I always admired Bill Ayres, but for the longest time I wasn’t sure why. He had this cherubic face out of which would come a Long Island-laden accent that to my New Jersey-trained ears clashed with his innate optimism. You see, when you grow up on Metro New York’s Left Bank, you’re conditioned to not buy a used car from someone who says, “cawfee.” But my cognitive dissonance would soon dissipate as I would later come to regard Bill as one of the more compassionate, sincere, and selfless men I’ve ever known.
Bill Ayers (photo by Moya McAllister)
It’s hard to lose such a one as Bill Ayres, especially now when the swamp is overflowing with self-serving sycophants. It’s almost as if an angry God was saying, “I am snatching another one of my angels back from you undeserving humans.” I’m not sure what parts of that sentence I really believe, but I do know that we need more people with Bill’s chutzpah. Though he could be a tad naïve at times, he was never afraid to ask, “WHY can’t we end hunger in the U.S?” or “WHY can’t we harness the prophetic voices of our great entertainers (as he did with Harry Chapin, Bruce Springsteen, and many others) to raise consciousness and money,” or “WHY can’t we coalesce a million anti-hunger and local food advocates to act as one toward a common goal?” Before the term was invented, Bill embodied “the audacity of hope.”
Bill and Harry Chapin co-founded World Hunger Year (later to be renamed WhyHunger) in 1975 to provide them with a vehicle for their vision and largesse. Though I never met Chapin, I could imagine that he and Bill made quite the pair. The gregarious troubadour and successful recording artist, teaming up with the former priest turned radio social justice shock jock, making music, preaching the word, and giving away money nearly as fast as it came in. This would lead to my first encounter with Bill who was tasked in 1985 with finding a recipient for the first Harry Chapin Self-Reliance Award. Through some inter-stellar configuration of heavenly bodies that I still don’t understand, the non-profit food organization that I ran at the time, the Hartford (Conn.) Food System was selected as the first ever recipient. I found this letter written by Bill in 2013 on the WhyHunger website:
After Harry died in July of 1981 in a car accident, we almost lost the organization [World Hunger Year] but we bounced back with the help of the artists such as Kenny Rogers, Peter, Paul and Mary, Tom and Steve Chapin and the Harry Chapin band. Sandy Chapin, Harry’s widow, came up with a brilliant idea in1984. She said that we were on target working with grassroots organizations but there were thousands out there and we knew few. She suggested that we create a set of awards to honor and fund the most innovative and effective grassroots organizations in America and in 1985 we gave out the first Harry Chapin Self-Reliance Award to the Hartford Food System [my italics]. Since then, we have awarded $920,000 to 175 grassroots organizations.
As a footnote, on the day of the check presentation to us, Bill and Sandra Chapin drove from New York to Hartford. Looking out the window of my shabby office located in one of the city’s less charming neighborhoods, I saw a large limousine parked at the curb. Out of it stepped Bill and Sandra. We had a lovely conversation, some brief interviews with the local press, a quick lunch, a passing of the check, and they were on their way. The next day Bill calls me up and says, “Mark, I want to apologize for the limo. It’s not what I wanted but sometimes you got to go along with the game.” I guess that was what I liked most about Bill, he was just as comfortable hanging out in the trenches with people like me as he was catching a ride in a rock ‘n roll car!
But that was also Bill’s game, one that he played as well as Derek Jeter played shortstop. As an impresario for food security, his forte was touching that sweet spot within the music industry that allowed it to lighten their wallets for good causes. It was that knack for the care and feeding of the rich and famous that defined his style and led to the release of millions of rock ‘n roll bucks to non-profit food organizations across the country. Never obsequious nor controlling, Bill would leverage his sincerity and his singular focus on ending hunger to quietly gain access to those whose passion for their art also had a window open for justice.
For a person like me who thought that the marriage of righteous work with the explosive power of rock ‘n roll was a sacred mountain to be climbed, Bill was some kind of Moses. He had a direct line to the performers whose music stirred my soul, but he used those connections to spread the wealth around. To that point, Bill called me one day in the mid-1990s and said, “Hey Mark, it’s Bill. I got good news for you!” He had somehow persuaded Bruce Springsteen and “his people” to select a non-profit food organization in each city he was scheduled to perform in as the recipient of a financial donation. Being the good kind of power broker that he was, Bill, who knew food organizations all over the country, had naturally set himself up as the person who would recommend those recipients to Springsteen’s people. And the Hartford Food System would be one of those recipients, not just for an upcoming Hartford concert, but ultimately for several concerts over the next 10 years.
How did he do this? I got a hint when I told Bill I was a raving Bruce Springsteen fan. “Well, you know all those crazy moves and gestures Bruce makes on stage,” he said. I knew them well having imitated them dozens of times in the privacy of my own home. “He develops and practices them in front of a big mirror in his house.” How does a nerdy ex-priest with unimpressive hair gain such intimate access to one of the world’s coolest performers? Whatever the answer, Bill withheld such People Magazine-worthy gossip to secure millions of dollars in support for frontline food organizations over the course of decades. He had a gift for gaining the trust of those who had grown suspicious of being taken advantage of; he had the gift of persuading those with growing financial capacity to share their gifts with those who needed help.
If Bill had a flaw, he wasn’t exactly a team player. He was more comfortable working one-on-one in the shadows with the semi-powerful as opposed to sitting around a large conference table with the riffraff of the community food movement. I can remember a coalition of food organizations I was affiliated with who had spent a considerable amount of time scheduling and planning a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. After much ruffling of feathers, the day had come and about 12 of us were assembled in the Secretary’s waiting room in Washington, DC. An assistant told us the Secretary was delayed but to please be patient. We waited and waited until the Secretary’s door opened as Bill Ayers and the Secretary walked out together arm-in-arm in the middle of a very cordial conversation. We were shuffled into his chambers where, if my recollection is correct, we each had two minutes to make our pitch. Later, out on the street staring at the Washington Monument, I laughed out loud at how that silky smooth talker from Long Island had beat us once again!
I guess it’s a pun, no matter how true, to say we are richer because Bill Ayres walked among us for a few decades. It would certainly be wrong not to thank him for putting others before himself. But it would be wrong as well to not acknowledge that we have been enriched by his presence. Devoid of cynicism, buoyed by a faith in humankind, and driven by the Springsteen inspired ethic that “we take care of our own,” Bill was a modest soul with a big vision. We can never drink too much from that cup.