Jean Zwickel died Friday morning, August 26, in Antioch, California.  She was 92.

Dear Contra Costa Times,

My mother, Jean Zwickel, died this morning at Lonetree Convalescent Home in Antioch.

She had been suffering from severe rheumatoid arthritis and an enlarged heart She refused food or drink for four days prior and passed peacefully.

She was born August 3, 1913 in St. Louis, MO, daughter of a schoolteacher, Lula B. Hoss and a Unitarian minister, Rev. Dr. Frank S.C. Wicks, of All Souls Unitarian Church, Indianapolis, Indiana, whose classic sermon, “Good Men In Hell”, published in 1914, was distributed well into the 1970s, having undergone nearly 50 printings.

She grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio and was raised by her aunt Imogene, and Imogene's husband, Superintendant of Schools Frank L. Wiley.  She attended Middlebury College in Vermont, Class of ’35, so fluent in French that she was the first Freshman allowed to live in the French-speaking only Chateau.  Jean went on to receive her post-graduate degree from the Sorbonne.

A dedicated pacifist and ardent defender of civil and human rights, she met her  husband, Abraham, in 1943 while on a march from New York to Washington to protest the Jim Crow Laws.

A friend of many notable activists, from the Canadian pacifist poet, Wilson McDonald and the Catholic Worker's Dorothy Day to Peace Pilgrim to César Chavez, her great passion was for Puerto Rican independence, in support of which she testified before the U.N. Committee on Decolonization. Her book, “Voices For Independence”, with contributions from former Congressman Ronald Dellums and actor, Ed Asner, has found its way to as far as Colombia.

She was a lover of classical music, enjoyed singing and playing the ’cello, but her great musical passion was the piano, which she played nearly every day well into her 70s.

While  traveling througout Europe just before World War II by bicycle and train, staying at youth hostels, sometimes in castles, she attended the opera in Dresden and so saw its famed opera house before it was destroyed.  She narrowly escaped Germany just before Hitler closed the borders.

She and her husband were supporters of labor and the environment, also, and fought injustice wherever they found it.

Her husband, Abe, passed in January of 2000; her older son, David, passed in September of 2001.  She is survived by her son, Daniel, of Pittsburg, California, her granddaughter, Karen Elizabeth Brown of Augusta, Georgia and two great granddaughters.

A Memorial Concert to celebrate her life will be held January 29, 2006 at the Mt. Diablo Unitarian Church in Walnut Creek California.

Those who so wish may send a contribution in her memory in support of the people of Vieques, Puerto Rico, to: TFLAC, 2017 Mission St. #305, San Francisco, CA 94110 and mark “Vieques” on the memo line. TFLAC is a committee of the international pacifist organization, Fellowship Of Reconciliation.


Peace with justice,