Free A Singular Woman by Janny Scott Page B

of Iona Stenhouse, who would become Stanley Ann’s classmate, was subpoenaed to testify before a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating communist activity in the Seattle area. Born in China and educated in England, he said he had attended a handful of Communist Party discussion-group meetings in Los Angeles in 1943 and in Washington, D.C., in 1946 but had had no contact with the party since. He had moved to Mercer Island in 1949 and joined the school board in 1951. He worked for an insurance company in Seattle and, with his wife, was active in helping to reclaim land on Mercer Island for parks and in working to establish a health cooperative. That spring, school boards in Bremerton and Tacoma were firing teachers who took the Fifth Amendment when called before the subcommittee, and the state legislature made Communist Party membership a crime. On the Stenhouse case, Mercer Island was split. Marilyn Bauer, a close friend of Iona’s, told me that her own father was constantly saying, half teasingly, “We’re not having the communist over, are we?” Iona Stenhouse, however, recalled feeling sheltered and protected by the community—spirited away to the beach club by family friends, for example, when reporters or lawyers were at her parents’ house. In March, two hundred people turned out for a school board meeting to consider Stenhouse’s fate. After a two-hour hearing, the board left the decision to Stenhouse, who decided not to step down. To Jim Wichterman, arriving not long afterward to teach at the high school, the island’s handling of John Stenhouse reflected a fundamental sense of proportion and balance that Wichterman believed prevailed at that time on Mercer Island.
    The 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,