On this date in 1937, public educator Diane Rochelle (née Suckow) Uhl was born to Elsie and Emil Suckow in Milwaukee, grew up in Evansville, “where we drank beer but didn’t tell anyone” and “survived high school in a small Wisconsin town where there were no divorces and the only ethnic groups were Germans, Swedes and Norwegians.” (Freethought Today, June/July 2013)
As a child, she wished and prayed for peace on Earth, Uhl later wrote. “Religion in my childhood home was not a big thing. I enjoyed singing in choir with my friends. In college I was reading more philosophy. … The one action item I took from my Lutheran upbringing that seemed to make sense was the Golden Rule.”
At college in Ripon, Wis. (birthplace of the Republican Party), she read philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, whose “Why I Am Not a Christian” put her on the path as a sophomore to freethought and rejection of religion. Teaching became her educational goal instead of nursing after she found out she couldn’t tolerate the sight of blood.
At Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., she earned an M.A. in speech correction/special education, “which equipped me (I thought) to save all those children with special needs. Those children taught me more about life than I ever imagined,” she wrote. Her students with special needs ranged in age from preschool to adult and she spent 33 years mentoring them. Working with adults was the most challenging.
Along the way she met Stephen Uhl, a psychologist who had quit the Catholic priesthood. They married on the Winter Solstice in 1968 and spent the rest of their lives together. They retired in 1993, sold everything, bought an RV and traveled full-time to all 49 continental states before settling in Arizona. They joined FFRF in 1999.
The Uhls became major donors to FFRF and over the years contributed well over a million dollars to its programs, including $250,000 for a five-floor expansion to its two-story building in 2015. The legal wing is named for Diane, who also purchased a $50,000 Steinway piano for use in FFRF’s small auditorium. The studio where FFRF’s radio, TV and online shows are produced is named the Friendly Atheist Stephen Uhl Studio.
A year after her husband died at age 90, Uhl brought an end to her own at age 84 using nitrogen gas. According to Arizona End-of-Life Options (June 1, 2022), she stated that “due to constant physical pain in my back, legs and feet, as well as headaches and now blindness, I wish to die. My quality of life has deteriorated in the last several weeks (on a scale of 1 to 10) from an eight or nine to a one.”
Her nephew Greg Uhl said “She went to sleep just as she’d hoped, listening to soft music and holding a photo of Uncle Steve. It could not have been a more beautiful, peaceful and clean end to a wonderful life.”
In her 2013 FFRF member profile in answer to the question “Where I’m headed?” Uhl wrote, “To dust, but I like to think of it as my personal sunset.” (D. 2022)
