Gloucester,MA: Jonathan Bayliss, novelist and playwright, died on April 15, 2009, at Addison Gilbert Hospital, Gloucester, following a catastrophic cerebral hemorrhage. He was 82.
His writing reflects wide-ranging interests including literature, history, science, engineering,liturgy, boats, systems, management, government, nature, railroads, and politics. His fiction series, Gloucesterman, is composed of Prologos and a trilogy, Gloucesterbook, Gloucestertide, and (to be published in 2009) Gloucestermas. His plays are The Tower of Gilgamesh (or the Iso-Recto-Tetrahedron) and The Acts of Gilgamesh.
He was born in 1926 to Henry Harold Balos and Lois Henderson Balos. After his parents’ divorce he grew up in poverty during the Depression with his mother and younger siblings, Sandra and Peter, mainly in Cambridge, Mass., and southern Vermont.
A student on full scholarship, he attended the Newton School of South Windham, Vermont, where he received a classical education, milked cows, learned to use an ax, and stoked the school’s boiler. After a year at Harvard College, at the age of 17 he was granted a leave of absence and enlisted in the Navy, which trained him as an electronics technician and sent him on sea duty in the Pacific during World War II.
He finished his A.B. at the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors in English and where he briefly taught.
While writing his four-volume Gloucesterman, he earned a living with a series of jobs involving sales analysis, accounting controls, administrative management, and computerization, beginning in 1950 as assistant manager and buyer for a bookstore in Berkeley, California.
His work as an executive included positions as controller and director of management services for the well-known processor of frozen fish, Gorton’s of Gloucester. At Gorton’s in the 1960s he initiated the development of integrated business systems using the IBM-360. His 1969 article, “Expanding the Uses of the Bill of Materials Processor,” was reprinted and distributed internationally by IBM. He supervised the design and construction of Gorton’s modern headquarters building.
After retiring from Gorton’s in 1972, he devoted five years to full-time writing. Later he held jobs with the City of Gloucester, as administrative aide to the mayor and as city treasurer. He was especially proud — during about three years of municipal work — of his reorganization of accounting and other administrative functions, his computerization of financial records, and his CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) hiring of low-income and unemployed residents, including artists.
He resumed full-time writing in 1985 and was editing his final novel at the time of his death.
A lifelong Democrat, he urged his party to emphasize that it serves the “common good” and the “general welfare." (He gave away miniature booklets of the U.S. Constitution pointing out its Preamble.) His 2005 essay, “The One Great Idea,” clarifies: “The common good is not just ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. It’s the best possible good — all things considered — as vital parts of a single body politic. Some of the parts must moderate their own wishes; others deserve a larger share of benefit: it’s the health of the whole body that should be, as the Founding Fathers meant, our political criterion – whether government is large or small, depending upon what is found by pragmatic consensus to be most expedient under present and future conditions.”
His life, he said gratefully, had been “between the bookends of FDR and Barack Obama.”
Although he lived extremely frugally, he was a frequent donor to the Democratic Party, environmental groups, and the poor. He was a steadfast advocate of energy conservation and Mother Earth long before the environmental movement.
He delighted in his dog and cat companions, and he befriended more than one seagull.
He is survived by his daughter Catherine Bayliss of Gloucester; his daughter Victoria Bayliss Mattingly and her husband, Joseph, of Fairfield, Iowa, and Traverse City, Michigan; his son, Geoffrey Bayliss, of Gloucester; Doris Lee Sturtevant Bayliss, of Gloucester, to whom he was married for eighteen years; half-sisters, Brigitta Balos Troy and Rowena Balos of Los Angeles; six nieces and nephews; and his friend Celia Eldridge of Gloucester.
His published work is available at Amazon and through his websites, www.baylisswritings.net and www.gilgameshplays.net. Some of his political essays are at www.democraticoaktree.info.
Those wishing to make contributions in memory of Jonathan Bayliss are invited to donate to the Democratic Party; local, national, or international poverty-relief programs; or global environmental initiatives.
A memorial service will be held at St. John’s Episcopal Church, 48 Middle St., Gloucester on Monday, April 27, at 6:30 pm. All are invited. Arrangements are under the direction of the Pike-Grondin Funeral Home, Gloucester. His ashes will be placed near his mother’s in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.