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Asho I. Craine
“Asho Craine, a champion with a social conscience,” read a headline in the January 11, 2002, Ann Arbor [Michigan] News, days after her 87th birthday. The article continued, “Her mother was a suffra...view more“Asho Craine, a champion with a social conscience,” read a headline in the January 11, 2002, Ann Arbor [Michigan] News, days after her 87th birthday. The article continued, “Her mother was a suffragette. Her father, a lawyer, was Brooklyn borough president in the reform-minded administration of New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia...She was a member of the charter class—1936—at Bennington College, a free thinking school in Vermont, an experience she says ‘opened up the world to me.’ Sixty-six years later, she retains liberal views on the environmental, politics, and social issues.”
In 1934 Asho traveled with the first student group to enter Russia after President Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union. After graduation she worked for a consumer-farmer milk cooperative, which led to a job in Washington with the Consumers’ Counsel Division of the Department of Agriculture. There she met Lyle Craine, whom she married in 1942. They had two sons and a daughter.
In 1953 the family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Lyle earned a Ph.D. and then joined the faculty of the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources. They enjoyed life together in Ann Arbor for forty years until Lyle’s death in 1993 following a 1988 stroke.
In Ann Arbor, Asho became a volunteer and community activist primarily through the League of Women Voters and the Gray Panthers, and once ran for school board. Following her husband’s death, Asho joined the Learning in Retirement Collective and began to produce her memoirs, excerpts of which appear in The Man Who Eats Snakes, an anthology produced by the Collective in 2001. In 2004 she moved to the Seabury Retirement Community in Bloomfield, Connecticut, where she joined a poetry group and begin writing poems. This volume is the product of sixteen productive years as a writer.view less