Sally Knox Winton Bryan

Sally Knox Winton Bryan, July 15, 1920 – October 25, 2015

In her own words

Sally Bryan was born in New Orleans and raised in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Illinois before going to Mt. Holyoke to college. Marrying, she bore children in California, Boston, New York, and Chattanooga before her husband, a metallurgical engineer, moved to Seattle with Boeing. The Northwest fit the family like a cradle, and the center of family living on San Juan Island is where dreams and love and work crafted a drawing home.

The longing to “improve the world” was long a chord in Sally’s heart. She majored in Economics because she thought changing the economic system was the way, minoring in English because she loved it. This she taught for years in Seattle, having been hired to be a counselor at West Seattle High School but soon deciding that for her the dailyness of working together in a classroom offered more possibility of the mutuality necessary in improving the quality of human living. To this end, she moved to Roosevelt High School where she taught English, World Philosophy, and Lab Writing.

Her years as a wife, mother, teacher, founding member and Clerk of University Friends Meeting (Quaker), and founding member of Group Health Cooperative, taught her that it is the human heart that must change, not the economic system. She believed that if everyone in the world would read a poem every day (experience a poem, not just read the words), the world would be changed because all human and more-than-human relationships would be warmer, deeper.

In a home filled with family overlooking the Haro Strait, Sally Bryan wrote far more letters than poems, letters to friends around the world, many of whom were once her students. But since learning is always a participatory process, all are students of one another, holding the world together, each with each, each with all.

She is survived by three children, eight grandchildren, and fifteen great-grandchildren.

In her classes, Sally would offer her students an “Opportunity Day.” Perhaps for her last opportunity day she would ask that each person who wishes to honor her memory choose to visit a place of worship, bringing a cherished poem and thinking about her.

In a letter concerning her last wishes, Sally asked that those who wished make donations in her memory to the Sally W. Bryan Scholarship Fund at Stillpoint School, P.O. Box 576, Friday Harbor, Wa., 98250.

A Celebration of the Life of Sally Winton Bryan will be held at 1:30 p.m. on December 6, 2015 at the Mullis Community Senior Center.

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