Abstract

Franklin Zahn, born in 1908 to a German family that had settled in California a generation before, was trained as a mechanical engineer. He might have spent a lifetime designing diesel engines had certain meetings and conversations not awakened in him a passion for nonviolence and social reform. Deeply influenced by the activities of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and several Quaker groups, he set a new course which led him to spend several weeks in a camp for conscientious objectors and some weeks in jail, to work as an independent builder and a free-lance religious psychotherapist, to sail a small boat into a nuclear test zone in protest, and to assist in a housing project for the poor in India.