In May, 1983 the Quaker Universalist Fellowship was organized at a gathering held at the London Grove Meeting in southeastern Pennsylvania.  Among those attending was Sally Rickerman, and she volunteered to serve as treasurer.  In the years that followed, she became a mainstay of the organization, while her duties expanded to membership clerk, publisher, and sometimes editor.  Until the coming of the internet with its revolution in publishing, costs were kept low by printing pamphlets and newsletters on a home copying machine, and folding and stitching them by hand.  Now, as Sally approaches her 90th birthday on February l6, she is still an active member of the Steering Committee.  In the past year she proposed and helped to organize a day-long program in Philadelphia at which discussion of “How to Speak to the ‘Other’” was led by Sallie King of the QUF.

Sally has reflected on her life as a Friend and on her descent from 17th-century Quakers in two pamphlets:  Growing up Quaker and Universalist Too (1999) and Trust:  My Experience of Quakerism’s Greatest Gift (2008).  Both are popular and can be read or downloaded from the QUF web site at www.universalistfriends.org.  She is active in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and its various committees, and she still lives in the mid-19th century stone farmhouse on land where she and her husband raised three sons, just across the Pennsylvania line from Newark, Delaware. 

—Rhoda Gilman

To be continued tomorrow: the Poetry of Sally Rickerman