If you want to learn more about what's on this website, click on the Links icon below. If you are interested in the doings of Purple Panthers, click here - OR, you can click here to go to the Ashfield, Mass. page, which has zillions of sub-topics - including more on our seniors.

Why the name Purple Panthers? A lady e-mailed me a couple of years ago to telll me the domain name was available for bidding on e-Bay. SO, my immediate past came rushing before my eyes, and I grabbed at the chance - and got it for $25. Too good to waste, even though the significance of the Ashfield page of that name had gone under with the demise of the actual group of seniors who had taken it. BUT - the context still lives! Read on.

OK, so the black panther above isn't purple! But she is powerful, isn't she. BEAUTIFUL! And DANGEROUS!  I've left her image BIG, even though it takes longer to come in, because that power needs to come through loud and clear!  It's where we Ashfield Seniors started our reform efforts on behalf of our little hilltown. You can read more about what we DID and DIDN'T manage to do before we got shot down by younger people.

The name celebrates the famous Gray Panthers started by a resourceful California lady, Maggie Kuhn, to do some advocating, some bold and independent muck-raking and reform activity - no, not as a pressure group with lots of Daddy Warbucks moolah like AARP - not a lobbying pressure group (get in line and be sure you bring your checkbook or your VISA card with you!) - but the real thing, like what you see the college kids on Move-On doing, fighting for peace and justice in a war-riddled and terribly, terribly unfair world.

Maggie's thrust was not so much on behalf of old people as it was based on a belief that old people themselves needed to be the reformers - not coddled or represented by others working on their behalf but active - on their own behalf and on behalf of others! Her target was injustice or cruelty in any form, especially when aimed at women and children. She believed that old people were the most appropriate group to bring about needed changes for the better!

The site name spun itself out of a short-lived but enthusiastic group of elders who were activists in the little hill town of Ashfield in western Massachusetts, after we had tried to become a cell of the Gray Panthers, only to discover that they were no longer active, but had become another pressure group in DC! So we adopted the name Purple Panthers - only to have this glorious symbol of activism sort of killed off by the disapproval of a new younger member who was outraged by the frivolity implied by the name and who came down on it - and us - like the proverbial Assyrian on the fold.

We shouldn't have given in, but we did. She was new and enthusiastic, and we didn't want to pull rank on her. So we became the Ashfield Senior Council, and did lots of good work (which basically came to nothing in the long run, as so often happens when you are trying to be cooperative).

But Purple Panthers was just too good a name to let die out, don't you think? Sure.

So that's what this new site is all about. Like Topsy, it's growing fast, and will go on growing. It starts with birth, of course, and goes right on through to death ... and beyond! Climb on board and do some exploring. And please give me some of your thoughts and ideas, OK? My e-mail address is below. I figure anyone over sixty (or even fifty!) who has taught her/himself computer skills ought to be inventive enough to help us save the planet! Right?

You can go on one of my other sites (the first one mostly about education. the second about biodiesel fuel and the third mostly for writings - by elders and others). You can take a look by clicking on one of the URLs below.

Thought you might like to see what I look like at 86: 

 

 

 Send E-mail (complaints, comments, shouts of joy, etc.) to:

maryskole@aol.com