ForeverMissed
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His Life

A Life Well-Lived

April 6, 2014

By Marc Mercer

Lyle Freeman Mercer, 92, died peacefully on March 27 after a short decline in his quality of life. Having spent his long and fruitful life following the dictates of his conscience, he perished by his own hand, made possible by Washington State's Death with Dignity Act. His wife of 69 years, Barbara Ann (Evans) Mercer, 94, was at his side.

 

Early Years

Lyle was born in Bellingham, WA, in 1921 to Freeman John

Mercer, then a returned WWI doughboy who was taking his

degree in teaching from what is now Western Washington

University. His mother, Ferdnande Chabran Mercer, of

Marseille, France, had been taken to wife by Freeman at the

end of the war and returned with him to the USA. Lyle was

preceded in death by his two younger siblings; a brother, Dean

Mercer and a sister, Narcisse (Mercer) Hilbiber.

After graduation, Freeman moved the young family to Burien,

where he became the principal of Burien Elementary School,

a post that he held for the rest of his working life. The two

brothers and their sister grew up along the beaches of south

Puget Sound, fishing, swimming and enjoying the outdoors from

an early age. Their mother, a skilled seamstress, made all their

clothes, and with the help of her husband kept a large garden to

During high school summer vacations, Lyle travelled with his

father to work on a wheat farm in the Horse Heaven Hills above

Yakima, which was owned by Freeman's uncle, Willis Mercer.

Willis also built and maintained one of the largest flocks of

sheep in the state. His descendants still farm in the area and

own Mercer Ranch Vineyards.

The Awakening

Lyle was a gifted and dedicated student. In 1936 he was one

of 20 high school boys and girls to win a Seattle P.I. history

contest, the prize being an expense-paid trip to Washington,

D.C., which included tickets to FDR's second inauguration,

tours of Congress, the White House and other historical sites.

The group also visited FBI Headquarters, where they watched

G-men firing sub-machine guns in the building's underground

range and were given an audience with J. Edgar Hoover, Lyle's

As Lyle wrote several decades later, "We met with the pudgy

little cross-dresser—and talk about innocents!—we gladly

bestowed our fingerprints, when invited, to the Bureau's vast

Upon graduation from Burien's Highline High School, he

attended Central Washington University for two years, then

worked several jobs to secure funds to continue his education.

At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, he was working as a

cook's helper in Kodiak, Alaska. His brother Dean had joined

the Navy after high school and was serving as a pharmacist's

mate on the U.S.S. California when it was sunk during the

attack. Unconscious and suffering from a broken jaw, Dean was

rescued by shipmates and spent several weeks in a Honolulu

hospital before his parents were notified of his survival.

Fidelity To Others

Lyle immediately tried to enlist in both the Navy and the Army,

but failed the physical because of an undescended testicle (!).

After an unsuccessful operation in Seattle, he chose and

was finally allowed to join the Army Air Corps. Having been

a student pilot at Central, he was now keen to continue his

training, but as with the majority of trainees, was "washed

out" early. He then reassigned to become an administrative

officer in the Corps, where he soon received his commission

as a Lieutenant. In 1943, at a Heavy Bomber base near Grand

Island, Nebraska, he met the love of his life, Lt. Barbara Evans,

of Akron, Ohio. At the time, she was then completing her

training as an Army Air Corps flight nurse. Before parting, they

agreed to correspond with each other.

Following the collapse of the Mussolini regime, his unit was

shipped Italy. Unhappy at being sidelined from the action, Lyle

asked for and received permission to transfer to the parachute

corps. He entered "jump school" and completed his training

as a paratrooper near Rome. As the result of an Army snafu,

however, he was never scheduled to take part in a course of

combat training. Therefore, he was not allowed to take part in

the fighting when his turn came. His unit, the 82nd

was badly mauled in many actions beginning with the D-Day

Landings and continuing with the Battle of the Bulge and

Operation Market Garden. Quite possibly, this bureaucratic

Airborne,

When the D-Day landings took place, Lt. Evans and her unit

were tasked with tending to severely wounded American

soldiers being flown from the European battlefronts to hospitals

Somehow during this period, the two found the resources to

meet again and resume their romance in person. They were

finally married in September,1945 at the American Cathedral

in Paris. Returning to the States in 1946, they settled in Seattle,

where both worked to complete their education at the University

of Washington, financed by FDR's GI Bill of Rights. Barbara

gained her BSN. and Lyle a degree in Political Science, with a

teaching endorsement at the secondary school level.

The Betrayal

Unfortunately, upon returning to the States, Lyle had not been

notified that the U.S. Constitution was no longer in effect.

Ever a participant in the cause most righteous, no matter how

implausible of attaining success, he joined a University student

group advocating for the election of Henry Wallace—FDR's

liberal first Vice President—running under the newly-formed

Progressive Party. Soon he was elected to a leadership position

of the organization. Concurrently, he lent his support to a

campus faction protesting the Washington State Legislature's

newly-minted version of the congressional House Un-American

Activities Committee (HUAC), known as the Canwell

Committee. Canwell was an ambitious self-promoter and

sycophant of U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy, along with the ever-

paranoid Dick Nixon, vice president under Dwight Eisenhower.

Parenthetically, a recently published book on the history

(fantasy?) of this specious and sophistic committee, The

Canwell Files, by one M. Kienholz, continues its practice of

character assassination by naming Lyle as a member of the

Communist Party, which is false.

The object of this so-called investigatory committee was, as with

its federal namesake, to aid in the destruction of FDR's legacy

of reforming certain anti-social elements of capitalism by the

enactment of certain laws designed to protect working people

from the worst abuses of the corporate oligarchy.

Initiated by hugely profitable military industrialists who were

fighting to continue their government contracts for munitions

and equipment, by declaring the Soviet Union a real and present

threat, representatives and senators were encouraged (with

hefty campaign contributions), to disable any opposition to

this scheme. The strategy included convincing the majority of

American citizens, who at the time supported the disbanding of

the military, as had happened after every other war.

The campaign began and was promulgated based on hysterical

pontifications about The Communists. It was well-funded by

business associations, the captains of industry, as well as corps

of rightwing fanatics. For two decades this post-war Witch Hunt

engulfed the country. Starting with intellectuals, professors,

artists and civil servants, this nazi-fication of the American mind

swept before it the destroyed careers, livelihood's and, in some

cases, the lives of hundreds of thousands of patriotic citizens.

With many other fearless students, Lyle helped organize

campus demonstrations to protest the investigation and firing

of professors based on their personal political views. He soon

became an object of FBI interest, which throughout the country

paid a network of students to secretly infiltrate and report on the

activities of potentially "subversive" campus organizations.

Graduating with high marks and sterling references, Lyle

sought a high school teaching job at a time when schools were

clamoring for new recruits. However, he soon became aware

of certain vague mumblings that accompanied his follow-up

questions after interviews with school officials. Finally, he

asked his father, the elementary school principal, to request

his university file as if being considered for job. The folder

revealed that the University of Washington had allowed the

FBI to insert into Lyle's otherwise exemplary portfolio, an

unsupported defamation regarding the nature of his political

beliefs and the potential risks his hiring might cause to national

security. There would be no teaching positions open to this

Even the ACLU, then under federal investigation as a

possible "communist-front organization," refused to offer

him legal counsel to challenge this spurious libel. Forced to

abandon his career dreams, Lyle worked to support his family

at "post- graduate stints" as a laborer in steel, flour and meat-

packing plants. Nevertheless, even having driven him from his

chosen field in academia, the FBI, directed by "the pudgy cross-

dresser," was relentless in its determination to destroy his life at

every level. At one employer after another, the men in the black

car eventually found him and secured from management the

promise of an immediate pink slip.

Years later, as the cold war faded, the FBI began to lose

interest in his case. Joe McCarthy was censured by his Senate

colleagues and died in a drunken stupor. Eventually, the

frenzied ravings of the political witch-hunters no longer made

the headlines. Finally, federal agents failed to care enough to

bother severing his employment as Advertising Manager of a

neighborhood news weekly. When he was recruited to become

the Executive Secretary of the Washington State Veterinarian

Association, they seemed not to take notice. Meanwhile he had

not slackened in his mission; he had become a board member of

the state ACLU office, had been elected to the board of Group

Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, and was very active in his

children's PTA, among many other social causes.

Of course, the FBI had not gone away; after a year or two as

manager of the Washington State Veterinary Association, they

let it be known to certain American Legion members among the

organization the "subversive" tendencies of its leader. Although

many veterinarians fought on his behalf, the final verdict led to 

another firing.

The Torch Bearer

After this last dismissal in the early sixties, he was appointed

to the position of Northwest Director, National Committee to

Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. His

mission was to educate, lobby and fund-raise, which he did with

great energy and success. His children will always remember

the clattering of his typewriter, echoing throughout the house

at all hours of the night. Finally, after many years of effort,

the organization was successful and the U.S. Congress voted to

defund this spurious and truly un-American artifact of the Cold

War. 

Upon relinquishing this phase of his career, Lyle took on the job

of managing the People's Memorial Association, a membership-

based group dedicated to reducing the costs for funeral, burial

and cremation services. Three years later, at 65, he retired from

the position. However, his larger efforts to secure a better world

for his children and fellow beings never ceased.

Always the committed activist, Lyle was a talented writer, a

passionate speaker and an enthusiastic constituent of many

organizations. As a lover of the natural world, he joined many

groups dedicated to its preservation. A partial list includes the

Animal Protection Institute of America, the Audubon Society,

the Nature Conservancy and the Puget Sound Mycological

Society, for which he did a stint as editor of its monthly

newsletter.

After witnessing firsthand the horrors that WWII had visited

upon the peoples of Europe, Lyle became a pacifist and

actively engaged in a lifelong struggle to prevent and end U.S.

imperialism. He was an energetic participant in groups seeking

to ban nuclear weapons, end the wars in Vietnam, the middle-

east and South America. He was arrested and jailed several

times in non-violent civil disobedience demonstrations. He

was a vigorous member of The Fair Play for Cuba Association,

American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Guatemala

Solidarity Committee, Peace Action Committee, Veterans for

Peace and Amnesty International, among many others. He

and Bobby were avid travelers who visited the USSR, China,

Vietnam and Cuba to learn about their peoples and the nature

of their experiments to establish socialist forms of governance.

They also travelled to many other countries to observe their

various historical and cultural endowments

An early and lasting proponent for the guarantee of Civil Rights

for all citizens of the world, Lyle and Bobby soon became

intense supporters of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his movement.

Whether writing, speaking in defense of, or helping to organize

protests and gatherings, he remained always on the frontlines of

this battle, serving in leadership positions of many civil rights

groups. Likewise, he supported Palestinian resistance against

the hegemony and human rights violations they suffered at the

hands of Israel. In 1989, with a group of six other Americans,

he was elected to serve as an "Eyewitness" in the west bank and

the Gaza strip. For two weeks he lived with Palestinian families

there and observed the cruelty and heartbreak inflicted on their

peoples by the Jewish State. In spite of this experience, he never

allowed himself to develop any bigotry or hatred against toward

Jewish individuals. In fact, he had a great many close Jewish

friends, and many more who were atheists, like himself, or

Muslims or Christians.

Although he led a life committed to others, he never sought

fame and was never pompous in his opinions or dealings with

people. Generous and kind to a fault, he remained ever happy

and optimistic that, given enough honest information, most

people would make intelligent decisions concerning public

affairs. He laughed every day and shared his humor with

everyone he met. Once, shortly after moving into what was

to become his lifelong home in Seattle's Capital Hill area, in

what was then an almost exclusively Catholic neighborhood, a

delegation from the Knights of Columbus knocked on the door.

He invited them in and listened to their pitch for him to become

a member. With a twinkle in his eye he said, "Are things that

bad that you are recruiting atheists now?"

He addressed the people he met in the course of his daily life by

their first names, and required the same of them. He knew the

bank tellers, his barber, the grocery store clerks, the mailperson,

the cobbler and his neighbors as his friends.

From his earliest days, he read voluminously, beginning with

reading the newspaper aloud to his father while the latter was

gardening. The walls of bookshelves lining all rooms of the

family home groaned with the weight of hundreds of books on

dozens of subjects. He was also, of course, a prodigious writer.

Aside from corresponding with far-flung friends and family,

he wrote articles for newspapers, editorials, and thousands of

letters to the editor, sent pointed missives to legislators, mayors,

congresspersons, senators and presidents. He described in many

compositions his experiences hunting, fishing, mushrooming,

the loss of people he had known, the pets that had died.

And yet, with all the labor he did in service for the greater

good, he always had time for his family. He was a devoted

and cheerful companion to his wife, Bobby, who endured

frequent trips devoted to bird watching, fishing, clamming or

the gathering of mushrooms. He was a loving, hands-on father

to his three children, always encouraging, untroubled by their

blunders and respectful of their intelligence. They all agree

that "he was the best dad anyone could have ever had!"