My brother, Walter George Wilson, named after our mother’s brother George Villa Burkey, started life with a good socialist background. His grandfather Ernest Rufus Burkey had named two of his sons in honor of his socialist and strong labor movement leanings. Uncle Gene was named after Eugene Debs, while Walter’s namesake, Uncle George Villa Burkey, had been named after Pancho Villa. George, in turn, named one of his sons after Woody Guthrie. Those were only the beginnings of the influence of his mother’s side of the family. Our mother, Margaret Mae Burkey, later known as Margaret May Burkey Wilson, was a wonderfully intelligent and eccentric woman with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, an interest in all humankind and justice for the oppressed. The last thing our mother said to me as she lay dying was to ask if I was alright, and to ask me to take care of Walter.
Somewhere back on our father’s side of the family, there are said to be some Quakers who lived around Terre Haute, Indiana. So Walter came by his simple caring for and interest in others honestly. The fact of Quaker relatives hasn’t yet been looked into, as we had lost all connection with my father’s side of the family after Charles Richard Wilson Sr.’s early death in 1970.
There actually was little contact with our father’s side of the family after about 1959 when Walter took on the task of rescuing our family from our parent’s marriage of over twenty-five years with an alcoholic father. In planning her escape, our mother had signed paperwork allowing our eldest brother Charles Richard Wilson Jr., to enlist in the Army just before he was old enough to join on his own, as he was the one who suffered all of our father’s wrath. Mom also arranged for Margaret Alice Wilson, known as Maggy with a ‘Y’, to move up to Andrew’s School for Girls in Ohio. Walter and our mother had plans for the rest of us to follow up to Ohio, where the family had originated, and where mom’s older sister, Gladys Overmyer and her husband Harold lived and had offered to help her until she could manage on her own. Not an easy task at that time, especially for a woman with five children.
So it was on Walter’s graduation day from high school that he loaded his mother and the two youngest of his sisters, Susan Elizabeth and me, Janet Louise, into his old white Chevy with huge flames painted along the front fenders and a transmission without a working reverse gear. We headed north to Ohio, only stopping by his Florida high school long enough to run in and pick up his diploma, ink still wet.
After helping mom and his younger sisters settle in Ohio, Walter headed down to St.Thomas, Virgin Islands, where he enrolled in some college courses, started to learn Spanish-- a lifetime endeavor-- and enjoying life.
He eventually ended up traveling across the U.S., spending much time in and around the mountains of Boulder, Colorado. Eventually he moved along, ending up on the Big Sur coast. He lived and worked down at Esalen Institute where, among other life experiences, he bonded with Strawberry, a wonderful yellow cat later known as Strawberry Momma. Strawberry may well be responsible for the over-abundance of orange cats living down by Kalisa’s, one of Walt’s haunts on Monterey’s old Cannery Row!
Walter later worked at Tassajara Hot Springs deep in the Coast Range when it was still a private hotel, and stayed when it changed hands, becoming what is now the Tassajara Zen Center. Walter studied Zen for nearly ten years after that, later moving to San Francisco and the old Zen Center on Page Street (Haight-Ashbury) where he studied under Suzuki Roshi.
During these years, Walter also became interested in the Quakers, from time to time attending Meetings in San Francisco, Berkeley, and the Monterey Meeting. he made several trips back to Ohio as well to visit with the family, and after sister Maggy graduated from high school, traveled with her down to Florida and then on to southern California.
In 1969, he did another rescue of his family, this time with only mom, and his youngest sister Janet. Sisters Maggy and Susan had both married by this time and remained living in Ohio for some years until they, too, followed out to Monterey. One day in the summer of 1969, Walter just showed up in Ohio, and within two weeks I was being dragged kicking and screaming-- not literally-- from Toledo to live out in San Francisco. Big brother Charles also arrived, suggesting we should move to Eureka instead! I remember it was traumatic, being pulled away from my friends without even time to tell anyone I was moving, and to be forced onto a Zen diet of brown rice and vegetables. Walter purchased a 1957 Chevy limousine station wagon with four doors on each side for this trip, with a tall roof rack along the entire length. Walter loaded the car to the gills with mom, Janet, Bogo, her cat, threw an old rocking chair, rug from Iran, and other memorabilia and potentially useful crap up into the rooftop carrier and off westward ho we went, with Walter refusing any and all requests to stop at a Dairy Queen or any such establishment anywhere along the road. I must admit to resenting the heck out of what I thought then was a sudden removal from Ohio, but I have long since discovered it to have been one of the most wonderful changes in my and our mother’s life. Our mother, by this time, had been able to return to work as a secretary in the Science Department at Toledo University with me the only child still at home. Our mother had just celebrated her fiftieth birthday. We still have a photo of her and her sister Gladys sitting on either side of the cake I made with a peace symbol the size of the cake. I had just finished the ninth grade, and our country was still deeply embroiled in the war in Vietnam. It wasn’t until recently that, reading old letters between Walter and mom, I found that they had both planned that move in advance. The year earlier, our father also had moved out and was living near his family in Sandusky. He had been trying to sweet talk mom into getting back together. I sure was the last to know about all these goings on, but hey, I was, and always will, be the baby of the family. Families do have their pecking orders, and whether mom would admit it or not, Walter was always mom’s favorite and could do no wrong. He drove me nuts sometimes, but I think he truly was everyone’s favorite.
So late in the summer of 1969, Mom Walt, Bogo the cat, and I arrived in San Francisco where Walter turned our lives upside down, and that was a good thing. Still no Dairy Queens, and I remember him driving us across the Golden Gate Bridge and pointing out Alcatraz Island and asking if I wanted to go see the Indians who had taken over the island. Not being a news junkie, I didn’t believe that tall tale until about twenty years later, so I may have rolled my eyes at that suggestion. Besides, I was terrified by the size of this monstrous city we were crossing the Golden Gate into and by the huge rivers of fog swirling down from it, blanketing the water we were crossing. I was a naive kid from the midwest, remember, and I had never seen anything like San Francisco or the parts of the country we had spent the last month crossing. That first night in San Francisco, we spent sleeping on tatami mats at Walt’s friends’ house across the street from the old Zen Center. Perhaps still kicking and screaming, I awoke before sunrise to join the procession over to the Center to sit Zazen, whatever that was. It was impressive, even for a punk my age at the time. Young women barely older than me, with shaved heads, everyone quietly converging and then sitting cross legged in total silence except for the gongs and the occasional smacks on the back as the Zen Master walked behind the rows of his followers. Walter got a smack, perhaps it was a welcome home, but it terrified me I would get whacked next.
Walter, mom, and I spent days there, trying to find a place to live near Haight and Ashbury where Walter wanted us to live. Not finding anyplace, with our money quickly dwindling, and this spoiled little sister who was terrified by the size, sounds and size of the big city, Walter decided to take us down to Monterey where he thought we could stay with his friend Julia until we sorted ourselves out. Before we left though, he took us through a tour of Berkeley, aka ”Berzerkley” and its famous Telegraph Avenue of the hippie era. Remember, we had just left the straight laced midwest where at my high school, guys were still being kicked out of school if their hair hit their collars, and girls were expelled if our skirts were above the knee. So there we are, Berkeley in its heyday, wall to wall with hippies, guys with hair down to their waists, torn and patched blue jeans, pot smoking in public, and yes, flowers in their hair, tie dye in abundance. We’re driving down Telegraph, heads ducked forward and eyes bugging out not to miss anything on the sidewalk and as we round a corner there near the University, one of the freakiest looking peaceniks of them all bends down to get a look inside the car (remember the old Chevy eight door black limousine with the full length rooftop storage full of antique furniture, rugs, and other wholesome miscellaneous.) This most colorful of all hippie- looking guy was staring back at us, pointing, and exclaiming, ”Far out, look at that! Wow!”. Fifty years later, and I can still point out that corner even though I didn’t see it again for at least another ten years. We had definitely arrived.
Walter settled with us there in Monterey. We visited Big Sur, snuck into the hot baths at Esalen (is there any other way?) and attended the last Big Sur Folk Festival that was held down at Esalen before moving it to the fairgrounds in Monterey. Years later, I found I’d heard Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills Nash and Young among other notable musicians in the folk world....remember, kid from the midwest being exposed to Big Sur and a new way of life.
Our mom had long been involved in the Methodist church and had taught Sunday school while I grew up in Florida. Her church there had sent her as their representative to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference where she heard about ending racism and promoting integration but when she went back home and invited people who were black to attend our church, she was pulled aside and asked what was she doing!? . In Toledo, being the poor kids in the rich neighborhood Methodist church, we three girls had been picked on. Even the church janitor would single us out for trouble makers when we were merely the scapegoats. So when Walter introduced me to the Monterey Peninsula Friends Meeting, it was an instant good feeling. The Meeting was still in the old Meeting House up in Seaside, and it was being used as a safe house for a guy from Big Sur who was avoiding the draft. People were really friendly and welcomed us. Remember the naive midwest upbringing? One couple were known openly to be not married and living together, he had hair down past his waist, and was an atheist to boot, and yet the people at the Meeting were welcoming and totally accepting of this couple. I decided this was the place for me. All of us attended Quaker Meetings off and on since that time, with only Walter becoming an actual member as recently as 2007. He also continued to study Zen and take part in meditation as well as attended an evangelical church for a while despite them telling him his ways were wrong and he was going to burn in hell. Too bad and sad that the world around him wasn’t more accepting of his differences.
Walter was amazingly creative. In the early1970’s, after gathering up a bunch of trash from the Monterey beach near what is now called Window-on-the-Bay, he arranged it in a huge picture frame, very ornate, and about six by ten feet in size, into an amazingly cool abstract and named it “Human Seashells”. He was truly ahead of his time. Throughout his life, Walter placed great importance in his dreams, usually keeping a notebook by his bed and awakening in the middle of the night to scribble down notes that would help him recall them later. He was extremely creative, thoughtful, and perhaps that was his curse as well. He had long years of balancing his exuberance and creative thought with the forced medications prescribed from various mental wards and hospitals. Although I worried about his safety some years when he was going through his most manic periods, I longed to have that vitality back in his later years as he often seemed overly medicated and dulled down. He was amazing at getting out of a straight jacket; I remember visiting him once at Garden Pavilion locked unit; he was sitting up in bed and the straight jacket he wore was attached to the bed. While we talked, he just calmly pulled his arm out of the contraption, did whatever it was he wanted to do, I don’t remember, and then stuck it back into the straight jacket again as if nothing had happened. He was cool. Once he escaped from there and caused quite a stir as he perched himself atop one of those tall Monterey Pines on the hospital grounds. He always seemed to keep a sense of vitality and adventure going despite and within his mental illness. During his last years, I think the thrill was gone and he had major side effects from the long years of medications.
Over the years, Walter made friends everywhere. He often attended Monterey Peninsula College and Hartnell College where he studied Spanish, took various other classes as well as mechanics and auto body classes so he could work on old heaps he was revitalizing. People came up to me often over the years, often telling me how nice my brother was to them. He would make friends just riding the bus, riding along and trying to speak Spanish with whomever would communicate back. He had many friends he met through his years of being connected with Interim Services, and lived in their housing off and on for years despite the headaches he caused them by his creative hoarding habits.
Walter is survived by his older brother Charles, and sister-in-law Andrea of Monterey. His sister Maggy Wilson Boast and brother-in-law Tom Pirkle of Kinsale, Ireland, a sister, Susan Zygela Cooley of Eureka, who I know loved him despite not talking to him for at least twenty years, and by me, his baby sister, Janet Louise Wilson of Pacific Grove. Also survived by Sue’s adult children, James Charles Zygela Jr. of Weaverville CA, Angela Zygela Childers and her husband Seth Childers of Weaverville;and by Charles’s daughter Carla Louise Wilson, of Tucson, Arizona, who recently gave our line of the family hope of continuing by giving birth to Walter’s only grand niece, Freedom Louise Wilson.
With many hopes of well deserved peace and creativity in whatever eternity exists, Walter now lives full time in his dreamland. May he be peaceful. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, March 24,1942, although he preferred to say he was born on the two dozenth day of a third of a year into the three and a half dozenth year... he loved wordplay; and passed quietly on March 7, 2019, in Monterey with Janet stroking his head.
Janet Louise Wilson Monterey Peninsula Friends Meeting