Associated Articles
Pride, family make her one of a kind
Los Alamos Monitor
by Roger Snodgrass
October 6, 2006
Cholene Espinoza is one of those people whose resume nearly says it all, but doesn't begin to describe what's going on inside.v
She spoke in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month on the campus of Los Alamos National Laboratory Thursday. She wore the uniform of a United Airlines captain, which she happens to be - very good for a half-Hispanic, half-Irish "valley girl" from Espanola, who was raised by her grandparents.
Her sister Valerie Espinoza, now Santa Fe County Clerk, worked at the laboratory for a number of years and Cholene has spoken here before on the subject of diversity.
Surely weighing under a hundred pounds and standing something less than five feet tall, she hardly matched the stereotype for a domestic airline pilot, much less a graduate of the Air Force Academy and the second woman U-2 spy-plane pilot, flying at 70,000 feet over Russia, Iraq and Yugoslavia, not to mention the award-winning radio journalist who was embedded with the 1st Tank Battalion during the Iraq War.
Then again, what else would somebody look like who did all that and wrote a book about her volunteer work in post-Katrina Mississippi, who now lives in New York City and just happened to be at an event with Sen. Hillary Clinton - and so much more.
And then when Espinoza started talking, there was so much more to every story and so many stories. They were not so much about her professional success, as about her lessons, passions, service, insights and relationships.
They were about her energy, about pushing herself, keeping the faith, challenging others and not taking herself too seriously.
She credited her grandmother with teaching her many valuable lessons.
One of the best was, "You can't expect others to invest in you if you don't invest in yourself."
She has made it a point to pursue every opportunity, a drive that has opened doors and forced her to continue to develop and transform.
It does not surprise her now that people embrace her "when it's obvious I just want to be on the team," she said.
Take her experience in Mississippi. She dedicated last year to Katrina relief work. She and her partner, Ellen Ratner, connected with some African-American churches in Harrison County where they showed up one day driving a U-Haul filled with supplies.
"It was a 21st century version of 'Guess Who's Coming for Dinner,'" she said.
In an area where individual efforts and faith-based efforts were doing the work the federal government failed to do, the community embraced them and she became committed in turn - to the point, she said, that she "enrolled" in the community.
Proceeds from her book, "Through the Eye of the Storm" went toward the million dollars in funds she helped raise to build a community educational center in DeLisle and a public pool.
One of the biggest donors was Mississippi Gov. Haley Barber, former chairman of the Republican Party who donated $400,000 from his own privately raised funds.
"That's America. That's what people don't see from the outside. We don't know how to fail," Espinoza said.
There is a special story about the pool. Southern Mississippi doesn't have swimming pools because after desegregation began, whites decided to fill them in rather than swim with blacks. There is a legacy of guilt about some of the people who drowned only because they could not swim.
"But we're going to keep at this," Espinoza said, communicating how impressed she was that a gay couple, a black community and a conservative governor had teamed up to build the first integrated swimming pool in the county.
She's a consultant to an investment company, a board director on a software company that protects children from the Internet and another that does water conservation, the resume says. She's a certified mediator who teaches conflict resolution to labor unions. Get the picture?
By the way, she was squadron Athlete of the Year in 1989.
The Power of Two: Ellen Ratner and Cholene Espinoza
AfterEllen.com
by Christie Keith
September 11, 2006
From the White House press room to the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast, there aren't too many challenges lesbian supercouple Ellen Ratner and Cholene Espinoza haven't taken on.
In addition to being bureau chief for Talk Radio News Service and a longstanding member of the White House press corps, Ellen Ratner is the “short” to Jim Pinkerton's “long” on Fox News' The Long and the Short of It, a weekly liberal vs. conservative news analysis show. What brought a feisty liberal lesbian like Ellen Ratner to conservative cable behemoth Fox News?
First of all, Ratner rejects that characterization. “I do not consider Fox ‘right wing.' They have an editorial viewpoint, but that's not reflected by the news department,” Ratner insists. And surprisingly, although Ratner has been liberal-baited, she has almost never been gay-baited or even had reference to her lesbianism made in the hate mail she receives.
“I'd really say I've been baited more for being Jewish than being gay,” she says. “I try not to do too many pieces on gay or Jewish issues, because they're subjects on which I'm passionate, and I don't think passion leads to objectivity.”
That's not to say Ratner is silent when it really matters. “There's a guy, Les Kinsolving, who I used to do a radio show with,” she explains. “He's a complete lunatic, obsessed with sex. Every time he's called on in the White House press room, he manages to work anything he asks around to sex, homosexuality, totally off-the-wall stuff.
“One day I lost it. I went to [White House Press Secretary] Scott McClellan and said, ‘I'm not going to tolerate this. You can have your views on gay marriage, but you can't allow verbal gay bashing in here. Would you let people talk like this about blacks in the '60s, during the civil rights movement? Then don't allow it here.'
“He asked what he should do, if he should be more aggressive in response to [Kinsolving's] questions. And I said yes. And he did it. So if it comes to that point, I don't mess around. I'm very open in the press room and have been since I got there 13 years ago.”
In 2002, Ratner met Cholene Espinoza, a former Air Force U-2 spy plane pilot and current commercial pilot for United. Espinoza had been hit hard emotionally by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and felt rudderless and full of doubts. She did her best to make sense of the tragedy, but time spent as an embedded reporter in Iraq for Ratner's Talk Radio News Service deepened her sense of frustration.
Just as Espinoza was beginning to recover from the terrorist attacks and her time in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast. “I had been to war twice,” Espinoza writes in her book, Through the Eye of the Storm. “Once as an embedded journalist with the First Tank Battalion of the United States Marine Corps, and again the following June, after the invasion. We had shipped almost 200,000 people and enough firepower to overthrow a government and attempt to rebuild an entire nation more than 6,000 miles, but here, within our own borders, we could not provide food, water, protection, or an escape for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.”
Espinoza and Ratner responded to the crisis with action. They packed up a U-Haul full of basic supplies and headed for Pass Christian, Miss. Ratner had been a passenger on a crowded flight with an attorney named Shantrell Nicks, who lived in Pass Christian, a town devastated by the storm.
Out of this initial visit grew an ongoing relationship between Espinoza and Ratner and the people of Pass Christian and neighboring DeLisle. Working with the community and other supporters, they have raised well over $600,000 to help rebuild the area and establish a community center. Ratner says, “Every moment of our lives has been devoted to raising this money.” She gives Through the Eye of the Storm much of the credit. “Cholene's book moves people.”
Ratner, too, is an author. Ready, Set, Talk! A Guide to Getting Your Message Heard by Millions on Talk Radio, Talk Television, and Talk Internet, co-written with Kathie Scarrah, was released earlier this year, and outlines ways that progressive organizations, campaigns and politicians can communicate effectively in the media.
Asked how effective the LGBT movement has been in getting out its message, Ratner is blunt: “They haven't been.” She cites personal and organizational missteps that interfere with that message, but focuses mostly on the experience working in Mississippi to illustrate one area in which the gay community could strengthen its outreach.
“Gay people need to be effective communicators in nongay organizations so people will be exposed to gay people,” she advises. “Be involved as human beings in the fabric of our communities, as well as in gay organizations.”
She believes that enabling straight and gay people to get to know each other and be present in each other's lives, families and communities is a key to overcoming homophobia in society. In Pass Christian, she says, being gay hasn't been an issue at all. Espinoza concurs: “It's been a nonissue. Work like this is opening doors, opening people's hearts to diversity of all kinds.”
Nonetheless, Ratner adds, “I've never met so many closeted people in my life.”
Espinoza agrees and says, “That aspect has been extremely painful, like my military experience.”
While she was a reporter in Iraq , Espinoza never discussed her lesbianism, but since the publication of her book, she's realized it's not an issue for the soldiers with whom she is still in touch. “To them, the important thing was that they wanted me to tell it like it was, to be their champion by telling the truth,” she says. “In the face of that, all the differences melt away. Also, sexual orientation is less and less of an issue with a younger military with changing attitudes.
Espinoza continues: “Which raises the issue, what does it really take to create social change? The right wants to go by the polls on gay marriage, but ignores the polls that show people want gay people to serve openly in the military.”
In the end, she says, “There are so many Katrinas everywhere, people and projects that need help. … This sense of service and community has been the antidote for my own bitterness. Community is the antidote to the challenges we face in our society today. We have a responsibility to each other. When we reach out, we have a stronger family.”
Ratner advises anyone with a cause to promote in the media to always be prepared for tough questions. What tough question would Ratner like to ask, and of whom?
She answers: “I'd like to ask Bush and, really, all elected officials, the question I asked Tom DeLay, right in front of dozens of reporters: Did he have any gay family members or staffers? Did he know any gay people at all?”
From a Dark Past, a Spirit Renewed
New York Times
by Lisa Belkin
August 13, 2006
The first time Cholene Espinoza put her work aside was after 9/11. Then, as
now, she was flying for United Airlines, a job she’d held since 1995, when
she left the Air Force after serving nine years.
As it happened, Ms. Espinoza’s last night as a co-pilot was Friday, Sept. 7.
She had flown into Manhattan, right past the twin towers, and she remembers
“thinking about how fortunate those people were to be able to see their
world as I did — from high in the sky.”
Her first flight as a full captain was supposed to be on Sept. 12. She was
scheduled to fly out of San Francisco, which would have meant flying first
as a passenger from New York to California on the morning of Sept. 11. But
the flight she was to command was canceled over the weekend, which is the
only reason she was not on United Flight 93 when it crashed in a field in
Pennsylvania.
For months afterward Ms. Espinoza was haunted by the close call and by the
fact that “those same people I had flown by (or with) that Friday night
chose to jump to their death rather than be consumed by fire.” She felt
helpless, as a former military officer, watching an attack on American soil.
“This was my city, my country, my airline,” she says. “I wanted to do
something, but what could I do?”
Eventually she took a three-month leave from the airline — which was more
than happy to let her go, reeling as it was from the loss of business after
9/11 — and spent time in Iraq, as a military reporter for Talk Radio News
Service, embedded with the Marine Corps.
She was just feeling some small sense of equilibrium, she says, when
“Katrina blew in and blew me right off my feet.” Back at work by then, she
flew in and out of Louis Armstrong Airport four days before Katrina hit on
Aug. 29.
Even though it was not yet clear what path the storm would take, she writes
in her book Through the Eye of the Storm (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006),
with proceeds going to Katrina’s victims, “I looked down on New Orleans with
a strange feeling of nostalgia — as though I was saying goodbye to an old
friend that I would never see again.”
Again, she felt a need to do something. This time she took vacation leave
and headed down to the gulf to help. Her partner, Ellen Ratner, happened to
be sitting next to a family on a flight a few days after the hurricane. The
father (who had stayed behind while the mother and two children left on this
flight) was a principal of a high school near DeLisle, Miss., and an aunt
(who had also stayed) was a minister at the Mount Zion United Methodist
Church, which had been all but destroyed.
Within a week, Ms. Espinoza and Ms. Ratner took a U-Haul full of toilet
paper, diapers, canned foods, soap, bleach and fresh fruit to DeLisle. It
was the first of more than a dozen trips over the last year. They became
close friends with the woman from the plane, a lawyer named Shantrell Nicks,
and her husband, Myrick, and with the Rev. Rosemary Williams of Mount Zion
Church. Together, the African-American family from Mississippi and the
Latina-Jewish gay couple from the Upper West Side worked to restore what
they could. “They say the first 20 days are the emergency, and 10 times
that, the next 200 days, are the relief, and then 10 times that, the next
2,000 days, are the recovery,” Ms. Espinoza says. “We plan to stick around
through it all.”
For months she and her new friends in Mississippi have been raising funds
for the Pass Christian/DeLisle Community Center. Ms. Espinoza personally
donated $130,000, used to purchase 5.2 acres of land, and the group has
raised $500,000 toward its $1 million goal. (For more information see
www.throughtheeyeofthestorm.com.)
The 6,000-square-foot structure planned for that land will not be a
rebuilding of something destroyed, but rather a brand-new entity. It will
provide adults with G.E.D. classes and computer training. In the afternoons,
it will become an after-school center, the only one in the area. There is a
junior Olympic-size swimming pool planned, too, so that more local residents
will know how to swim.
Ms. Espinoza says she is determined to replace the helplessness she felt
after 9/11 with a sense of purpose. “9/11 was a transformation for me, in a
bad way,” she explains. “It was a loss of hope, a loss of spirit. Katrina
was also a transformation, but it was a renewal of hope, a renewal of
spirit.”
A Woman Warrior’s New Mission
EDGE
by Peter Cassels
May 7, 2006
At the age of 41, Cholene Espinoza has already experienced more than an average person does in a lifetime.
A graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Espinoza became only the second woman to fly the U-2 spy plane and was awarded the Air Medal for combat missions over Iraq and Bosnia in the 1990s. Today, she’s a pilot for United Airlines--she narrowly missed being killed on 9/11 because she was supposed to be aboard Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania--and a journalist for a news service who was embedded with the soldiers in the Iraq war.
A deeply religious woman, Espinoza also is a lesbian who did not come out publicly until after she completed her military service.
Her spirit of service to others that she told EDGE in a recent telephone interview was instilled during her Air Force Academy days led her and life partner Ellen Ratner to travel to the Gulf Coast to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. That experience prompted Espinoza to write Through the Eye of the Storm, a book published in March by Chelsea Green. She’s donating the proceeds from sales of the book to build a community center in a small Mississippi town ravaged by the hurricane.
Her generous decision to turn the profits of the book over to building the 12,000-square-foot Pass Christian/DeLisle Community Center, estimated to cost $1 million, is only part of Espinoza’s financial support. She also bought land the center will be built on and contributed $135,000. Her partner also is a donor. Thus far they’ve raised additional commitments of $150,000.
Espinoza discussed a range of issues with EDGE--the federal government’s response to Katrina, the Iraq war, the conundrum of being a devout Christian while many religions condemn her sexuality, and gays in the military.
Read the rest of this article
Republican $3 bills
World Net Daily
by Ellen Ratner
May 1, 2006
This week, President Bush decided to recognize National Volunteer Week by calling for volunteers to help rebuild the mess that Hurricane Katrina left behind. Does Bush's call strike you as a day late and a dollar short? How about eight months late and billions of dollars short?
What rankles me personally about this is that last September, I sent a note to someone I see almost every day – White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan – pleading with him to persuade Bush to immediately call for an all-out volunteer effort by every American to help the rebuilding effort. When nothing happened, I didn't call for anything – instead, I teamed up with airline pilot Cholene Espinoza, and together we loaded up a van with food and health supplies and drove down to Mississippi.
Read the rest of the article
Flying into the ‘eye' of Katrina's aftermath
The Cleveland Jewish News
By Ted S. Stratton
April 21, 2006
Cholene Espinoza, second from right, visited a tent city near Pass Christian, Miss., on a trip in March with members of the Ratner family and other volunteers.
Former Air Force pilot on a mission to provide community center for Mississippi cities
Cholene Espinoza, 41, has lived many lives: Air Force pilot, reporter, trainer and activist. But her hardest and most rewarding job came within the last year, she says.
Espinoza has been helping rebuild a small community in coastal Mississippi flattened by Hurricane Katrina. Her task is still ongoing; she hopes to raise enough money to construct a community center to educate children and provide a refuge in a devastated town.
"It's been the challenge and privilege of a lifetime,” says the petite United Airlines pilot, who was in Cleveland for the Passover holiday and to promote her book of memoirs, Through the Eye of the Storm (Chelsea Green, 2006, $14).
Espinoza's partner is Ellen Ratner, cousin of Charles Ratner, president and chief executive officer of Forest City Inc.
Espinoza, a devout Christian, discovered her Jewish roots after meeting Ratner, who runs a talk radio news bureau in Washington and is a consultant for Fox News.
After doing research in the Southwest, Espinoza discovered that her father's family in New Mexico was descended from crypto, or hidden Jews. They fled the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 and moved to Mexico, then north to a small town near Santa Fe where succeeding generations lived for over 400 years. Espinoza grew up without knowing her heritage or any Jewish practices.
"Most of the Jewish traditions died with my great-grandfather,” she says. He wore a hat at all times, slaughtered animals in a kosher manner and drank Mogen David wine. The family had a menorah, but Espinoza thought "it was a Christmas decoration, because instead of candles it had electric lights.”
It was partly the Ratner family's dedication to charitable causes that inspired Espinoza to go down to Mississippi shortly after the hurricane hit.
"In my family, the number one value was loyalty, because of their history,” Espinoza says. "Being around Ellen and her family, their driving value is charity.”
Ratner wasn't even sure she wanted to travel to the hurricane zone at all. She had been planning a vacation with Espinoza, until she encountered a family on a plane trip back from Houston.
Ratner admonished a mother for letting her children "crawl all over the place” on the plane. The two women then began to chat, and Ratner found out the woman was Shantrell Nicks, a lawyer from Pass Christian, Mississippi, a town completely leveled by Hurricane Katrina. They exchanged contact information, and Ratner promised to help Nicks's community.
Back home in New York, Espinoza felt a sense of personal responsibility to help the victims. She had seen what happened on TV and heard statistics about wastefulness by FEMA and other relief organizations. "I was bitter and angry about the government response. I asked, ‘What can we do about it?'”
Instead of a vacation, Ratner and Espinoza flew down to Pass Christian to deliver supplies and provide aid. What they saw was shocking. The community didn't need old clothes or linens. They needed homes, electricity, water and money. Apart from one church, Mt. Zion United Methodist in DeLisle, a few miles inland from Pass Christian, there were no community buildings where the whole community could gather.
Espinoza spent weeks in Pass Christian and DeLisle, getting to know the community and helping with construction and relief work. After many return trips - her job as an airline pilot gives her ten days off per month - she hatched the idea for a community/vocational center as an antidote for some of the area's problems.
Together with Rosemary Williams, the pastor of Mt. Zion church, they created a plan for a center that would provide recreational and educational opportunities for the area.
Raising money has been difficult. Forest City helped out, and Ellen's cousins, Ron Ratner and Joan Shafran, visited the site. KA architects in Cleveland donated the plans for the 12,000-square-foot center, which includes classrooms, meeting rooms, and a gymnasium. Espinoza will also donate all proceeds from the sale of her book to fund the center. The cost of the center is $1 million, and they have raised about $300,000 so far.
Espinoza feels amazingly welcomed by the community that she admits she was wary about at first. "We're from New York, and we're about as different from the community as you can get,” she explains. But "we shared common interests and common goals,” she says.
Ratner, who spent her childhood in Memphis, Tenn., and Cleveland, is impressed by the resiliency of the Pass Christian community. "It reminds me of growing up in Shaker Heights and the larger Jewish community. Here it was temple-centered. There, everything is church-centered.” As a result of the hurricane, she says, there is also a lot more mixing among the ethnic groups: black, white and Hispanic.
They haven't broken ground yet on the Pass Christian-DeLisle Community Center, and contributions and physical help are needed. Proceeds from the book will help, but it won't be enough. However, the former military flying ace isn't giving up her dream anytime soon. Quoting the Book of Proverbs she says, "people without vision are dead.'”
For more information about the book and the community center project, visit www.throughtheeyeofthestorm.com
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