THE BELL CURVE:

Some of the most critical events in American history have been set in motion by anonymous people long forgotten, while the events they launched — sometimes deliberately but often mindlessly — will be forever remembered.

Take, for example, Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling separate education facilities are inherently unequal and therefore de facto segregation that violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The impact of that ruling fueled the whole civil rights movement, yet does anyone today know who Brown is?

Oliver Brown was a welder for the Santa Fe Railroad in Topeka, Kan., where his third-grade daughter was required to take a long bus ride to a segregated school when an all-white school was an easy walk from her home. Brown was one of 13 parents who sued the Topeka Board of Education when their children were refused admission to white schools. His name but not his persona will be forever etched in American history.

So will John F. Parker. He was one of four Washington police officers assigned to protect president Abraham Lincoln from anyone with designs on him, and Parker was performing this duty alone on the night of April 14, 1865 when the Lincolns and their guests attended a play at Ford’s theater. He was a disastrous choice who had been charged repeatedly with violations of police rules and regulations.

On this night he was told to sit in a chair outside the door to the president’s box from where he could challenge anyone entering. Although Parker couldn’t see the stage, he could hear the dialogue and became so involved in it that he abandoned his chair for a seat in the audience. When the play began to bore him, he left the theater for a nearby bar, and that’s where he was when John Wilkes Booth entered the president’s box and killed him. Another name, buried in anonymity, who changed our history.

All of this comes to mind because this week marks the 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe vs. Wade that legalized a woman’s right to choose.

And Norma McCorvey — the Jane Roe in that lawsuit — may be the least likely and worst prepared accidental celebrity ever to serve as a catalyst for such a historic decision.

I met her a few months after the decision came down — and 10 years before her identity was known publicly — when I was sent to Dallas by a national magazine to profile the two young female attorneys who argued her case all the way through the Supreme Court.

One was politically liberal and strongly feminist. The other was quiet, conservative and strongly influenced by her Baptist upbringing. But both felt — as the latter expressed it to me — that “legally and morally this is a matter of individual conscience. This ruling doesn’t require any doctor to perform an abortion or any patient to have one.”

When I pressed them to meet “Jane Roe,” they finally arranged a test meeting in a bar that led to several lengthy conversations in the home McCorvey shared in a lesbian relationship with a strongly protective woman friend.

Once I gained her confidence, McCorvey described a frightful childhood as an “Army brat,” wandering from town to town in an angry and alcoholic household. She was 10 when her parents divorced, and when she was rejected by both she quit school at 16 and found a job as a carhop in a Dallas drive-in.

There, she was swept away by a youthful customer who said he was a prospering rock singer, got her pregnant, then abandoned her. She turned the child over to her mother before she was kicked out of the household.

Then she found work with a traveling carnival where she quickly became pregnant again. This time she went to a hospital, claimed she had been raped and asked for an abortion. When it was denied, the two attorneys, looking for a test case to legalize a woman’s right to choose, found out about her plight and offered their services. And Roe vs. Wade became living history.

She wrote to me several times after the story — in which a fictitious name, as per my agreement with her, was used — appeared. I saw her twice in those intervening years, once when she lived briefly in Orange County and once when I was sent back to Dallas to do a follow-up on the 25th anniversary of the decision.

The years have not treated her well. Since she surfaced in 1983, she has been both snubbed and used by her associates, vilified by her detractors and even shot at.

She has also been the subject of a major TV movie, sought after for public appearances, and invited to hobnob with prestigious public figures. She was ill-prepared for any of this. Her impetuosity, quick anger, rough edges of street talk, lack of formal education and outspoken honesty made many of her supposed allies in the pro-choice movement exceedingly wary of her. And made her increasingly angry at them.

All of this brought about the last public view we’ve had of McCorvey when she decided, several years ago, to jump ship and throw in with an anti-abortion group called Operation Rescue. There was a flurry of media coverage before she disappeared quietly into obscurity, along with Oliver Brown and John F. Parker.

But McCorvey had the last word. “They genuinely love me,“ she said. “I felt like the pro-choice people only cared about what I could do for them, not what they could do for me.” Which was probably true — at least until the next anniversary.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.