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PrintLunch With - Maxine Horner and Mable Rice
League of Women Voters Pathfinder Award winners
Date: Aug. 28
Time: 11:45 a.m.
Place: Saint Simeon’s Episcopal Home
Interview subjects always enlighten me, particularly when you can time travel. Today’s visit with former state Sen. Maxine Horner and fellow community leader Mable Rice helped us remember three decades some of us had lived, others had only read about and each knew in dissimilar ways.
Senior Editor Joy Jenkins joined me to ask questions for our story on Booker T. Washington High School, along with League of Women Voters’ Ruth Richards and photographer Melissa Claborn. In a twist on our usual restaurant lunches, Mrs. Rice, a Saint Simeon’s resident, hosted us in one of the home’s private dining rooms.
On Oct. 6, the League of Women Voters will honor Rice and Sen. Horner with its 2009 Pathfinder Award. Even sweeter, the two women have been “best buds” since the seventh grade — more than 60 years of friendship that began with giggly conversations about adolescent concerns and grew into helping solve the racial and educational inequities that ruled our country in the 20th century.
We talk a long time about the changes in education (and the high expectations teachers used to have of their students). When lunch is served, they begin to tell us the lighthearted side of their lives together. Their favorite meeting spot at Greenwood and Pine; Mable was “the friendly girl” who “always had all the poop because everyone kind of gravitated to her,” Horner says; “Maxine was more mature than everyone else,” a quality Rice admired. Mable convinced the then-Maxine Cissel that Don Horner was a good catch.
They grew up; had families; and, while Horner was into “the station wagon and kids,” Rice became an activist. 
“Mable always kind of thought outside the box,” Horner tells us.
One time she showed up at a girls’ night out with “a big Afro.” In the 1960s, when racial tensions ran high everywhere, including Tulsa, Rice organized a Black Arts Festival. She thought art would “make people forget all the hatred,” she says. “It was the first time people all came and sat together … just enjoying whatever it was” the festival offered. It remains Rice’s proudest achievement.
Rice and Horner, who would become a state senator in 1986, worked together at the Tulsa branch of the federally funded Minority Women’s Employment program. With Rice as program director, in the mid-’70s they placed 52 minority women, recent college grads, in managerial or technical jobs. A remarkable achievement — for minorities and for women, both groups then struggling for workplace acceptance.
Horner would go on to found the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame with Rice’s assistance as a community organizer; Rice would volunteer help run nonprofits such as the North Tulsa Heritage Foundation and the Oklahoma Chapter of the National Association for Sickle Cell Disease from 1983 to 1995. Although retired, both remain passionate about education and the arts. Their awards and achievements are enough for four women. The Pathfinder is one more, and one they consider special.
“This honor is kind of surreal,” Horner says. “I thought Mable and I had gone around the horn, wrapped around the wagon … It’s really great. My best bud and I have come to the top of the mountain.”
