The late Guy Kuttner (1946-2011, Harvard ’67) was the recipient/victim of a dreary public school education. Guy shared his humanity, insight, irreverence and wit in his story “Always” in HSE’s Above Ground and through his writings on school reform, social justice, politics and the people he knew. He wrote books, columns and powerful letters to the editor. A lifelong peacemaker and war resister, he turned in his draft card with a poem to J. Edgar Hoover and worked whole-heartedly with the War Resisters League, War Tax Resistance Movement, Humboldt Draft Coordinating Committee, Humboldt Sanctuary Movement and Humboldt Committee for Conscientious Objectors, establishing the GI Rights Hotline.
As the Ironies of Fate decreed, he moved from his native Chicago to became a public school teacher in a small college town in Northern California. In his unflagging attempt to introduce humanity and environmental wonder into the curricula, he butted heads, crossed swords, and mixed metaphors with one implacable administration after another. After twenty years, he migrated to a small community college nestled in the redwoods, where he happily taught Academic Literacy. He worked as an education columnist for the local paper and was the author of Tales of the Dolly Llama (Outskirts Press, 2007), a series of vignettes from the classroom liberally intermingled with educational polemic. His last book is entitled More Tales. Guy co-founded the Lost Coast Writers Retreat. He was the proud father of three, grandfather of two, and was married to a saint.
