Anne Morgan Stadler 1931-2023 - A remarkable life

Anne Morgan Stadler 1931-2023

Anne Morgan Stadler died of natural causes on October 28, 2023, in Seattle's Swedish Hospital, in the company of her family. She was ninety-two years old. She was born Anne Elizabeth Morgan on March 7, 1931, in Rochester, NY, to Martha Oliver Morgan, a school teacher, and Wesley Morgan, an electrical engineer. Wes and Martha took Anne and her younger sister, Mary, on winter picnics, packing food and skates and blankets to hike in the woods and play on the ice and snow, during the long upstate-New York winters. 

The family lived a comfortable working-class life in Rochester's 19th Ward. Martha taught physical education. Anne proudly recalled her mother umpiring the first game played at The Baseball Hall of Fame's Doubleday field, in Cooperstown, NY: as Anne told it, while teaching at a nearby school Martha took her girls to play softball on the field before the Hall of Fame used it. Wes was also an athlete, recruited as a pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics. He turned down the offer when his mother told him to attend college, which he did at Cornell.

Wes fell sick when Anne was eight and he died when she was eleven. While she vividly recalled his presence early in life, she rarely spoke about his illness and death. Even her children didn't know until long into adulthood. 

Late in life, Anne wrote a brief recollection for her granddaughter to publish in a book of memories: "In 1938, during the second part of the Depression, dad had a psychological breakdown. He and his team had just invented a new set of signals for the Railway Signal Company, and he had presented their proposal to the big shots in Chicago. He'd been told they’d done a beautiful job. However, because the second phase of the Depression had happened, a few weeks after he came home the whole team was fired; the company decided it couldn’t invest in this at that time, and they needed to 'downsize.' It completely devastated him. He ended up in the Monroe County mental institution because my family didn't have the money for private care. The whole rest of his life was so tragic and sad. My father who had loved life so much, and had done everything he could for us and his work, was in an institution that didn’t have the resources to help people get better. I feel he probably died of a broken heart, isolated from us (he couldn’t see us), and from everything and everyone he cared about."

Facing loss, Anne found hope and growth, first of all from Martha, then widowed and raising two kids on a teacher's salary. Her job at a private school, The Harley School, led to a scholarship for Anne and an important teacher, Clif Whiting. Whiting told Anne to "stop being so nice!" Already skilled and confident as an athlete, Anne was able to grow into her social ease and boldness as teachers and friends showed their pleasure in her lively intellect. She read Ghandi, Rumi, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Far from the wealthy environs of Harley, Anne was exploring her own neighborhood and Rochester's polyglot working-class communities, which, in the manner of that time, thrived cheek-by-jowl, adjacent but split along racial and ethnic lines that could sometimes be crossed. The Morgans were Welsh and Episcopalean. 

Anne also attended the Catholic church because it was on their street, and her best friend was Catholic. Later she discovered the music of Black churches and the dancing at racially mixed "black and tan" clubs. Greeks ran the candy store, Italians, Irish, and Russians owned other shops where Anne took the family's ration stamps—her childhood world in Rochester was the same cosmopolitan world that she would grow up to do her work in.

Summers shaped who she would become. Clif Whiting and a friend opened a camp in Maine and staffed it with teenagers, including Anne, who was told to 'run the waterfront.' At Camp Joncaire, Clif Whiting's faith in Anne led to her take on all of the organizational and social complexities of what she'd later call 'a thriving community,' without a safety net. She learned by doing, and by listening to others affected by her choices. She loved canoeing. The pleasure of a canoe—its course set by responding to the flows around it—was a metaphor for her future journeys into collective work.

As a senior geology student at the University of Rochester, Anne was invited to tea by a young teacher, a man she and her friends called "Dr. Dimples." David Stadler had just finished his PhD in genetics at Princeton and taught for one year before he met and eloped with Anne. The newlyweds moved to Pasadena, California, where Dave had a post-doc at Cal Tech.

Anne recalled being "star struck" by their new friends in Pasadena, a worldly, brilliant group of young scientists, orbiting around the emigre physicist Max Delbruck and his wife Manny, who were as passionate about politics and social justice as they were certain that science had a key role to play in handling the moral dilemmas of a now-apocalyptic time—the nuclear age. 

Linus Pauling, Richard Feynman, the Delbrucks, and others held what Anne recalled as weekend-long gatherings, loud with arguments, music, and games. This was the milieu in which she became an activist, first protesting the threat of nuclear war that these scientists felt partly responsible for, and later in the civil liberties fight reacting to Senator Joseph McCarthy's witchhunt for Communists and their "fellow travelers." Anne met Quakers and other pacifists attending meetings at the ACLU and a Friends congregation.

In 1955, Anne and Dave and their two young kids moved to Seattle, where, as Dave explained it, he was offered a job at the University of Washington because the botany faculty needed a good left-handed hitter for their softball team. Anne explored the city by taking their children on city buses to the ends of the lines and picnicking. By 1960, Anne had four kids and a busy life of volunteer activism.

Through her ACLU and Quaker contacts she met a half-dozen other women, mostly mothers her age, who together created "The Peace Store" for the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. Anne's central, lifelong friendship with Lucy Dougall began here. From The Peace Store, two peace organizations were founded: Platform For Peace and Turn Toward Peace (which later became the World Without War Council), run by young parents raising their kids in the heady atmosphere of public protest. 

Dave was an equal partner, but Anne was the public face of the family's peace work. In addition to their local activism, Anne and Dave gathered and delivered nuclear disarmament petitions to Washington DC and Moscow's Red Square. In 1960, Anne was an Adlai Stevenson delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, where John F. Kennedy jr. won the nomination. 

In 1962 she traveled to Port Huron, Michigan, for the founding of the Students for a Democratic Society. Then Seattle's B'nai B'rith named her the 1962 "Woman of the Year" (calling her "Mrs. David Stadler"). The children were raised in the drudge-work of activism and the giddy optimism of collective work. Anne helped build networks linking Seattle's diverse religious communities with student activists and those in business, media, and government sympathetic to the cause of world peace.

Anne loved music and singing. She loved to harmonize. The anti-war and civil rights work brought with it long weekends of music, banging away on guitars and singing all the great protest songs. Pete Seeger played a small concert at one of these gatherings, after the venue that was booked for his fund-raising show barred him. 

Each Christmas the Stadlers hosted a Christmas caroling party that wandered the wooded streets of Lake Forest Park, often culminating at the house of U.W. orchestra conductor Stanley Chapple, whose conducting delighted Anne. Friends Richard Levin and Chris and Ellie Kauffman were among the talented musicians and political fellow travelers who filled Anne's life with music. 

In her last hours before dying, Anne's children sang these same songs to her, gathered around her hospital bed.

In Anne's early forties several profound shifts came all at once: she learned Transcendental Meditation (TM, a twice-daily practice of emptying the mind); she quit smoking (overnight—after twenty years of pack-a-day smoking); she took a workshop in transpersonal psychology (and later helped develop Process Work, the post-Jungian, dream-based, body-movement therapy pioneered by Arnold Mindell); and she began to learn Aikido (for several months, as a daily practice, she threw herself across the living room repeatedly, "learning to roll"). 

In 1973 Anne was hired by Emory Bundy at KING-TV to program and run a collaboration between KING and more than forty civic groups in Seattle, called "People Power." Quite suddenly, Anne Stadler, peace activist, was also Anne Stadler, TV-show producer, a field completely new to her.

With the keen interest and support of Mrs. Bullitt, as KING's charismatic executive director was known to her employees, Anne brought her curiosity and organizational skills to a job where she had to learn everything from scratch. KING's veteran crew of editors and cameramen helped Anne learn to craft TV documentaries of astonishing relevance and reach—including the first local coverage of the AIDS crisis, in the mid-1980s, and a historic exchange with Soviet television during Perestroika, building a 'space bridge' connecting GostelaRadio in St. Petersburg (then, Leningrad) with KING-TV in Seattle. 

Via live satellite, citizens of both countries were able to speak with each other directly. Anne and news anchor Jean Enersen, who worked as a writer and co-producer as well as onscreen host, were in Leningrad for two weeks of programming. Anne called television "a learning medium for our community." Using the shows as a catalyst, People Power helped the city become more self-critical and engaged, from the four-part "Classified Critical" series Anne produced, looking at our region's role in military defense, to "Target Seattle," and "City Fair," a grassroots celebration of urban problem solving. In her seventeen-year career at KING, Anne won six Emmy Awards.

More profoundly Anne's presence—echoing Mrs. Bullitt's leadership— catalyzed a group of talented young women working beneath KING's glass ceiling to help bring the station's programming into the widely respected position of industry leadership it enjoyed in the 1980s and 1990s, under Bullitt-family ownership. Lucy Mohl, Wendy Tokuda, alongside the more veteran Enersen, and others found a home and a road to prominence in their fields by taking to heart Anne's support and her frequent reminder to aim higher. 

Lucy Mohl wrote, "Anyone who thought peace, community, and love were laid-back concepts didn't know Anne. She was someone to live up to but also to laugh alongside. She never stopped being a work godmother, whether you liked it or not. Because those blue eyes would always tell you there was a high standard of excellence to meet and more work that needed to be done."

In 1981 Anne's first grandchild was born, followed by eight more in the decades after. As active as they were in civic life Anne and Dave loved being grandparents. Whether visiting Redlands, California, where eldest son, Mike, and his wife, Linda, were raising their six kids, or arranging summer visits to Seattle and the Northwest, Anne and Dave provided their grandchildren with an open door to the world and the love and support that helped them cross into it boldly. At age thirteen, each grandchild had their own trip to a city of their choosing, just them with grandma or grandpa. Great grandchildren came, beginning in 2004 (there are now seventeen), and filled Anne's life with an even greater level of joy and fascination.

On her own, Anne also wrote and painted. She wrote all the time, often refining her notes into essays or stories, for whomever requested it. She and Lucy Dougall delighted in writing parody send-ups of their peace-work colleagues, such as a fake fundraiser for "The World Without Issues Council" that they'd mimeograph and send to their targets. 

Anne loved to play Fictionary, inventing absurdities to make herself and her family laugh. More deliberately, she wrote books, one of which she published in 2015, a spiritual conversation called Burnished By Love, and a second that she completed a month before dying, The Way Home, about her understanding of Open Space and collective work. She painted colorful watercolors of vistas and plants, usually in small notebooks, as a kind of visual and manual meditation, another path toward empty mind. She would as often set them aside as she would give them to friends or display them at home.

The inner transformations that were catalyzed when Anne began TM and body-work practices shifted her attention toward the collective energies that shaped the work she cared about. Anne saw that groups shape their own potentials by the patterns and practice of listening, not just to oneself and each other, but to sources beyond the self. Seeking a practice that might enable collective work, Anne asked how can we together grow those capacities?

Anne left KING in 1990, discouraged by the new ownership, and a year later she began work as a "consultant and coach to communities." Later she described it this way, "I open space for personal and collective vision expressed in practical community-building outcomes." The problem of naming what she did was lasting. What Anne Stadler did was show up—she listened with curiosity, considered what she heard, and offered what came to her. She was honest and frank. She believed in abundance, not scarcity. She quoted Rumi, "let the beauty you love be what you do."

Anne was honored by Third Place Commons. On the left is Ron Sher, founder and owner of Third Place Books; on the right is Norman Lieberman, long-time board member of Third Place Commons.
Photo courtesy Third Place Commons.

Anne's "clients" (another misnomer) were communities of every size and character (from schools to board rooms to neighbors in conflict), from near and far (she helped reinvent her local shopping center as a Commons while also working in India, Hawaii, and The Netherlands), with rich or poor (in India she combined work for the Tata Steel corporation with the bottom-up reinvention of a local school for lower-caste kids). 

Locally, Anne helped found Spirited Work (guided by Angelis Arrien's The Four-Fold Way) at the Whidbey Institute, mentored at Antioch College, "showed up" to help the Richard Hugo House, El Centro de la Raza, Third Place Commons, MOHAI, and many others; while globally she opened space for India's School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL), the Ala Kakui group in Hawaii, and In Claritas, in Europe, among others.

Her inner work—to live in dialogue with "spirit" (which she said first began in the woods of Maine at age 18, lying in the bottom of a canoe at night, staring up into the stars)—was vastly enriched by her lifelong friendship with Lucy Dougall, who shared Anne's interest in Celtic spiritualism and the female-centered histories of pre-Christian cultures in the North Atlantic, especially Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Iona, and the Orkney Islands. They traveled together, or with their husbands and friends; their bond deepened as each was widowed, Anne in 2007 and Lucy in 2009.

Dave Stadler's death, from lymphoma, in 2007, was a major turning point. As with every profound loss in her life, Anne experienced it as, also, a new beginning. Old friend Lucy became a more frequent travel companion and their habit of walks and conversation at home brought them to an intimacy both named, "anam cara," the Celtic term for a unique friendship in life, a lasting communion of spirits. 

With others whom she met while "opening space for personal and collective vision" Anne learned techniques of "sourcing" that deepened her ability to sense the presence of truth or spirit. As she explained, when sourcing, "there's a feeling sense in my body that I call 'resonance...' I experience a shared presence with the speaker and/or the maker (a musician, artist, writer, actor, etc.). I sense deep trust and joy rising in me, and a feeling of tears...I listen to the Universal field and get messages, images, and practices that help me unite the spiritual with the material fields of my life." 

While she continued to explore the use of Open Space, sourcing, and other techniques in her work, Anne more often simply showed up as herself—a voice of curiosity, love, and optimism who could share the insights she gleaned by listening to herself, to "the field," and to others.

Anne Stadler was an inexhaustible learner. Having ventured far and wide, in her last two decades she found that most of what mattered to her was rooted in the same working class, ethnically-specific communities she'd grown up in, now in Seattle rather than Rochester. At El Centro de la Raza, in the leadership circle of the BIPOC Sustainable Tiny Art House Community (asked what Anne's job title there was, co-founder Carol Rashawnna Williams said, "she was just a really good friend"), with civic activists in Burien, at home with Lake Forest Park's Third Place Commons, and in smaller groups such as the Women's Giving Circle and the Heart Fire Circle, Anne found deep traditions of collective work, often female-centered and linked to spirit and faith. Her last decade was buoyed by the joy of inclusion in communities that had answered long histories of injustice with solidarity, hope, and abundance. As happened everywhere that Anne showed up, those of every age and temperament, the quietest most of all, found their voices supported by this affirming old soul.

Anne Morgan Stadler will be celebrated and missed. She is survived by her four children, Mike, Sue (and Sue's wife, Quince Affolter), Aaron, and Matt, nine grandchildren, and seventeen great-grandchildren. A memorial celebration of Anne's life is planned for the afternoon of June 23, at the Lake Forest Park Civic Club. 

--This account of Anne's life was written collaboratively by her children

Correction: Anne has 17 great-grandchildren, not 20 as previously reported.

Addition: a date has been set for Anne's memorial celebration