Activist sacrificed pay for peace

Kent Larrabee was a peace activist who lived below the poverty line in order to identify with the poor and avoid paying income taxes that would support wars.

"He didn't have money - $44 in the checking account" at the time of his death, said his son Arthur, general secretary of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

"He wanted to go out with nothing," his son said.

On Oct. 15, Mr. Larrabee, 90, died of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease at Medford Leas, the Quaker retirement community where he lived.

He was imprisoned for peace activism in the United States and in the Soviet Union, his son said, but only the Soviets honored him with a tour of their capital.

"He was a conscientious objector in World War II," Arthur Larrabee said. "He went to jail" in New York State, but for less than a year because the war ended.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Larrabee was distributing his antiwar poetry in Moscow when the authorities took a very close interest.

"After he got arrested, the police went through his knapsack, wondering who was this guy," his son said. "After they read all his stuff, they decided he was a good guy and gave him a tour of Moscow - in a police car - so to honor him."

Mr. Larrabee, a native of Fredonia, N.Y., grew up in Connecticut. Chafing at attending Hillsdale College in Michigan, where his father and grandfather graduated, he dropped out and hit the road.

It was the late 1930s, his son said, when Mr. Larrabee developed the way of living that would sustain him for decades: earning his keep as he went.

"He took some pride in leaving home with a penny in his pocket," his son said.

"The family story I'm remembering is [of him] working for a couple of months at Yellowstone National Park," going to San Francisco, and getting "a job on a freighter" to the Far East.

Mr. Larrabee returned to earn a bachelor's degree in sociology and psychology from Syracuse University in 1940. In 1965, he would earn a master's degree in social work at Bryn Mawr College.

From 1947 to 1952, his son said, Mr. Larrabee was pastor of two Friends churches in Upstate New York, where Quakers have churches and pastors rather than meetings and clerks.

In the 1950s, he focused on low-paying jobs in the Philadelphia region.

When the building of Levittown in Bucks County erupted into racist hostility, Quakers formed the Friends Service Association and opened the William Penn Center in nearby Fallsington. In 1952, Mr. Larrabee became the first executive secretary of both groups.

In 1957, after serving as board chairman of the Human Relations Council of Bucks County, he became the community work director for the Philadelphia Fellowship Commission.

With his Bryn Mawr degree, Mr. Larrabee went to Washington and worked six to eight years in community relations for the U.S. Department of Transportation.

In keeping with his modest financial goals, his son said, "he cashed in his pension" when he left Washington and used the money to study Jungian psychology for two years in Zurich, Switzerland.

Asked when his father retired, Arthur Larrabee called the Washington work "the last conventional job he had," but said his father had never retired from activism.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Larrabee joined a group called Walk to Moscow, which, lacking visas, got no farther than the border between East and West Germany. He ultimately managed to fly into Moscow.

For two years, his son said, he traveled the United States, giving a slide show about his Walk to Moscow.

"He would arrive in a town on a Sunday and stay at the YMCA," he son said. "He would call up clergy in town and say he had a presentation and would line up speaking engagements." He stayed in homes and earned money from the groups to which he spoke.

With those savings, Mr. Larrabee went on to study at ashrams in India.

In 1994, 31 Quaker chapters disbanded the New Jersey Friends Council and formed the Friends Council for New Jersey Legislation. Mr. Larrabee was named its executive secretary.

His father's philosophy of purposeful poverty meant that at Christmas everything was homemade, Arthur Larrabee said.

When Arthur was 6 or 7, his parents gave him food boxes that they had carefully preserved so he and his brother could set up an imaginary store.

"It was the most simple thing, but for kids the most wonderful thing."

Besides his son, Mr. Larrabee is survived by his former wife, Margery; another son, Benjamin; a daughter, Deborah; and two grandchildren.

A memorial meeting is planned for 3 p.m. next Sunday at Mount Holly Friends Meeting House, 81 High St., Mount Holly.