Expanded obituary - written by Sheldon G Weeks
SHELDON GRISWOLD WEEKS (1931 - 2022)
He was born on November 18th, 1931 in Manhattan and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Brooklyn Friends High School in 1949 where he was active in art, writing, photography, and sports as well as academic pursuits.
His love of traveling began in 1948, when he was 16 years old and the family drove to Fairbanks, Alaska and back; he was one of the main drivers with a new Massachusetts license. He got a job in Fairbanks as a carpenter’s assistant building staff houses at the University of Alaska. They had many adventures in the outback of Alaska, experiences that helped endear him to travel and the wilderness.
In 1949, he spent the summer in Europe cycling around England, Scotland, Germany, and Italy. He returned to Europe as a seaman in 1950, spending most of the summer at a World Council of Churches workcamp in Napoli, Italy where they were building the foundations for a hospital, as 90% of the city was still in ruins from World War II.
The summer of 1950, he also participated in the International Union of Students Congress in Prague, at a time when Americans were banned from going to Czechoslovakia. (This was eventually to cause him to lose his passport, until the Supreme Court declared it a right in 1958.) After being hospitalized in Prague and Hamburg for serous meningitis, he returned to Swarthmore College on a merchant vessel.
At Swarthmore, he was excited by English literature, intrigued by psychology, and fascinated by history. He found his milieu in extra-curricular activities and in writing under a pen name (TP, for Thomas Paine). He began a lifelong habit of acquiring master passkeys (to Wharton, to Clothier Tower, to Larsen Laboratory, and the secret combinations for entry into the exclusive Book and Key, which was then exposed by him in a full-page article in the Phoenix).
The summer of 1951, he was a social group worker in west Harlem at the Manhattanville Neighborhood Center (MNC) working with troubled youth. In 1951-1952 he spent a year abroad at Edinburgh University, Scotland, studying anthropology and sociology (then not offered at Swarthmore College) and furthering his interests in history and psychology. While there he organized a weekend workcamp in the Dumbiedykes, and helped host the first student delegation from the People’s Republic of China.
In June 1952, he joined a merchant vessel in Genoa, Italy, as a seaman to Karachi, Pakistan, to spend the summer at workcamps with Service Civil International. First in Lalukhet helping Muslim refugees from India build homes. Then he walked across a closed border in the desert to get to the Simla Hills in India where they were building a hospital. His return to Swarthmore by merchant vessel from New Delhi was delayed by sandflies fever. (Due to his socio-political work his passport was denied by the US State Department, however the FBI fully approved his seamen’s papers.)
The summer of 1953 he returned to Alaska, this time working as a civil engineer ranked Government Service 4, working on the rebuilding of the Alaska Highway between Tok Junction and the Canadian border. With permission from the Tetlin Indian Reservation elders, he built in collaboration with Ricky Call from Williams College, a cabin above the Tanana River where they lived off the land while working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, employed by the Alaska Road Commission to inspect the contractor work.
After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1954 with a BA in Psychology, he had the opportunity to spend a year at Thule in northern Greenland as an engineer but decided that was not the career to pursue. He instead chose to work during the summer of ’54 as a social group organizer at the MNC and Morningside Community Center.
His next job was with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in New York City for five years (1954-1959) as Projects Secretary and then Youth Secretary. He was responsible for workcamps, UN Seminars, Institutional Service Units in mental hospitals, weeklong seminars on urban social change, talks at high schools and tertiary institutions, newsletters, Images of Man film series, outreach to schools and colleges, and other AFSC activities.
He volunteered in non-violent direct-action projects with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resistors League, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Tombs (Manhattan Municipal Jail) for not taking shelter during an international air-raid drill, a law later voided by the Supreme Court. Other cases related to his life that went to the Supreme Court involved the right to travel, the right to not take a loyalty oath (when employed at Harvard), and the right to be a conscientious objector on non-religious grounds. He worked closely with Bayard Rustin, Robert Gilmore, and AJ Muste, on a variety of peace marches and local demonstrations, run by the peace movement, anti-nuclear, and civil rights organizations.
He worked closely with Terry Evans, Barry Benepe, Hugh and Maris Corbin, Lella Smith and Abby Rockefeller to form new organizations that were partially funded by The Gandhi Foundation: The Friends Neighborhood Group that ran a school in East Harlem on 111th Street; and Sheffield Projects in Massachusetts, that ran a summer workcamp for youth from East Harlem and a second-chance school for dropouts.
Sheldon joined the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, in 1956, as a member of the New York Monthly Meeting and Brooklyn Preparatory Meeting. In August 1957 at the 15th Street Meeting House, he married Sara "Sally" Shoop, a teacher, seamstress and interior designer. They welcomed their daughters, Sara (1958) and Abigail (1960), both born in Brooklyn.
From 1959-1960 he was a graduate student at the Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education, at Glen Maples, Vermont, which in 1964 became Antioch University New England. Highlights included studying “teaching practice” at the Ecole d’Humanite in Goldern, Switzerland, and a study tour with the graduate school director and Quaker, Morris Mitchell, to the UK, Sweden, Soviet Union, and Poland. The study tour investigated how different societies dealt with mental illness, juvenile delinquency, city planning, urban social change, and the management of industries.
As a doctoral student at Harvard University Graduate School of Education in Boston, Massachusetts in the early 1960s, he became involved in comparative education. A Ford Foundation Fellowship allowed him, Sally, and their two daughters to go to East Africa in 1962 and 1963 to research education practices in Kenya and Uganda. In Uganda he met his second wife Mary Kironde, a visual artist and educator, whom he married in 1964. They had two children, Harold (1964) and Edisa (1966), both born in Boston, where Sheldon completed a Doctorate of Education in Sociology and Anthropology from Harvard in 1968. From 1969-72 Sheldon returned to Uganda where he taught at Makerere University, and then from 1972-74 he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
From 1974-1991, he was research professor and Director of the Educational Research Unit, at the University of Papua New Guinea (PNG). He reunited with his sweetheart from the 50’s, Gudrun Schulz Gay, a concert violinist and music teacher, who became his third wife and joined him in PNG in 1980. Their daughter, Kristina (1980) was born in Port Moresby, PNG. One of many projects he initiated was the innovative Secondary Schools Community Extension Project supporting rural youth in their transition from boarding schools back into their communities. During his 12-year term as the Chairperson of the UPNG Press they published over 20 books.
In 1991 he moved to Botswana with his family to help found and be the Director and eventually the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Botswana until 2002. He remained a sociologist interested in problems of development and change, including being President of the Southern African Comparative and History of Education Society (1998-2002); editor of Southern African Review of Education (1996-2004); and foundation Director of BEST: Evaluation Services Team Botswana (1997-2013). He was team leader in multiple studies investigating educational goals and outcomes in Botswana and other parts of Africa.
In Botswana, he remained an active Quaker, joining the Botswana Monthly Meeting, and served as clerk of the Central and Southern African Yearly Meeting and edited the Southern Africa Quaker News. He helped manage two organizations facilitated by the Quakers: the Kagisano Society’s Women’s Shelter Project, the only women’s shelter in the county, and the Kagisong Centre, a one-star hotel and conference center whose profits helped fund the Shelter.
Sheldon was a prolific writer, writing monographs, articles and contributing to books. From 1961-2015 he wrote under three pen names, Moto Wanachi, Sasa Majuma and Sheridan Griswold, for several newspapers, including the Christian Science Monitor, Africa Today, as well as weekly columns on education, and movie and book reviews in Mmegi/The Reporter, a local daily newspaper in Botswana.
In June 2013, Sheldon experienced double pneumonia with complications to the heart. As a consequence, in November 2013, Sheldon and Gudrun moved to Vermont to live with their daughter Kristina in Brattleboro. They were members of the West Brattleboro Quaker Worship Group, and Sheldon focused on writing short stories about his life. In June 2021, Sheldon was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and he passed away peacefully at home on May 4th, 2022.
Sheldon was predeceased by his father, Harold Eastman Weeks (1885-1960) and mother, Virginia Travell Weeks (1900-1981), his older sister Virginia Davidson Weeks, (1928-2012) and older brother Willard Travell Weeks (1929-2011), his three wives Sara "Sally" Shoop Shaw (1935-2019), Mary Kironde Weeks (1934-2020), and Gudrun Helga Weeks (1936-2018). Sheldon is survived by his younger sister Elinor Weeks, his five children, two stepchildren, one unofficially adopted child, fourteen grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
He was born on November 18th, 1931 in Manhattan and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Brooklyn Friends High School in 1949 where he was active in art, writing, photography, and sports as well as academic pursuits.
His love of traveling began in 1948, when he was 16 years old and the family drove to Fairbanks, Alaska and back; he was one of the main drivers with a new Massachusetts license. He got a job in Fairbanks as a carpenter’s assistant building staff houses at the University of Alaska. They had many adventures in the outback of Alaska, experiences that helped endear him to travel and the wilderness.
In 1949, he spent the summer in Europe cycling around England, Scotland, Germany, and Italy. He returned to Europe as a seaman in 1950, spending most of the summer at a World Council of Churches workcamp in Napoli, Italy where they were building the foundations for a hospital, as 90% of the city was still in ruins from World War II.
The summer of 1950, he also participated in the International Union of Students Congress in Prague, at a time when Americans were banned from going to Czechoslovakia. (This was eventually to cause him to lose his passport, until the Supreme Court declared it a right in 1958.) After being hospitalized in Prague and Hamburg for serous meningitis, he returned to Swarthmore College on a merchant vessel.
At Swarthmore, he was excited by English literature, intrigued by psychology, and fascinated by history. He found his milieu in extra-curricular activities and in writing under a pen name (TP, for Thomas Paine). He began a lifelong habit of acquiring master passkeys (to Wharton, to Clothier Tower, to Larsen Laboratory, and the secret combinations for entry into the exclusive Book and Key, which was then exposed by him in a full-page article in the Phoenix).
The summer of 1951, he was a social group worker in west Harlem at the Manhattanville Neighborhood Center (MNC) working with troubled youth. In 1951-1952 he spent a year abroad at Edinburgh University, Scotland, studying anthropology and sociology (then not offered at Swarthmore College) and furthering his interests in history and psychology. While there he organized a weekend workcamp in the Dumbiedykes, and helped host the first student delegation from the People’s Republic of China.
In June 1952, he joined a merchant vessel in Genoa, Italy, as a seaman to Karachi, Pakistan, to spend the summer at workcamps with Service Civil International. First in Lalukhet helping Muslim refugees from India build homes. Then he walked across a closed border in the desert to get to the Simla Hills in India where they were building a hospital. His return to Swarthmore by merchant vessel from New Delhi was delayed by sandflies fever. (Due to his socio-political work his passport was denied by the US State Department, however the FBI fully approved his seamen’s papers.)
The summer of 1953 he returned to Alaska, this time working as a civil engineer ranked Government Service 4, working on the rebuilding of the Alaska Highway between Tok Junction and the Canadian border. With permission from the Tetlin Indian Reservation elders, he built in collaboration with Ricky Call from Williams College, a cabin above the Tanana River where they lived off the land while working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, employed by the Alaska Road Commission to inspect the contractor work.
After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1954 with a BA in Psychology, he had the opportunity to spend a year at Thule in northern Greenland as an engineer but decided that was not the career to pursue. He instead chose to work during the summer of ’54 as a social group organizer at the MNC and Morningside Community Center.
His next job was with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in New York City for five years (1954-1959) as Projects Secretary and then Youth Secretary. He was responsible for workcamps, UN Seminars, Institutional Service Units in mental hospitals, weeklong seminars on urban social change, talks at high schools and tertiary institutions, newsletters, Images of Man film series, outreach to schools and colleges, and other AFSC activities.
He volunteered in non-violent direct-action projects with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resistors League, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Tombs (Manhattan Municipal Jail) for not taking shelter during an international air-raid drill, a law later voided by the Supreme Court. Other cases related to his life that went to the Supreme Court involved the right to travel, the right to not take a loyalty oath (when employed at Harvard), and the right to be a conscientious objector on non-religious grounds. He worked closely with Bayard Rustin, Robert Gilmore, and AJ Muste, on a variety of peace marches and local demonstrations, run by the peace movement, anti-nuclear, and civil rights organizations.
He worked closely with Terry Evans, Barry Benepe, Hugh and Maris Corbin, Lella Smith and Abby Rockefeller to form new organizations that were partially funded by The Gandhi Foundation: The Friends Neighborhood Group that ran a school in East Harlem on 111th Street; and Sheffield Projects in Massachusetts, that ran a summer workcamp for youth from East Harlem and a second-chance school for dropouts.
Sheldon joined the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, in 1956, as a member of the New York Monthly Meeting and Brooklyn Preparatory Meeting. In August 1957 at the 15th Street Meeting House, he married Sara "Sally" Shoop, a teacher, seamstress and interior designer. They welcomed their daughters, Sara (1958) and Abigail (1960), both born in Brooklyn.
From 1959-1960 he was a graduate student at the Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education, at Glen Maples, Vermont, which in 1964 became Antioch University New England. Highlights included studying “teaching practice” at the Ecole d’Humanite in Goldern, Switzerland, and a study tour with the graduate school director and Quaker, Morris Mitchell, to the UK, Sweden, Soviet Union, and Poland. The study tour investigated how different societies dealt with mental illness, juvenile delinquency, city planning, urban social change, and the management of industries.
As a doctoral student at Harvard University Graduate School of Education in Boston, Massachusetts in the early 1960s, he became involved in comparative education. A Ford Foundation Fellowship allowed him, Sally, and their two daughters to go to East Africa in 1962 and 1963 to research education practices in Kenya and Uganda. In Uganda he met his second wife Mary Kironde, a visual artist and educator, whom he married in 1964. They had two children, Harold (1964) and Edisa (1966), both born in Boston, where Sheldon completed a Doctorate of Education in Sociology and Anthropology from Harvard in 1968. From 1969-72 Sheldon returned to Uganda where he taught at Makerere University, and then from 1972-74 he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
From 1974-1991, he was research professor and Director of the Educational Research Unit, at the University of Papua New Guinea (PNG). He reunited with his sweetheart from the 50’s, Gudrun Schulz Gay, a concert violinist and music teacher, who became his third wife and joined him in PNG in 1980. Their daughter, Kristina (1980) was born in Port Moresby, PNG. One of many projects he initiated was the innovative Secondary Schools Community Extension Project supporting rural youth in their transition from boarding schools back into their communities. During his 12-year term as the Chairperson of the UPNG Press they published over 20 books.
In 1991 he moved to Botswana with his family to help found and be the Director and eventually the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Botswana until 2002. He remained a sociologist interested in problems of development and change, including being President of the Southern African Comparative and History of Education Society (1998-2002); editor of Southern African Review of Education (1996-2004); and foundation Director of BEST: Evaluation Services Team Botswana (1997-2013). He was team leader in multiple studies investigating educational goals and outcomes in Botswana and other parts of Africa.
In Botswana, he remained an active Quaker, joining the Botswana Monthly Meeting, and served as clerk of the Central and Southern African Yearly Meeting and edited the Southern Africa Quaker News. He helped manage two organizations facilitated by the Quakers: the Kagisano Society’s Women’s Shelter Project, the only women’s shelter in the county, and the Kagisong Centre, a one-star hotel and conference center whose profits helped fund the Shelter.
Sheldon was a prolific writer, writing monographs, articles and contributing to books. From 1961-2015 he wrote under three pen names, Moto Wanachi, Sasa Majuma and Sheridan Griswold, for several newspapers, including the Christian Science Monitor, Africa Today, as well as weekly columns on education, and movie and book reviews in Mmegi/The Reporter, a local daily newspaper in Botswana.
In June 2013, Sheldon experienced double pneumonia with complications to the heart. As a consequence, in November 2013, Sheldon and Gudrun moved to Vermont to live with their daughter Kristina in Brattleboro. They were members of the West Brattleboro Quaker Worship Group, and Sheldon focused on writing short stories about his life. In June 2021, Sheldon was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and he passed away peacefully at home on May 4th, 2022.
Sheldon was predeceased by his father, Harold Eastman Weeks (1885-1960) and mother, Virginia Travell Weeks (1900-1981), his older sister Virginia Davidson Weeks, (1928-2012) and older brother Willard Travell Weeks (1929-2011), his three wives Sara "Sally" Shoop Shaw (1935-2019), Mary Kironde Weeks (1934-2020), and Gudrun Helga Weeks (1936-2018). Sheldon is survived by his younger sister Elinor Weeks, his five children, two stepchildren, one unofficially adopted child, fourteen grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
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Sheldon's work and legacy will be held in the Quaker Archives at the Robert S Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. If you wish to donate in memory of Sheldon G Weeks you can do so to the Robert S Cox Research Center here.
Sheldon's work and legacy will be held in the Quaker Archives at the Robert S Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. If you wish to donate in memory of Sheldon G Weeks you can do so to the Robert S Cox Research Center here.
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To read more of Sheldon's writings about his life these are available to download below:
To read more of Sheldon's writings about his life these are available to download below:
- My Life as a Friend and Fellow Traveller
- 55 Years of My African Education
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A few monographs and writings by Sheldon G. Weeks
Some of these and many more are available to read for free through Research Gate here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sheldon-Weeks
- Divergence in Educational Development: The Case of Kenya and Uganda, Sheldon G. Weeks; Teachers College Press, New York, NY, 1967.
- African Higher Education: An International Reference Handbook, Editors: Damtew Tefera, Philip G. Altbach; “Botswana” by Sheldon G. Weeks, pp. 80-99, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 2003.
- My Life as a Friend and Fellow Traveller, Sheldon G. Weeks, Southern Africa Quaker News of the Religious Society of Friends; SAQN, Elsberg, South Africa, 2004.
- 55 Years of My African Education, Sheldon G. Weeks, in Wolhuter, Charl C. (ed). Access, Participation and Democratisation in African Education. Potschefstroom, South Africa, Southern African Comparative and History of Education, pp. 1-24, 2006.
- Issues In Education, Dorcas Molefe, Nkobi Owen Pansiri, Sheldon G. Weeks; Pentagon Publishers, Gaborone, Botswana, 2008.
- Higher Education in Africa: The International Dimension, Editors Damtew Tefera, Jane Knight; “National Approaches to Internationalisation: Historical Perspectives and Socioeconomic Influences” by Sheldon Weeks, pp. 182-194; Boston College Center for International Higher Education, Chestnut Hill, MA, 2008.
- Review of the Grant/Loan Scheme of the Department of Student Placement and Welfare, Sheldon G. Weeks et. al. Evaluation Services Team Botswana (BEST) Consultancy Services for the Ministry of Education, Republic of Botswana, ISBN 99912-65-40-6, Gaborone, Botswana, 2009.
