Download PDF of this full issue: v40n2.pdf (14.6 MB)

Bill Hammaker - Professor of Peace and Vietnam

By Steve Crandall

I first met Bill at the Camarillo Democratic Club. Bill was the Club's designated Peace Promoter and I quickly learned that promoting peace was Bill's pleasure and passion in life. Bill had been promoting peace for over 70 years.

Bill Hammaker and Steve Crandall

His strong desire for peace did not spring up with America's invasion of Iraq, Vietnam or Korea. His convictions predate all of these conflicts.

Bill talked about a speech he gave while standing on the steps of Gilman Hall at Johns Hopkins University where he was working as the Executive Director of the student YMCA. He gave this speech in 1936. His speech was not about the rumblings of war in Europe but rather about peace, because he believed it to be the only way to live. He also talked about the meeting he and his wife had in the West Wing of the White House with Eleanor Roosevelt.

Bill's interest in the peace movement began when he read a book, The Fight for Peace, by Devere Allen published in 1930. The book outlines the work of the peace movement from its beginnings to that date. After reading the work, Bill became a life long disciple of the peace movement. To satisfy this "passion for peace" he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) over seven decades ago. FOR officially began its work in 1915 but its idea sprung from a chance meeting a year earlier that took place in a railroad station in Germany. Henry Hodgkin, an English Quaker, and Friedrich Sigmund-Schultze, a German Lutheran attended an ecumenical conference in Switzerland which sought to prevent the start of World War I, but before the conference ended, war had broken out.

In 2007 I ran into Bill at a peace rally in Ventura, CA. I told him about VVAW and gave him a copy of The Veteran to read. He later called me and said he had joined VVAW as a Life Member, Bill was 99. I thought why would a person join as a Life Member at 99 but that was the way Bill looked at life.

He was an avid reader and writer so anytime I got a letter published or wrote an article I would get a call from Bill congratulating me and urging me on.

From a letter from Bill to FOR's national office, "Our purpose, peace, is the best goal on our planet. In fact, if we fail to achieve it, nothing else would matter." That was Bill.

Steve Crandall is a Vietnam Veteran and the President of the California Central Coast Chapter of VVAW.