Randy Kehler, who died on Sunday, just a few days after turning 80, was solidly grounded in Gandhi’s principles of non-violence, and planted those deep in the soil of Franklin County, where he’d lived since 1973.

I met Randy soon after arriving here as a reporter in 1976, when he was a candidate for a Franklin County commissioner’s post, running on a platform as a “peace” candidate that harkened back to his recent federal imprisonment for refusing the draft during the Vietnam War.

He was best known for that arrest, and the anti-war speech he gave at Haverford College, where Daniel Ellsberg was so moved in the audience that he leaked the Pentagon Papers, leading to the war’s end. Locally, the refusal by Randy and his wife, Betsy, to pay income taxes that funded the war led to his arrest and jailing, and to seizure of the house by the IRS and an 18-month vigil by supporters.

But Randy Kehler, who also headed the national nuclear weapons freeze campaign and led a campaign finance reform movement, lived a life devoted to peace. He grew up in affluent Scarsdale, N.Y., and attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College, but he championed the causes of justice and the rights of disadvantaged.

Unsure of what he might want to do after graduation, he took a year off in 1965 to teach at a Rwandan refugee camp in Tanganyika. The experience gave him new insight as the war in Vietnam intensified, and he devoted himself to opposing it, in escalating actions that led to his 1969 arrest.

Two episodes even earlier helped plant seeds for a lifelong struggle against oppression. The first what he remembered was the “horrifying” experience of watching a younger boy bullied by a circle of older boys during a summer band rehearsal recess. Choking back tears as he recalled the moment watching another kid being tortured, Randy lamented, “Why didn’t I at least scream for help? I look back on that and realize I could never ever again let myself be an innocent bystander.”

A few years later, at Exeter, he was injured while defending a roommate who was repeatedly harassed for being Jewish, even though he was a Unitarian.

Randy Kehler became a compassionate, passionate, thoroughly committed nonviolent fighter for justice, a friend and inspiration for myself and for so many. Influenced by Christian, Buddhist and Jewish theologians, he thought deeply and embraced a love for knowing in his heart that, driven by his spiritual convictions, he could bring this world better closer to his own ideals.

That doesn’t mean that Randy wasn’t discouraged, by our failure to take action to stop climate change, and by our inability to come together around domestic and global conflicts.

Three years ago, Randy acknowledged to me, “I’ve had a very privileged life, because of the color of my skin, my background, knowing the people I’ve met. I’ve been so fortunate … But there’s another privilege, of circumstance and being able to make something of it. I’ve been so fortunate.”

Apart from his direct influence on Daniel Ellsberg, leading to an end to the Vietnam War, Randy lamented that his work on so many issues hadn’t necessarily resulted in “major change.”

But he told me, “What’s motivated me to work on different political projects has never been any kind of realistic prospect of major change. … I do it because it goes to the heart of what’s wrong. So it gives me personal satisfaction to be not fussing around the edges of the problem, minimalist approaches that don’t go to the heart of it. And believing, perhaps wrongly, that’s what most people want.

Randy added, “I’d like to be remembered as an optimist doer, who wasn’t afraid to charge the windmill, and could imagine the windmill coming down. And doing so obviously gave me a sense of personal satisfaction. It made me feel good about my life and who I was and what I was trying to do.”

Now Randy Kehler can truly rest in peace.

Richie Davis, of Montague, was a reporter for The Greenfield Recorder from 1976 to 2019. He has published three collections of feature stories: “Inner Landscapes,” “Good Will & Ice Cream,” and “Flights of Fancy, Souls of Grace.”