March 29, 2022 | Noon (PST)
When her daughters were very young, Lee Schore spent months in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury. The trajectory of her life – from her youth in Atlantic City where the seeds of her activism took hold, through her years of dissidence resulting in that time in jail, and beyond, to a career forged in her sixties which took her to Bulgaria and Poland – is revealed in her memoir To Live is to Take Sides. Lee never forgot her roots, and her story lovingly displays memories of her parents and grandparents, the meals and rituals that were an integral part of her life. Our program includes excerpts from the memoir read by members of her writing community: her friends, teachers, and fellow writers.
Lee Schore was born December 25, 1932, in Atlantic City, NJ and died August 26, 2021. She was so many things: a mother, a friend, a social worker, an activist, a teacher, a union shop steward, a writer. She grew up in a close-knit Jewish family and moved to California, on her own, at age 16 to live with relatives. She attended UCLA, returned east for her BA from Penn State, then back to UCLA for her LCSW. The word “peripatetic” could have been invented for her. Her work encompassed such a wide range and such a far-reaching geography: she was a Jantzen Girl sewing bathing suits in Portland, she was a shop steward at a water heater plant in LA, she was the Executive Director and Founder of the Center for Working Life, she counseled displaced workers in Bristol Bay, AK and Bulgaria and Poland.
Lee loved music: in her youth she was a bobby soxer for Frank Sinatra and snuck into jazz clubs in New York. Lee was effortlessly fashionable – we envied her style and even the way she smoked. She was cool. And Lee was, utmost, a writer. She attended Oregon’s Flight of the Mind workshop for women writers on the Mackenzie River and was accepted to Hedgebrook, a Writers in Residence program on Whidbey Island. She served on the board of Soapstone, a women’s writing retreat in the Oregon Coast Range. Her work included professional manuals and articles and most richly, stories about her life.
Readers will be Sandra Dorr, Ruth Gundle, Anndee Hochman, Nancy LaPaglia, Sandy Polishuk and Katy Riker. The program will be moderated by Linda Chaplik.