Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my deep appreciation of the life and legacy of Gordon Parks. A gifted photographer and director, Parks, passed away Tuesday, March 7 at the age of 93. I would also like to enter into the Record numerous…
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my deep appreciation of the life and legacy of Gordon Parks. A gifted photographer and director, Parks, passed away Tuesday, March 7 at the age of 93. I would also like to enter into the Record numerous obituaries chronicling his life's achievements.
Born in 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas, he was the son of a dirt farmer and overcame tremendous obstacles to become a trailblazer--breaking down barriers posed to blacks throughout media and entertainment. The youngest of 15 children, Parks was orphaned at 16 when his mother died. After leaving high school before graduation, he found himself drawn to photography as a means of social documentary to advance those forgotten in the community. He referred to his photography as ``his weapon against poverty and racism,'' and used his skill to give a voice to the black experience. ``I never allowed the fact that I experienced bigotry and discrimination to step in the way of doing what I have to do,'' he once said. ``I don't understand how other people let that destroy them.''
His first substantial work came when he began work in 1942 as a documentary photographer with the Farm Security Administration, an agency created to call attention to and produce a historical record of social and cultural conditions across the country. Six years later, Parks became the first black person to work at Life magazine where he covered poverty, segregation, crime and other issues through poignant photo essays. He was also the first black writer to join Vogue and the first to write, direct and score a Hollywood movie ``The Learning Tree'', based on a 1963 novel he wrote about his life as a farm boy. He later directed the 1971 film ``Shaft''.
Parks was a passionate voice and a pioneer in the civil rights movement. While his mark was made documenting the human consequences of intolerance and crime through photojournalism, him empathy also shone through novels, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction including photographic instructional manuals and filmmaking books. A self-taught
pianist, Parks composed Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1953) and Tree Symphony (1967). In 1989, he composed and choreographed ``Martin,'' a ballet dedicated to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Parks also performed as a jazz pianist and as a campaigner for civil rights.
Mr. Speaker, please join me in honoring the life of Gordon Parks, a man who not only changed the face of photography, but refused to ignore the most forgotten.
[From Reuters, March 7, 2006]
Filmmaker Gordon Parks Dies
(By Bob Tourtellotte)
Los Angeles (Reuters).--Gordon Parks, the pioneering black
photographer and filmmaker who explored the African-American
experience in his work, including landmark movies ``The
Learning Tree'' and ``Shaft,'' died on Tuesday in New York, a
relative said.
Parks, 93, had been in failing health, said the nephew,
Charles Parks, who lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was orphaned by age 15
and grew up homeless. He worked a variety of menial jobs
before taking up photography in the late 1930s. He joined
``Life'' magazine in the late 1940s and became its first
black staff photographer, remaining with the publication
until 1968.
He worked at several government jobs as a photographer and
was a correspondent for the U.S. Office of War Information
during World War Two. After the war, he served for a stint as
a fashion photographer for Vogue magazine.
But it was at ``Life'' where he made his mark documenting
the human consequences of intolerance and crime. He was
equally at ease with gangsters as with cops, and he won the
trust of the fiery Malcolm X, the militant Black Panthers and
ordinary black Americans who lived in big cities and small,
rural towns.
His photo of a black cleaning lady, standing in front of a
huge American flag, mop in one hand, broom in the other and a
resigned look on her face, became one of his best known
shots.
``I suffered first as a child from discrimination, and
poverty to a certain extent, bigotry in my hometown in
Kansas,'' Parks told Reuters in a 2000 interview. ``So I
think it was a natural follow from that that I should use my
camera to speak for people who are unable to speak for
themselves.''
photos to film
He turned to filmmaking in the late 1960s, and in 1971
directed the hit movie ``Shaft,'' one of the first of a wave
of ``blaxploitation'' films that directly targeted a black
American audiences and typically featured exaggerated
sexuality, violence and funk or soul music.
``Shaft'' starred Richard Roundtree as a police detective
who was as street tough as he was sexy with the ladies. It
spawned a hit song, ``Theme from `Shaft' '' by Isaac Hayes,
and in 2000 was remade by director John Singleton with Samuel
L. Jackson in the lead role.
In 2000, when HBO aired a documentary on the photographer
and moviemaker, called ``Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works
of Gordon Parks,'' he said the two films were hard to
compare.
``There was a lot of humanity in the first one that was
lacking in the second one,'' he said. ``People probably want
more violence now and so on.''
Parks' first movie, 1969's ``The Learning Tree,'' was
adapted from a novel he wrote about growing up poor and black
in 1920s Kansas. He became the first black to write and
direct a major studio production when Warner Bros.
commissioned him to adapt his book to the big screen.
In 1989, the film was among the first 25 to be deemed
culturally and historically significant and was preserved in
the U.S. National Film Registry for future generations.
Over the years, he wrote volumes of poetry and fiction,
grew into an accomplished pianist and wrote a ballet about
the life of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King,
Jr., titled ``Martin,'' which aired on the PBS network in the
United States.
[From the New York Times, Mar. 8, 2006]
Gordon Parks, a Master of the Camera, Dies at 93
(By Andy Grundberg)
Gordon Parks, the photographer, filmmaker, writer and
composer who used his prodigious, largely self-taught talents
to chronicle the African-American experience and to retell
his own personal history, died yesterday at his home in
Manhattan. He was 93.
His death was announced by Genevieve Young, his former wife
and executor. Gordon Parks was the first African-American to
work as a staff photographer for Life magazine and the first
black artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film,
``The Learning Tree,'' in 1969.
He developed a large following as a photographer for Life
for more than 20 years, and by the time he was 50 he ranked
among the most influential image makers of the postwar years.
In the 1960's he began to write memoirs, novels, poems and
screenplays, which led him to directing films. In addition to
``The Learning Tree,'' he directed the popular action films
``Shaft'' and ``Shaft's Big Score!'' In 1970 he helped found
Essence magazine and was its editorial director from 1970 to
1973.
An iconoclast, Mr. Parks fashioned a career that resisted
categorization. No matter what medium he chose for his self-
expression, he sought to challenge stereotypes while still
communicating to a large audience. In finding early acclaim
as a photographer despite a lack of professional training, he
became convinced that he could accomplish whatever he set his
mind to. To an astonishing extent, he proved himself right.
Gordon Parks developed his ability to overcome barriers in
childhood, facing poverty, prejudice and the death of his
mother when he was a teen-ager. Living by his wits during
what would have been his high-school years, he came close to
being claimed by urban poverty and crime. But his nascent
talent, both musical and visual, was his exit visa.
His success as a photographer was largely due to his
persistence and persuasiveness in pursuing his subjects,
whether they were film stars and socialites or an
impoverished slum child in Brazil.
Mr. Parks's years as a contributor to Life, the largest-
circulation picture magazine of its day, lasted from 1948 to
1972, and it cemented his reputation as a humanitarian
photojournalist and as an artist with an eye for elegance. He
specialized in subjects relating to racism, poverty and black
urban life, but he also took exemplary pictures of Paris
fashions, celebrities and politicians.
``I still don't know exactly who I am,'' Mr. Parks wrote in
his 1979 memoir, ``To Smile in Autumn.'' He added, ``I've
disappeared into myself so many different ways that I don't
know who `me' is.''
Much of his literary energy was channeled into memoirs, in
which he mined incidents from his adolescence and early
career in an effort to find deeper meaning in them. His
talent for telling vivid stories was used to good effect in
``The Learning Tree,'' which he wrote first as a novel and
later converted into a screenplay. This was a coming-of-age
story about a young black man whose childhood plainly
resembled the author's. It was well received when it was
published in 1963 and again in 1969, when Warner Brothers
released the film version. Mr. Parks wrote, produced and
directed the film and wrote the music for its soundtrack.
He was also the cinematographer.
``Gordon Parks was like the Jackie Robinson of film,''
Donald Faulkner, the director of the New York State Writers
Institute, once said. ``He broke ground for a lot of people--
Spike Lee, John Singleton.''
Mr. Parks's subsequent films, ``Shaft'' (1971) and
``Shaft's Big Score!'' (1972), were prototypes for what
became known as blaxploitation films. Among Mr. Park's other
accomplishments were a second novel, four books of memoirs,
four volumes of poetry, a ballet and several orchestral
scores. As a photographer Mr. Parks combined a devotion to
documentary realism with a knack for making his own feelings
self-evident. The style he favored was derived from the
Depression-era photography project of the Farm Security
Administration, which he joined in 1942 at the age of 30.
Perhaps his best-known photograph, which he titled
``American Gothic,'' was taken during his brief time with the
agency; it shows a black cleaning woman named Ella Watson
standing stiffly in front of an American flag, a mop in one
hand and a broom in the other. Mr. Parks wanted the picture
to speak to the existence of racial bigotry and inequality in
the nation's capital. He was in an angry mood when he asked
the woman to pose, having earlier been refused service at a
clothing store, a movie theater and a restaurant.
Anger at social inequity was at the root of many of Mr.
Parks's best photographic stories, including his most famous
Life article, which focused on a desperately sick boy living
in a miserable Rio de Janeiro slum. Mr. Parks described the
plight of the boy, Flavio da Silva, in realistic detail. In
one photograph Flavio lies in bed, looking close to death. In
another he sits behind his baby brother, stuffing food into
the baby's mouth while the baby reaches his wet, dirty hands
into the dish for more food.
Mr. Parks's pictures of Flavio's life created a groundswell
of public response when they were published in 1961. Life's
readers sent some $30,000 in contributions, and the magazine
arranged to have the boy flown to Denver for medical
treatment for asthma and paid for a new home in Rio for his
family.
Mr. Parks credited his first awareness of the power of the
photographic image to the pictures taken by his predecessors
at the Farm Security Administration, including Jack Delano,
Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn. He first saw
their photographs of migrant workers in a magazine he picked
up while working as a waiter in a railroad car. ``I saw that
the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism,
against all sorts of social wrongs,'' he told an interviewer
in 1999. ``I knew at that point I had to have a camera.''
Many of Mr. Parks's early photo essays for Life, like his
1948 story of a Harlem youth gang called the Midtowners, were
a revelation for many of the magazine's predominantly white
readers and a confirmation for Mr. Parks of the camera's
power to shape public discussion.
But Mr. Parks made his mark mainly with memorable single
images within his essays, like ``American Gothic,'' which
were iconic in the manner of posters. His portraits of
Ma1colm X (1963), Muhammad Ali (1970) and the exiled Eldridge
and Kathleen Cleaver (1970) evoked the styles and strengths
of black leadership in the turbulent transition from civil
rights to black militancy.
But at Life Mr. Parks also used his camera for less
politicized, more conventional ends, photographing the
socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, who became his friend; a
fashionable Parisian in a veiled hat puffing hard on her
cigarette, and Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini at
the beginning of their notorious love affair.
On his own time he photographed female nudes in a style
akin to that of Baroque painting, experimented with double-
exposing color film and recorded pastoral scenes that evoke
the pictorial style of early-20-century art photography.
Much as his best pictures aspired to be metaphors, Mr.
Parks shaped his own life story as a cautionary tale about
overcoming racism, poverty and a lack of formal education. It
was a project he pursued in his memoirs and in his novel; all
freely mix documentary realism with a fictional sensibility.
The first version of his autobiography was ``A Choice of
Weapons'' (1966), which was followed by ``To Smile in
Autumn'' (1979) and ``Voices in the Mirror: An
Autobiography'' (1990). The most recent account of his life
appeared in 1997 in ``Half Past Autumn'' (Little, Brown), a
companion to a traveling exhibition of his photographs.
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born on Nov. 30,
1912, in Fort Scott, Kan. He was the youngest of 15 children
born to a tenant farmer, Andrew Jackson Parks, and the former
Sarah Ross. Although mired in poverty and threatened by
segregation and the violence it engendered, the family was
bound by Sarah Parks's strong conviction that dignity and
hard work could overcome bigotry.
Young Gordon's security ended when his mother died. He was
sent to St. Paul, Minn., to live with the family of an older
sister. But the arrangement lasted only a few weeks; during a
quarrel, Mr. Parks's brother-in-law threw him out of the
house. Mr. Parks learned to survive on the streets, using his
untutored musical gifts to find work as a piano player in a
brothel and later as the singer for a big band. He attended
high school in St. Paul but never graduated.
In 1933 he married a longtime sweetheart, Sally Alvis, and
they soon had a child, Gordon Jr. While his family stayed
near his wife's relatives in Minneapolis, Mr. Parks traveled
widely to find work during the Depression. He joined the
Civilian Conservation Corps, toured as a semi-pro basketball
player and worked as a busboy and waiter. It was while he was
a waiter on the North Coast Limited, a train that ran between
Chicago and Seattle, that he picked up a magazine discarded
by a passenger and saw for the first time the documentary
pictures of Lange, Rothstein and the other photographers of
the Farm Security Administration.
In 1938 Mr. Parks purchased his first camera at a Seattle
pawn shop. Within months he had his pictures exhibited in the
store windows of the Eastman Kodak store in Minneapolis, and
he began to specialize in portraits of African-American
women.
He also talked his way into making fashion photographs for
an exclusive St. Paul clothing store. Marva Louis, the
elegant wife of the heavyweight champion Joe Louis, chanced
to see his photographs and was so impressed that she
suggested that he move to Chicago for better opportunities to
do more of them.
In Chicago Mr. Parks continued to produce society portraits
and fashion images, but he also turned to documenting the
slums of the South Side. His efforts gained him a Julius
Rosenwald Fellowship, which he spent as an apprentice with
the Farm Security Administration's photography project in
Washington under its director, Roy Stryker.
In 1943, with World War II under way, the farm agency was
disbanded and Stryker's project was transferred to the Office
of War Information (O.W.I.). Mr. Parks became a correspondent
for the O.W.I. photographing the 332d Fighter Group, an all-
black unit based near Detroit. Unable to accompany the pilots
overseas, he relocated to Harlem to search for freelance
assignments.
In 1944 Alexander Liberman, then art director of Vogue,
asked him to photograph women's fashions, and Mr. Parks's
pictures appeared regularly in the magazine for 5 years. Mr.
Parks's simultaneous pursuit of the worlds of beauty and of
tough urban textures made him a natural for Life magazine.
After talking himself into an audience with Wilson Hicks,
Life's fabled photo editor, he emerged with two plum
assignments: one to create a photo essay on gang wars in
Harlem, the other to photograph the latest Paris collections.
Life often assigned Mr. Parks to subjects that would have
been difficult or impossible for a white photojournalist to
carry out, such as the Black Muslim movement and the Black
Panther Party. But Mr. Parks also enjoyed making definitive
portraits of Barbra Streisand, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland,
Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder. From 1949 to 1951 he
was assigned to the magazine's bureau in Paris, where he
photographed everything from Marshal Petain's funeral to
scenes of everyday life. While in Paris he socialized with
the expatriate author Richard Wright and wrote his first
piano concerto, using a musical notation system of his own
devising.
As the sole black photographer on Life's masthead in the
1960's, Mr. Parks was frequently characterized by black
militants as a man willing to work for the oppressor. In the
mid-1960's he declined to endorse a protest against the
magazine by a number of black photographers, including Roy
DeCarava, who said they felt that the editorial assignment
staff discriminated against them. Mr. DeCarava never forgave
him.
At the same time, according to Mr. Parks's memoirs, Life's
editors came to question his ability to be objective. ``I was
black,'' he noted in ``Half Past Autumn,'' ``and my
sentiments lay in the heart of black fury sweeping the
country.''
In 1962, at the suggestion of Carl Mydans, a fellow Life
photographer, Mr. Parks began to write a story based on his
memories of his childhood in Kansas. The story became the
novel ``The Learning Tree,'' and its success opened new
horizons, leading him to write his first memoir, ``A Choice
of Weapons''; to combine his photographs and poems in a book
called ``A Poet and His Camera'' (1968) and, most
significantly, to become a film director, with the movie
version of ``The Learning Tree'' in 1969.
Mr. Parks's second film, ``Shaft,'' released in 1971, was a
hit of a different order. Ushering in an onslaught of genre
movies in which black protagonists played leading roles in
violent, urban crime dramas, ``Shaft'' was both a commercial
blockbuster and a racial breakthrough. Its hero, John Shaft,
played by Richard Roundtree, was a wily private eye whose
success came from operating in the interstices of organized
crime and the law. Isaac Hayes won an Oscar for the theme
music, and the title song became a pop hit.
After the successful ``Shaft'' sequel in 1972 and a comedy
called ``The Super Cops'' (1974), Mr. Parks's Hollywood
career sputtered to a halt with the film ``Leadbelly''
(1976). Intended as an homage to the folk singer Huddie
Ledbetter, who died in 1949, the movie was both a critical
and a box-office failure. Afterward Mr. Parks made films only
for television.
After departing Life in 1972, the year the magazine shut
down as a weekly, Mr. Parks continued to write and compose.
His second novel, ``Shannon'' (1981), about Irish immigrants
at the beginning of the century, is the least
autobiographical of his writing. He wrote the music and the
libretto for the 1989 ballet ``Martin,'' a tribute to the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., choreographed by Rael
Lamb.
He also continued to photograph. But much of Mr. Parks's
artistic energy in the 1980's and 1990's was spent summing up
his productive years with the camera. In 1987, the first
major retrospective exhibition of his photographs was
organized by the New York Public Library and the Ulrich
Museum of Art at Wichita State University.
The more recent retrospective, ``Half Past Autumn: The Art
of Gordon Parks,'' was organized in 1997 by the Corcoran
Museum of Art in Washington. It later traveled to New York
and to other cities. Many honors came Mr. Parks's way,
including a National Medal of Arts award from President
Ronald Reagan in 1988. The man who never finished high school
was a recipient of 40 honorary doctorates from colleges and
universities in the United States and England.
His marriages to Sally Alvis, Elizabeth Campbell and
Genevieve Young ended in divorce. A son from his first
marriage, Gordon Parks Jr., died in 1979 in a plane crash
while making a movie in Kenya. He is survived by his daughter
Toni Parks Parson and his son David, also from his first
marriage, and a daughter, Leslie Parks Harding, from his
second marriage; five grandchildren; and five great
grandchildren.
``I'm in a sense sort of a rare bird,'' Mr. Parks said in
an interview in The New York Times in 1997. ``I suppose a lot
of it depended on my determination not to let discrimination
stop me.'' He never forgot that one of his teachers told her
students not to waste their parents' money on college because
they would end up as porters or maids anyway. He dedicated
one honorary degree to her because he had been so eager to
prove her wrong.
``I had a great sense of curiosity and a great sense of
just wanting to achieve,'' he said. ``I just forgot I was
black and walked in and asked for a job and tried to be
prepared for what I was asking for.''
[From the Associated Press, Mar. 8, 2006]
Filmmaker Gordon Parks Dies at 93
(By Polly Anderson)
New York.--Gordon Parks, who captured the struggles and
triumphs of black America as a photographer for Life magazine
and then became Hollywood's first major black director with
``The Learning Tree'' and the hit ``Shaft,'' died Tuesday,
his family said. He was 93.
Parks, who also wrote fiction and was an accomplished
composer, died at his home in New York, according to a former
wife, Genevieve Young, and nephew Charles Parks.
``Nothing came easy,'' Parks wrote in his autobiography.
``I was just born with a need to explore every tool shop of
my mind, and with long searching and hard work. I became
devoted to my restlessness.''
He covered everything from fashion to politics to sports
during his 20 years at Life, from 1948 to 1968.
But as a photographer, he was perhaps best known for his
gritty photo essays on the grinding effects of poverty in the
United States and abroad and on the spirit of the civil
rights movement.
``Those special problems spawned by poverty and crime
touched me more, and I dug into them with more enthusiasm,''
he said. ``Working at them again revealed the superiority of
the camera to explore the dilemmas they posed.''
In 1961, his photographs in Life of a poor, ailing
Brazilian boy named Flavio da Silva brought donations that
saved the boy and purchased a new home for him and his
family.
``The Learning Tree'' was Parks' first film, in 1969. It
was based on his 1963 autobiographical novel of the same
name, in which the young hero grapples with fear and racism
as well as first love and schoolboy triumphs. Parks wrote the
score as well as directed.
In 1989, ``The Learning Tree'' was among the first 25
American movies to be placed on the National Film Registry of
the Library of Congress. The registry is intended to
highlight films of particular cultural, historical or
aesthetic importance.
The detective drama ``Shaft,'' which came out in 1971 and
starred Richard Roundtree, was a major hit and spawned a
series of black-oriented films. Parks himself directed a
sequel, ``Shaft's Big Score,'' in 1972, and that same year
his son Gordon Jr. directed ``Superfly.'' The younger Parks
was killed in a plane crash in 1979.
Roundtree said he had a ``sneaking suspicion'' that the
Shaft character was based on Parks.
``Gordon was the ultimate cool,'' he said by telephone.
``There's no one cooler than Gordon Parks.''
Parks also published books of poetry and wrote musical
compositions including ``Martin,'' a ballet about the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Parks was born Nov. 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kan., the
youngest of 15 children. In his 1990 autobiography, ``Voices
in the Mirror,'' he remembered it as a world of racism and
poverty, but also a world where his parents gave their
children love, discipline and religious faith.
He went through a series of jobs as a teen and young man,
including piano player and railroad dining car waiter. The
breakthrough came when he was about 25, when he bought a used
camera in a pawn shop for $7.50. He became a freelance
fashion photographer, went on to Vogue magazine and then to
Life in 1948.
``Reflecting now, I realize that, even within the limits of
my childhood vision, I was on a search for pride, meanwhile
taking measurable glimpses of how certain blacks, who were
fed up with racism, rebelled against it,'' he wrote.
When he accepted an award from Wichita State University in
May 1991, he said it was ``another step forward in my making
peace with Kansas and Kansas making peace with me.''
``I dream terrible dreams, terribly violent dreams,'' he
said. ``The doctors say it's because I suppressed so much
anger and hatred from my youth. I bottled it up and used it
constructively.''
In his autobiography, he recalled that being Life's only
black photographer put him in a peculiar position when he set
out to cover the civil rights movement.
``Life magazine was eager to penetrate their ranks for
stories, but the black movement thought of Life as just
another white establishment out of tune with their cause,''
he wrote. He said his aim was to become ``an objective
reporter, but one with a subjective heart.''
The story of young Flavio prompted Life readers to send in
$30,000, enabling his family to build a home, and Flavio
received treatment for his asthma in an American clinic. By
the 1970s, he had a family and a job as a security guard, but
more recently the home built in 1961 has become overcrowded
and run-down.
Still, Flavio stayed in touch with Parks off and on, and in
1997 Parks said, ``If I saw him tomorrow in the same
conditions, I would do the whole thing over again.''
Life's managing editor, Bill Shapiro, said in a statement
Tuesday that it had ``lost one of its dearest members. ``
``Gordon was one of the magazine's most accomplished
shooters and one of the very greatest American photographers
of the 20th century,'' the statement said. ``He moved as
easily among the glamorous figures of Hollywood and Paris as
he did among the poor in Brazil and the powerful in
Washington.''
In addition to novels, poetry and his autobiographical
writings, Parks' writing credits included nonfiction such as
``Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary
Portraiture,'' 1948, and a 1971 book of essays called ``Born
Black.''
His other film credits included ``The Super Cops,'' 1974;
``Leadbelly,'' 1976; and ``Solomon Northup's Odyssey,'' a TV
film from 1984.
Recalling the making of ``The Learning Tree,'' he wrote:
``A lot of people of all colors were anxious about the
breakthrough, and I was anxious to make the most of it. The
wait had been far too long. Just remembering that no black
had been given a chance to direct a motion picture in
Hollywood since it was established kept me going.''
Last month, health concerns had kept Parks from accepting
the William Allen White Foundation National Citation in
Kansas, but he said in a taped presentation that he still
considered the State his home and wanted to be buried in Fort
Scott.
Two years ago, Fort Scott Community College established the
Gordon Parks Center for Culture and Diversity.
Jill Warford, its executive director, said Tuesday that
Parks ``had a very rough start in life and he overcame so
much, but was such a good person and kind person that he
never let the bad things that happened to him make him
bitter.''
Parks is survived by a son and two daughters, Young said.
Funeral arrangements were pending, she said.