1996 Dorothy Day Award
Kip and Terri Hargrave
     A couple less familiar with the Catholic Worker movement, and all of the single-minded, personal sacrifice for the benefit of others, inherent in that movement, would be less embarrassed than Kip and Terri Hargrave about receiving the Dorothy Day Award.
     Oh sure, they were Maryknoll missionaries together for three years in Bolivia in the late 1980s.
      They have both champion social justice causes all their adult lives.
     Kip took a semester's hiatus from his position teaching Spanish at Syracuse University to run a Catholic Charities program for 60 new Cuban refugees.  And Terri is a pediatrician for the poor at the Syracuse Community Health Center's West Side satellite office.
     Still, they consider themselves a bit too well off - snug in their Westcott neighborhood home with four kids and a comfortable life - to be held up to the image of Dorothy Day, the selfless founder of the movement.
     "Dorothy Day would be rolling over in her grave," said William "Kip" Hargrave, to think that people with a house, a car and money in the bank - earning interest - could get an award named for her.
     But the Hargraves are, tonight.
     The couple will be honored at an appropriately egalitarian spaghetti dinner at the St. Andrew the Apostle Church hall to benefit the Dorothy Day House for battered women.
     As imperfectly prosperous as they are, the Hargraves are perfect for the award because they think so hard about the kink of public service they do and know so much about how it would compare with the work of Dorothy Day.
     For example, they are unapologetically liberal (he recently wrote a defense of '60's style liberalism in a letter to The Syracuse Newspapers in response to a Suzanne Fields column). but they approach and participate in partisan politics reluctantly.
      Terri ticks off the problems they see: Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, George Pataki and James Walsh.
     Kip explains that Dorothy Day wouldn't have paid such politicians any notice.
     "She would have worked at the grassroots level," he said, But they said they feel they have to take a stand on social issues.

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In their missionary work, they say the terrible outcome of a widening gap between the haves and have-nots. Bolivian teachers didn't teach because the pay was so low that they had to supplement their incomes working in the drug trade or exchanging currency.
     "The U.S. is moving more and more to the kind of oligarchy that Bolivia has," she said.
     These Days, they do what they can, with political action on the near West Side, their jobs helping the poor and the local Maryknoll Affiliates.
     They work part time because they consider raising their four children almost a full-time job.
     Both believe that the "social infrastructure" of support for poor families is in jeopardy.
     Terri, as a pediatrician, has seen the damage done when the products of weak parenting become weak parents, themselves.  She said she appreciates the value of interrupting that cycle.
     Kip is a Vietnam veteran and a 1967 graduate of Notre Dame University.  Terri graduated from Motre Dame's sister institution, St. Mary's College, in 1968 before completing studies at John's Hopkins and Harvard universities.
     They could have lived anywhere in the United States after finishing their three years of missionary work in Bolivia, but the pair chose Syracuse, they said, because of its caring people and programs.
     "We've never been disappointed," Kip said.
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By Frank Brieaddy, The Post-Standard, May 17, 1996