Thursday, August 19, 1999
This mom beat the odds - and City Hall
BY LAURA PULFER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The school said it was the city's problem. The city said it was the school's problem. It involved danger to thousands of children — including her son — so Joanne Gerson made it her problem.
And solved it.
All it took was 12 years of nagging and letter-writing and fund raising. A blizzard of paperwork. Meetings. More meetings. In the meantime, Joanne Gerson's son grew up. But she hung in there for other people's children. She blinks wide blue eyes and says ingenuously, “That's what you do.”
Glad you think so, Joanne.
Orange barrels welcome
Officially, she could have claimed victory in November, when Montgomery City Council decided to build a sidewalk on a little street called Delray Drive — less than a mile of concrete. But she was afraid to celebrate “until I could actually stand on it.” Monday she stood on it, took a ta-DA stance and had her picture taken. Never had orange barrels looked more beautiful.
Joanne was afraid — terrified, really — that what she would see instead someday was one of those dismal little crosses, flanked by wreaths and piled with flowers and ribbons and teddy bears. Modern signs of the death of a child.
Her campaign began when her son Craig, then a student at Sycamore Junior High School, was run off the road while riding his bike to school. Traffic was bad then, and it would only get worse.
Built in the 1970s, Delray was a quiet street that began on Cooper Road at the junior high school and meandered toward a dead end. As Montgomery grew, Delray became a major connector among Sycamore Junior High, E.H. Greene Elementary and Maple Dale Elementary schools.
Scary video
“It was just a disaster waiting to happen,” Joanne says. She has a packet of statistics she has been showering on city officials for a dozen years. She also has a video. The quality is a little better than the Blair Witch Project, and it is twice as scary — eight minutes of narrow misses taken on an ordinary day. Cars, buses and kids — walking and on bikes — all sharing the road. A recipe for tragedy.
But that's not the point. Not anymore. This sidewalk is built.
The point is Joanne Gerson, an artist who works in oils, a stay-at-home mom. A nag. This woman who is a shade under 5 feet, 2 inches tall, is quietly and politely as fierce as anybody I've seen. You read about ferocious mothers, about the nature of a mother defending her cubs.
In Joanne's case, they didn't even have to be her own, personal cubs.
Craig used to groan every time his name was in the paper again. Joanne retold the story of her son flipping over the handlebars of his bike — the narrow miss that began her crusade — as often as anybody would listen. But he moved from his bike to a car, then off to college and law school.
And still children were dodging traffic along Delray.
From the end of Joanne's driveway on Stonehenge Drive, you can see the sidewalk, bordered by newly seeded grass. You might even see a few orange barrels left from construction. Fat, ugly orange barrels, usually despised as a symbol of traffic messes. Not these. Not this time. The ones along Delray Drive came from a mother who fought to put them there instead of something much uglier.
A teddy bear or a wreath.
E-mail Laura Pulfer at lpulfer@enquirer.com.
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