Andy Baltzo, a Pleasant Hill resident and local peace activist who founded the peace center in 1969, died May 25. He was 89.
Thirty years ago, Andy Baltzo quit his job as a chemistry teacher at a Pleasant Hill middle school to pursue this crazy dream — peace on Earth, an end to the Vietnam War and the abolishment of nuclear weapons.
He was 48 in 1969, not exactly your typical Bay Area hippie still
recovering from the Summer of Love. But Baltzo was as anti-establishment as they came. He left that decent- paying teaching job to go door- to-door soliciting donations for the Mount Diablo Peace Center, a group he and friends were forming to, put simply, “Try to avoid the end of the human species from nuclear war.”
The Peace Center was founded by local teacher & activist, Andy Baltzo. Andy’s vision was to create a “local voice for peace” in the area. Throughout the years, the Center has evolved to address the prevention of violence and promotion of social justice in the local community.
No matter how small the donation, Andy Baltzo always wrote a note of thanks to those who supported the Mt. Diablo Peace and Justice Center. He always wrote it by hand, with a first draft in pencil, and he underlined the word “thanks.”
“Every single letter was so genuine,” said former Walnut Creek center director Charles Goodmacher of his friend Baltzo, who died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. “Those little notes were the perfect expressions of him. In the end, it may not have been good time-management, but it was very effective. I came to understand that people wanted that contact.”
Baltzo, a Pleasant Hill resident and local peace activist who founded the peace center in 1969, died May 25. He was 89. Born in Berkeley and raised in Oakland, Baltzo left teaching chemistry in Pleasant Hill to start the peace center because he wanted the building and use of nuclear weapons to stop. A medical lab technician in the Army for four years, Baltzo embraced the peace movement and started his fight against nuclear weapons when Hiroshima was bombed in 1945.
Though he didn’t live to see the end of nuclear weapon production, he took joy in the fight to rid the world of such weapons, said Goodmacher.
Walnut Creek peace center founder Baltzo dies at 89
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