Minnie Kennedy, the first from her family to get beyond the 3rd grade, became a pioneer in the theory and practice of pre-school education.

In 2010, when we first met, she talked all day with hours of stories, from her youth on the Bernard Baruch estate, to building battle ships, to marching for civil rights in the South and lecturing in Africa. On returning two years later with a video camera, the illness that would eventually take her had started its attack on her memory, but not her indomitable, and quite opinionated spirit, which I recorded for her, and all of us.

Minnie graduated college in her native South Carolina, taught high school; and then moved to New York after Pearl Harbor, where she welded ships at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, saving her money for graduate school. She subsequently earned advanced academic degrees, lectured internationally, marched with and was jailed with Dr. King, was appointed by President Johnson as a Head Start administrator, and throughout taught children and teachers of children.

Richard Levine has written several award-winning shorts, including “The Debt,” a winner at the Moondance film festival and “A Riverside Evening,” a winner at the Park City Music Film Festival. As a freelance journalist he won the “Charlie Award” for best feature article from the Florida Magazine Association.

He currently has three feature screenplays available for production: “A Cult Film,” a comedy about a fanatical religious cult; “Old Scars,” a dark comedic thriller about a gang of elderly bank robbers with emotional issues; and “Soulbreak,” about a woman prison psychologist who gets caught up in an escape plot.

He also does group counseling in community programs and in a correctional facility.

IMDB page: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2431522/

He can be contacted at: http://hiddenowl.com/Contact%20form.html