Lillian Kanet Adams died at home in Carbondale at 5:15 AM on January 24, 2009. She was 96.
The daughter of immigrant Polish Jews, Nathan Kanet, a furrier, and his wife Lena (Lustenburg), Lillian was born in Chicago on May 10, 1912. She had two sisters, Rose and Karyl. It was the era of Teddy Roosevelt's campaign for the Bull Moose Party, 8 years before women secured the right to vote and the year of the great Titantic disaster.
Lillian recalled her suffragist mother marching for women's right to vote. That early impression of determined activism developed into a lifetime's vocation. She and her first husband, E. Leonidas Vernon, hitch-hiked throughout the American South in the late 1930s holding union meetings for tenant farmers and sharecroppers. With Socialist leader Norman Thomas they defeated martial law during a labor strike in Indiana.
But her deepest passion was the plight of women. She was a founder of the Women's Center in Carbondale, a strong member of the League of Women Voters, and a supporter of Pro Choice legislation.
Leo Vernon, with whom she had her son James Kanet Vernon Adams in 1940, had trained as a physical chemist. While Leo was pursuing a post doctorate at Harvard, Lillian began working with Planned Parenthood in Boston and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In Cambridge and New York they were part of a circle of radicals and Socialists that included the science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp.
Tragically, Leo, who had been tapped to work on the Manhattan (Atomic Bomb) Project, died suddenly. Lillian returned with her infant son to Chicago where she became reacquainted with an old friend, fellow Socialist and union organizer Edward Lawrence Adams. Ed, a widower, and Lillian were married on May 31, 1941, and they settled on a farm near Ava, Illinois. Their daughter, Jane Helen Adams, named after the Jane Addams of Hull House, was born in 1943. Ed served as a Navy Lieutenant in WWII while Lillian traveled with their children to wartime bases.
Lillian and Ed worked to defeat racial segregation in theatres, restaurants and the public schools. They put up their Ava farm as bail bond collateral for civil rights demonstrators in Cairo, Illinois. Their son Jim was one of the jailed protestors. She supported the decision by both of her children, Jim and Jane, to participate in the Freedom Summer of 1964 in violently segregated Mississippi. She and Ed were early opponents of the War in Vietnam.
Lillian was a long time member of the Unitarian Fellowship of Carbondale and a founder of the Southern Illinois ACLU. She and Ed shared a passionate love for Southern Illinois; it's flowers, birds and especially mushrooms. Fiercely independent, Lillian lived alone after Ed's death, and drove her car until she was 95. She was an inveterate writer of letters to the editor. Once, it was determined that she had published over 600. A concerned editor, suggesting that she was a frustrated editorialist, limited her to one letter every three weeks. And, like clockwork, they arrived.
A friend and backer of Senator Paul Simon, she was an early supporter of Carol Mosely Braun who was elected as the first black woman in the United States Senate. Lillian was among the first persons contacted by the Barack Obama senatorial campaign in the region. After meeting Obama she declared repeatedly that he would become President someday. This past Tuesday she rallied one last time from her declining health and asked to watch President Obama sworn into office on television. She repeatedly whispered: "astonishing, astonishing".
She is survived by her daughter Jane Adams of Carbondale, a professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, her son Jim Adams of Louisa, Virginia; her granddaughters Arwen Evenstar Podesta, M.D. of New Orleans and Dawn Adams Roberts of Mesa, Arizona. She was preceded in death by her sisters Rose Rothchild and Karyl Chipman; her husbands Leo Vernon in 1940 and Edward Lawrence Adams in 2001.
A memorial service is planned at the Unitarian Fellowship in Carbondale on February 8 at 2 PM. Donations in the name of Lillian Adams may be made to the Women's Center, the Carbondale Chapter of the NAACP, and the Unitarian Fellowship.
We invite you to contribute your memories by posting them as a comment at the end of this blog entry.
We miss you, grandma
ReplyDeleteWhat an incredible woman! She led a full, rich and meaningful life that was a constant example of giving, service and commitment. I feel very fortunate to have met her recently. God Bless!
ReplyDeletethanks for the blog and to know that Lillian saw some of the inauguration. she has inspired and will continue to inspire me and others as well as moving her organizational activities to a different place (and unlimited letter writing). i remember at her 80th birthday party where she told me that she had met Emma Goldman among many such activists in her life. my thoughts are also with her family.
ReplyDeleteWe are lucky to have had such an incredible grandma. Not only was she a heroic leader and activist, she was a fun and loving grandmother. She taught us to bake, sew, fish, hike and hunt for rocks and mushrooms. She and grandpa took us on epic hiking trips across the country, and when we weren't doing that, we were doing projects near Lake Lillian and Union Hill. She froze a beautiful blue bellied bird that died when it hit the huge window, so that she could ask a friend to help identify it. She made a gorgeous chocolate cake when Dawn first learned to swim. She laughed hysterically when the whole family hung spoons on our noses at the dinner table. She loved us fully, just as we love her. We miss you grandma.
ReplyDeleteWhat a life! She was indeed a wonderful woman. I feel very fortunate to have met her when she welcomed me and my husband as her neighbors. She is dearly missed.
ReplyDeleteToday as I drove to Huffman-Harker Funeral Home to make the necessary arrangements I stopped at the stoplight at Poplar and Main. Looking up, I saw a bald eagle soaring overhead. Mother never failed to be thrilled at the sight of bald eagles wherever they saw them in their travels, and particularly here in Southern Illinois when they began to come back. We used to make an annual trek to the Union County Wildlife Refuge and Lyerla Lake at Reynoldsville around new years to see the eagles there. She always said if there was one thing she wished she could do it was fly, especially soar like a raptor. So it was thrilling to see that bald eagle today, soaring over Carbondale.
ReplyDeleteLinda Rush's story in the Southern Illinoisan can be read at this url: http://www.southernillinoisan.com/articles/2009/01/26/local/27875274.txt
ReplyDeleteHere is a clickable link to the S.I. article that mom mentions above: http://thesouthern.com/articles/2009/01/26/local/27875274.txt
ReplyDeleteThank you, Linda! That is a wonderful article about grandma.
What an incredible honor it was for me to be able to spend time with Lillian during her last week of life. We had spoken about death often during the 25 years that I knew her and she made her wishes clearly known. She never wanted to become a burden to herself or her family. The love in the house that week was palpable...the stories unending, laughter, tears, a celebration of a life well lived and the relief that Lillian was comfortable and died peacefully. Thank you Lillian for giving me the gift of spending this sacred time with you and your family.
ReplyDeleteThank you also for loving and supporting my children and all of the other children who have passed through the Unitarian Fellowship.
Lillian Adams – In Remembrance
ReplyDelete(by Ken Starbuck)
My wife Kathy and I started attending the Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship in 1980. The first Sunday in attendance Ed Adams spoke on the issue of young men finding ways to resist the required registration for the draft (remember Viet Nam). We were particularly interested in the issue since we had three sons graduating from Herrin High School that spring.
It soon became evident that Ed and Lillian were key people in the development and continuing life of the Fellowship. Initially I probably identified Lillian with my grandmother Starbuck; they were about the same height, bone structure and with a serious approach to the world. My childhood relationship with my grandmother ( who lived two blocks away), gave me a chance to get away from a home environment where everybody was bigger, louder and more aggressive. As a young child sleeping with my grandmother in a feather bed was a gentle and affirming experience. Some personal and e-mail experiences with Lillian matched those projections –certainly not all.
Eventually Lillian and other leaders in the Fellowship encouraged me to speak during the services on Sunday morning. I made a presentation on the thought and life of the theologian Paul Tillich, on May 19, 1996. At a Fellowship potluck following that service Lillian approached me with an idea and request. She wondered if I would be interesting in using the same kind of format to create a talk about the life and thought of the theologian Henry Nelson Wieman.
Wieman was an active part of our Fellowship three or four years, during the same time period that he taught in the Philosophy Department at Southern Illinois University. Normally theology wasn’t her thing; one time she gave a talk on “Social Action is My Theology”. I don’t think she liked Paul Tillich because German Romantic Philosophy wasn’t her thing, and she was too much of an activitist to entertain European Existentialism.
Though theology or even philosophy wasn’t Lillian’s thing, I think she and Wieman were cut out of the same cloth. She loved talking with him at Fellowship potlucks, and she loved the pragmatic and rationalistic way that Wieman framed the issues of God or not-God. I suspect that Wieman enjoyed talking with her, i.e. getting that kind of listening ear from someone who appreciated yet challenged his thinking.
I did honor Lillian’s request by making a presentation on “The Larger Vision: Henry Nelson Wieman Revisited”. Prior to giving that sermon on December 1, 1996, I had the chance to spend part of a day with Laura Wieman (Henry’s widow). She lived in Grinnell, Iowa, and had a very close friend there by the name of Rebecca French; both had recently become widows. How that all came together is that Kathy and I were also close friends with Rebecca and her deceased husband Porter.
Lillian and I did not always agree, but we kept connecting on Sunday morning during the last 28 years. I think Lillian most often opted for believing the system could somehow right itself, and through change new systems could emerge; I hoped for that too but I know I see life more through poetry and irony. Lillian and I never resolved the issue as to who was the most important theologian – Tillich or Wieman. If anyone would like some resolution about that issue I suggest reading Martin Luther King’s dissertation on “A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman”.
As a relatively new member of the Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship, Isaw Lillian every Sunday and was impressed by her feistiness and sly smile. I've been grumpy and unsociable as of late. However, on the last Sunday before her passing, Lillian came up to me, introduced herself, and made me feel very welcome. This simple encounter left me with a lasting glow of happiness. That's all.
ReplyDeleteJoseph Robbie
Although Obama's grandmother and mother missed the inauguration, I like to believe that Lillian manifested their spirits as she was watching the event on TV. She and her offsprings carried the dream forward. What an honor to have known her though not well. To me she was ageless as was her impact on us.
ReplyDeleteA MEMORY OF LILLIAN
ReplyDeleteLillian was a powerful person in this community and her tenacity and good
nature will be missed in so many venues. But her interests took in the
world, and I was surprised that Lillian’s obituary and other speakers at her
memorial service did not mention her Nicaraguan experience (including Ed and
Jane) during the mid-1980s.
Lillian and I and many others in Carbondale and across the country were very
upset with President Reagan’s opposition to Sandinista programs and
Nicargua's fair election in 1984 when Daniel Ortega was elected by a
majority of over 60%. (A popular uprising headed by Ortega and the
Sandinista Party in 1979 had overthrown the Samozas [a family of serial
dictators supported by the U.S.] who had dominated the country since the
1930s.)
President Reagan supported “Contra” mercenaries whose mission was to upset
Ortega’s new "balanced" Nicaraguan government. The “Contras” seriously
disrupted the Sandinista revolutionary programs in literacy and health with
attacks in rural areas on villages that included killings, destruction of
crops, schools and clinic buildings, and general intimidation. Reagan’s
support supposedly was “secret” and yet it was widely known and disapproved
by Congress. Reagan's involvement was proved in the late 1980s when an
airplane with goods for the Contra and piloted by an American mercenary
(Hasenfus) was shot down over Nicaragua. The Contra harassment lasted until
1990 when Ortega’s Sandinista Party lost the election and a puppet of the
U.S. was elected as President. Domination by the U.S. has lasted since then.
But back to Lillian. She and I developed a plan to organize a group to go to
Nicaragua on a “fact-finding” two week mission sponsored by the
inter-denominational “Witness for Peace” organization. From conversations in
the UU Fellowship Lillian and I thought a nucleus for such a group might
come from Fellowship members. Our group did end up with four members from
the Fellowship (Lillian, Ed and Jane Adams and myself), two others from
Carbondale (Sally Schram and Bonnie Swift) and another eleven from the
Midwest that included my brother Alan Christensen from Des Moines. Our two
week visit to Nicaragua was from July 12 to 26, 1985. We were fortunate to
have several Spanish speakers in our group (including Jane Adams) to aid the
interpreters in our many conversations.
I especially remember Lillian and Ed during the very intensive two weeks
(they were in their 70s!) among the much younger members of the Witness for
Peace group. But they didn’t miss a beat in all of our two weeks of
“training sessions” in Miami, in Nicaragua sometimes slogging through ankle
deep red mud (even up hill), our long hours, our sleeping on the floor in a
pensione and an “open to the weather” community building – with gunshots
intermittent through the night, the menu of mostly rice and beans in rural
areas, and our many meetings and interviews with priests (of very different
views, including Miguel D'Escoto who was fasting for peace), villagers,
officials, farmers and a rancher. In Managua our sleeping and eating
situations were also spartan, but then, that was the same for all
Nicaraguans through those difficult times….that have continued to the
present.
In my notebook of the 1984 two weeks experience, one note says Lillian was
particularly moved (reviewing in her mind and for the group a particular day
’s experiences) when she interviewed (with Jane’s help) 6 mothers and 1
father who were fasting to protest not hearing over the last year and a half
about their children who had been kidnapped by the contra.
Lillian will be missed in our Fellowship and our community in so many ways.
And she was so bubbly pleased when Obama was elected President!
Dave Christensen February 12, 2009
A MEMORY OF LILLIAN
ReplyDeleteLillian was a powerful person in this community and her tenacity and good nature will be missed in so many venues. But her interests took in the world, and I was surprised that Lillian’s obituary and other speakers at her memorial service did not mention her Nicaraguan experience (including Ed and Jane) during the mid-1980s.
Lillian and I and many others in Carbondale and across the country were very upset with President Reagan’s opposition to Sandinista programs and Nicargua's fair election in 1984 when Daniel Ortega was elected by a majority of over 60%. (A popular uprising headed by Ortega and the Sandinista Party in 1979 had overthrown the Samozas [a family of serial dictators supported by the U.S.] who had dominated the country since the 1930s.)
President Reagan supported “Contra” mercenaries whose mission was to upset Ortega’s new "balanced" Nicaraguan government. The “Contras” seriously disrupted the Sandinista revolutionary programs in literacy and health with attacks in rural areas on villages that included killings, destruction of crops, schools and clinic buildings, and general intimidation. Reagan’s support supposedly was “secret” and yet it was widely known and disapproved by Congress. Reagan's involvement was proved in the late 1980s when an airplane with goods for the Contra and piloted by an American mercenary (Hasenfus) was shot down over Nicaragua. The Contra harassment lasted until 1990 when Ortega’s Sandinista Party lost the election and a puppet of the U.S. was elected as President. Domination by the U.S. has lasted since then.
But back to Lillian. She and I developed a plan to organize a group to go to Nicaragua on a “fact-finding” two week mission sponsored by the inter-denominational “Witness for Peace” organization. From conversations in the UU Fellowship Lillian and I thought a nucleus for such a group might come from Fellowship members. Our group did end up with four members from the Fellowship (Lillian, Ed and Jane Adams and myself), two others from Carbondale (Sally Schram and Bonnie Swift) and another eleven from the Midwest that included my brother Alan Christensen from Des Moines. Our two week visit to Nicaragua was from July 12 to 26, 1985. We were fortunate to have several Spanish speakers in our group (including Jane Adams) to aid the interpreters in our many conversations.
I especially remember Lillian and Ed during the very intensive two weeks (they were in their 70s!) among the much younger members of the Witness for Peace group. But they didn’t miss a beat in all of our two weeks of “training sessions” in Miami, in Nicaragua sometimes slogging through ankle deep red mud (even up hill), our long hours, our sleeping on the floor in a pensione and an “open to the weather” community building – with gunshots
intermittent through the night, the menu of mostly rice and beans in rural areas, and our many meetings and interviews with priests (of very different views, including Miguel D'Escoto who was fasting for peace), villagers, officials, farmers and a rancher. In Managua our sleeping and eating situations were also spartan, but then, that was the same for all Nicaraguans through those difficult times….that have continued to the present.
In my notebook of the 1984 two weeks experience, one note says Lillian was particularly moved (reviewing in her mind and for the group a particular day ’s experiences) when she interviewed (with Jane’s help) 6 mothers and 1 father who were fasting to protest not hearing over the last year and a half about their children who had been kidnapped by the contra.
Lillian will be missed in our Fellowship and our community in so many ways. And she was so bubbly pleased when Obama was elected President!
Dave Christensen February 12, 2009
A few thoughts, to amplify the historical record:
ReplyDeleteMother and Laura Weiman began weaving at around the same time (maybe it was the same time), around 1958. SIU had built an art program centered on crafts, and was in in the process of developing a national (international?) reputation for its ceramics, glass blowing, and metal working, especially Brent Kington's use of lost wax casting, as well as lithography. She got hooked on weaving, particularly fabrics. She wove my college wardrobe, made dozens of hand bags and quetzkemitals (?-- a kind of poncho or shawl) which were sold in a craft shop that supported the Women's Center, and much much more. Around the same time another member of the Unitarian Fellowship and friend, Claribel McDaniel began weaving tapestries. When Jim and I went South in 1964 she wove a rhea rug, as she said untying the knots in her stomach by knotting the yarn in the rug. When they built the house at Union Hill one room, off the kitchen, was set up for weaving and sewing. Some time in the mid-1980s, after more than a quarter century of weaving, she decided her weaving days were over and she sold her loom and the many spools of yarn she'd accumulated.
On the farm at Ava, we were able to receive University of Illinois WILL, and the Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, station KFUO AM and FM (we received the AM signal), which filled the house with classical music and, on Saturdays, the Texaco Metropolitan Opera -- unusual fare for rural southern Illinois! I also learned the hail Mary's which were recited regularly between classical music programs on KFUO.
As other posts have noted, she and Dad traveled widely after his retirement in the early 1970s. They took their Scotty trailer, then an all-in-one truck camper, to every state in the Union -- twice to Alaska, where they got hooked on fishing, two or three times to the Bay of Fundy, several springs to the Great Smokey Mountains and winters to Big Bend Texas -- where they thrilled to see the first whooping cranes come back to Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. They were of an era when social activism, keen interest in the natural sciences and arts, and handicrafts merged into a hopeful view of human possibility.