Jane Prettyman

Posted 8/21/12

Jane Prettyman, a sometime resident of Callicoon, NY and Honesdale, PA, died at her home in Philadelphia, PA on Monday, June 24. She was 68.

She was born in 1944 in Miami, FL to George William …

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Jane Prettyman

Posted

Jane Prettyman, a sometime resident of Callicoon, NY and Honesdale, PA, died at her home in Philadelphia, PA on Monday, June 24. She was 68.

She was born in 1944 in Miami, FL to George William Lyman Prettyman and Jane Wardlow. A graduate of the University of Tallahassee, her multiple talents and miraculous competence led her to a career that encompassed at various times tennis pro; editor and art designer at Esquire Magazine; freelance art designer whose redesign of The New York Times’ Home section was used by them for decades; publisher of her own magazine, Dromenon: A Journal of New Ways of Being; manager of a doctors’ office in Santa Barbara, CA specializing in workmen’s compensation; and medical editor.

A lifelong advocate of the causes that she held dear, starting with her involvement in the civil rights movement of the ‘60s, Jane, during her time in Callicoon and Honesdale, became passionately involved in the local opposition to fracking and in ancillary causes such as home rule rights and protection of the environment.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Jane’s fighting spirit was that she never had any sentimental illusions about the likelihood of winning. She was a cynic but never a prey to cynicism, right up to the end firing off emails, letters and twitters to her representatives, the newspapers and dark-horse candidates and political parties on the chance that somebody out there would stop and listen to her clear, common-sensical and deeply moral reasoning, in which a call to return to the basic principles of the American Constitution, from which she saw the nation drifting, remained an ever-present theme.

She is survived by a daughter, Kristen Moseley and husband James of Jacksonville, FL and their two sons Jack and Jimmie; a sister, Mary Willard of Dobbs Ferry, NY; two nieces, Tamsin Willard and husband Shigemi Takagi and their sons Seiji and Koji, of Hastings, NY, and Anne Willard of Hankins, NY; cousins Pat (Bogert) Covill and husband Dan, Barbara (Bogert) Baker and Bruce Bogert and their families, all of Melbourne, FL; her beloved cat and companion, Sneaker; and many, many comrades in arms.

If you wish to make a memorial, visit the Green Shadow Cabinet at greenshadowcabinet.us, see if any of it makes sense to you, and if it does, do something about it.