Kathleen Kinkade, Founder of Utopian Commune, Dies at 77
Ms. Kinkade grew up on the lower rungs of the working class in Seattle. Her father died when she was young. After her stepfather was jailed for sexually abusing her and her sister, she lived with an aunt, whom she described as critical and unloving.
She flourished at the Prairie Bible Institute, a fundamentalist high school, where she learned the hymn-singing to which she returned enthusiastically later in life, despite her atheism. After a year at the University of Washington, she married Donald Logsdon, an Army sergeant, but the two quickly divorced. With a daughter in tow, Ms. Kinkade, headed off to Mexico City, where she learned Spanish and found a job teaching English to first graders at a private school.
In 1964, while living in Los Angeles and working in a dead-end secretarial job, she read “Walden Two.” Skinner’s novel, about humans living in a hivelike egalitarian society, strikes many readers as bloodless and forbidding, but Ms. Kinkade responded ecstatically. She wrote to the author asking if such a community existed, and if she could join.
