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player ready...Robert A. Cleland’s anti-nuclear activism dated to the early years of the atomic age, and was manifested across five decades in myriad marches, letters, vigils and speeches backing efforts to promote peace and ban the bomb.
Mr. Cleland, 89, died of natural causes Sunday, April 11, at his Wilmette home, said his daughter, Trena.
Mr. Cleland was active in a collection of peace and anti-nuke organizations in Chicago and the North Shore. He helped start groups including the Wilmette Chapter of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in 1960, and the North Shore Chapter of Clergy & Laity Concerned About Vietnam.
After retiring from his career as an accountant and office manager in 1976, he co-founded and served as director for the Committee for a Nuclear Overkill Moratorium in Chicago for several years, participating in the nuclear freeze movement as it gained steam in the 1980s.
“He just had a passion for peace, to bring about a more peaceful world,” said Jack Kelly, a past president of the North Suburban Peace Initiative, which Mr. Cleland helped start around 1980.
He spoke at many churches and civic forums and in the 1980s taught foreign policy classes at Columbia College. His letters to the editor of the Tribune dated from 1963, when he wrote in support of a nuclear test ban treaty, to 2005, when he addressed issues surrounding the nuclear aims of North Korea and Iran.
“Are we really prepared to annihilate an entire nation in reprisal?” he wrote in that case. “Could any single act more quickly extinguish the world’s remaining goodwill toward the United States of America?”
During the Vietnam War, Mr. Cleland led silent vigils every Saturday at North Shore post offices, and was diligent in seeing that participants stood quietly to make their point even amid occasional catcalls, said Don Farley, a retired minister.
“He was kind of relentless. But he was steady and he was anything but a ranter and a raver,” Farley said.
As the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq in 2003, Mr. Cleland called Kelly with a plan for action.
“We need to do more about protesting this war that appears inevitable,” he said, according to Kelly. “How about we go to the Willow Road overpass with the sign?”
So the two men toted an oversize banner that read “Stop the War” among other things to a bridge over the Edens Expressway and held it up through the afternoon rush hour, prompting the predictable fusillade of pro and con horn honking.
In 1986, Mr. Cleland made a somewhat quixotic run as a Democrat for the North Shore’s 10th District Congressional seat held by Republican John Porter. He used the campaign to press his case against nuclear weapons and testing, falling short in the election.
Mr. Cleland grew up in St. Paul and graduated from the University of Minnesota. He then went into the Navy and sailed the Mediterranean during World War II. The bombing of Japan, and the later buildup of what President Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex,” cemented a feeling that war was not tenable in the nuclear age, said his son Stuart.
Before going overseas, he met his future wife, Jean Rolfing, at a Northwestern University sorority party. They were married in 1945.
The family’s home on Forest Avenue was a focal point for kids in the neighborhood. Mr. Cleland built a pulley-equipped zip-line that sent kids zooming from the side of the house into the backyard, where they dropped onto a mattress.
Tree forts and swing sets made the wooded yard an attractive playground, and the parents would often join in for bonfires and the sort of fireworks Mr. Cleland found palatable, Roman candles and sparklers.
Mr. Cleland is also survived by his wife, Jean; four other sons, David, Carter, Phillip and Roger; and three grandchildren.
A memorial service is planned for May.
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