David T. Bates

Bates—David T. Bates, 82, on March 11, 2024, peacefully in his sleep, at West Chester Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in West Chester, Pa. Dave was born on June 1, 1941, to David and Lucy Bates in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was the oldest of seven children. Some of his brothers’ earliest memories are of Dave, soldering iron in hand, surrounded by wire, resistors, capacitors, and tubes, breathing life into broken-down TVs and radios, or building new ones from scratch. A local electronics store hired Dave to do repair work when he was 14.

Dave graduated from Westtown School in West Chester in 1959, where he boarded from the seventh grade. He received a degree in English from Haverford College in 1964 and earned a late-career doctorate in ethnomethodology from Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Dave met Juliana Blom, a talented school teacher, artist, and potter, at Powelton Meeting in Philadelphia, Pa. They married in 1971 under the care of Chappaqua (N.Y.) Meeting, in which Juliana had grown up. Together, they raised a son, Moses.

Dave worked in the audio-visual department of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Philadelphia, Pa., for 23 years from 1969 to 1992. While at AFSC, Dave helped to win union representation for staff members. Dave’s skill and knowledge were on display when, from boxes of parts, he assembled a studio-quality Ampex tape recorder, a complex machine highly esteemed by sound engineers. Management of Ampex learned of the tape recorder, which had been one the first ten to come off its assembly line. They shipped AFSC a new model in exchange for the old recorder, and put the old recorder on display at corporate headquarters.

When Dave’s department at AFSC was rendered redundant by changes in technology, he began to work in radio and television. He was employed by WGBH-TV in Boston, Mass., and later by a station in Philadelphia. Dave, a strong pacifist, was fired from a television station in Washington, D.C., after he and his coworkers defied their bosses by continuing to send news packets that included coverage of anti-Vietnam War protests to GIs in the United States and abroad.

Sadly, Dave’s vision degenerated due to retinitis pigmentosa and he could no longer do the photography, film editing, and electronics work he excelled at and loved so much. At one point, he was the sole legally blind photographer employed in the United States.

Toward the end of his career, Dave taught communications as an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware in Newark, Del.

Both Dave and Juliana were active in the meetings in which they were members, as well as in the broader Quaker community. Over the years they were members of Middletown Meeting in Lima, Pa.; Sandy Springs (Md.) Meeting; and Birmingham Meeting in West Chester, Pa.

Dave was predeceased by a sister, Elizabeth Bates.

He is survived by his wife, Juliana Blom Bates; one son, Moses Bates; four brothers, Robert Bates, Timothy Bates, Matthew Bates, and Frederick Bates; and one sister, Margaret Harrison.