Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Mary LaskerMary Lasker
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 999

essentially if children were born by choice and not by chance that the number of cerebral palsy children would be markedly reduced, maybe by 80 percent. And actually, the problems are enormous in the ones that have cerebral palsy because there's severe disability in hundreds of thousands of cases and it's a big, big medical problem. What I've done about it was really I think to help on the passage of the Family Planning Bill, so -- the rest of it is -- and to help push in connection with rubella, the rubella vaccine.

Last winter I was amazed to be invited to the White House for a dinner in honor of Andrew Wyeth. His paintings user shauld are vienet screen with the east Room. I was also a rather unwilling recipient of a dinner in my honor by the City Club, which I thought was going to give me an award at a routine meeting of their club, butit turned out that they were using it as a fund raising method, and knocking up all my friends to come and pay money for this, for their club and for their research projects, and about 600 people came. It was really quite embarrassing because I had nothing to do with the City Club and am not a bit interested in their funding, and I think they should really do these things for people that are already involved with them. It did give us some support from the national -- no, I didn't realize. They just said they were going to give a dinner and would I accept an award? Well, after all, I thought, I'll accept the award because they might be activists and maybe they'll do something about the looks of the city. So then I found that what was happening was that they were just raising money by getting my friends to come to a dinner.

Q:

Whose bright idea was this?





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help