Preston Breckenridge Kavanagh Jr. died peacefully on June 23 at his home in Safety Harbor, Fla.
He was born in 1932 in Washington, D.C. Two loving older sisters later told stories of his boundless energy and childhood adventures.
He was a gifted athlete who played football, basketball and baseball, and won every foot race. He said “Until I was in 8th grade I thought I might be the fastest kid in the world”. Preston graduated high school playing sports, head of the student government, and a high school All American in football.
An Admiral Holloway scholarship to Princeton University followed. After graduation, he was commissioned an ensign in the U.S. Navy. He left the Navy as a lieutenant junior grade.
His 20s were transformative. He served with honor, met and married Lois Lapham and found that he was called to both Protestant ministry and to social justice issues. He earned a divinity degree from Harvard, was jailed alongside early civil rights leaders, fathered three children and was active in Chicago’s urban missionary movement. He determined that he could best serve from outside the church and started his career at the Chicago electric utility.
His 30s and 40s saw the steady growth of his faith and his business skills. He was the driver behind legalizing self-insurance trusts for Illinois nonprofits and was an active and inspired board member of the United Way, Chicago’s Community Renewal Society and several community organizations.
He discovered a love of Martha’s Vineyard, where he would spend the day reading, a tendril of smoke rising from his pipe, and then head out to a bridge tournament. His wife and children see these as the family’s happiest moments.
At the same time a transformation had happened in his personal life, as he acknowledged that he was an alcoholic. This led to a lifelong commitment to sponsoring and counseling others in Alcoholics Anonymous. Upon his death, Preston had 43 years of continuous sobriety.
In his 50s he took early retirement from the electric utility and started a new phase of his religious life. He refreshed the Hebrew he had learned in divinity school. He detected a pattern in two passages of the Book of Isiah. This led to the work he took up for the next 35 years: defining, describing and advocating for a “code” running through the Old Testament and revealing the identity of Scripture’s Suffering Servant, the scribe-authors of many passages, and the identity of an early female scribe of the Old Testament.
He and Lois spent their 60s on the Vineyard, where he poured his energies into biblical research. He described conversations with Jesus and with God. He also drove Edgartown’s recovery of its water utility, saving residents from one of Massachusetts’s worst and highest cost utility services.
In their 70s, Preston and Lois moved to Washington D.C. where both had sisters living in the area. In their 80s they moved to Safety Harbor, Fla. In his final years, which coincided with the pandemic years, Zoom made possible his continuing participation in AA meetings and the services of Faith United Church of Christ in Dunedin, Fla. Parkinson’s is a terrible, horrible, degrading, and demeaning disease that robbed his family of his abundant presence. All the while, untold numbers of people brought kindness to his life while he coped with the steady degradation of Parkinson’s disease.
He is survived by his wife Lois, children Katharine of Vineyard Haven, Preston off Tarpon Springs, Fla. and Evan of San Diego, Calif., four grandchildren, four great-grandchildren and a long list of friends and admirers.
Comments
Comment policy »