Sam Day, 1926-2001.

The world is a lesser place this month.

Sam Day has died.

A massive stroke on January 26 did to him what no prison could, what no bully could, what no police officer or repressive government could do.

It stopped him, finally, from pursuing peace and justice. He was seventy-four.

Whether it was behind a desk or in front of a demonstration, with a pen or with a megaphone or with a silent act of civil disobedience, Sam put himself on the line for peace.

He was a traitor to his class. Born into privilege, the son of a U.S. diplomat, Sam went to Phillips Exeter Academy, but he quickly dropped every trace of the preppie.

Sam began his journalism career as a copy boy with the Washington Evening Star, and then he joined the A.P. in Idaho, moving from there to the Lewiston Morning Tribune, and on to the Intermountain Observer, a crusading paper that championed civil rights, the environment, and an end to the Vietnam War.

"When Sam Day got knocked off his establishment horse, he never got back on," recalls Perry Swisher, who worked with Sam at the Intermountain Observer in Idaho in the 1960s and early 1970s.

When that closed down, Sam moved to Chicago to edit The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. And in 1978, he became Managing Editor of The Progressive, where he shepherded the magazine's most controversial story: "The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It--Why We're Telling It," by Howard Morland.

Without Sam, there would have been no story. He assigned it, and he worked with Morland on draft after draft, composing the crucial introduction and conclusion.

These are Sam's words from the conclusion: "The secret of how a hydrogen bomb is made protects a more fundamental `secret': the mechanism by which the resources of the most powerful nation on Earth have been marshaled for global catastrophe. Knowing how may be the key to asking why."

Look at the last sentence again and admire the cleanliness of the language: nine words--seven of them one syllable--to crystallize a complicated story. That was one of Sam's gifts. He "wrote like an angel," former Progressive Editor Morris Rubin once said.

The U.S. government issued an unprecedented prior restraint order against The Progressive, forcing the magazine to keep the story under wraps for six months. But eventually the government folded, and the magazine published the article in November 1979.

Less than a year later, Sam left The Progressive.

"The ending of the H-bomb case left me with a sense of unfulfillment with regard to the issues we had raised," Sam wrote in his 1991 autobiography, Crossing the Line. "We had won a First Amendment victory by blocking the government's heavy-handed attempt at censorship. But we still had a long way to go in achieving our original objective in publishing the H-bomb story, which was to encourage public defiance of nuclear secrecy, thereby strengthening opposition to the nuclear weapons enterprise. As one who had come through the fire of that historic confrontation, I felt drawn both as a writer and political activist to further battle against the demon of nuclear secrecy."

Sam spent his last two decades fighting that demon--mostly as a political activist. He threw himself into Nukewatch, a nonprofit group now based in Luck, Wisconsin, that not only covers nuclear issues but engages in civil disobedience to prevent war.

"Whatever the origins of, or reasons for, our policy of threatening to destroy the world in order to save it, I resolved on a personal level, to the extent possible, to withdraw my consent to the policy," Sam wrote. "Not in my name, I would say, nor in the name of others who cared to join me in that stand."

Sam was arrested many times for his nonviolent civil disobedience, and it was at the end of one six-month period of incarceration about a decade ago that he had a stroke that cost him his eyesight. (I interviewed him on radio after another six-month sentence five years ago, and we're running an excerpt on page 22 this month.)

In the last few years, Sam concentrated his efforts on the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear-technician-turned-whistleblower, whom the Mossad captured and the Israeli government has imprisoned now for fourteen years.

The headquarters of the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu was Sam Day's house in Madison.

But because of his indefatigable energy and stellar organizing abilities, the campaign got off the ground. Daniel Ellsberg, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Rotblat, peace activists in Israel, and even thirty-six members of Congress joined the effort, which Sam was still pressing at the time of his death.

He also was devoting himself to the cause of the blind, noting in one of his last articles that the blind are being discriminated against in the high tech world. "Let us insist on our rightful place on the superhighway," he wrote in the Wisconsin Spotlight, a publication for the blind.

He wrote his last piece for the Progressive Media Project, an affiliate of The Progressive magazine, just one week before he died, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of America's nuclear detonations at the Nevada Test Site.

"Today, the mushroom clouds are gone, but a dangerous legacy remains," he said. "The flame that first seared the Nevada desert fifty years ago has left a wound that may never heal."

Sam used all of his gifts in service of something larger than himself.

"I remain an Old Codger for Peace, ready to continue my resistance and to recruit others to the cause," he wrote in his autobiography. "There is more work for me to do, whatever the risk and whatever the pain. I want to continue to speak truth to power--as an editor, activist, and inmate--and to help others undertake that high calling."

He succeeded in doing so up to the day he died.

Sam was a father to a generation of peace activists and political journalists all across the country and even abroad.

He inspired us to confront power, not to compromise.

To be stubborn when it would be easier to cave in.

To tell the truth when all around us there are lies.

More than anything, he was a lovable leftie, cuddly, almost childlike at times.

For all his courage and his convictions and his prophetic voice against nuclear war, he didn't take himself too seriously. He liked a good joke and was known to tell a bad one, and he took a genuine interest in other people. I spent many an evening at Sam's home with his wife, Kathleen, a wonderful and good-humored person, and the three of us would talk not just about politics but about family and friends--about who was having a hard time, and who wasn't. Sam didn't ridicule; he sympathized.

In no small measure, his greatness was his goodness.

He wasn't a rich man, but that's partly because he didn't charge for his services. He was an unfrocked confessor figure, an unpaid consultant, and an unlicensed psychiatrist with a large client base.

I was one of his clients, and he leaves a gaping hole in my life: I will miss his leadership and his friendship, his levity and his love.

My deepest condolences go out to Kathleen, and to their three sons, Philip, Sam III, and Josh.

Sam Day was like no man I ever met.

He was one of my heroes, and I don't have many.