Jon / Sukie
Jon (left) and Steve Hall, Harvard football 1972 season.
Jon’s dad Sergeant Bill Hall, 108th Medical Battalion, Army 33rd Infantry Division.
Jon and Carole Hall, Ballet Arizona Charity Event.
Sukie and her dad.
Father Taylor’s mug shot (row 3, second from right), 1961 Freedom Ride. From Breach of Peace: Protraits of the1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders, by Eric Etheridge.
David Amory and Sukie Taylor, Lowell House. (Photo by Stuart Crocker)
Sukie now at the Cape Anne Museum. (Photo by Joy Horowitz)
05-15-2025
Freshman year, Sukie Taylor hitched a round-trip ride home to Chicago with classmate Jon Hall and his brother Steve, Class of ‘73. Looking back, she and Jon are amazed that on those long drives, they never talked about their fathers’ work together on civil rights. Five decades later they finally have that conversation about their fathers’ dedication to social justice and how it influences them to this day.
When Sukie told her mother Carvell that she was reconnecting with Jon Hall, she lit up and said, “His father Bill Hall saved your father’s bacon!”
Chicago businessman Bill Hall, Harvard ’45, found the cause he was looking for when he heard Sukie’s dad, Father Robert Taylor, deliver a sermon about St. Leonard’s House, a radical, new project in a crumbling old house on Chicago’s West Side dedicated to helping men (and later, women) impacted by incarceration rebuild their lives. It was a cause Bill supported by serving more than thirty years on the board, and that Sukie’s parents believed in so deeply that they chose to live in the halfway house with the residents until Sukie started kindergarten. Years on at Harvard for a Soc Rel paper, she would interview Scoop Lankford, her favorite babysitter, who had served 43 years for a murder he never committed.
So how did Bill save Bob’s bacon? When Bob spent three weeks in a Jackson, Mississippi jail during a September 1961 Freedom Ride, first stop in a Prayer Pilgrimage to confront racism in the Episcopal Church from New Orleans to Detroit, Bill’s support persuaded opponents on the Saint Leonard’s board not to fire him. And Jon tells Sukie something she never knew—in light of the firebombing of a Freedom Ride bus three months earlier, his dad helped her dad write his will before he set off.
How have lessons from their fathers shaped them?
Following his father’s lead to “become engaged,” Jon has co-founded several social venture non-profits that serve marginalized communities in Arizona and Africa through skills training and jobs that also address climate mitigation. In Africa, Jon and his nonprofit colleagues are collaborating with Sukie’s Lowell House roommate Vicky Wells Wulsin at Soteni International in Kenya.
Sukie’s early home is always in her mind when collaborating with David, her partner in life and work, on designs for buildings and gardens for nonprofits, serving those who serve others. In that spirit, she’s honoring her parents’ work by helping Saint Leonard’s Ministries fill in the history of their founding years and raise money for her childhood stomping grounds—and working every day to “open her heart.”