WILMINGTON — The 2011 winners of the Common Wealth Awards of Distinguished Service accepted their prizes at the Dupont Theatre Saturday evening before a black-tie audience of governors, foundation presidents, business leaders and members of Congress.
Their acceptances speeches touched on baseball, Joe Biden, Tony Blair, human rights, and the importance of storytelling.
The recipients, chosen for enduring contributions to modern society, are novelist Russell Banks, human rights lawyer Cherie Blair, political columnist George Will, and Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico.
Banks wrote 19 books translated into more than twenty languages.
Blair is internationally recognized for her work on behalf of women, children, prisoners and persons with disabilities.
Will, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is the country’s most widely published political columnist.
Richardson served two terms as governor of New Mexico, 15 years in the U.S. Congress, and was Secretary of Energy in the Clinton cabinet.
2011 Common Wealth Awards for Distinguished Service
Excerpts from award winners’ press conference
Richardson, in his acceptance speech, referred to the leaders sitting in the audience, a group that included Gov. Jack Markell, Sen. Chris Coons, New Castle County Executive Paul Clark, former governor and former Congressman Mike Castle, and June Petersen, widow of former Gov. Russell W. Peterson, who died in February.
He spoke of Delaware as a state with a great bipartisan tradition from the late Sen. William V. Roth Jr. to recently retired Congressman Mike Castle.
The governor said his grandmother taught him to respect every individual beginning when she called him out during a youth baseball game in Mexico after she heard him dress down a teammate. He said he learned to find the good in each individual, so much that President Bill Clinton sometimes assigned him to meet with dictators, joking that bad people like Richardson.
“You have to respect every person and you have to engage people to make things better,” Richardson said. Banks discussed the importance of storytelling in preserving essential human values: “We must not be allowed to forget what it means to be human, the worst of it – what we share with our primate cousins – as well as the best of it – what we share with the angels.”
Cherie Blair, a British human rights lawyer who established a foundation to help women generate their own income through entrepreneurship, said the most important raw material in any country is the people and women who gain the ability to make money of their own can then advocate for changes that improve their lives and the lives of their children.
“This country can lay claim to being the very first nation founded on the principle of human rights,” Blair said, “Sadly, there are still hundreds of millions of people denied their basic human rights.”
Blair announced a new partnership with Google that will link fledgling entrepreneurs from Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia with mentors around the world. She asked Delaware leaders to join as mentors.
Discussing the current Congressional debate over the national budget, George Will said he had faith that America will “bring our appetites and our resources into balance.”
He quoted the wry observation of the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who he said loved America as much as he loved his American mother Lady Randolph Churchill: “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing – after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
The audience laughed as:
- Will, who has written two best-sellers about baseball, admitted that his wedding ring bears the logo of major league baseball. “I wanted to let Mrs. Will know she ranked up there close to baseball,” he said.
- Blair joked that her husband, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, usually gets all the American awards and she enjoyed telling him, just for once, that she was the award recipient.
- Richardson quipped about Vice President Joe Biden’s loquaciousness and who garnered the most votes when they faced off in the 2008 Democratic primaries. His last words before he left the stage were, “ Please don’t tell Biden what I said.”
The awards ceremony and awards dinner at the Gold Ballroom of the Hotel du Pont were hosted by The PNC Financial Services Group. The Common Wealth Awards were created under the will of the late philanthropist Ralph Hayes, and PNC serves as trustee and administrator of Hayes’ trust.
The awards recognize outstanding lifetime achievement in science, invention, literature, government, sociology, public service, dramatic arts and mass communications. Each recipient of the award receives a $50,000 prize.
The first group of awardees, in 1979, included actor Laurence Olivier, director Joseph Papp, chemist Charles Plank, chemical engineer Edward J. Rosinski, sociologist Kingsley Davis, sociologist Robert Merton and computer engineer Jay Forrester.
Among the 170 honorees since then were astronaut John Glenn; inventor James Hillier; author Robert Penn Warren; anchorman Walter Cronkite; MADD founder Candy Lightner; dramatist Samuel Beckett; poet Andrei Voznesensky; Jonas Salk, who cured polio; explorer Jacques Cousteau, Eunice Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics; poet Seamus Heaney; Archbishop Desmond Tutu; William and Kathleen Magee, founders of Operation Smile; children’s television icon Fred Rogers; inventor Dean Kamen; actor Sidney Poitier, and Kevin Spacey, director of London’s Old Vic Theatre Company.
Among the attendees this year were four Delaware high school students, all winners of PNC’s Common Wealth writing awards for essays about the Common Wealth honorees they most like to meet. Attending, with their parents, were John Fairchild of Wilmington Friends School, Lisa Jacques of St. Andrew’s School, Faith Ann Lyons of Tower Hill School and Brianne Sands of Cab Calloway School of the Arts.
