An e-mail gone viral, a driveway, City Council meetings and, yes, Sarah Palin…chewing gum
IMAGE: Los Angeles Times
Anne Kilkenny (pictured above), who lives in Wasilla (hometown of Sarah Palin), decided to write to 40 of her friends to share her impressions of fellow resident, former mayor, current Alaska governor, and now John McCain’s vice president candidate.
Since it was e-mail, it didn’t stop there, and by the time the Los Angeles Times reported on it last week, she had 13,700 e-mail responses, half a million Google hits (and, one presumes, counting)….an e-mail that had gone viral as only these things can do (you can make it 500,001 by reading it here).
As the Times article notes, Kilkenny crossed paths with Palin, in particular, because of a driveway proposal that needed City Council approval:
It was Kilkenny’s firsthand experience with Palin — who was elected to the council in 1992 and became Wasilla’s mayor in 1996 — that inspired her to craft the e-mail that made her famous.
“I wanted people to be informed,” Kilkenny said. “I wasn’t trying to make a judgment call.”
A 70-foot-long and 30-foot-wide smooth slab of concrete fans out from the garage of Kilkenny’s home to the street. She glances through the window of her tidy kitchen plastered in dandelion-yellow and pumpkin-orange wallpaper. Most of what she knows about local politics started with her fight to pave that driveway.
Until then, Kilkenny rarely paid attention to city issues, though she did vote to put Palin on the City Council. Four years later, the city of Wasilla announced it was going to pave Kilkenny’s street.
She had a fondness for municipal development because her father had been a civil engineer. The family used to drive around their neighborhood in Contra Costa County, Calif., to check out new building projects.
Kilkenny sketched a drawing of how she wanted her driveway apron to look and showed it to planning officials. It was rejected because the footprint was too wide.
“They said, ‘You can only have 12 feet,’ ” Kilkenny said.
At a council meeting, an attorney told her the only way to appeal the ordinance was to rewrite it.
So she did.
Kilkenny showed up at each City Council meeting with her typed driveway ordinance, trying to get it approved. The sessions were held inside a refurbished high school gymnasium. Six council members sat around a horseshoe-shaped table; in the center was Palin, often chewing a wad of gum.