When your widowed mother leaves Cuba sometime around 1960 with her young daughters and when that widowed mother works for 30 years to support the family, you, being one of those daughters, had better develop your own work ethic. Ileana Maria's work ethic made her mother proud.
Ileana head a long career working for the State of Maryland. She began as a parole officer supervising formerly incarcerated folks. She might have stayed at it, but moved on to become a tax assessor for a few years.
Ili's real career centered around the Maryland's Labor Department. For nearly three decades she moved up the ranks quietly, making friends, impressing the powers that be, and adding success after success in areas that made the entire State safer.
How safe? Well let's start with the silly side. Ocean City wanted, in the worst way possible, to add bungie jumping to the amusement park "rides". Ili did her homework and concluded that this was an inherently risky operation that could not be engineered to protect young kids, drunken sots, or aging parents. As was usually the case, lawyers representing the amusement park industry pushed back. Today, look as hard as you will for bungee jumping near the ocean. It's not there.
Next time you go to a doctor's office and you receive a vaccination, watch where the needles are placed - they better be in a closed container. And if you were bleeding ask where the bandages go. It's interesting to think back during the AIDS crisis and realize Ili was instrumental in keeping the medical workforce safe from inadvertent needle stabs and blood-borne pathogen exposures. Seems rational now but every one of these precautions generated significant opposition.
This list could go on and on. When railroad safety inspectors thought the tracks carrying Santa's Christmas train in Western Maryland might not be safe, Ileana closed it down. Period. Legislators and her superiors railed at her but the decision had been made. And if you were tasked with cleaning a closed oil storage tank, and your employer was forced to provide you with air handling safety equipment, guess who pushed for this. Perhaps you were digging a ditch and those great reinforced metal cages were protecting you from cave-ins. Ileana had a hand in this as well.
Much of what Ileana did set new standards for Maryland. In at least one major field, though, her decisions helped spur national changes. Second hand smoke from cigarettes did not seem to bother anyone for hundreds of years. Only when the science started to emerge showing that wait staff were dying from cancer and emphysema did secondhand smoke warrant a second thought. Ileana designed an enforcement system premised on workplace safety that gave the nation it's first glimpse of success in the battle against smoking. The BBC even did a film outlining the strategy that originated at Elise desk.
Maybe the best way to sum up how this career public servant protected workers over and over again was simply to take a trip with her anywhere in the State. Ileana would point out the roofers who were tying off their lines, the troopers wearing safety vests when giving tickets on the highway, and other innovations meant to keep all of us safe. She listened to the experts, questioned their conclusions, studied the data, and made a decision.
Before she was finished, this Cuban immigrant was the State's highest ranking Hispanic official. Hundreds if not thousands of workers benefited from her vigilance, common sense, and strong sense of ethics. Not the worst legacy to leave behind.
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