Author Kevin S. Giles: Famous people I knew, or saw, and a few I wish I had met

By Kevin S. Giles

Soon after Dances With Wolves won Best Picture, as I drank beer in a Tucson hotel with fellow newspaper editors, a man watching fish in the nearby aquarium caught our attention. I recognized him even without the feathers.

He resembled Graham Greene, who played Kicking Bird in Kevin Costner’s epic. That very moment, Beau Bridges walked past with a woman on each arm. He wore a tuxedo. I went to the front desk to claim my room. A tall silver-haired man stood next to me. He was Lloyd Bridges, dad to Beau and Jeff, and star of Sea Hunt, a 1960s TV drama I watched in boyhood. Minutes later, I went to the elevator.

“Hold the door!” someone called. In walked Terrance Knox, an actor from TV’s St. Elsewhere and a subsequent Vietnam war drama, Tour of Duty. He stuck out his hand. “Hi, I’m Terry,” he greeted me. Being face to face with the TV doctor who became a serial rapist in the basement morgue of the St. Eligius hospital (the actual name of St. Elsewhere) gave me pause.

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‘Pink Wave’ of 2018 started with the first woman, a Montanan, elected to Congress

By Kevin S. Giles

(Details in this story come from my book, One Woman Against War: The Jeannette Rankin Story, which examines the life and times of a historical figure whose involvement in American politics spanned 60 years.)

What a difference a century (and two years) makes.

When Montana’s Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to Congress, she broke a gender barrier that had frustrated American women since before the Civil War.

History shows that Rankin’s remarkable election to the US House of Representatives in 1916 didn’t unleash an immediate flood of female candidates hoping to achieve the same thing. Through the 1920s, after the Nineteenth Amendment gave all American women the right to vote, relatively few women went to Congress. (Not until 1924 were indigenous people granted the right to vote.)

Now look, in 2018.

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From Kevin S. Giles: What I said about my original Jeannette Rankin biography

Photo shows author Kevin S. Giles

This is how I looked at the time I published the first edition of my Jeannette Rankin, entitled “Flight of the Dove.” The second edition is renamed “One Woman Against War: the Jeannette Rankin Story.”

These are my actual quotes that I pulled from newspaper and broadcast interviews after I published the original Flight of the Dove. I would say much the same thing today about my new edition, which I retitled, One Woman Against War, but add this: “Pacifists like Jeannette Rankin perpetually live in the shadow of war, devoting their entire lives to shining sunlight on the prospect of peace.”

¶ “Why was she so terribly lonely?”

¶ “My parents have been great, too, always being interested in the book and telling everybody about it. They thought maybe I was a little too radical in college, but never once have they criticized me for writing about a woman who was considered radical in her time.”

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