Steve S: Ethical vegetarianism was a defining value of John Stockwell’s life.  It is also what brought John and me together.

In the early 1980s, I was one of just a few university professors teaching about animal liberation, including anti-vivisection.  The Journal of the new England Anti-vivisection Society heard about this and published a little article about four of us.  Dixie Mahy, then President of the San Francisco Vegetarian Society, saw the article and invited me to come across the Bay—I was teaching at the California State university campus in Hayward, just south of Oakland—and address one of her Society’s monthly meetings.  I believe that is when John came up to me, informing me of his East Bay Vegetarian Society, and inviting me to reprise my lecture there.  That would have been the spring of 1981.

Besides founding and shepherding the E.B.V.S., a strictly volunteer effort, John was then working as the Humane Educator for the Oakland S.P.C.A.  Though he had been trained as a geologist—love of geology being another defining passion of his life—John’s heart at that time seemed to be focused primarily on animal welfare issues.  That was an era when such concern was given a great deal of institutional support across the Bay Area.  In addition to the Oakland S.P.C.A., the San Francisco S.P.C.A., Peninsula Humane Society, and the Marin Humane Society also had well-funded humane education programs.  Alas, humane society coffers did not continue to swell through the 80’s, and after just a few years, John’s position at O.S.P.C.A. was eliminated.  Although he had to fall back on teaching science in the public schools, his devotion to ethical vegetarianism and other animal welfare issues remained.

Prior to my meeting john, he had collaborated with George Abbe to publish a few issues of a literary journal about animal welfare called Between the Species, that title being drawn from one of Abbe’s writings.  John wanted to resurrect that journal but also wanted to expand its offerings to include a good deal of philosophy as well as literature.  He asked if I would be willing to collaborate with him on this project as the philosophy editor.  The timing could not have been better.  Not only did I have a sabbatical coming up, which would give me the time to take on this job, but also the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals, which sponsored presentations at the meetings of the American Philosophical Association, was looking for a new outlet to publish those presentations.  Professor Harlan Miller, the founder of that Society, was tiring of publishing the Society’s journal, Ethics and Animals, and asked me if I would take over that job.  Expanding BTS TO incorporate E&A seemed the perfect solution.  Also at that time, the Animal Protection Institute, headquartered in Sacramento, wanted to expand its already substantial support for humane education.  John and I approached their manager about A.P.I. supporting BTS and were rewarded with a $1,000 grant to begin publishing the journal.  And that is how bts began in 1984, with me selecting the philosophical articles and doing the typing and John choosing the literary offerings and graphics and preparing everything for the printer.

We continued to produce BTS until 1997.  By that time, my vision had degenerated to where I no longer was able to do a good job as a teacher or editor, so I retired from both jobs.  I believe that John was also tiring of preparing the journal for publication and seeing to the journal’s management and distribution, a truly demanding triad of jobs.  Professor Joseph J. Lynch, of Cal Poly, San Luis obispo, a long-time contributor to the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals agreed to become managing editor of the journal and was able to secure support, including student staffers, from his university, to convert the journal into an online philosophy journal.  John’s baby continues to thrive online to this day.

Since both my wife and I had retired from teaching in the Bay Area, we began spending more and more time at our home on the Mendocino Coast.  I believe John and Meg came to visit once, but otherwise John and I gradually lost touch with each other.  I understand that John returned to get his master’s Degree in geology—at Cal State, hayward, where I had taught in the same building as the geology department—and became renowned as an expert on “thunder eggs”.  My wife and I did visit John and meg in Berkeley on the occasion of his 80th birthday and were pleased to catch up with him but disappointed that none of the other old animal activists crowd was there, at least during the couple of hours we attended.  I guess that like most everything else, our lives run through their seasons.

I shall always treasure having known and worked with John Stockwell to help make our part of the world at least a little bit better place for animals.  Between the Species was a big part of my intellectual life for over a decade, and without John BTS would never have come to be.  John was a thoroughly decent man who so wanted to focus his life on helping those most in need, i.e., animals subject to human inhumanity.  If only the necessary support had been there, he would have been one of the greatest of humane educators.  As it is, he will remain for those of us fortunate enough to have shared a bit of life’s road with him an exemplar of what it means to lead a life worth living because it was devoted to doing good.