Death seems to be hovering around me this summer, and I’ve really been enjoying it. Specifically, I refer to the deaths in recent weeks of two prominent women from our region who led very long and rich lives of service and achievement.
One was Toshi Seeger, wife of legendary folk musician Pete Seeger. The other was Caroline Glassman, the first woman to serve on the Maine Supreme Court – or any state supreme court in northern New England.
They died within days of each other, each in her early 90s, and I think I may be the only person on the planet who knew both of them. It’s weird that their deaths nearly coincided because, to me, they were remarkably alike – and in ways that set each woman off from almost the entire rest of humanity.
Both Toshi Seeger and Caroline Glassman were powerful figures with successful marriages to high-achieving spouses. Pete Seeger, of course, is Pete Seeger. Caroline Glassman was actually the second Justice Glassman to serve on the Maine Supreme Court, joining the bench only after the death of her husband Harry Glassman.
Both women devoted significant parts of their lives to raising their children. Justice Glassman, in fact, put her legal career on hold for a whole decade to raise her son.
And, most importantly, both women were formidable non-nonsense characters when lesser women of their generation might have been tempted to get by on charm and endearment.
I knew Toshi Seeger by working for, and later serving on the board of, the organization she and Pete founded – Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. At the big annual music festival Clearwater puts on every year, Toshi would patrol the grounds on a golf cart and if you saw her coming you were always tempted to hide if you didn’t want to be instantly pressed into service moving a pile of garbage or building something in the rain. Toshi’s husband is a dreamer and they say it was she who made it possible for him to actually accomplish stuff. They’re right.
I had the honor of serving as a law clerk to Justice Glassman right out of law school, a job that involves lots of research and ghost-writing. One time Justice Glassman had me try my hand at the first draft of a dissenting opinion. Finally, I thought, I get to indulge my opinionated and vitriolic tendencies. But when she read what I had written, the judge said I had been way too polite. “Drop the gloves, Don,” I can still hear her saying in that gravelly voice she got from a lifetime of chain smoking.
No other women remind me of Toshi Seeger or Caroline Glassman – neither anyone I know today, nor anyone I know of from the earlier and more sexist era from which these two luminaries emerged. It would be presumptuous of me, as man, to make claims about what their remarkable lives teach us about how to be a high-achieving woman. I just know I’d be mighty glad if my eleven-year-old daughter turned out to be just like them.
