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Tradition. Opportunity. Transformation.®
Kate
COmmIttED ACtIVISt AND HONOrED FACUltY SPOUSE
KAtE OSEr AlwAYS wENt wHErE HElP wAS NEEDED
To label her merely as a liberal would be to demean the breadth and depth of her
compassion for the human condition. Her passion for the righteousness of simple
human dignity transcended politics. While on their face, her ideals and values
clearly coincided with the left on the political spectrum, her passion for all humans
precluded her from advocating for any cause simply for political gain. That’s not to
say Kate Oser, who passed away on September 8, 2009 at the age of 91, didn’t involve
in the occasional political donnybrook, but the intersection of her humanism with the political
orbits of particular parties was clearly a matter of happenstance.
Oser, wife of the late Jacob Oser, professor emeritus of economics, began her life of activism in
the mid-1930s when she joined other Boston-area college students at a rally protesting fascist leader
Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. “I think it was the first rally I went to,” Oser said in late
August at the Utica-area assisted living facility where she had been residing for the past year. “I was
really self-conscious because I had never been to a rally before and any new thing you get a little
jittery about, but it was the right thing to do. And there I was,” she added with a little laugh.
While slowed by age and physically hampered by a stroke she suffered in 2006, Oser still recalled
in wistful tones the part she played at particular stops along the path of history. She arrived in the
Utica area in the early 1950s when Jake accepted a position at the College, and wasted little time
in getting involved in the community. In Clinton, where she and Jake settled, there was a sizable
migrant farm worker population, and these seasonal workers from the South, most of whom were
African-American, endured poor working conditions and meager pay. Added to that was the overt
and covert racism of the day. Oser, naturally, set about to help.
“They were very hard-working people and I don’t think people appreciated the work they were
doing. Their life wasn’t easy,” Oser recalled. “They were given a chit every time they filled a bushel
of peas or beans. They only got 30 cents a bushel. It takes an awful lot of peas to fill a bushel basket.”
Oser enrolled the workers in Federal assistance programs. “We were trying to bring these
programs to the people; they could get free butter, milk and cheese and I even think they got cereal.
This would help them get through when they had very little cash. It was very valuable to them.”
She would take the women to area clinics for exams and help with birth control. Child care,
summer schools, evening adult education, and even inter-camp baseball games were also started
by Oser and the many other volunteers.
Often, Oser was viewed with disdain by some of her neighbors. She remembered one woman was
absolutely horrified when Oser told her she was going to visit the camps. “People were mystified.
One woman gave a screech of horror and exclaimed, ‘You’re going to a camp where there are black
men?’ She couldn’t believe it,” Oser recalled, chuckling at the memory.
pioneer 17 fall 2009