Pretty nervey note to start out with, isn’t it? A year ago I’d have been pretty tickled to say, “My friend the alderman.” (I trust) But last May, we were blessed with a visit from Mairead Corrigan, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1976 for her work, with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown, in making peace a reality, someday, in Northern Ireland. Of course she didn’t come across land and sea just to visit the Stout family. There was an incidental visit to the U.N. to receive the Woman of the Year award, and, while in St. Louis, there was a nice little Presidential Citation from St. Louis University.
While she visited St. Louis, she needed a place to stay, and I offered my house. So, there she stood, having coffee and toast in my nice new kitchen. Since she was going to be in the neighborhood anyway, we arranged for her to have a brief visit with the neighbors at Grace Church. It was thrilling to see how much at home she felt with our neighbors. It should have been no surprise since so much of the philosophy and plans of The Community of the Peace People in Northern Ireland are not much different from what we are doing right here in our neighborhood.
They even have a newspaper, called Peace By Peace, in which Mairead had some flattering things to say about us. “In St. Louis I stayed at the home of Ed and Mary Bea Stout. This couple were in Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement and are continuing their work by living in an integrated area of the city. The King Movement is similar in many ways to our own: huge rallies have been replaced by the nitty gritty hard work of integrating communities. I felt very much at home with the Stout family—they reminded me of so many of our own people here in Northern Ireland who are prepared to pay the price of building a new society by hard work and courage.”
If Mairead had gotten to know more of our neighbors better she would have known that those sweet things could not be limited to Ed and me.
That’s really all I have to say about my friend the Nobel Peace Prize winner, except that I miss her very much.
Original photograph caption
Original photograph accompanying Mary Bea Stout’s account of Mairead Corrigan’s visit. The Paper, November 1978, page 2. Photographer and individual placements are not credited in the source.
Originally published in The Paper, November 1978.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1978_11.pdf, printed page(s) 2; PDF page(s) 2.
