Marian Chatfield-Taylor

Marian Chatfield-Taylor was born on January 23, 1945, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Ruth and

Jack Auritt. Marian had an older sister, Lois, who died in 2013. When she was three years old, her

family moved to Norfolk, Virginia, where she lived, graduating from Granby High in 1961. Her

school was integrated in 1959 by Federal Marshals. By the time she graduated, there were a

handful of Black students attending Granby. The parents of the white kids organized an

‘alternative’ prom to exclude the Black kids. Virginia at the time was a place where students were

taught that JEB Stuart’s eyes were blue, Confederate flags were used to sell cars and all kinds of

consumer goods, and Robert E. Lee’s birthday was a state holiday. The reality of the gross

injustices of life in the Jim Crow South deeply affected Marian; she couldn’t wait to leave Virginia.

Following a suggestion from a friend of her mother, Marian applied and was accepted into Sarah

Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York. Her horizons expanded dramatically. She met young

women who came from backgrounds she could hardly imagine, some of whom became lifelong

friends. She studied European intellectual history with excellent, often inspiring teachers, became

competent in German, and met her first serious boyfriend. She was 30 minutes by train from the

center of Manhattan and its explosive cultural life. The boyfriend didn’t work out, but in the fall

of 1964, she met her future husband, Charlie Chatfield-Taylor, at a party in Manhattan given by

one of her classmates. They were engaged (secretly), and were living together in Cambridge,

Massachusetts, in the summer of 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson announced that he was

not going to send married young men to Vietnam. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of instant

marriages all across the country. Marian and Charlie were married that August at the Cambridge

Town Hall.

The newlyweds moved to Little Italy in Manhattan. Their apartment cost $55.00 a month. While

Marian finished her senior year at Sarah Lawrence, Charlie fulfilled six months of ‘active’ duty

with the District of Columbia Air Guard. After Marian graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1966,

the Chatfield-Taylors moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Marian got a job working for

Harvard’s travel agency, and Charlie started work at a motorcycle shop in Haverhill. Later, they

moved to the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and they both entered graduate school at New York

University. Graduate school wasn’t working for either, and they moved to Stonington,

Connecticut, shortly after the birth of Mercedes, their first daughter, in the spring of 1968. Their

second daughter, Jessica, was born in 1970.

The Chatfield-Taylors bought a house in Stonington, a three-flat tenement, which was about to be

condemned, for $5,500, and lived in it until 1977, fixing it up piece by piece. Charlie set up a

motorcycle business and wrote some articles for the local newspaper and for motorcycle

magazines, while Marian did some writing, but was mostly engaged in raising the kids.

In the fall of 1977, the Chatfield-Taylors moved to Tomales, a very small town in West Marin,

California (“pop 153” said the sign on the edge of town). Tomales was composed of a mix of

stoners, back-to-the-landers, and people who had lived there for generations. It was a kind of green

paradise of rolling hills and blue skies, with Tomales Bay nearby and the ocean three miles away.

Charlie reestablished the motorcycle business, and Marian got a job with the Point Reyes Light.

She wrote down-home articles about things like how old timers dealt with gophers (not pleasantly).

She commuted to Dominican College on a small Triumph 350 cc motorcycle, which Charlie made

roadworthy for her, while working on her Master of Arts degree in English. In 1980, she completed

a novel called “Leaving Home”. The story was about her high school experiences, her life-

changing move from Norfolk to New York, her college friends, and her first serious boyfriend.

The book remains unpublished.

The Chatfield-Taylors’ time in Tomales was a good one. They were in love (again). Marian was

fully employed, between working for the Point Reyes Light, her studies at Dominican College,

and her work on her novel, while also raising their children. Their daughters went to the Tomales

elementary school and rode around town on $50.00 ponies, along with other kids on similar

mounts. The ponies could be seen tied up at a rail next to Diekmann’s General Store, where the

children bought candy. The only thing wrong with Tomales for the couple was that they didn’t

make many friends there. To offset this, they hosted friends from across the country, or across the

Atlantic.

In 1979, Proposition 13 was passed, and the local high school, a district school which included

students from Inverness, Point Reyes, Marshall, and inland homes and farms, announced that it

was going to have to make cuts. Concerned about the negative effect this would have on their

children’s education, Marian and Charlie decided they would have to move. After considering San

Rafael, they decided that moving back to Stonington, which was familiar to them and the girls,

and which had a good high school, and where they owned a home, was a better solution. They had

decided that the hassle of moving was much the same, whether they moved 40 miles or 2500 miles.

Marian grew up in the Jim Crow South, an experience that help shape her life-long commitment

to social justice causes. She ascribes her early religious education to her father, whom she

accompanied for many years to the synagogue, as well as to the profound spirituality of her mother.

Marian left the synagogue when she heard the Rabbi speak from a Nationalist Zionist position,

which she characterized as deeply disturbing.

After returning to Connecticut Marian worked at the Women’s Center of New London in various

capacities assisting battered women, ending up as Director of Outreach (publicity). From her youth

Marian was engaged in anti-war efforts, and at this time she began doing sustained work on behalf

of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1995 she participated with a

group of 100 women who traveled by train from Helsinki to Beijing to the United Nations’ Fourth

World Conference on Women. The women represented every generation from late teens to early

eighties; they came from different countries and spoke different languages.

While doing peace work, Marian encountered and worked with Quakers until a long-time member

of the New London Meeting invited her to attend Meeting. She eventually accepted the invitation

and began attending Meeting in the mid-1980s. Marian believed in actively living her way into the

life of the meeting before seeking membership, which she did in New London around 1988. She

served as co-clerk of the New London Meeting from 1997 through 1998. During those years

Marian was also active in the New England Yearly Meeting. Her belief in non-violence led her to

obtain a master’s degree in Conflict Resolution from Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg,

Virginia, in 1998.

After returning to San Francisco in 1999, Marian began attending San Francisco Meeting. In 2002.

Marian transferred her membership from New London to San Francisco. Here in San Francisco,

Marian placed her organizing skills and passion for the truth into efforts at the American Friends

Service Committee (AFSC) on behalf of the National Women's Program. She has served the San

Francisco Friends Meeting as a member of the Hospitality and Community. Peace and Social

Concerns, and Ministry and Oversight Committees. Marian also served on the board of directors

for the Ben Lomond Quaker Center.

Marian had a devotion to the reading and study of the Scriptures. She was a regular attender at the

Meeting’s Bible study. She also participated in studying the Torah with Rabbi George Altshuler

at Sherith Israel synagogue in San Francisco. She was particularly interested in the Book of Job

and the Psalms and spoke often of their effects upon her.

Among Marian’s many contributions to the life of the Meeting were her messages given in vocal

ministry. She would often expound on her understanding of the Scriptures, important works of

literature, and the human condition. Her messages came from a deep understanding of her personal

experiences and observations concerning the struggles we face witnessing the suffering of our

fellow humans.

During Marian’s time in the San Francisco Meeting, she was actively involved in pursuing various

projects outside of Meeting, including working for the AFSC in San Francisco from 1999-2001,

and working at Linking San Francisco, a group supported by the San Francisco Unified School

District, from 2001-2003. It was designed to connect underutilized resources to where they were

needed at individual schools. From 2004-2012, she worked for the Friends of San Francisco Public

Libraries as the chief organizer of the campaign for the rehabilitation of 15 branch libraries. In this

capacity Marian arranged for community meetings to provide input into how the branch libraries

could serve the public’s needs. It was an example of how civic involvement including neighbors

determining their needs could be best met. After finishing her work on the branch libraries Marian

worked at establishing an umbrella organization that would bring together the various

organizations working to improve San Francisco’s public schools. This was called PEPS (Public

Engagement for Public Schools). It was privately funded. Its mission was to organize parents to

do hands-on work with students and teachers in the schools. It was definitely not the PTA. It got

lukewarm support from the SFUSD, and after some success, was eventually shut down when the

funding ran out.

Marian had a life-long devotion to writing. She did freelance writing for various newspapers and

magazines from 1970 through 2017. In the 1970s she did part time teaching (English and writing)

at Danielson Connecticut Community College. She was both a writer and photographer for the

Point Reyes Light, 1978-1980. In 2021 Marian, Charlie, and her grandson Angel took a cross

country trip by rail. Marian kept a detailed journal of that journey that she shared with friends. It

is an insightful meditation on her life, spiritual concerns, current events, and the conditions of life

in the United States in the early 21st century. At the time of her death, Marian was also trying to

finish work on a novel concerning being a young mother becoming involved in the anti-war

movement of the Vietnam War era. This book was also about the chaos and confusion caused by

the war in the lives of people who were her good friends (Charlie included), which in one instance

involved the suicide of a friend of hers. He, and many people she knew were draft reisisters. and

their lives were upended by the war.

Marian and Charlie have two daughters, Mercedes and Jessica. Mercedes is married to John Flett.

They also have four grandchildren, Emma, Ben, and William Flett, and Angel Sanchez. Mercedes

and her family live in Southlake, Texas, and Jessica and Angel live in San Francisco.

Marian and Charlie were married for almost 59 years, something neither one of them could have

imagined when they started out. What made this possible? Honesty, open communication, mutual

respect, kindness, and love. Love that never disappeared even when things got difficult as they

sometimes did. “It is a constant appeal; we are the Sun and the Moon to each other”, as she wrote

in her diary from 1978.

We all understand what Charlie means when he says, “I miss her more than I can express. She was

an exceptional human being”.