A Life Well-Lived
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!"