If we want to tell you much about Jefferson Hill, we will need to tell you about people like Emma Lopez, a lifelong resident of the Hill.  Emma doesn't talk about her age, but we know that she must be somewhere around seventy.  It still often seems that nothing ever gets done on the Hill without her involvement.  She is a regular and participating parishioner at St. Gertrude's.  Even though she and her late husband closed their shoe repair and leather work store almost twenty years ago, she has been an active part of the Jefferson Hill Business Association for more that thirty years.  She helped organize the Jefferson Improvement Association in the 1950's and the Jefferson Hill Community Council in the 1970's.  Her husband, Ricardo "Rick" died in 1983 after a brief bout with liver cancer.  Her two sons and two daughters are grown;  none of them lives on the Hill.  One son lived with her briefly in the early 1990's while Emma was undergoing treatment for breast cancer and he was adjusting to a divorce, but Emma recovered well and her son fell in love again and moved out.

Emma has been an extrovert all of her life.  Her late sister Edna Russell, who was six years Emma's senior and who lived on the same block on the Hill all of her life, told me once that Emma was born talking and talked to everybody she met from that time.  When Emma was about five years old, she interrupted mass at St. Gertrude's Church to ask Father Schultz to slow down and speak slower.  Father Schultz was stunned and did speak a little slower, but when Emma found that she did not understand the Latin he was speaking, she made a second demand and asked him to use words people could understand.  Father Schultz, Edna said, told her that it wasn't so important that young Emma really know the meaning of the Latin words because God knew them and she could learn them when she was older and could appreciate them better.  That was enough to shut up the child for the moment, but Emma's outgoing personality remained with her.  Ms.Russell also told me another story about Emma, that when she was about seven or eight, years before UNICEF, she got the idea of going "Trick or treat" for poor children.  People were dumfounded to see this young child from a family that was decidedly not wealthy taking this collection on her own initiative during the midst of the Great Depression.  She covered a larger area than a girl of her age could be expected to cover and collected a fair amount of candy and a few dollars for poor children which she then gave to a flabbergasted Salvation Army worker, who assured her that her collection was appreciated and that she would see to it that it all went to needy children[1].

Emma may have been born an extrovert, but her youthful Halloween adventures notwithstanding, she wasn't born an activist.  As a youth, she kept herself busy with school and in following Edna by helping in her father's gas station/auto repair garage.  Although some of her parents' friends and neighbors missed few opportunities to tell them how "unladylike" they thought having girls working in a garage was, their parents, like many small business people, needed all of the low-overhead help they could get.  They dismissed the criticism, assuring their friends and neighbors that "the girls will grow into ladies, you'll see."   Indeed, even though Edna and Emma spent a good part of their childhoods at the garage, their father tried to make sure that their brothers and he did those jobs which seemed more masculine in nature, seldom letting Emma or Edna do any heavy lifting and  never any complicated diagnostic matters.  The girls were basically limited to greeting, retrieving, cleaning, pumping gas,  and jockeying cars.

After graduating from high school, she worked as a sales clerk at the Golden Rule department store downtown, starting in women's wear and later selling cosmetics and scents.  These experiences may have help to steer her back into the part of the world that her elders and contemporaries considered appropriate for a young lady.

Emma married at age 20.  About a year after her marriage and with her first child on the way, she quit working at he Golden Rule to begin raising her family.  Although she later worked with her husband in his shoe and leather shop, she did not work for a private employer again for many years, until after she and Ricardo sold their store, and she obtained part-time employment doing clerical work at a local insurance agency.

Perhaps Emma's introduction into activism came when her second child was attending school at St.Gertude's.  Emma and a Sister Mary Catherine disagreed over the best way to teach the child. Sister Mary Catherine was well known as an immovable rock at the school and while I don't know that anybody except Emma might remember exactly what prompted the disagreement, it would be hard to imagine that both parties could emerge unscathed.  When the disagreement was over  Emma's children, while destined to accompany their parents to mass every Sunday,  were also destined for education in the public schools.  Although she would have subsequent disagreements with public school principals and teachers, she never returned her children to the parish school.

Her next adventure in activism may have come later in the mid-1950's  when she and some neighbors attempted to get concrete paving on a two-block stretch of Binghampton Avenue.  Emma and most of her neighbors thought it was about time to bring the street into the last half of the twentieth century, but a few neighbors were reluctant to pay the special assessments the city would require to lay the pavement.

Emma began a two-pronged attack.  She organized her own education campaign, taking her young children downtown on the bus with her so she could do research at the Public Library to obtain the information she needed to convince three wavering neighbors that their financial interests would be better served by having a paved street.

Concurrently, she also changed the battle by redefining the battlefront, adding a sympathetic third block to the proposal.  She told a neighbor at the time that if the English could redefine Ulster to ensure a majority' which would not support independence, she could add a block to a paving proposal.  Using these two tactics, winning over new supporters and changing the sample, she got paving approved for the next year's construction season2. When the work was begun, she threw a little party, inviting neighbors, politicians, and construction workers to have lemonade and cookies in her front yard.

This was some of the beginnings of Emma's life as a mover and shaker of Jefferson Hill.  As noted earlier, Emma has been involved in a lot of things.  More of her activity will be noted elsewhere on these pages.



1.  It might be noteworthy that a Catholic girl would think to give the collection to the Salvation Army in that era, but I really know little more about the story than what Edna told me.  When I asked Emma once, she just shrugged and said that she wasn't sure why she thought of the Salvation Army, but added that she must have felt then that it was a good idea.
EMMA LOPEZ