Frederick T. Haley papers, 1931-2001

Frederick T. Haley was a Tacoma businessman and civic leader. His chief interests in civic life were education, civil rights, and civil liberties.

Frederick T. Haley was born in Tacoma, Washington, on June 29, 1912. He grew up in Tacoma and attended Stadium High School. His father, J. Clifford Haley, co-founded Brown & Haley, a candy manufacturing company known for its signature product, Almond Roca, in 1912. Fred Haley earned a B.A. from Dartmouth in 1935 and returned to Tacoma to work as a salesman for Brown & Haley. He also studied business at the University of Washington. During WWII Haley served in the Pacific as a Navy harbor pilot. There he developed both a lifelong love of the Pacific Islands and, in the face of the stark realities of war, a drive to dedicate himself to meaningful and difficult civic causes. After the war, Haley married Dorothy Geyer and had four children. He became chairman and chief executive officer of Brown & Haley after his father’s death in 1954.

In the succeeding years, Haley involved himself in a myriad of civic causes. In the 1950s and 1960s his efforts were focused mainly on education and civil rights and liberties. During his tenure on the Tacoma School Board, on which he served two terms as chair, Haley was an outspoken critic of de-facto school segregation and advocated bussing programs as a remedy. He charged that segregated schools hindered the development of all children in a racially diverse society. As a school board member, Haley took another stand on a controversial issue when he spoke out in defense of Jean Schuddakopf, an elementary school counselor who refused to submit to questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He served as president of the Pierce County School Directors’ Association in 1957. Haley continued his work for civil rights as a founding member of the Washington Citizens’ Committee for Civil Rights Legislation. During this time he also served on the Washington State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and on the boards of the Washington State Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Washington State Board Against Discrimination.

Under Haley’s leadership, Brown & Haley competed successfully on the world market and earned a Presidential E for Export award in the 1960s. Haley believed strongly in the value of American awareness of international issues; he took his family on extended trips to Europe and encouraged his children to study multiple foreign languages. These experiences were useful to Haley in the arena of international trade. He served on the Washington State International Trade Fair’s (WSITF) board of trustees, planning committee, and executive committee during the 1970s. He was president of WSITF in 1974 and attended several trips to Asia and the USSR with WSITF delegations. Haley was also a member of the Pacific Northwest International Trade Council. He served on the steering committee of the Regional Export Expansion Council in 1968. Haley also supported several organizations that promoted international peace and friendship. These included Turn Toward Peace and its successor, the World Without War Council; Platform for Peace; Focus International; Friendship Force; and the United Nations Association Advisory Council on Nuclear Proliferation. He was state chairman of Washington United Nations Day in 1979.

Education remained an interest throughout Haley’s civic career. He was active in the National Committee for Support of the Public Schools throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. He served on the board of advisors of the U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education in 1980 and 1981. Governor Spellman appointed Haley as chair of the Washington State Temporary Committee on Educational Policies Structure and Management in 1983.

Often described as an educational visionary, Haley favored progressive and experimental approaches to the improvement of public education. In the mid-1970s he chaired the board of trustees of Tacoma’s Prometheus College. The college, which closed due to financial difficulties around 1979, allowed students to design their own courses and offered a number of correspondence and evening courses designed to make post-secondary education more accessible for non-traditional students. Haley went on to serve on the board of governors of the The Evergreen State College (TESC) from 1978 to the mid-1980s. A public college formed in 1971, TESC matched Haley’s progressive approach to education. Evergreen encourages self-directed learning, maintains small classes with high levels of student participation, and issues written student evaluations instead of grades.

Even as Haley scaled back his civic activities in the mid-1980s, he took on a new position on the University of Washington Tacoma (UWT) Siting Advisory Board. Haley advocated the idea that a branch campus of Washington’s largest public university would be a valuable asset to the citizens of Tacoma and its vicinity. (Tacoma was already home to two private universities, Pacific Lutheran University and the University of Puget Sound.) In 1991, after several years of planning, the University of Washington opened its second branch campus. A driving force behind the successful birth of the UWT, Haley gave the featured speech at the university’s first full-fledged commencement ceremony in 1992.

After a lifetime of civil service, Haley’s most prestigious awards and honors included a 1963 John Hay Fellowship for study at the Williams College Summer Institute in the Humanities, an honorary doctorate from the University of Puget Sound in 1970, and the William O. Douglas Award from the Washington Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1985. Frederick T. Haley died in 2005.