On the foggy, drizzly morning of June 13, 1958, Morris Pesin made an eight minute canoe trip to the Statue of Liberty with a Jersey Journal reporter to dramatize how close the Jersey City shoreline was to the Statue of Liberty. The resulting newspaper story drew public attention to his ideas for public access from New Jersey to the Statue and for an open space family park on a waterfront of decaying piers and abandoned railroad yards. He repeated the canoe trip on October 28, 1961, the Statue’s seventy-fifth birthday. Known as the father of Liberty State Park, he spent eighteen years leading the effort to create the urban state park, which opened on June 14, 1976, and then worked with other advocates for sixteen more years to guide its growth as a free green park for people of all backgrounds to enjoy within view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. A year before his canoe trip, he and his wife Ethel had traveled from Jersey City to Liberty Island with their two children on a frustrating three-hour trip through a Holland Tunnel traffic jam and a long wait for the Circle Line ferry in Manhattan, and from Liberty Island he was struck both by how near the Statue was to Jersey City and by how shameful the desolate waterfront looked as a background for the sacred Statue of Liberty. A few days after the 1958 canoe trip, he told the Jersey City Commission, “We have here at our doorstep, America’s greatest shrine – the Statue of Liberty – and we have failed to realize its potential.” In 1985, President Ronald Reagan presented him with the Volunteer Action Award at a White House ceremony.