Comments:
With Sister Susan Swain and other Loretto women, I am working on activities and events to commemorate the 200th Anniversary of the Sisters of Loretto, the Catholic Sisters who founded Loretto Academy in Kansas City in 1901, nearly 80 years after their origins in Kentucky in 1812. The Anniversary will be the calendar year 2012, but some events may occur as early as 2010. We would very much like to have participation by Loretto in Kansas City students and faculty. Watch this space for more!
My full time job now is to conduct summer adventures on the old pioneer trails that begin in Kansas City and lead west to California, Oregon, and Utah.
I started this kind of work in 1973 when Sister Jeanne and I took ten Loretto girls on a month long trip following the Oregon Trail to the Pacific! In October this year, I "found" one of those girls, Cathy Johnson, in Boise Idaho, still eager to follow the old trail! She has agreed to meet me and some younger pioneers on the trail in June 2010!
I'd love to find the rest of the Loretto Trail pioneers from 1973 and 1976.
Each summer for the past dozen years I've taken 15 teens who are blind or visually and a group of gifted adults on a living history trek in the wagon ruts of the pioneers. We've relived the tragedies of the Donner Party, travelled fast and light in the footsteps of the Gold Rush adventurers, and exalted in the wilderness with the earliest of the westbound explorers, Lewis and Clark. In 2008, in a ceremony at the White House, our Discovery Trails Program was given the Coming Up Taller Award by the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities as "one of the top arts and humanities program in the country for youth beyond the school hours."
