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were these matters that a district leader got into?

Before me?

Yes.

Okay, because I must say with a certain amount of pride, while Carol and I were not the first reform leaders -- there were others, even in the VID; there was Lanigan -- but we were the first to be as involved in the community as district leaders all ultimately became if they were any good. We got involved in everything, and I'm talking about on a local level. That would mean on preserving Washington Square Park, on getting the busses out of Washington Square Park. Washington Square Park was the hub; everything revolved around Washington Square Park. Another was cleaning up Sixth Avenue. When I say “cleaning up,” I mean the people who were just tawdry and disheveled and panhandlers, not violating anybody's civil rights -- you always have to be aware of that -- but we were involved in trying to stop that. There was getting better conditions in the Women's House of Detention. I'm giving you all local issues. When we first started in '63, national issues did not predominate as such except for the nuclear bomb and the hydrogen bomb. There we would be in support of Adlai Stevenson's stop the testing of the bomb. Those would be the best illustration of a substantive issue at that time.