Had Rachel and I met a decade or two later we might well have become friends. We met in the Twin Cities some 60-odd years ago. It was about the time the Russians were holding out against Hitler’sforces during World War II.

I was living in what my friends and I rather grandly called an apartment. Accurately speaking, I lived in lighthouse keeping rooms, one large room with a studio couch and an extremely small kitchenette.

I was a welfare worker in Selby District, St. Paul. I don’t know what Rachel was doing. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. It was something political. There was a liberal newspaper of some sort, Rachel’s field of activity. That’s why she was brought to me. One of the most brilliant speakers I’ve ever met, she was incapable of writing a line that wasn’t someway dead on paper.

Would I ghost write for her? I had qualms. On the public payroll, I came under the Hatch Act, forbidden to participate actively in politics.

Moreover, Rachel and I didn’t take to each other. The metaphysical sea that roared between us was not so much one of hostility as it was of complete noncomprehension.

We came from different turfs. In my early twenties, I had never set foot outside the Midwest and had never been in a city larger than Minneapolis. I knew nothing about garment workers. Rachel knew nothing about dust storms, drought, cattle prices, closing packing houses and farm mortgage foreclosures.

Moreover, in my hesitation about ghost writing for her she read evidence that I was &uot;a spy for the capitalists.&uot; This struck me as so absolutely outr, that I was ready to go back to my miserable little flat and relax into a moult.

I did the writing. Show me a chance to put words together on paper and I lose all sense of self-control.

When I knew Rachel she was a bit on the plump side. As a child, though, she told us, she had been thin, delicate, big-eyed, and &045; though perfectly healthy &045; looking as if she were in the last stages of galloping consumption.

Brought up in a home where little groups with the same backgrounds and tradition gathered to drink tea and celebrate the Sabbath, the hourly topic was how to improve the lot of garment workers. Some of the demonstrations were working out well.

Now a marvelous episode had been planned. To gain sympathy for the movement they arranged to have a demonstration. There would, of course, be police present, and there would be reporters with press cameras to capture the picture of a brutal policeman savaging a small, fragile Jewish daughter of hard-working underpaid garment workers.

Rachel didn’t have to be asked, she volunteered; full of enthusiasm, she picked the biggest, most brutal-looking cop she could see.

It wasn’t easy, she said, to get him to do his stuff. Busy keeping an eye on the demonstrators, he simply suggested that Rachel run along home.

&uot;I finally had to kick him in the shins,&uot; she said. &uot;Even then he didn’t give me his full attention. Just sort of pushed me away.&uot;

In sheer desperation, she latched on to him and gave full voice to screams of terror.

&uot;Help! Help!&uot; she screamed, &uot;He’s killing me!&uot;

The timing was bad. The streets were filled with elderly women with shawls over their heads, shopping for food. They weren’t particularly interested in the demonstrations. They’d seen too many of them. They were more than interested, though, in the seeming plight of Rachel. Never mind that none of them actually knew her name. They recognized immediately that she was one of theirs.

In one broad, angry stream, they surged toward the policeman. The picture caught by the press cameras was not of a brutal policeman abusing a fragile, hungry child, but of a set-upon policeman, surrounded by women apparently trying to beat him to death with loaves of bread and whatever else they could lay their hands on.

I doubt if Rachel is still alive. She lived hard. If she is, wherever she is, my best wishes go out to her. I still treasure the vignette she bestowed.

Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column appears Thursdays.