>I'm researching an exhibit on cultural perception.  Does anyone
remember
>the name of the young girl who wrote to Gorbachev, later met him and
>founded a peace organization?  She was later killed in an air crash with
>her father.
>

Detail are fuzzy because I'm casting back to my own childhood in Maine,
(she and I would be the same age now), but yes, her name was
Samantha Smith.  She was from Manchester, Maine, and in the early 80's
she wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov that essentially expressed her fear
of dying in a Soviet nuclear attack.  (Believe it or not, Maine actually was
a primary Soviet missile target site, mostly because of the Bath Iron
Works shipyard and the now-closed-but-then-critical Loring Air Force
base in Limestone.)

Samantha became a world-wide symbol for peace (and the pessimists
among us would say an instrument of Soviet propaganda) when she and
her parents went on a tour of the USSR - on Andropov's invitation - to
meet ordinary Soviets face-to-face and see first-hand that the Soviet
Union wasn't quite the evil empire she feared.  She later hosted a group
of Soviet students who came to a summer camp in Maine.  I believe that
more exchanges were planned (could this be the work of the
"foundation" you mentioned?), but then she and her father were killed in
a Bar Harbor Airlines commuter plane crash in the mid-80's.

I'm not sure whether Samantha herself started a "peace foundation," but
I do recall that shortly after the crash her mother, Jane Smith, set up a
foundation in Samantha's name to further her legacy.  Last I knew, Jane
Smith still lives in Maine, but I'm not sure of the status of the Samantha
Smith Foundation or where it resides if it's still in existence.
_________________________
Nicole M. Bouvier
SITES
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