Dean Freiday
On June 20, 1915, I was born in Irvington, New Jersey, near the point where the suburban gave out and the dairy farms began. Nearby was Olympic Park (then almost as famous as Six Flags Great Adventure is now). Since I had the habit of wandering off at an early age, my mother despaired of keeping track of me and attached me to a pulley running on heavy wire. This gave me the run of the backyard but nothing further. Some of the neighbors thought this was terrible!
At the close of World War II, as I was preparing to be discharged from the U.S. Naval Reserve, I read in Time magazine of how Friends in Seattle were befriending returning Nisei. These Americans of Japanese descent had been kept in internment camps during the war. The farmers, nurserymen, and others who had worked their land while they were interned were reluctant to give it back, and opposed the return of the Nisei in general. Seattle had, and still has, the largest Japanese-American population of any city in the United States.
Sometimes their return was greeted with violence, causing many of them to cower behind closed doors. Friends first demonstrated that at least some people were glad to have them back. They cut their grass, made baked goods, or did their shopping for them, and performed other acts of neighborliness. They also set up legal aid to help them regain sequestered property.
Shortly after reading the article in Time, I was discharged and returned to Seattle where I had a camera store prior
to the war. Unable to get my previous location, I went back to college for some graduate work in anthropology
under the GI bill. It was in one of these classes that I met “Sandy” (Esther). Just before her graduation, I proposed and we were married in her hometown Lutheran Church in Dickinson, North Dakota.
My mother's people had been Methodists for several generations. I attended Methodist Sunday school and sang in the boys' choir at the South Orange Church, but I had never joined a church.
A couple of years after marriage we moved to New Jersey and lived in my parents' summer home in Elberon. That summer Shrewsbury Friends put on a series of Sunday afternoon lectures on the Quaker peace testimony. The content of the lectures was impressive, but more impressive was the fact that people like Howard and Anna Brinton and Henry J. Cadbury were willing to give up their weekend, travel at their own expense, and forego an honorarium in order to help a very small group become reestablished.
Over and over this quality was evident to me in Quaker activities—integrity motivated by faith and lacking complications created by professional status. And, while I admire the theological stances, spirituality, and social witness of some other Christian churches, I agree with the 1993 World Council of Churches Conference on Faith and Order, which warned that rites and ritual should not be valued too highly or mechanically. Recognition of but one leader—Christ Jesus—and his continuing presence by the Spirit were further reasons for adhering to Quakerism.
Advice for young Quakers today: You are surrounded by a sea of secularism, consumerism, and a culture of violence and sex robbed of its only appropriate setting—the basis of marriage, family, and child-rearing. Ignoring the clear view of Christian values that Quakerism provides is like trying to steer a ship without a rudder.
Hold fast to what Quakerism says is good, and life will have more serenity, pose fewer questions, and provide the best place to look for guidance. And you will not be seeking in solitude, but have the wisdom of a faith community to help you discern what is right in all pursuits and how to go about realizing it.