Barbara Leonard Reynolds

Barbara Leonard Reynolds (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, June 12, 1915 – February 11, 1990), was an American author who became a Quaker, peace activist and educator.

In 1951, Reynolds moved with her husband to Hiroshima where he conducted a three-year study on the effects of radiation on children who had survived the first atomic bomb. She and her family then became peace activists, sailing around the world to protest nuclear weapons. In the early 1960s, she traveled around the world with atomic bomb survivors to show world leaders, first-hand, the horrors of nuclear warfare. She then established the World Friendship Center, devoting 13 years to it, and donated the Hiroshima Nagasaki Memorial collection.

After this, she continued her peace and anti-nuclear activism, and after 1978, in California, she helped to resettle Cambodians fleeing Pol Pot, among other humanitarian pursuits.

She was born Barbara Dorrit Leonard in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the only child of Dr. Sterling Andrus Leonard, a Professor of English and Education at the University of Wisconsin and prolific author of books on English composition and literature and Minnetta Florence Sammis, an educator who evaluated the safety of new toys for children. Barbara's paternal grandmother, Eva Leonard, was a syndicated daily columnist in over 200 newspapers during World War II and later wrote advice to the lovelorn under the name Elizabeth Thompson.

Barbara was fifteen years old — and one month from graduating from high school — when her father, 43, a popular English teacher at the University of Wisconsin, drowned in Lake Mendota. A colleague from Cambridge University, Dr. I. A. Richards, 38, had come to Madison to meet Dr. Leonard and learn more of Leonard's original perspectives on English usage. Dr. Richards had spoken at the University of Wisconsin the night before and the two were spending the afternoon canoeing together. The canoe capsized and after two hours in the cold water, Leonard lost his grip on the canoe and sank. Dr. Richards was later rescued exhausted and in shock. Dr. Leonard's death was the top story in both The (Madison, WI) Capital Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune. The failure of lifeguards on shore to see the overturned canoe and save the two professors became a local scandal, resulting in an investigation. Dr. Leonard's body was never recovered.

In 1935, Barbara married Earle L. Reynolds, and they had three children: Tim (1936), Ted (1938) and Jessica (1944). In 1951, Dr. Reynolds was sent by the Atomic Energy Commission to Hiroshima to conduct a three-year study on the effects of radiation on children who had survived the first atomic bomb (1951–54). Barbara and the family went with him. They lived in Nijimura, an Army occupation base nearby. During their three years there, he designed and built a 50-foot (15 m) yacht, Phoenix of Hiroshima.

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