Quest Magazine

Originally printed in the September-October 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: O'Grady, John P. "The Dark Side of Succession." Quest  88.5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2000): pg 178-183.

By John P. O'Grady

In New England the forest first came back in the old burial grounds, places barely remembered and hardly noticed anymore, where shade was expected and even welcomed. As trees crowded in among the graves, the letters inscribed on the markers simply let go from the cold stones, fluttered down to the ground like leaves, and in this way word followed voice back into the quiet earth.

In forestry school, where they otherwise teach you a variety of nasty tricks to pull on the natural world, they redeem themselves, somewhat, by providing you with a wondrous piece of lore. Called the Story of Succession, it's one of the few things from my forestry education that stayed with me over the years. I learned it in a course called Forest Ecology, which is really just an unacknowledged kind of metaphysics for resource managers. As I was taught it, this story comes right out of the nineteenth-century book of ideas about the balance of nature. And it goes like this.

When the first European explorers showed up in New England in the sixteenth century, everything looked like a Thomas Cole painting. When the English settlers arrived at Plymouth and Boston, they looked out upon this new world and all they could see was dark and intemperate forest, teeming with all manner of savagery. The Puritans referred to their new neighborhood as a "howling wilderness," an attitude that was passed down through the generations. You can still see it in Cotton Mather, who was writing in the early eighteenth century. "Beware the Evening Wolves," he says, "the rabid and howling Wolves of the Wilderness, which would wreak Havock among you, and not leave the Bones till morning." I heard something rather like this from my forestry professors when they talked about those people who would save the trees during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

If in addition to textbooks on silviculture and economics, my fellow forestry students and I had been exposed to Butler's Lives of the Saints, our education might have had the necessary depth required to understand the Story of Succession. For instance, I think it no coincidence that the name "Boston" is actually a contraction for "Botulf's Stone," which is back in Lincolnshire, England. Ironically, it's a better rock upon which to found a myth than the one in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Botulf was a popular saint in medieval times. His calling was to hike around in the still standing forests of his day, and chase out all the "develen and gostes" that made their homes there. When these poor wood sprites realized they couldn't scare away the earnest saint, they asked him why, since they had already been expelled from everywhere else, they could not simply remain in this quiet corner of the world, where they bothered no one. In response, the saint made the sign of the cross, and the poor "develen and gostes" were thereby forced to flee. They must have gone to North America.

Thus when it comes to Cotton Mather, you could say he was the Stephen King of his day. Long before the horror novel was invented, Mather was providing his eager readers with spine-chilling accounts of witchcraft and other forms of demonism going on in their woods. With gusto he warned them about "Droves of Devils" that cavorted in the yet unmanaged forests of New England, ready to pounce upon all but the most vigilant of Christian soldiers. The good people of New England took heed, and hacked away at their forests until, by 1800, the wolves had been exterminated and most of the landscape had been rendered into pasture.

This latest expulsion of "develen and gostes" was the first triumph of land resource management in North America. As if to commemorate this early victory over the dark forces of the natural world, the federal agency in whose care the citizens of the United States today place their forests is organized along military lines: it follows a strict chain of command, requires all who belong to it wear a uniform, maintains cadres of "rangers," and calls itself the Forest Service. They've even recruited a bear to their ranks, and they make him wear a hat.

Ah, but such victories are short-lived. Blame it on economics, blame it on improved technology, or blame it on other wars in other places, but by the 1830s people were abandoning New England in throngs. Better land--and lots of it--awaited them in the west, so they surged forth into the setting sun. In their wake, the forest sidled back into New England and another remarkable transformation ensued: the forest returned. The region today lies more thoroughly under shade than at any time since Cotton Mather. The wolves took a little longer to return, but they're back now too. Perhaps you've not heard about this. That's okay. It's just a sign of how smart the wolves have become. I think it safe to assume the "develen and gostes" are here too.

A more concise version of the Story of Succession comes from my old college notes. It takes the form of a definition, the sort we were required to memorize and repeat back on countless exams: "Succession is the progressive development of vegetation toward its highest ecological expression, the climax." As suggested by the final word in this somewhat prudish, technical description, out there under cover of the wild lurks a poem. Or at the very least a boundless passion. To forestry professors and their well-heeled students, this is worrisome.

Yet even foresters have their renegades, the most famous of whom is Aldo Leopold (1887-1948). He went to forestry school at Yale, where he listened to an early version of the same Story of Succession I was told at the University of Maine seventy years later. If only the professors knew the corrupting influence this tale has had on certain students, I'm sure they would drop it from the curriculum.

In the case of Aldo Leopold, the story became the basis for his revolutionary Land Ethic, which he lays out in a book entitled A Sand County Almanac. "In short," he writes, "plant succession steered the course of history." Leopold doesn't have much to say about the "climax" stage of succession, but he does go on at length about fertility ("the ability of soil to receive, store, and release energy") and health ("the capacity of the land for self-renewal"). He summed up this Land Ethic in what might be called the Golden Rule of environmentalism: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

One quickly discerns that all this talk about nature is in fact an allegory for how one might live the good life, in the old Platonic sense of doing the right thing. This is Leopold's ecological Republic. Like all utopian visions, it presents an Eden or Arcadia or someplace where natural harmony prevails, much as high barometric pressure does over the West Coast in summer. Thus in terms of Utopia's weather, every day is a good day. A Sand County Almanac was the best book I read in forestry school, but I had to discover it outside of my classes.

Of course, right from the start, the Story of Succession (not to mention any ethic derived from it) has had its critics. Among certain scientists, the Story of Succession was always already a diminished thing because, well, it's a story. Worse, it's less than a story—it's a fable. They say that those who place their faith in such narrative are willfully blind to natural phenomena, choosing not to see things as they truly are but rather as they wish to see them.

Even though the Story of Succession has been roundly rejected by these people, no one has put forth a more compelling account of the mysterious workings of the universe. Some folks just don't like stories of any kind, but they enjoy obliterating a utopia when they spot one. To all who would seek a pristine state of nature, they say: "Don't use science to prove your myth!"

I must admit, there is some substance in what they say. As the ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan puts it: "We are often left hearing the truism, 'Before the White Man came, North America was essentially a wilderness where the few Indian inhabitants lived in constant harmony with nature'—even though four to twelve million people speaking two hundred languages variously burned, pruned, hunted, hacked, cleared, irrigated, and planted in an astonishing diversity of habitats for centuries."

In early New England this is confirmed by Thomas Morton. He complains in 1637 that what few big trees are to be found there are located around the swamps, where the extensive broadcast fires set by the Indians each spring could not reach to do them harm. As for the rest of the region, the fires kept the woods fairly open and the trees reduced in size. Thus the forest never achieved the "climax" you hear about in the Story of Succession. "For the savages," says Morton, "by this custom of their firing the country, have spoiled all the rest, and it has continued from the beginning."

Environmental historians are fond of saying that, if ever there had been "virgin forest stable at climax" in New England, it disappeared long before the first history was ever written. Such visions of an untouched wilderness, they say, exist chiefly in the tales of other times. Thus the Story of Succession, with its ardent talk of fertility and health, with its timeworn plot that leads inevitably toward some "highest expression" of being, is consigned by more sophisticated minds to the hinterlands of myth. Yet I, for one, take comfort in knowing that there are some places not even historians can enter.

Myth is undervalued in a scientific education. To explain what I mean, I'll turn once more to my old college notes. In a Wildlife Management class, we were informed about the "Edge Effect." My notes define it as "the interactions that take place in the transitional zone where one cover type ends and another begins." In other words, the Edge Effect is what goes on along the boundaries between different ecological communities or realms. The plants that grow where forest meets grassland, for instance, produce the perfect combination of habitat and food supply to encourage an abundance of wildlife. That's why the New England Indians were setting all those fires—the flames generated the subsequent growth of plants that lure elk, deer, turkeys, and numerous other animals. New England, under Indian management, was one vast game farm throughout.

Myth is a kind of Edge Effect. It occurs between the human community and what is not human. In one sense, the word "myth" simply means a "telling of events," but this telling creates the proper conditions for commerce between realms. Myth is a boundary situation, placing us at the very brink of being human. It's like standing on the edge of an open grave. Look around the next time you attend a funeral. Amid all the flowers and tears, you'll see people casting furtive glances into that dark opening in the earth. Be assured, they are looking well past the bottom of the hole, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ferocious emptiness. Nowhere in my notes can I find a definition for this term.

Understanding of these darker matters must be sought in places that offer the proper cover. One such place is Henry Thoreau's journal, especially in the last years of his not long life. Unfolding in those pages is the earliest version of the Story of Succession. So far as anybody knows, it was Thoreau who, in the 1850s, coined the term "forest succession." But you'll look long and hard through the scientific literature before you find any mention of his name. Certainly it was never spoken in any forestry class I took.

A critical commonplace has it that Thoreau's journal in the last decade of his life became less "literary" and more "scientific." So far as it goes, this is an adequate description. But as a diligent reader bushwacks through the abundance of obsessive and repetitive observations that Thoreau makes about the changes going on in the eastern Massachusetts landscape--long passages that even the most generous of readers describe as little more than unusually well written field notes—the ferocious emptiness will occasionally be seen bolting from cover. "I confess," he writes about a year and a half before his death, "that I love to be convinced of this inextinguishable vitality in Nature. I would rather that my body should be buried in a soil thus wide-awake than a mere inert and dead earth."

Another place the ferocious emptiness gives a snarl is in a story that comes from eighth-century China. The famous painter Wu Tao-tzu had just finished work on his masterpiece, a grand landscape done on a wall of the palace. It took more than a decade to complete. The only thing more far-reaching and impressive than his painting was the solitude in which the great artist pursued his work during all those years.

He kept the painting under a huge drape until it was finished. When the Emperor arrived for the unveiling, Wu Tao-tzu gave the signal and the covering dropped away to reveal an immense and awesome scene rendered in exquisite detail: there were wild mountains, pristine lakes surrounded with venerable trees, and clouds boiling off cold ridges into limitless expanses of sky. If you looked closely, you could even see numerous people at work and play throughout the spectacular landscape. The Emperor stared astonished at this fabulous country.

"Look!" the artist exclaimed pointing, "there's a cave in the side of that mountain. Inside is a dragon. Let's go pay a visit!" He clapped his hands and a gate suddenly flew open on the side of a mountain, revealing the entrance to the cave. Wu Tao-tzu stepped into the painting, turned around, and said to the Emperor: "Come on, it's even better inside. I can't put into words how lovely it is, I can only show you. Follow me!"

With that, he entered the cave. But before the Emperor could gather his wits and follow, the painting and the ten thousand things it contained—including the artist and the yet unseen dragon in the cave—began to fade away. In no time, everything had vanished. The Emperor was left staring at a blank wall.

The ferocious emptiness is something like that, but not so far away. You encounter it when you go back to a favorite spot of wilderness, some woodland haunt where you enjoyed a family picnic or spent your honeymoon camping--let's say it's in Idaho—only to find that the place has been "harvested" (my old college notes define this as "the removal of a crop or stand of financially or physically mature trees"). Or you return to the house you grew up in and discover the woods where you used to play are gone and in its place are a shopping center and a lot of houses that all look alike. In this case, it's your childhood that's been harvested. Suddenly you begin to get the picture: sooner or later everything—including you—will meet the same fate. Now that's the ferocious emptiness.

You'll even encounter it on the tops of mountains. An acquaintance of mine recently told me about a climb he made up Borah Peak. At 12,655 feet, it's the highest mountain in Idaho. Technically, not a very difficult ascent, but according to one guidebook at least three people have died on it. Two were swept away by an avalanche, and the other lost control of his glissade and went soaring off a cliff edge, never to be seen again.

My acquaintance and his brother climbed this mountain in late summer, when the weather was clear and the snow for the most part gone. They had a safe trip, save for one unsettling moment, but it had nothing to do with physical danger.

After making the arduous hike that climbs 5200 vertical feet in just three and a half miles, the two young men made it to the top. Out here in the west, most of the high peaks have some kind of register on their summits, places where successful climbers can sign in. It's a record of achievement, as good as pinning your name to a cloud.

My acquaintance located the heavy aluminum box stashed between some boulders. He opened it to take out the notebook that holds the names, but was surprised to find the box filled with dirt. "It was the weirdest dirt I've ever seen on a mountain," he told me. "I wondered how it could have gotten into the box. I figured it must be the wind.

"So I reach in there and feel around till I come up with the notebook and pull it out. It's filthy, covered with all this gray dust, and so are my hands and clothes at this point. It's even getting in my mouth. There's no water up there so I have to live with it for a while. Anyways, I shake the book off and hand it to my brother. He opens it to the page with the last entry on it so we can sign in. He starts reading for a moment and then screams, 'Oh, hell!' and throws the notebook down on the ground. 'Oh hell!' he keeps screaming, 'Oh hell!'

" 'Kerry, man,' I say to him 'what's wrong? What's the matter?' And he looks over to me and says, 'That's not dirt. The last entry in the notebook says it's some guy who died a couple weeks ago and they cremated him. That's his ashes! His son must have come up here and put them into the register. What the hell was he thinking? Oh hell, and you've got him all over you!' "

I like then to picture these two young men, bounding their way down the mountain, one of them screaming "Oh hell!" and the other spitting as the dust unfurls behind him like a banner, until far below, among the sheltering trees, they find a clear stream where they might wash away this memento mori obtained at higher elevation, and thereby purge their memory of this man they never knew, and forget their sudden encounter with the ferocious emptiness.

Perhaps by now you see where this—and the Story of Succession—has been leading.

Among the pantheon of ancient Greek deities, the only one who had no altar dedicated to him was Hades, lord of the underworld. That's because he is everywhere and requires no special place or temple to make his appearance. Your mortal body is altar enough. He just shows up, unbidden. In many ways, he is the most generous of all the gods, bestowing his blessings wherever he roams, and that's why he acquired the nickname Pluto, which means "wealth" or "riches." Everybody loves him. Or should. In fact the running joke in ancient times was that whoever pays him a visit is so overwhelmed with his beneficence, they just can't bear to leave. If this wasn't so, far more people would return from his kingdom than has been the case.

"Nature loves to hide," says Heraclitus, who wrote a whole book on the subject and then hid it away in a temple. What fragments we have from this fugitive text suggest that Nature is yet another nickname for the lord of the underworld. Wisdom too may be found in the treasure house of the charitable Hades, which is why philosophy can be defined as "the practice of death."

And so we come full circle to the Story of Succession, the dark side of which is death. As in forests, so in the seral stages of life. Even speech itself has its Story of Succession, as pointed out by Augustine, in an Aldo Leopold kind of way: "Not everything grows old, but everything dies. . . . That is the way our speech is constructed by sounds which are significant. What we say would not be complete if one word did not cease to exist when it has sounded its appointed part, so that it can be succeeded by another." Meaning itself, we must conclude, is yet another of those gifts that come up from below.

Today when you ask college students what their goals in life are, they commonly respond, "Success!" The transient ground upon which they chase their dreams constantly gives way to yet further ground, similar in kind. "Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed," is Emily Dickinson's version of this same story.

The dark side of succession, the ferocious emptiness, reveals itself in the clear air of a high granite peak, in the ultra-violet fragrance of a flower that grows only there. Or it stands forth in the green shimmer of a mountain meadow, in the icy flicker and blinding flash of a waterfall in winter, or in the quiet amazement of fields and forests all across New England as the moonlight pours down upon sleepers in warm beds. Or it's there in the autumn, when the leaves let go one more time in the roaring cascade of years.

You see it too along the thousands of "Golden Miles" all across America, leading back to that very first dream of success, where everything becomes transparent as hunger pains in the very belly of being.

John P. O'Grady teaches literature and environmental writing at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. His latest book, Grave Goods, is forthcoming in 2001 from the University of Utah Press.

Originally printed in the September-October 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bland, Betty. "The Banana Trap." Quest  88.5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2000): pg 196-197.

By Betty Bland

In a remote village, long ago and very far away from us, some hunters set out to capture a monkey. Monkeys, however, are very intelligent creatures, who not only look very much like humans but even think like us. So to capture one of them, you have to use a creative approach. In one end of a coconut, the village hunters drilled a hole large enough to insert a banana. Then they fastened the coconut to a tree. Soon a smart little monkey came along and, smelling the banana inside the coconut, reached into the hole to grab the fruit. But then the monkey was caught in a dilemma. It could not withdraw its fist while holding onto the banana. It could drop the banana and escape, but it didn't want to lose the fruit. So it was trapped. Smart little monkey! Smart little monkey-mind!

We are just like that monkey when we do not want to let go of our resentment over wrongs others have done to us. We are trapped by our unwillingness to let go of resentment over whatever slights or offenses we remember. Our monkey-mind thoughts will not let go of the past. And so we are trapped in the incident, playing its broken record somewhere in the back of our minds. Whoever gave the offense may be free, but we are not. We are trapped in pain and resentment until we can convince ourselves to let go and to forgive. Maybe one day we will learn to be smarter than the monkeys!

Forgiveness seems like such a simple thing. Of course I can forgive--if I want to. I just may not feel like it. But that is exactly the point. We are caught in our feelings. If we live anywhere with other people, forgiveness is a necessary ingredient in our everyday lives. Most of us have learned to let many little infractions pass, with forgiveness easily meted out in order to live in harmony with our fellow human travelers. The problem comes when we cannot let go, when we cannot forgive an infraction on our space, whether big or small, intentional or unintentional. Then we get stuck in a situation that we cannot release, and we continue to blame the other person for our stuck-ness!

Forgiveness is letting go of our self-attachment to a situation. It is an ultimate act of selflessness--moving beyond our wounded personality self. Forgiveness is in fact one of the great initiatory processes exemplified in the Christian tradition. Jesus was able to walk through his tragic persecution and crucifixion without wavering in his God-connectedness, without getting attached to blame or resentment, leaving this physical plane with forgiveness on his lips. Would he have been remembered as a great Teacher if he had died vilifying his detractors? Certainly not. His ability to forgive was a major step in his initiation.

The self-torment of resentment can end. We can wake up at any time. We can begin to know ourselves, and through that self-knowledge and self-devised effort, leave some of our traps behind.

As we are trying to travel the spiritual path and to develop our latent powers along the way, one of those powers is forgiveness. The third object of the Theosophical Society is "to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity." People often think of that object as focused on paranormal, psychic phenomena, powers called the lower siddhis or lesser spiritual gifts. In fact, the powers H. P. Blavatsky encouraged us to develop are those powers of the spirit that bring us closer to the master teachers of humanity, closer to our own true natures, closer to a unitive spirit. Forgiveness is an important discipline in the development of such spiritual powers. Forgiveness frees us from old constraints and resentments and makes our inner resources available for higher work. It initiates us to a higher level of living. We who are Theosophists can work to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity--our first object--only if we learn to forgive each other in our daily encounters.

Some of the early workers in the Theosophical Society received instruction and advice from great adepts in the form of letters. In letter 131 in the chronological series of The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, the Mahatma KH exhorted his correspondents to move beyond self-focus, to let go of the past and move with hope into the future. That is the essence of forgiveness:

Beware then, of an uncharitable spirit, for it will rise up like a hungry wolf in your path, and devour the better qualities of your nature that have been springing into life. Broaden instead of narrowing your sympathies; try to identify yourself with your fellows, rather than to contract your circle of affinity. However caused . . . a crisis is here, and it is a time for the utmost practicable expansion of your moral power. It is not the moment for reproaches or vindictive recriminations, but for united struggle.

If we carry any resentment or animosity toward our fellows, in or out of the Society, then truly this present moment is our opportunity to let go of the banana in the coconut shell and grow into our own humanity. Life, the one great initiator, is beckoning us: Let go, and go forward.

Betty Bland is National First Vice President of the Theosophical Society in America and a board member of the Theosophical Order of Service, Theosophical Book Gift Institute, and Pumpkin Hollow Farm Theosophical Camp. She manages a small business marketing secure air grilles and filters.

Originally printed in the SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2007 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Kern, John. "Personal Reminiscences on the Origins of the Kern Foundation." Quest  95.5 (SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2007):

Although we each may have entered the Theosophical Society through different doors and at different times, we are all indebted to the inspiration, creativity, and motivation of our founders and the dedicated supporters of Theosophy over the past century. Each of us, in ways as different as our many paths, would like to give back to the Society which has given us so much. Herb Kern had the opportunity to establish the Kern Foundation in order to provide financial assistance for the spread of Theosophy into the future. During her administration as president of the American Section, Joy Mills and Kern Foundation Programs Committee expanded the effect of Herb Kern's contribution. In the following articles, John Kern and Joy Mills reflect on those early days.

By John Kern

How did the Kern Foundation, dedicated to aid in the spiritual enlightenment of humanity through access to Theosophy, come about? How did Theosophy, itself, enter into Herb Kern's life? And what other effects did it have on him?

The answer is that this endowment for the furtherance of the Theosophical Movement was established by Herbert Arthur Kern in the late 1950s, as he became aware of the jeopardy of the future of the Theosophical Society in the post World War II era. At that time, unless significant additional funds became available for their programs and other activities, the Theosophical Society in America would not survive. But, to answer the rest of the questions, there is a much richer and interesting story.

Herbert Kern was born in 1890 on a farm in Minnesota, the last of four children of Josephine and Charles Kern. He was innately interested in how things worked and why. One day in 1907, after pedaling to high school in nearby Stillwater, he answered an ad in the local paper by a resident doctor. The doctor had just purchased an automobile, the first one in the city, and he wanted to hire a part-time chauffeur. My dad was the only person to answer that ad, as no one else (including my father) had personally seen an automobile. He got the job, we presume, simply on his bravado and demeanor. He told me he arrived an hour early for the interview, read the manual from cover to cover, and ended up driving the good doctor out to White Bear Lake to see a patient that very afternoon! As a result of this experience, he became a lifelong auto enthusiast, passing along this interest to both his sons. We saw every antique car he could find on our family travels around the United States during the 1930s and '40s, and had explained to us the inner workings of all of them. Upon graduating high school, my father went to Minneapolis to register as a freshman at the University of Minnesota. In the registration office, he noticed an announcement on the bulletin board about a brand new department—Chemical Engineering. As he recounted to me many years later, he signed up because he wanted to be involved in the very latest and newest field of study. He also met some young Masons, whose religious ideas were a far cry from those of the conservative German Lutheran Church across from the farm where he lived. He became a Mason and joined Acacia, their social fraternity at the University. (Acacia's founders established the fraternity in 1904 on a unique basis. Membership was restricted to those who had already taken the Masonic obligations, and the organization was to be built on the ideals and principles inculcated by the vows taken by Master Masons. Members were to be motivated by a desire for high scholarship and of such character that the fraternity would be free of the social vices and unbecoming activities that for years had been a blot on fraternity life.)

My father received his Chemical Engineering degree in 1913. But, he also had met a wonderful young lady, Edith Speckman, (my mother to be) and did not want to lose her while she completed her final year of studies, so he studied an additional year and received a second degree, this one in Chemistry. My parents were married after graduation. My father's first job was as the first research chemist for the Pure Oil Company, where he worked on oil additives and the use of detergents in lubricating oils as cleansing agents. In 1917, with America's entry into the World War, he joined the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps office in Chicago where he was placed in charge of the specification and procurement of fuels and lubricants for the War Department. It was there he met Frederick Salathe, Jr., a professor of chemistry at Indiana University, from whom he learned about using sodium aluminates as a flocculating agent (a means of separating out and precipitating suspended particles in fluids).

He saw the potential for developing the use of this process to clarify both industrial and domestic water supplies. After the war ended, and with financial backing from the family of this professor, he founded the Chicago Chemical Company to produce and market this technology.

During the early 1920s, my father met members of the Holyoke Branch of the TSA. Apparently while on a business trip to visit paper mills in the area to sell them his water treating chemicals. Members Jennie Ferris and Helen Tait turned over to him several books on Theosophy, and that got him started. Today, those books with their names inscribed, are in my personal library. My father joined the Holyoke Branch, even thigh he lived in a suburb of Chicago, and his name is listed in archival branch membership records from 1931 and 1941. He was a voracious reader and I actually recall driving in a Model A Ford Coupe out to Olcott on a Sunday in 1931, as he often borrowed books from the new American Section administrative headquarters library in Wheaton.

Theosophy's message about being responsible for one's actions and their effects upon others resonated with my father's own informal style. He established profit sharing, medical expense coverage, retirement pensions, an employee stock purchase plan, and other programs geared towards developing partnerships with all involved in his company. He saw each person as having a vital role to play in the success of the total enterprise: from the employees, all of whom he knew on a first name basis during the early years and whom he felt should be compensated on a fair and equitable basis; to the stockholders who provided the capital to start and run the business; as well as the company's customers and suppliers.

One personal case I recall vividly, as I knew the individual well, was one of my father's department heads, Mr. Moriarty, who contracted adult poliomyelitis. This employee's prognosis was eventual total paralysis. My father arranged for Mr. Moriarty to have almost daily treatments by our family osteopath. Dr. Evans massaged and manipulated Mr. Moriarty's limbs to maintain their muscle tone, and after ten years (at full salary) Mr. Moriarty returned to his office at the company, same job, albeit in a wheel chair!

In the late 1930s, as the country began to gear up for the coming world conflict, the local chemical suppliers my dad had helped out by always paying his bills promptly during the Depression years, came to his rescue as these chemicals became in short supply. They put my father's firm at the head of their shipment lists. And, as the company developed, my father continued to focus on solving pollution problems and other environmentally sensitive issues.

I had an extensive childhood acquaintanceship with the Theosophical books from my father's library, which the two of us discussed regularly. When I came back from World War II in the spring of 1946, I began attending the Summer Sessions in Wheaton and that year joined the Society. I was so affected by the international Theosophical leaders attending these post war annual Summer Sessions that I convinced my father to come out to Olcott and attend not just the occasional Sunday lecture, but the entire series of talks. As a result, he became an active member of the Theosophical Society as well. Soon, he was invited to attend the TSA Board meetings as Financial Advisor. Sitting in on those meetings, my father saw that the new dynamism of the post-war TSA leadership needed greatly-enhanced financial support in order to achieve their new goals and objectives.

He also visited Krotona and was introduced to the idea of it becoming an educational center for Theosophists. He was elected to the Krotona Board. Soon, he embarked on the building of a guest house to handle anticipated visiting theosophical researchers, faculty for a School of Theosophy, as well as attendees. (Several years after my father's death, when his foundation had become active, I wrote N. Sri Ram, the international president and head of Krotona, and received his approval to support this School of Theosophy at Krotona.)

My father had decided to continue this support after his death, so he established a foundation to offer aid in the dissemination of the theosophical philosophy, thus setting an example for others. The foundation was funded by the Founder's stock he had received for establishing and leading his firm, by then renamed Nalco Chemical Company. The resulting document named his two sons, my younger brother Herb Jr. and me, to be life personal trustees, to operate under a corporate trustee position administered by the Northern Trust Company. My dad shared these intentions with me and my brother, who though not a Theosophist, was completely supportive of our father's wishes. I suggested my father should provide for flexibility in the selection of the organizations and the amounts to be distributed, as the effectiveness of organizations can vary with the passage of time. I was then named to advise the corporate trustee "as to distributions of income and principal . . ., the organizations to receive distributions, and the amount or proportions each such organization is to receive by way of distribution."

My dad had hoped others would make major contributions as well, but none were immediately forthcoming. So, with Alonzo Decker, co-founder of Black and Decker, John Sellon (a senior re-insurance executive), and several leaders of the Society, the Theosophical Investment Trust was established, with my dad's lawyer writing the document. It is, in effect, an in-house endowment for the Society into which all individual major gifts and bequests are placed for professional investment management.

My father had a vision for enabling Theosophy to become a vital part of the lives of many more than those who might accidentally come across books on Theosophy, as he had. The first major program the Kern Foundation supported at the TSA was the Quest Books publishing venture, his dream of aiding in the prospects for many more persons coming in contact with up-dated contemporary Theosophical literature. Joy Mills, who had just become president of the TSA when the Foundation was activated in 1966, was a tremendous support as we created the first programs to receive grants. The Kern Foundation continues to fund the Society's publishing activities, along with major support for the professional staff at the National Center and their internationally-used web page, www.theosophical.org, in addition to many other educational programs.

From a "white paper" I wrote to our Corporate Trustee in 1987, the bank accepted the concept of a continuing Kern Family Advisor in future generations, if a family member is interested in Theosophy and has the time to commit to the Foundation. Currently, my daughter Louise, along with the Corporate Trustee, are sharing with me in the development, investigation, and deliberation of grant proposals. Our son John Jr. (Jay) serves as a Trustee of the Theosophical Investment Trust and on the Legal Committee of the TSA.

For a world so greatly in need of understanding the essential unity of all life and our individual responsibility for our actions affecting all other people, all living things, and our environment, the ideas encompassed in the Theosophical Worldview could well offer one of the most important messages in the post World War II period.

After nearly forty years, the Kern Foundation still provides the single most important outside support for the American Section of the Society. Yet, the success of the National Center can continue to grow only if others will step up to provide even greater funding in order to support additional programmatic as well as much needed capital improvements. Today, even the combination of the Kern Foundation and the Theosophical Investment Trust cannot provide sufficient funds for all that could be done. We must continue to seek out new contributions which will allow for the increase of the outreach of the Society. Though we are enormously proud of my father's remarkable legacy, we know that new and increased contributions, regardless of size, are essential to support this expanded outreach of Theosophy. Think of your ability to impact the Society even decades from now, and show your support through a financial contribution.