On June 23, 2023, Preston Breckenridge Kavanagh Jr. died at his home in Safety Harbor, Fla.
Preston was born in 1932 in Washington, D.C., where his father was a respected attorney. Two loving older sisters told stories of boundless energy and childhood adventures. He was a gifted athlete, playing football, basketball, and baseball, and winning every footrace. He said, “Until I was in eighth grade, I thought I might be the fastest kid in the world.” Preston graduated high school playing on sports teams, head of the student government, and a high school All-American in football. An Admiral Halloway scholarship covered expenses while at Princeton University. While there, he was active in student organizations; and wrote a thesis on India’s foreign policy. Post-graduation, he was commissioned an ensign in the U.S. Navy. He left the USN as a lieutenant (junior grade).
His twenties were transformative. He served with honor, met and married Lois Lapham, and found that he was called to both Protestant ministry and social justice issues. He earned a divinity degree from Harvard, was jailed alongside early civil rights leaders, fathered three children, and was active in Chicago’s urban missionary movement. He determined that he could best serve from outside the church, and started his career at the Chicago electric utility.
His thirties and forties saw the steady growth of his faith and his business skills. He made a home at the Wilmette, Ill., First Congregational Church, where he was known for showing faith in action. He was the driver behind legalizing self-insurance trusts for Illinois nonprofits, and was an active and inspired board member of the United Way, Chicago’s Community Renewal Society, and several community organizations. At work he was involved in the landmark First National Bank building, and in defining the load-balancing procedures that became standard across the industry. During the building of the utility’s fleet of nuclear power plants, he was responsible for 10 percent of industry spending.
He discovered a love of Martha’s Vineyard, where he would spend the day reading, a tendril of smoke rising from his pipe, then head out to a bridge tournament. His wife and children see these as the family’s happiest moments. At the same time, a transformation happened in his personal life, as he acknowledged that he was an alcoholic. This led to a lifelong commitment to sponsoring and counseling others in Alcoholics Anonymous. Upon his death, Preston had 43 years of continuous sobriety.
In his fifties, Preston took early retirement from the electric utility, and started a new phase of his religious life. He wrote an action novel set in ancient Israel, and refreshed his divinity school Hebrew. He detected a pattern in two passages of the Book of Isaiah. This led to the work that would take the next 35 years: defining, describing and advocating for a “code” running through the Old Testament and revealing the identity of scripture’s “Suffering Servant,” the scribe-authors of many passages, and the identity of an early female scribe of the Old Testament.
He and Lois spent their sixties on Martha’s Vineyard, where he poured his energies into biblical research. He described conversations with Jesus, and with God. He also drove Edgartown’s recovery of its water utility, saving residents from one of Massachusetts’s worst and highest-cost utility services. In their seventies, Preston and Lois moved to Washington, D.C., where both had sisters living in the area. In their eighties they moved to Safety Harbor, escaping the difficulties of aging in a three-story home.
In his final years, the pandemic years, Zoom made possible his continuing participation in AA meetings and the services of Faith UCC Church in Dunedin, Fla. Parkinson’s is a terrible, horrible, degrading, and demeaning disease that robbed all of us of his abundant presence. All the while, untold numbers of people brought kindness to his life while he coped with the steady degradation of Parkinson’s disease.
He leaves behind his wife, Lois; children, Katharine (Vineyard Haven), Preston (Tarpon Springs, Fla.) and Evan (San Diego, Calif.); four grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and a long list of friends and admirers.
“Well done, good and faithful servant … enter into the joy of your master.” –Matthew 25:21
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