Loretta and Adam at book signing in 1986.My first child was born when I was eighteen-years-old. Like many young women, I struggled to balance the challenges of motherhood with marriage and the hope of a career. After eight years and a second baby daughter, I finally got a BA in literature from Seattle University. I continued on to get a masters degree from the University of New Mexico and complete my PhD coursework at Indiana University. By this time my husband was a young doctor specializing in emergency medicine. We moved to Philadelphia and I began teaching at two local colleges while interning at Philadelphia Magazine.
One evening, on my way home from the magazine offices, I stopped at a red light and spotted an old woman trying to crawl down a flight of stairs in front of what looked like an abandoned row house. I pulled over and helped her inside. She told me that she was 84-years-old and trying to get food. Her name was Martha Roca. She had almost starved to death. I was stunned and thrown back to the memory of the hungry child I had seen begging for food outside a gas station in the deep south when I was only six years old. I helped her inside. My daughter and I returned with food.
I also did some research and learned that there were tens of thousands of people in Philadelphia alone who were desperate for food.“May I say something?” I whispered to Ethel Kennedy. “Just say ‘Thank you,’” she replied softly. My editors at Philadelphia Magazine still believed that the only problem people in Philadelphia had was eating too much food. They decided to humor me by allowing me to continue my research and to write the stories of the people I found. The article called “Nothing to Eat” was published in the December 1974 issue of Philadelphia Magazine. A few months later, I traveled to Washington to receive my first journalism award. It was the Robert Kennedy distinguished service award for outstanding coverage of the problems of the disadvantaged. Congressmen and Senators and reporters were all clapping and acting as if I had solved the problem of hunger in America. But, I knew that I had barely scraped the surface. “May I say something?” I whispered to Ethel Kennedy. “Just say ’Thank you,’ she replied softly. I nodded and thanked her. Then, it was time for me to sit down.
For the next seven years, I worked on the problem of hunger in America, traveling through muddy back roads and urban slums. In 1981, I finally published Starving in the Shadow of Plenty.
During those busy years, my husband, now a successful physician decided he wanted to be free. Child support rarely arrived and suddenly, the boundaries between the people I was writing about and the life I was living began to merge. There was little money to be earned with writing about the hungry. I decided I had taken hunger as far as I could and needed to write about more “commercial” subjects. The years passed. Two true crime and two women’s issues books followed.
Loretta and Joni in 2007My personal life changed. I remarried. My father died. I had another child, a son born nearly 25 years after my first daughter. I tried my hand at fiction. The Journey tells the story of two married, middle aged people who fall deeply in love but sacrifice that love for the sake of their families. At the start of the novel, the woman, Laura, is old and near death. As she drifts in and out of consciousness, she thinks of David, whom she has not seen in many years. It was a short, lyrical book but the drafts I wrote of it stacked up against the closet wall were two feet taller than I was. I kept writing and re-writing the ending. I was convinced that they had to die apart yet couldn’t bear that conclusion.
During this period, I continued to be haunted by hunger in America. Once again, I returned to the subject. I traveled across the country interviewing the hungry in urban ghettos, rural shacks and even middle class homes. Growing Up Empty, a twenty year retrospective eventually followed.
In 2003, I was still fighting for women and for children’s right to get enough food to eat when I learned how many of them were slowly being poisoned by that food as well as by the air they breathed and the water they drank."I turn to all people of faith and spirit and reverence and good will, in the hope that they will join me" It was a whole new world for me. I had never been an environmentalist but, fortunately, by that time, I was a seasoned investigative journalist who had learned how to track down a lead without letting it go. Four more years of research followed. There were days when anger pushed me forward and days when the research left me numb with despair. During these four years my beloved mother died, my second marriage ended, and my only sister died of a rare environmentally linked tumor just three weeks after diagnosis. Yet, somehow, all those losses and the birth of a grandchild made life even more precious. As I continued to research Poisoned Nation, my father’s voice echoed. Once again. I could imagine him saying, “try to forget about it. It’s just too big for you.” I knew I was tackling a subject I couldn’t possibly deal with alone. But, I also knew that I had fallen across something too urgent to turn away from. It is with that realization that I turn to all people of faith and spirit and reverence and good will, in the hope that they will join me in declaring that this can’t be allowed to continue. Together, we have the collective strength and the power to change things. All we need is the will.
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