Mischief Makers
Alberto Vinicio Baez (Abo)
acrylic on panel
30 x 20
in
When it came to nonviolent activists as role models, Joan didn’t have to look any further than her own home. She was a still a teenager when she joined her pacifist father, Albert, in passing out anti-war leaflets outside a movie theater showing “On the Beach,” a classic 1959 movie about the aftermath of a global nuclear conflagration.
“He was a professor at Stanford and invited me to go with him,” she recalls. “It was organized by the American Friends Service Committee, the active branch of the Quakers.”
Born the son of a Methodist minister in Puebla, Mexico, Albert became a Quaker after the family immigrated to the United States. While at Stanford, where he earned his doctorate in physics, he co-invented the X-ray reflection microscope, which is still used to this day for the examination of living cells.
During the Cold War arms race in the 1950s, he turned down lucrative offers to work in the defense industry, devoting himself instead to education, research and humanitarian causes.
He served as the first director of science education for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris and later moved his family to Baghdad for a year to establish a physics department and laboratory at Baghdad University. He chronicled the experience in his memoir, “A Year in Baghdad,” co-written with his wife, Joan. At MIT in Boston, he worked on physics education producing nearly 100 films for Encyclopedia Britannica. In retirement, Baez gave occasional lectures, but devoted much of his energy to serving as president of Vivamos Mejor, a nonprofit formed in 1988 to help impoverished villages in Mexico. Until shortly before his 2007 death in a Northern California retirement home at the age of 94, he lived in a landmark round house he designed on a boardwalk on the fringe of San Francisco Bay in Marin County.
“With a role model like that,” Joan says, “it’s no surprise that I fell so naturally into nonviolent activism.”
