Martha Jane Wheeler nee Renfrew, an activist for civil rights, the environment, and LGBT rights, and an ardent outdoorswoman, died peacefully on November 26, 2017. She received the Lifetime Hero Award in 1996 from Governor Mike Lowery for her work with the Hands Off Washington campaign. Martha was born in 1927 in Philadelphia and grew up in Waterbury and Woodbury, CT, with her parents, Norma Estes Renfrew and Alan Spaulding Renfrew, and three younger siblings. She graduated from Radcliffe College and worked in the US Foreign Service in Belgium after WWII and returned to the US for positions at Stanford Research Institute in Washington, DC, Palo Alto, and Portland, OR. She met the man who would become her husband, Lawrence Wheeler, at a Harvard-Yale-Princeton picnic in Portland. They settled in Seattle's Mt. Baker neighborhood and raised their five children.
Martha was engaged with progressive causes that included recycling (long before most of us had heard of it), quality integrated education, the League of Women Voters, and gay rights with PFLAG and Hands Off Washington. She was a founding member of the Wednesday Walkers, a group of women who have weekly ventured afoot into the mountains and other wild places of the Pacific Northwest from the 1960s to the present. She was a rower in college and at the Mt. Baker Rowing Club on the Conibears boat in the 1980s.
This New England transplant instilled her love of the Pacific Northwest's wild places into the family values through many hikes and trips to the mountains and the ocean. In addition to her husband and three younger siblings, she is survived by her children Beth (Gary), David (Barbara), Ben (Gilda), and Charlotte and daughter-in-law Ragna Jacobsen; five grandchildren and two great grandchildren. She was predeceased by her son Steven. Martha was guided by an internal moral compass that always pointed toward universal rights and will be dearly missed.
A celebration of Martha's life will be held at the Mt. Baker Community Club Ballroom, 2811 Mt. Rainier Dr. S., Seattle , on Sunday, December 10 at 9:30AM.
In lieu of flowers, please make a donation in Memory of Martha Wheeler to Rainier Scholars , an NPO that creates pathways to college education for hard-working, low-income students of color.