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The person that Nancy Stein Frappier would become was greatly influenced by her relationship with her father, Saul Stein. Judy, her younger sister, remembers that when Nancy was nine or 10 years old, their father took them to hear the popular folk singer Pete Seeger, who is well known for his music about people's struggles to form unions, for racial equality and peace, and for popularizing the song "We Shall Overcome" during the Civil Rights Movement. Seeger's concert was held in a Michigan barn, not an auditorium. By the mid-1950s, he and many others had been blacklisted by the government, making it difficult to find work. But he continued to sing and pluck his five-string banjo and even signed the cast covering Nancy's broken ankle.
During this period, Saul Stein, a physician, flirted with socialism. Judy added that, "according to our mother, he never sent out a bill. His goal was to cure and help and if his patients couldn't or wouldn't pay, so be it. He was a very caring man, and to my mind, unprejudiced. Nancy was very much his daughter, with her caring regard for all people, and her warm and generous spirit." For that reason, Judy was puzzled "why he took Nancy's foray into leftist politics as a rebellion of any kind. Surely, it was really just an extension of his own beliefs." Yet their relationship remained close until her father passed away.
Nancy and I met in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during the summer of 1967. She loved Detroit, which at the time was the site of one of the most devastating riots in US history. After the smoke had cleared, there were 43 dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed. The impact of this on...