Nancy Cronon Ball, one of the founders of the Walla Walla Friends Meeting and clerk of our meeting many times over the years, passed away on March 7, 2020 at the age of 93. The following are excerpts from the memorial website Nancy’s family has put up at www.nancyball.org.
Nancy did not officially become a Quaker until 1980, but her
admiration for the Quaker approach to life had been building for at least forty
years before then. She first learned what Quakers were through her sister,
Connie, who was six years older than Nancy, and went to college at Macalester
while still living at home with the family.
“The values she [Connie] was defining and accepting at
Macalester College had a great influence on me. It was at Macalester that
Connie began to consider pacifism as a motivating force in her life. She dated
a Conscientious Objector to war (a C.O.), who volunteered for a
government-sponsored experimental program in starvation, the results of which
they hoped would help our country deal with starved war refugees and prisoners
of war. I was impressed with his unwillingness to inflict pain on others,
coupled with his willingness to suffer himself for what he considered the
greater good of society. In the highly patriotic atmosphere of World War II, it
took courage just to be a C.O., not to mention volunteering to be starved.
Connie spent a summer at a Quaker (AFSC) workcamp scraping old concrete from
used bricks with others in a multi-racial, low income area of Indianapolis, so
that a settlement house could be built. This was my first awareness of the
social concerns of the Quakers. How did all this fit in with cashmere sweater
sets and the right kind of saddle shoes?”
Nancy herself went to Oberlin at the recommendation of
Connie's Quaker friends, and she spent a summer at a Quaker work camp in
Mexico. Her first real boyfriend at Oberlin was a Quaker, which she considered
as a promising sign. Oberlin was also where Nancy attended her first Quaker
meeting:
“On Sundays I sometimes went to the worship service at First
Church (Congregational) especially because of the fine large choir. For awhile
I even sang in the choir myself but then decided that I didn't want to commit
myself to it because of the demands of my studies -- and also because I wanted
to attend the Friends (Quaker) Meeting sometimes, too. The strong concerns for
peace and social justice held by several of the faculty members and their
spouses who attended the Friends Meeting gave me pause about my own lack of
real commitment in these areas.”
Nancy and George went on to lead two Quaker work camps in
Mexico in 1951 and 1954, but George, after all, was an ordained Methodist
minister, and Nancy, as always, enjoyed singing in choirs, so while their kids
were young, the family stayed within that faith tradition. After all four kids
had left home, Nancy, once again, went her own her way. She writes,
“George, the children, and I all were members of Pioneer
Methodist Church in Walla Walla. I sang in the choir for years but never felt
content with the church's traditional form of worship. Stand and sing a hymn
(whose words extol dubious theology). Sit. Stand and mumble a repetitious
responsive reading. Sit. Stand to read a creed (whose theology I'm supposed to
believe but don't). Sit. Listen to people stand and tell God what they hope God
will do for them. Stand and sing another hymn. Sit. Sing an anthem while people
pass plates with money in them. Listen to an indifferent sermon that rarely
deals with theological or social questions. Etc. The children still chuckle
over one sermon preached there, entitled, "Was Jesus a Boy Scout?"
(Well, no, was the answer, but he would have been if there had been Boy Scouts
then. I didn't look forward to Sundays except for the choir anthems. I was ready for a change when in 1980, a
small group of us decided to try to start a Friends (Quaker) Meeting
(unprogrammed). Thirteen years later we're still a small group but active
beyond our size in areas of peace, justice, and other social concerns, meeting
every Sunday in the Olin faculty lounge on the Whitman campus. It has been a
good move for me. George still attends Pioneer Methodist Church, somewhat
irregularly, since he is ordained in the Methodist denomination and feels loyal
to it. His father and grandfather were also Methodist ministers.”
The first known Friends activity in Walla Walla was in the
mid 1960’s when Nancy and George Ball began a worship group in their home with
Friends Chuck and Etta Marie James, who had moved to Walla Walla for a period
of work, and several others. In the later sixties when the Jameses moved back
to Seattle, that group ended. In the Spring of 1971, when Dan and Barbara Clark
moved to Walla Walla, the Balls and the Clarks formed an unaffiliated worship
group called the Friends Meditation Group, which began meeting on Sunday
afternoons in the Fireside Room at the First Congregational Church. The Clarks
had attended the Berkeley Friends Meeting while attending law school and
organized an unaffiliated Friends group in their home in Napa, California in
1969. The new group included the Balls, the Clarks, one or two others who had
attended the prior worship group at the Balls’, and several people new to
Friends. The group continued to meet until 1977, when some of the older members
were no longer able to attend. In 1980, the Balls and the Clarks decided to
form a formal Quaker meeting in Walla Walla affiliated with North Pacific
Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, and invited others to join
with them. On Easter Sunday, 1980, about twenty people gathered in a room at
Whitman College. From 1988 to 2018, the Walla Walla Friends Meeting met weekly,
except during school holidays, when schedules varied. Since then, the
unprogrammed meetings have been held monthly, with Nancy serving as the Clerk,
or presiding officer, alternating with Dan Clark throughout the life of the
meeting.
Though the Friends Meeting has always been small, many peace
and justice initiatives have come out of this little group and its members over
the last thirty years, with Nancy often playing a leading role. It would be hard for any biographer to count up all of the
"many peace and justice initiatives" which have come out of this
little group.
Nancy's Quaker beliefs also influenced her public-school
teaching career, as when she led a unit on Future Problem Solving. It was at a
time when Walla Walla was panicking about the possibility of nuclear war, and
students across town were peppering their teachers with questions about where
to find bomb shelters and safe drinking water. Nancy tried to steer her class's
discussion away from mere self-preservation and to lasting peace by posing the
following question: “In what ways might we bring about a more stable world and
thereby reduce the likelihood of a nuclear war? This is a different problem than
the issue of what can I do in my own backyard to survive, This is your problem
-- maybe more than adults even -- because you have longer to live."
Nancy's daughter Sarah explains how her commitment to the
Quaker concepts of peace and justice colored the way she raised her four
children:
“We were taught to try to view almost every situation from
the other person's perspective. We were
expected to focus on the moral implications of the most everyday tasks--failing
to take out the trash without being asked suggested we valued someone else's
time less than our own, for example. We
were taught to conserve the world's resources decades before that became
fashionable. We were expected to be
brave enough to follow the roads less traveled by in the face of peer
pressure. We were expected to complete
lists of chores--"it takes many hands to make a family." We were expected to read books that went well
beyond the homework we were assigned.
And we were modeled behavior that virtually never included even a
slightly raised voice--a raised eyebrow was considered a strong statement. Mom
in particular expected us to be competent and take responsibility--saying
"But I can't" about a project would be met with "if you life
depended on doing it, what would you do?"
Mom and Dad both modeled behavior that signaled that, as a Christopher
Wren clock in Oxford says, though in Latin, "Time passes and is put to
your account." On Wednesday nights
we were given a more meager dinner than usual and then took part in adding the
saved cash into a jar that we mailed to CARE.
This was Mom and Dad's way of reminding us how lucky we were and to
experience and understand hunger--it is hard to imagine most families today
doing that kind of thing with their children, but it showed the global reach of
their imagination at a time when that was truly exceptional.”
