![Kathy Boudin in 1981.](https://media.guim.co.uk/7f5444046e44dc31f7d18987f5eccdee1aae0ca6/995_361_607_364/500.jpg)
In 1950s New York, Kathy Boudin and I were friends and school-mates at both the Little Red Schoolhouse and Elisabeth Irwin high school. Her later life as a radical revolutionary and penal reformer notwithstanding, my abiding memory of Kathy is of her prodigious talent as an athlete.
She was among the best young female basketball players in New York City, and deployed a strong throwing arm when she played demon third base on the softball diamond in the public recreation park opposite her family’s house on St Luke’s Place. Helena Kennedy’s account helped me put those memories in context.