GUILDERLAND — Joan Storey, a diminutive woman in her eighties, organized a No Kings Day protest in Guilderland.

As 7,000 soldiers and tanks and Strykers, at a cost of millions of dollars, paraded 1,600 yards down Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. to Donald Trump’s reviewing stand on his birthday, June 14, a score of Guilderland citizens brandished handmade signs at the corner of routes 20 and 155 as passing drivers honked horns in solidarity.

The small Guilderland two-hour rally was one of hundreds nationwide. A larger No Kings rally took place seven hours later, at 7:30 p.m., just a short bit west on Route 20 in front of the Guilderland Public Library, organized through Indivisible, with about 300 participants.

Storey said she acted because she was concerned about the direction the nation is headed

“I really care about this community and I care about this country,” she told The Enterprise on Saturday evening after the rally. “And I care about the future because the bottom line for me is I absolutely love life and, for it to continue on this planet, we need to work together to straighten this out to prevent the demise of humanity.

“Right now it’s so dangerous and scary. Look at the two people that were just shot today,” she said, referencing the two Democratic Minnesota legislators who had been targeted, with one of them assassinated.

When Storey first learned of the “No Kings” protests, she thought she wasn’t up to traveling to a rally, joining a big crowd. 

“I have back problems. My husband has stability problems. I thought, just the two of us, we’ll walk to the corner,” not far from their home at Presidential Estates.

She rounded up some neighbors and wrote a letter to the Altamont Enterprise editor.

“Our country is walking a tightrope that is about to break. We must not let that happen,” Storey wrote in her letter. “We cannot be written down in history as the fearful who allowed it to happen. We cannot let our grandchildren and children suffer the consequences of our indifference and passivity.

“We the people are all that stands between our democracy and authoritarianism. We must be involved. We must speak out. We must resist.”

On Saturday evening, after the protest, Storey described her evolution as an activist.

She grew up in the Bronx, the only child of loving Catholic parents who considered her a miracle.

“I was born five years after my parents married and my mother could never get pregnant again,” she said.

But Storey had tons of cousins in a close-knit neighborhood. “It was like a small town; everybody’s parents looked out for everybody’s kids,” she said. “The grade school was across the street; the high school was up the street.”

The schools were Catholic and Storey was impressed with the nuns who taught her. At age 18, she entered the Sparkill Dominican Convent.

Looking back at her childhood household and neighborhood — her parents were Republicans — she said, “I grew up in an environment that was probably racist.”

But what her parents gave her, she said “was a freedom to become who I am … It wasn’t their belief system as much as that I could be who I wanted to be and I could believe what I wanted to believe eventually.”

Storey was particularly influenced by a diary kept by her father’s brother, Nicholas Elmo. She never met her uncle because he died young, in his thirties, before she was born.

“My father would talk about him. And I realized through his diary he was very politically involved in his time period, the 1930s, before he died,” she said.

“I never met the man …,” she said. “It was very tragic. The family was poor and couldn’t afford medications for some kind of infection he had as a child that led to heart problems. He eventually just withered away and died from the heart problems because of what happened in his youth.”

“It was hard times … like it is today,” said Storey. “The same thing is happening today as happened to my uncle,” she said of poor people not being able to afford medical treatment.

Storey spent eight years in the convent, earning a bachelor’s degree in education and math from St. Thomas Aquinas College and becoming a teacher.

She loved teaching and she liked the “progressive women” in the convent who “wanted to make the world a better place,” she said.

Storey left the convent in the 1960s as “the church itself was changing.” Of the 60 women who entered the convent with her, Storey said, “at most 10 are left … it was a great exodus.”

Storey said she realized she could make the world a better place and also get married and have a family.

She became a teacher near Binghamton where she met the man who would become her husband, Arthur Storey, an engineer.

When his work brought him to the Albany area, the Storeys with their daughter, Susan, eventually settled in Guilderland.

Storey worked a variety of jobs over the years, as a substitute teacher, opening a sporting goods store on Carman Road, running a business “picking up elderly people and taking them to doctor’s appointments or just out to lunch … I did a million different jobs while I subbed and home taught,” she said.

Along the way, she earned master’s degrees in education and in counselling and psychology.

Storey considers being attuned to herself and those around her as well as staying informed critical for herself and everyone else.

“So many people are so involved in their own lives that they never can think about what’s happening to somebody else,” she said. “If you really want to be happy, you have to have an environment that’s happy and that means the people around you; that means the earth and the land around you.”

Storey was thrilled with the turnout at her rally on June 14 and with the support from passersby.

“One woman brought us coffee,” she said, while others who came to the rally suggested joining Indivisible.

Saturday evening’s rally in front of the Guilderland library was organized through Indivisible, according to Janyce Lukowski. The progressive organization was founded during the first Trump administration to “save American democracy,” it says.

Lukowski also noted that two women from Guilderland Neighbors for Peace, which started during the Iraq War but no longer exists, are part of a group that stands at the corner of routes 20 and 155 in protest of Trump initiatives, rallying each Monday at 4:45 p.m.

Storey concluded of those who joined her for Saturday’s rally, “So they want to carry this further because we know this is going to be a long haul … this brought such warmth and connection. That’s what’s missing is that warmth and connection within humanity.

“So we’re going to have to find that strength through each other, by walking hand in hand. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to do this. We cannot sit by.”