A rare man of conscience, who spent a good part of his life working to build peace and justice, Howard TenBrink drew his last breath on December 12, 2000. At his memorial service on December 22, Bill Petersen offered a fitting quotation from Adlai Stevenson, "someone has gone from our life who was like a certainty of refuge . . . a certainty of honor. " Howard was the first recipient of the Peace/Life Center’s "Friend of Peace" award in 1979, a friend to many of us, and an example for all of us. We cherish his memory.

The photo of Howard on the memorial program showed him resting in his sofa chair, comfortably reading the paper. In the last years of his life, his health failing, he spent most of his time in that chair. He loved to read, and he loved to talk and visit with friends and family. When someone entered his living room to see him, Howard’s eyes would brighten up, his smile widen into a happy greeting. "Hi, friend!" he’d almost call out, dropping the paper and raising his arms to shake hands or give a hug. When I visited, I’d bend over and kiss him on the cheek, he’d reach up and kiss me on mine, we’d hug, and then we’d enjoy being together, sometimes talking, sometimes not. Being together was what mattered. He’d tell a story, start a joke and then forget it, or make an observation, often humorous.

When friends think of Howard, his untiring sense of humor comes to mind. He was a walking anthology of jokes. More than a few times, he told the same joke over, and almost always would erupt in laughter at his own punch line. Even during his stay at Valley Comfort convalescent home, he maintained his wry outlook and upbeat disposition. One day his room mate was agitated, alternately railing out against God for his isolation and pain, and then moaning in contrition. Howard turned to me, a smile ripening on his face, the kind that signaled a joke or wise crack: "He can’t make up his mind," he said, then burst into a throaty chuckle. At times Howard must surely have wrestled with his increasing limitations, but I don’t remember ever hearing him complain.

For a man who had walked fast, worked hard, and seldom rested, his first stroke in 1979 was like felling a towering redwood. The second severe stroke in 1991 cut down further what remained of a once robust trunk. Yet through all this impairment, inspired and coaxed each step of the way by his loving wife Ruby, Howard rebounded. His strength and resilience and Ruby’s alternative healing methods and loving fortitude were amazing. Later smaller strokes and illness gradually sapped Howard’s strength. Yet through all this, he mellowed and softened, and his rough hewn toughness yielded to tenderness and a more open affection.

Howard experienced deep pain in his life. Perhaps his gregariousness and ironic sense of humor were his way of compensating for it. In any case, his years of health problems forced him to slow down and ponder his life. Ever a realist, he let go the hurt and accepted what he could not change. He learned to surrender and let be, and thus freed himself to love with a warmth long kept within. He took each day as it came with a contentment and serenity he had sought over his long lifetime and finally gained.

Howard’s children treasure their father’s legacy. They learned from him the value of hard work. They grew up watching him work from sun up to sun down. Howard joined fellow World War II conscientious objectors Gale and Gordon Nutson, Rudy Potochnik, and, later, Gilbert Grover, to create Wolverine Real Estate Company in the late 1940’s. Soon Rudy was designing and Howard was building homes. One or more of his children sometimes went with him to job sites where he’d inspect the work and always demand quality out of his crew. Howard had learned to work as the oldest son of twelve children growing up on his parents’ Michigan farm. He believed in an honest day’s work. "If someone’s not willing to do it well," son Evan remembers him saying often, "then they should not do it at all."

For the family this meant few summer vacations, since Howard always worked as long as the sun shone. But yearly the family would take a weekend trip to Yosemite or Calaveras Big Trees, often with out of town relatives or friends. Rare family getaways were balanced by frequent family reading at night. The thespian came out in Howard when he read poetry to Julie and children’s stories to Evan, Terri, and Bobbie.

Howard’s labor with Wolverine produced nearly 400 homes and over 500 pools in our area. He once told me that when he’d drive around town and see a home he had built or one in which he’d added a pool, he felt a deep and enduring satisfaction.

Howard used his building skills to help many people. In 1963, a devastating earthquake leveled parts of Skopje, Yugoslavia. Howard picked up his tools and volunteered three months helping reconstruct the city. Locally, in the later 1960’s Howard assisted Self-Help Enterprises build homes with and for farmworkers and other low income rural people. His generosity extended to me and my wife in 1987 when he lent me his transit and helped me lay out the foundation for a living room addition to our home.

By that time, living only a few blocks away, we had gotten to know Howard and Ruby well. At their invitation our children enjoyed many hot summer days swimming in their pool. Howard proudly showed us his garden and greenhouse, and always gave us a sack of his plump tomatoes, just as Ruby treated us to her delicious home-baked bread.

Besides being an exceptionally hard worker, Howard was a man of principle, of integrity. He probably learned this from his father. When Howard was ten his father was excommunicated from the Dutch Reformed Church because he didn’t share the church’s view of creation. Just as Gene TenBrink stood up to his church’s elders, Howard stood up to the U.S. government 15 years later. In 1940 with two Quakers, Howard refused to register for the draft to test the constitutionality of the Selective Service Training Act. Howard’s picture and story adorned the front pages of Detroit’s newspapers and that act of resistance began a lifetime of posing truth to power.

In 1941, Howard lived at Frank Lloyd Wright’s community in Taliesen, Michigan. Wright was a great architect, but Howard did not think much of him as a human being. Most people yielded to the famous man, but not Howard. Fed up with Wright’s injustice to people who worked for him, Howard walked into Wright’s office, told him what he thought, and walked out of Taliesen.

From 1942 to 1946 Howard had to live in work camps set up for conscientious objectors to the war.

In the late 40s when Wolverine Real Estate and Building began, its founders decided to break the taboo against white businesses employing black people. They hired the first black receptionist. Rudy Potochnik recalls, "Other realtors were sure it would be our demise. It was not." Wolverine also was the first real estate company to secure bank loans and build homes for black families in Modesto. Rudy also remembers that Wolverine found a site for the black Second Baptist Church which had been displaced by the construction of the freeway, and became the guarantor for the loan without any remuneration.

Around this same time in the late 40’s and early 50’s Howard and Sam Tyson started a local chapter of CORE, the Congress on Racial Equality, and worked to desegregate a local creamery and two other businesses that had refused to serve black people.

In the late 50’s, the TenBrinks, Rudy, Sam and other local peacemakers got involved in protesting this country’s Cold War buildup in nuclear weapons. They participated in the first protest against above- ground weapons testing in the Nevada desert. They organized several protest at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. With Dr. Linus Pauling as main speaker, a public meeting in Livermore drew and overflow crowd. A generation before Greenpeace, they also helped build a trimaran in the TenBrinks' backyard that the Committee for Nonviolent Action sailed into the nuclear testing zone in the South Pacific. During an ear of black lists, Howard was a man of courage, Sam recalls.

During the 60’s and 70's, Howard protested the Vietnam War, serving as a draft counselor with the newly formed Peace/Life Center. In the 80’s, Howard opposed the Reagan Administration’s low intensity warfare in Central America. In a protest against the U.S.’s Contra war against Nicaragua, he committed civil disobedience and was arrested during a sit-in at then Congressman Tony Coehlo’s office in Modesto. Fred Herman recalls the cop wincing when Fred congratulated him for "making Modesto’s streets safe from Howard TenBrink." I will never forget Howard’s face as he entered the police wagon. He turned around to the cheering crowd. His smile was jubilant.

Howard’s peace convictions carried over to the way he raised his children. One day oldest daughter Julie came home from school excited that her fifth grade class was going to take a field trip to the Atwater Air Force Base. Her father listened, then explained why he would not let her go. The net effect, he reasoned, would be to glorify war and weaponry. In another instance Evan remembers his father’s reaction to the "Duck and Cover" Cold War bomb drill exercises school children all over America went through in the 1950’s. At the sound of the siren, kids were asked to crouch on the floor under their desks. Howard refused to give Evan permission to participate. Howard felt complying with drills that prepared people for nuclear war helped make the preposterous idea of such a war more acceptable. Evan sums up a key trait in his father, "He didn’t suffer fools very well."

On another occasion Howard’s fatherly protectiveness almost superseded his sense of outrage at social injustice. In the mid-1960’s Julie wanted to go to the South to help with the civil rights movement's voter registration drive. Knowing the dangers she might encounter, Howard was preoccupied. He hesitated to give her permission, but seeing her conviction he gave her his blessing. How could he not respect her deepest sense of calling? This was the same father who, before each of his daughters got married, insisted the question be deleted that asks, "Who gives this woman to be married? The woman, as Howard had early appreciated in Julie, makes her own decision. She is her own person.

Howard’s solicitude for his children is evident again in 1964 when he took daughters Terri and Bobbie to a civil rights rally in San Francisco. Coretta Scott King was the featured speaker, so the crowd was big and the march was long. Seeing his little girls would be exhausted by the slow trek, he arranged for a friend on a motorcycle to take them, ahead of everyone, right to the front where the speech would take place. The girls may not have remembered the talk but they were thrilled by their first motorcycle ride. I picture Howard chuckling affectionately at their priorities.

In his brief memoir Howard wrote of the impact the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on him: " I was so depressed I no longer wanted to live in this world." I’m thankful Howard chose to live on. And I’m thankful Ruby cared for him with so much love and ingenuity that he lived more than twenty years beyond his first stroke.

As is true of a number of people in or near their eighties who have been so influential in the peace community, Howard’s life for us was a gift. His sensitivity and outrage at injustice, violence, and war, and his commitment to speak honestly and unpretentiously in his work for peace have helped shape me and others in the Peace/Life community. His lively, energetic presence at protests, from Livermore to downtown Modesto, animated us. His sense of humor lightened our burden. His integrity, dependability, and loyal friendship enriched us.

One of Howard’s favorite short readings was from a Quaker Friends Bulletin he came upon in Costa Rica in 1956. After acknowledging that at times the future seems hopeless, the passage affirms belief in a loving Creator who inspires us to serve others with a pure heart. The passage encourages us to hope that the day will come when the forces of Light and Love will rise over the spirit of selfishness and over the greed for wealth and power so prevalent today, so that the peace all peoples long for may become reality. The passage ends with an invitation: "May we all be awake to our individual duty in bringing that day nearer." Howard responded to that summons with unhesitating boldness. May we follow his lead.

Read Howard's reminiscences of the draft in "A Tale — Wart and All"

A.J. Muste, Fellowship of Reconciliation, and Francis Heisler, American Civil Liberties Union, at the first protest against above ground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, 1957. Photo: Howard and Ruby TenBrink

A generation before Greenpeace, the Everyman sailed into the nuclear testing zone in the South Pacific in 1962. The cabin of the trimaran was constructed in the TenBrinks' backyard in Modesto by the Committee for Nonviolent Action.

First protest against above ground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, 1957. Parachute/pole shelter constructed by Howard TenBrink. Photo: Ken Jones, Las Vegas Sun .Archives of Sam Tyson.