GrassrootsKPFK: Ron Spriestersbach's Bio

Ronald Spriestersbach is I. I have been an organizer, a joiner, a leader, and a student all of my life. In Montebello, where I attended school from kindergarten through high school, I organized a chemistry club and a Spanish club. Spanish has been a big thing since then. I attended Sunday school at the Montebello Methodist church from kindergarten through high school. I think my parents wanted to get rid of me on Sundays, because they attended church only at Easter. While in high school, I was a DeMolay, and was the Master Councilor for one year. Since I was a good orator, I stood alone on the stage of the Shrine auditorium and delivered a mother’s day presentation to DeMolays from all over the region. In high school, I graduated 5th in my class scholastically in 1946.

I attended John Muir college in Pasadena, and received an AA degree in 1948, concentrating on physics.

In 1948, I entered UCLA with a major in physics. I had been a republican until 1949, when I changed worlds and began my new drift toward being more and more radical politically. I became an atheist and a member of the Unitarian Universalist club on campus. Our group worked with others to abolish a rule at UCLA barring controversial speakers on campus. I was called in with others to see the dean, but he just listened to us. After I graduated the rule was abandoned. (During the Vietnam war there were wonderful teach-ins on campus.)

I organized a forum at the YWCA, next to UCLA, entitled “What Price Conformity.” The three speakers were all opposed to the newly passed California loyalty oath. One speaker was a doctor at Cedars Sinai who was doing cancer research and who lost his job. The second speaker was the Reverend Howard Matson, the minister of the Santa Monica Unitarian church, later to become the Unitarian-Universalist minister for Cesar Chavez’s farm workers union. He was one of our advisors. The third speaker was Dr. David Saxon a Quaker and a physics professor at UCLA who also refused to sign the oath. He was unable to teach, but worked for the United States Bureau of Standards on the UCLA campus. We packed the hall. After the law’s repeal, Dr Saxon was rehired and later became an assistant to the chancellor of UCLA, then the President of the University of California, and then the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.

While a senior at UCLA I became very active at the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles. I was president, for two separate years, of the Board of Trustees, and president for two years of a large chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship for Social Justice. I was a Sunday school teacher, and a member of the religious education committee. I served on the finance committee, was a chairman of that committee, and I was the head of one of the annual fund drives. When I gave a talk on civil rights at the church, a visiting, very highly regarded Unitarian minister congratulated me and recommended that I become a Unitarian minister. I declined to do that, but have often regretted that I did not take that direction.

I was married at the age of 32 to Constance Finch, an artist and a dancer , at which time I acquired three step-daughters, ages 16, 10, and 8. This year (2010) we will reach our 50th wedding anniversary.

I worked for 40 years as an electronics engineer, the last 26 years at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I was the project engineer for the on board timer and sequencer for the Ranger spacecraft for Ranger missions 5 through 9. Then, I worked on many more space missions, such as Mariner, Viking, and Voyager. I served on the sequence team for the Voyager spacecraft, and my notes and drawings for the meetings ended up in the Voyager archives. Just before I retired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I coordinated the redesign of the sequence for the encounter of one of the large planets to protect against the loss of photographs due to the magnetic fields, as had occurred at Jupiter.

While employed at JPL, I earned masters degrees in computer science, mathematics, and business administration.

After I retired, from 1990 until the end of 2008, I studied Spanish, French, and Japanese at the California State University at Los Angeles. I received a master’s degree in Spanish, and completed all of the course work for a master’s degree in French. I had many different, individual tutors for Japanese. For one year, I received the award for the best male graduate school student in languages.

During my language studies, I organized the Humanist Association at Cal State LA, an affiliate of the American Humanist Association. We were very active from 2002 through 2009. We sponsored programs on humanism, Latin American affairs, Spanish literature, peace, civil liberties, and global warming. Three of our speakers were in the KPFK family: Blase Bonpane, Don White, and with Tanya Torres introducing the Cumbeley band.

I am a member of the Sierra Club, the ACLU, Common Cause, Planned Parenthood, Office of the Americas, FAIR, SOA, Amnesty International, and Public Citizen, and have belonged to many other organizations, several connected with my work.

---

---