Jan Harwood: Still a ‘Raging Granny’ after all these years

If AARP is ever in the market for a local spokesperson who embodies the possibilities of retirement, Santa Cruz has a promising candidate for the job.

Jan Harwood has done what many of us envision for our own lives. In the mid-1990s, she retired from her career as a psychiatric social worker, moved to Santa Cruz and, in a real sense, became herself. And since then, she’s become something of a local legend.

For years, Harwood led the Raging Grannies, a mix-and-match group of local older women, which was part political protest, part performance art. It was the most public expression of her post-retirement transformation. Now, having just turned 93, she’s telling the story of her life. On Sunday, she will be at Bookshop Santa Cruz to talk about the release of her new memoir “Patchwork.”

For much of that long life, Santa Cruz really didn’t play much of a role. In her peak career years, Harwood was living in Menlo Park and working in various places around the Bay Area. But her daughter Rachel attended UC Santa Cruz.

“I kept coming over the hill to visit her,” she said, “and every time I drove into town, I just had this feeling: Ah, I’m home.”

It wasn’t until many years later that Santa Cruz became her literal home as well as her spiritual one. When she retired at 65, she wasted no time in moving to Santa Cruz.

“I was always sort of a hippie at heart,” she said from her home in downtown Santa Cruz, “though really I was always too old to be an actual hippie. But I was really in love with certain parts of the counterculture, especially the part that had to do with friendliness and love and all that stuff. Menlo Park, for all its charms, was cold, and even after all those years, I hardly knew anybody because everybody kept their children inside and nobody went out, except in a car. Whereas here, people would call out to you and say hi, and stop you on the corner to talk. The feeling of Santa Cruz — the feeling of happiness and goodwill, which just seemed endemic to the area — just swallowed me up.”

It’s a wonderful fantasy that propels many people through their work lives, the idea that retirement is that moment when you can shift attention away from the world and toward the cultivation of your own soul. Harwood made that shift about as completely as possible.

“I had been a psychiatric social worker for 30 years, and I really loved my job. But I was very tired of being responsible for so many fragile human lives,” she said. “So it was such a freedom to move over here, and do everything that I had put off doing.”

That included painting, a pastime that she’s still very much involved in, as well as gardening and building onto her house. But her retirement was not about turning away from the world. In an effort to build some social relationships through political activism, Harwood, shortly after moving to town, got involved with a group called Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Inspired in part by the informal 19th-century proto-feminist movement known as the Blue Stockings Society, WILPF originally rose out of a pacifist response to World War I at the International Congress of Women in 1915. From that same majority-women peace and justice well came, many years later, the Raging Grannies, a Pete Seeger-style folk music protest movement featuring older women.

Raging Grannies is not an exclusively Santa Cruz phenomenon. Several Grannies groups emerged out of Reagan-era nuclear anxieties across the country (the first was, in fact, from Canada), and in fact the organization still exists today. But, with Harwood’s help and leadership, the Raging Grannies really caught on in Santa Cruz. 

Anti-war activism was certainly nothing new for Jan Harwood. Having grown up in Kansas City during the Depression, she got a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Missouri, then jumped on a Greyhound bus bound for New York City. She was a young mom with three children living in rural New Jersey when she traveled to Washington to picket at the White House during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In her early days as a Santa Cruzan, she jumped into organizing with WILPF, publishing a newsletter and assuming a leadership role. Soon enough, the idea to bring the Raging Grannies style to Santa Cruz took shape.

That style involved not only singing at protests, demonstrations, rallies, courthouse steps, public meetings and festivals, but often doing so in colorful and showy hats and feather boas. They represented a playful and satirical side to political protests that seems out of favor today. 

As for the songs, many if not most of them were originals, and in Santa Cruz, they were largely written by Harwood. Locally, the Grannies were most active in the immediate post-9/11 years, and their songs were not shy about their decidedly left-oriented point of view. As the Iraq War raged in the mid-2000s, Harwood and the Grannies often evoked images of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in irons at Guantanamo, but always with a flowery hat and a twinkle in the eye. Harwood’s approach to songwriting was to refashion well-known melodies into political poison darts, turning, for example, “Embraceable You” into “Impeachable Crew.”

“I knew thousands and thousands of songs,” she said, “so I could always find a melody and fit some words to it. I have five books of song lyrics that I’ve put together. I never tried to sell them; they were just for the Grannies.”

Writing is yet another facet of Jan Harwood’s late-life creative work. And her new book represents her efforts to make sense of a wide and varied life. She calls writing “my own therapy, really helpful in getting rid of some of the old junk I’ve been carrying around.” Other than her memoir, she’s also written, and published, various short stories and poems.

Locally, the Grannies faded away in the 2010s. But, at Sunday’s event at Bookshop, some of the surviving members of the Santa Cruz Raging Grannies will again come together for a melody or two. 

The Bush and Obama years were, she said, much more simpatico to the Grannies’ trademark approach. When Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the tone changed, and the Grannies were reluctant to engage in that new world.

“I’ve written a lot of anti-Trump songs, as you can imagine,” she said. “But the Grannies never really wanted to sing them. I think he was just too awful. It wasn’t funny anymore.”

Jan Harwood will be reading from and signing copies of her new book, “Patchwork,” on Sunday, July 28, at Bookshop Santa Cruz. The afternoon event begins at 2 p.m. It’s free.

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