Michael W. Hathaway 11/11/1941–1/2/2019
Authored by Michael Hathaway, with edits by James Griffith, Richard Parker and BB Ha!
W
onderful faerie spirit Michael Hathaway (Billie name: Hank) died on Vashon Island, Washington, January 2, 2019. He grew up in Southern California and lived his long and notably peripatetic life in San Francisco, Sonoma County, Cambridge MA, Bavaria, the Greek Islands, Kathmandu and Prague. After decades as an environmental activist and poet, he wrote a multi-volume memoir demonstrating “the possible happiness of life.” His personal idealism and optimism were gifts from his mystical German-born mother and his loving American diplomat grandparents, gifts nurtured by seven years at the progressive and very liberating Happy Valley (now Besant Hill) School. He studied Russian language, culture, politics and history at Stanford —and also rowed varsity crew. Graduating with honors, he went on to graduate work at Harvard, the Free University of Berlin and ancient Charles University in Prague. With fluency in seven languages, he was a cosmopolitan global citizen. For a time, he seemed destined for teaching, writing and thinking—the quiet life of the scholar. But in his mid-twenties, the Vietnam War intervened, forcing choices on him (like millions in his generation) that fundamentally ended the prospect of an ivory tower life, just as surely as it overturned the nation and the world. Michael’s deep feelings about the war’s criminality let him to quit his Harvard doctoral studies to become a peace activist, and eventually to serve
Portrait of Hathaway by Joel Singer.
on the national staff of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 insurgent presidential campaign. That summer, with thousands like him in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, Michael got first-hand experience of the price peaceful protest can carry, and was beaten in the streets during the infamous police riots that enveloped the convention. It was a startling lesson for someone unaccustomed to violence, inexplicable in terms of the values he lived by and thought the country shared. (Sound familiar?) Sen. McCarthy’s heartbreaking defeat—and Nixon’s cynical victory that November—left him suddenly adrift, searching for a new path through which to live and teach those values. Learning—lifelong learning—and the love of teaching and nurturing were still at his core, but not to be lived out in the cloistered confines of universities. He morphed into a “longhaired, VW-vanliving hippie.” This alternative lifestyle presented a problem: he began to run out of money. Thus, in the early summer of 1969, Michael returned to Santa Barbara where with the help of friends he found work as a researcher at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Robert Maynard Hutchins’ legendary progressive think tank. Here he could use his intellect and learning— but also keep his ponytail, VW bus, and spend his off-hours building the local antiwar movement. After two years at The Center, Michael returned to Europe, where he discovered the beautiful island of Hydra in Greece. Entranced by its beauty and the charm of its inhabitants, Michael realized that his $2,000 savings could buy a handsome five-arched, 440-year old ruin of a house. RFD 180 Winter 2019 7
