Sandperl was born in St. Louis, Missouri and raised in a Jewish household by Harry and Ione Sandperl. His father was a surgeon and his mother was a follower of Norman Thomas, leading Mr. Sandperl early on to be exposed to both socialist and pacifist ideals.[6] He attended Stanford University but dropped out after World War II began. His attempt to join the armed forces in the ambulance corps was denied because of a childhood bout with polio.[3]
As a student at Stanford he tried to generate sympathy among the faculty for the Japanese-Americans in concentration camps. He left for Mexico returning after World War II to Palo Alto where he taught meditation and Sunday school classes at the Palo Alto Friend's Church, and lectured at Stanford. In 1955 he was hired at Kepler's Books as the very first employee.[6] He engaged customers on political topics as well as giving advice on literature, and introduced a generation of draft-age men to nonviolence during the Vietnam War.[6]
Sandperl was a longtime resident of Palo Alto and Menlo Park, where he was an oracular presence at Kepler's bookstore, Peninsula School and other venues, and influenced many young people who grew up in his community in the 1950's and 1960's, including Joan Baez and John Markoff.[7]
Social and political involvement
Joan Baez and Sandperl at Ostermarsch 1966 to Frankfurt.
Protesting at a quaker meeting in Palo Alto in 1959, urging them to refuse payment of war taxes,[8] Sandperl met Joan Baez when she was a senior in high school and through their interests in various philosophies and political causes they developed a friendship. In 1965 they founded together the Institute for the Study of Non-violence in Carmel Valley, California with Sandperl running the general operations and funding coming from Baez.[9] The school invited a small number of students each year (in order of applications received) to learn the principles of nonviolence, partake in readings, meditation, and discussion. Some local residents of Carmel were frustrated by the image that the school represented and fought the school from continuing operations. The episode is recounted in Joan Didion's essay "Where the Kissing Never Stops" first published in 1966 under the title "Just Folks at a School for Non-Violence" in The New York Times Magazine. and reprinted in her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
In 1966, Sandperl accompanied Baez to Grenada, Mississippi to join in a campaign to help desegregate local schools with Martin Luther King Jr. Two years later King visited them in Santa Rita prison, where the two served 45 day sentences for trying to shut down the Oakland, California draft induction center for "Stop the Draft Week."[5] King said that he made the visit "because they helped me so much in the South."[10] King also famously sent members of his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to study with Ira on the subjects of organizing and non-violent tactics.
The nationally famous catholic monk and non-violent activist, Thomas Merton, met with Sandperl and Baez in December 1966 at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky where he lived. Their discussions strongly influenced Merton and his changing philosophy of activism despite being a monk and he wrote about them in his journals and his book New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton also kept up with Mr. Sandperl through correspondence during his travels through Asia from 1966 through 1967 and considered Sandperl an authority on Gandhi's teachings of non-violence.[4]
Works
Sandperl is the author of A Little Kinder, with an Introduction by Joan Baez, a memoir of the civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960's.[11] His book is really a series of essays, in the form of journal entries sent as letters to a young friend, on the subject of how to live, what to do, and the nature of a life of critical purpose well-lived. In the manner of Montaigne, the inventor of this essay form, it discourses on Sandperl's wide-ranging passionate investments in the philosophy and practice of nonviolence, the study of political history and its dangerous characters, and his reading (he was extraordinarily well-read, worked in a bookstore and lived in a tiny apartment crammed with thousands of books), with his personal stories of the characters he met in the movements of his time, including most of the movers, from Martin Luther King to Daniel Ellsberg. It concludes with Sandperl's annotated bibliography of recommended reading, picked from among the thousands of writers whose works influenced him.
Death
Sandperl died on April 13, 2013, at home in Menlo Park, California, surrounded by friends and his books, from complications arising from a respiratory infection.[[1]] He was 90 years old.[5] His obituary was written by N.Y. Times reporter John Markoff.[[2]]
