Cleo Kocol
2016
Local Writer · Atheist
Cleo Fellers Kocol, who lived a life of constant achievement, died after a short illness at the age of eighty-nine on July 5, 2016.
Cleo was born in 1927 to non-religious parents in Cleveland Ohio. As World War II was ending, she worked for the Department of the Navy, then as a medical secretary, doctor’s assistant, and assistant hospital administrator.
Subsequently, Cleo succeeded as a social activist, a feminist, a Humanist, a poet, a historian, a novelist (both historical and fictional), a teacher, an actress, a playwright, a public speaker, and a prolific writer of letters to the editor.
Morning light filters dimlythrough dense fog, spreadspast beachcombers whofail to see the roiling waters.Barely outlining headlands,a sunbeam holds on to risingseas of far-flung reason.Looming rock monolithsof creation darken the dawn,and overshadow stonesshaped smooth by currentsof logical beginnings. Tide poolsbristle with biblical barnacles.By noon, hot, overhead suntraces a path through dampsand and broken bottle glass,racing waves unfurling a hightide of school vouchers andchurch/state entanglements.A froth of ignorance floats aboveverifiable scientific knowledge.As night descends, atheists,humanists, and constitutionalscholars tend a watch fireof rationality, hold at bay?stealthy bottom feeders who,with charm and misdirection,subvert the national tide.
In 1960, Cleo married Hank Kocol, a health physicist. Her feminism and atheism came to the fore when she and Hank joined the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) and the American Humanist Association (AHA). She served on AHA’s national board, co-chaired its Feminist Caucus for many years.
In 1980, Cleo and Hank became part of a weekly Sunday picket at the Mormon Temple in Bellevue, WA to protest the LDS church’s opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. She and twenty others were arrested for chaining themselves to the temple gates to stop Mormon President Spencer Kimball from entering. Two subsequent acts of civil disobedience were in front of the White House in Washington D.C. and at the Federal Building in Seattle.
In 1981, Cleo and Hank moved to Sacramento, where they became members of the Humanist Association of the Greater Sacramento Area (HAGSA), a chapter of the AHA. At the 1988 AHA Conference, Cleo received the Humanist Heroine Award. In 1993, Cleo and her husband became charter members of Atheists and Other Freethinkers (AOF).
Her own very detailed insight of her life with Hank and of his death may be found between the covers of her final book, The Last Aloha.