Ronald Jay Sax, long-time active member of Palo Alto Friends Meeting, died on February 13, 2021, after a long journey with Parkinson’s Disease and a mercifully short one with cancer. He was 88.
Ron was born on January 2, 1933, in Benton Harbor, Michigan, to Nathan and Adeline (Jacobson) Sax. His Jewish upbringing during the Depression in Benton Harbor brought him in contact with various classes of people where he witnessed and sometimes experienced the sting of racial and religious bigotry. He absorbed black culture mixed with Jewish immigrant culture working at his father’s junk shop and other odd jobs in “the Flats,” the largely poor black and immigrant section of town a mile or two from his middle-class neighborhood. He often felt himself a bridge between cultures and religions.
With Selective Service knocking in 1952 he enlisted in the Air Force to reduce his chances of having to fire a gun and kill someone. He spent two years in Texas as a Basic Training instructor and two in Tokyo as a file clerk. His years in Japan opened his mind to a distant and recently “enemy” culture. He never lost his fascination with and love of other cultures.
Back in the States in 1956 Ron enrolled at Central Michigan College. He gravitated towards a circle of students and faculty who questioned the prevailing social and political values, centered around a kindly, elderly German Jewish Quaker philosophy professor, Oscar Oppenheimer. Something was planted, but after a lackluster semester he departed to seek his fortune in Manhattan. He returned to CMC a year later where in the International Club he met a Japanese exchange student, Katoko Inoue, with whom he shared a sense of urgency for international understanding as the way to peace. But after another semester he departed once again, this time first to San Francisco and then Chicago. Katoko later joined him in Chicago, where they were married in 1962. Their daughter Naomi was born there in 1962 and son Kenji in 1965.
Marriage and parenthood brought focus and motivation to Ron’s life. He was promoted to branch manager in the bookstore where he worked and became more successful in his night school classes, especially in math and science. He left the bookstore and started a job operating IBM tabulating machines. He and Katoko also became active in the anti-war and civil rights movements in Oak Park and began attending Quaker meeting. Ron was first drawn to AFSC’s social welfare efforts, but then to the spiritual base for Friends’ outward concerns. He decided to try for that ideal himself, which seemed a long way off.
In 1967 Ron accepted a job offer as a computer programmer at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). No sooner had the family arrived in Palo Alto than Ron was arrested at a sit-in at the Oakland Army Induction Center and sentenced to 10 days in county jail along with over a hundred other anti-war protesters including Joan Baez. Katoko and the children were looked after by members of the Quaker meeting. Welcome to California.
Thus began Ron and Katoko’s long engagement with Palo Alto Friends Meeting, of which they became members in 1969. Over the years Ron served the Meeting in a variety of ways, including as Clerk and Associate Clerk of Meeting, newsletter editor, host for Hotel de Zink rotating shelter, and many other committee roles. His most challenging role may have been as clerk of the “Pentler Estate Settlement Committee” that had the difficult task of bringing the Meeting to unity on how to use a very large bequest the Meeting had received. This multi year experience, he wrote, “strengthened my resources of inward light, patience and perseverance, and use of the healing power of time.”
Another marathon achievement of Ron’s came after he took up jogging in 1978. Starting with “modest goals and a great deal of pain,” he gradually worked up from a lap or two to longer and longer runs until he completed his first of three San Francisco Marathons in 1982 and ran in innumerable other races, “not to defeat but to build.”
Ron and Katoko loved to travel. They, with the children or alone, took “hundreds of trips” throughout the US and to over 40 countries, reaching out to friends and strangers wherever they went. In 1988 Ron and Kenji made a cross-country bike ride together from Seattle to Chicago, with Kenji continuing on alone to Washington D.C. Ron was also an avid jazz fan, serving on the board of the Palo Alto Jazz Alliance and traveling to Cuba in 2000 on a jazz-oriented trip sponsored by PAJA. He participated for many years in writing classes through the Palo Alto Adult School, producing memoirs and other pieces.
Ron and Katoko were very close with their four grandsons, taking them on trips and reveling in their recitals, presentations, and sporting events. Ron made it to all four high school graduations and the two college ceremonies that happened before his death.
Though Ron had a traditional Bar Mitzvah, the experience convinced him he wanted no further part of “organized religion.” But he immediately and for many years felt completely at home in Friends Meetings. That feeling of comfort in Quaker circles began to erode somewhat over Quakers’ apparent bias in favor of Palestinians over Israelis. It came to a head in 2006 over what Ron identified as anti-Semitic posts on the Meeting listserv. When a clearness process failed to soothe the conflict, both parties felt too uncomfortable to attend Meeting any longer. It was a very sad loss for the Meeting.
Ron continued working at SLAC and closely related jobs the rest of his professional career, retiring in 2000. He was predeceased by Katoko, who died of cancer in 2013. He is survived by his daughter Naomi (Neil Simmons) and son Kenji (Cindy Lamerson), and grandsons Nathan, Joel, Nick and Scott.