s how I got involved. They were starting to articulate. They would have meetings on Friday evenings at the [Catholic Worker] Storefront. Somebody had given Bob Begin that building. And so I would go to every Friday. It was the same conversation, what it means to be community. It was like everyone was trying to explore, like, how can we be community together? And that’s what I was looking for, like, how to be community. And so, yeah, it really spoke to me. Just a lot of really super committed people. Ralph Delaney. I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned Ralph. Ralph Delaney had been a Marianist, so I knew about him, but he would whiz through there. The Corrigans. I had met Bill Corrigan, who was– I kind of idolized Bill Corrigan. He always said the right thing. Very provocative kinds of things to say, very push the envelope kinds of things to say, and then walk away. And, Judy, I mean, they were– You know, there were kind of people their door’s always open. There was always enough food, you know, if you wanted. If you needed a place to go. You knew the Corrigans were always there for you. Patty and Jimmy. Jim was married to Patty at that time. They had little kids, George and Stephanie. They had little kids. So it was– They were all kind of an example of what I wanted my life to be like when I decided not to be a nun. [laughs]
Bali White [00:41:14] So were you– You were practicing law also while you were–?
Maria Smith [00:41:19] Yeah. So I worked at the Institute for Child Advocacy, and I wasn’t, like, practicing law, but I was a staff attorney. So I was analyzing laws and legisla
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