religion to which Stanley Ann was exposed as a teenager was Christian and liberal. Along with the Stenhouses, the Dunhams were among a group of families on Mercer Island that attended East Shore Unitarian Church in Bellevue, known for a while during that period as “the little red church on the hill.” It had been started in the late 1940s in an old kindergarten building on Mercer Island and then in a funeral chapel in Bellevue by several families, including Stanley and Madelyn’s bridge partners, the Farners. Tired of commuting to a Unitarian church in Seattle, the founding families were interested in religious education and the teaching of moral decision-making for children. The founders were “bright, liberal movers and shakers,” as the Farners’ eldest daughter, Judy Ware, described them. Her mother, the director of religious education for the church, encouraged Judy to read John Hersey’s Hiroshima at age twelve. The Reverend Dr. Peter J. Luton, the senior minister when I visited the church in 2009, told me that the original families had emerged from World War II confident in the possibility of building a just, rational, and loving community. They were religious humanists, he said, their faith rooted more in “lived experience” than in supernatural and revealed truth. They had a sense of awe and wonder, an appreciation of what he called nonrational experience—idealism, the mystery of love, the moving power of music—without attributing it to a traditional god. The first minister, Chadbourne A. Spring, delivered sermons with titles like “In Praise of Heretics.” At Christmas, children reenacted the birth of Jesus Christ, Confucius, and the Buddha. The church encouraged community service and tolerance, and pushed for social justice. It took up the fight against redlining and in favor of nuclear disarmament, and King County’s fair-housing legislation emerged from meetings at the church. Its youth groups, in which Stanley Ann took part, attended services at other churches and synagogues, then would “come back and do comparative religion,” said Iona Stenhouse. They would “talk about world religions, good works, what we could do in the world as we got older.” Jane Waddell Morris, who attended the youth groups with Stanley Ann, told me that she herself had become, through the East Shore experience, “a lifelong seeker,” aware of spirituality around her but not committed to an organized religion (just as Stanley Ann would be described, I noticed, many years later as an adult). Jane Morris’s home in Taos, New Mexico, she said, was filled with religious icons—a Northwest Coast warrior, a Hopi kachina, a Guanyin, various retablos and bultos, and an old stone Ganesh.
Jim Wichterman, who taught Stanley Ann during her senior year, was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Washington when he was hired to teach on Mercer Island. The principal of the high school assigned him to teach “contemporary world problems” to seniors, who were barely ten years younger than he was. Since contemporary world problems were philosophical problems, he figured, why not teach philosophy? He did that for seventeen years, thundering through Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Marx, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus. After Mercer Island, he taught philosophy at a private school in Seattle for another twenty-two years. He never got his Ph.D., but that had ceased to matter. When I met him in the summer of 2008, he was pushing eighty and still teaching philosophy—this time at the Women’s University Club in Seattle and in a night class for adults on Mercer Island. “I had a circus teaching,” he said. “I should have paid them.” The feeling appears to have been mutual. In high school annuals in the late 1950s, Mercer Island students wrote about Wichterman more often than almost any other teacher. In conversations a half-century later, Stanley Ann’s classmates described Wichterman’s class as an intellectual coming of age.
At seventeen, from the 1960
Mercer Island High School annual
His method, modeled on his graduate-school