My ancestor Calamity Jane couldn’t vote, but you can
A Pennsylvania cousin researched our family and declared that Nurse Vivian’s great-great-grandaunt was Martha Jane Canary, also known as Calamity Jane.
My grandmother’s maiden name was Elizabeth Kiniry. Her family had emigrated during the Irish Potato Famine. During those days, it was legal to put a sign out saying, “Irish need not apply,” and so half the family changed their last name to the more American-sounding “Canary.”
The irony is the Kiniry side moved to western Pennsylvania and worked in the iron/smelting/steel industry, so indeed there was a Kiniry in the coal mine.
The Canarys flew out west. Martha Jane’s parents died when she was 12, leaving her the head of the family, and she determined that she would survive by any means necessary. She worked as an ox-driver and a dance-hall girl, for a while even serving in a house of pleasure named the Fort Laramie ThreeMile Hog Ranch.
There are a lot of stories about Martha Jane, some of them even true. One goes that she got her nickname because when a man threatened her, she said he was “courting calamity.”
The movie about her, although it starred Doris Day, was mainly untrue, except it did show she was a cross-dresser. She probably did say, “I figure if a girl wants to be a legend, she should go ahead and be one.”
She was an atypical heroine: sharpshooting, hard-drinking, but kind. In a Wild West that didn’t put much stock in compassion, she nursed the victims of a smallpox epidemic in Deadwood.
For a woman with as many opinions as she had, Calamity Jane never once got the chance to vote. She left that privilege to her descendants.
Nurse Vivian was not sharpshooting, and only on an occasion would she drink a highball. As for cross-dressing, she left that to me, and regular readers know that I make a horrific drag queen.
Nurse Vivian was born the year that women were first allowed to vote in the United States (1920), and she took the matter seriously. For the 54 years of their marriage, she canceled out Pop’s vote every single time from Dewey versus Truman to Bush versus Gore.
At one time, our little row house in South Ozone Park contained a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian, a Conservative and a Whig. Even Whiskers was a Yellow Dog Democrat. The only politics we agreed upon was Nurse Vivian’s axiom, “Vote, or shut up!”
Crazy Mike says you should vote whether you’re informed or not. Not sure I agree. I think you should feel guilty and do your homework.
About 60 percent of people who are eligible to vote show up for presidential elections. Midterms hover closer to 40 percent.
Let’s do the math. In 2016, 56 percent of the U.S. voting age population cast ballots. That means 137.5 million of the 245.5 million. That’s more than 100 million people who had the right to get their opinion counted and didn’t. Crazy Michele, another co-worker of mine, calls that “leaving money on the table.”
Australia: They get about a 93 percent turnout. Austria, Sweden, Liechtenstein, you name it.
And what about San Francisco, the city that knows how? In that same 2016 election, 393,318 people cast their vote, which does represent 77 percent of the registered voters, but only 62.5 percent of eligible voters are registered. Voting is easy. Let me be frank: I’m not even certain what the San Francisco Community College Board does or what effect it has on the outer, outer, outer Excelsior. But I read what I can search, and in the information age, none of us has an excuse.
San Francisco is an awfully small town. Turns out I’ve told off at least one person running for office, and another one attended Zane’s confirmation (didn’t think I saw you standing in the back at San Anselmo’s, eh Gavin?); one of the candidates for Board of Education, Martin Rawlings-Fein, was a parent at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy the year that I went down to the board to protest the principal slapping Zane.
I’m not telling you how to vote. That’s the beauty of this. Aidan is the only person who knows how I vote, because he stands in the booth with me, his crayon ready lest I should falter.
Take a side. Stand up and be counted. Don’t blame me when you’re condemned to perpetual daylight savings time.
Or, to quote my great-great-greatgrandaunt, the only one in the family to have more calamities than me, “Can’t count on miracles. Sometimes you just got to have a plan.”
Nurse Vivian was born the year that women were first allowed to vote in the United States, and she took the matter seriously.