William Sears (Bahá'í)

William Bernard Sears (March 28, 1911 – March 25, 1992) was a writer and a popular television and radio personality in various shows culminating in the 1950s with In the Park but left television popularity to promote the Bahá'í Faith in Africa and embarked on a lifelong service to the religion, for some 35 years as Hand of the Cause, the highest office of the religion he could be appointed to. He wrote many books about the religion with Thief in the Night being his most popular.

William Bernard Sears was born March 28, 1911 in Aitkin, (near Duluth) Minnesota, youngest of Frank and Ethel Sears' four children, and the only male. Sears was from an Irish Catholic background. Sears suffered from a bout of jaundice which was to affect his health later in life. Grown during the period of the Great Depression in the United States, he worked under the name Bernard Sears as a playwright winning some awards in 1933, and some plays were published of his in 1935-6 including Dad Cashes in which has biographical aspects and one produced. The plays were not income enough and Sears got his first job in radio at WOMT in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. His first wife, Kathleen Sears, died about 1934, leaving him with two young sons, William and Michael, whom he and his second wife Marguerite Reimer Sears raised.

Marguerite and William met in Milwaukee, Wisconsin - he having attended the University of Wisconsin and she Marquette University. She had only recently joined the Bahá'í Faith, despite hearing of it from her father earlier, after meeting Mary Maxwell (just a few years before she herself would marry). Marguerite and William were married about 1937 with two clear understandings. On her part it was that the religion was a prominent part of her life and he would have to work with it being a priority for her - affecting, for example, where they would live. On his it was that he had a year old son with Tuberculosis and he needed someone to help care for him. By the time they married he was working in Iowa for the formerly WGRR station of Radio Dubuque having just applied for work in California. On the way to California for a job with KFBK (AM) the Sears considered living in Utah because it was a goal area for the religion. They show up living in Salt Lake City in Spring 1939, (apparently as their contribution to Shoghi Effendi's call for Bahá'ís to relocate to support the religion) where he was soon assistant manager of KUTA radio station (later KNRS (AM).) Marguerite left the Bahá'í book The Dawn-Breakers out for him to read - after picking it up and setting it aside once, he read it three times in three weeks and by December 1939 was avowedly a Bahá'í officially joining the religion in 1940.

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