Biography
William “Lefty” Gilday was an anti-war activist who died as an incarcerated elder for his role in revolutionary actions against the Vietnam War. He was a former minor league baseball player from Amesbury, Massachusetts, who, while in his early to mid-thirties, was arrested and imprisoned on robbery charges. While imprisoned he met up with Stanley Bond, a Vietnam helicopter pilot also imprisoned on robbery charges. The two became friends and after their release, both entered into the Student Tutor Education Program (STEP), a program designed to help former inmates enter into university level education. Gilday enrolled into Boston’s Northeastern University with another fellow inmate, Robert Valeri; soon Gilday, Bond and Valeri became involved in the student movements of the 1960’s, joining organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground.
On September 23, 1970, Gilday and other college students (Bond, Valeri, Susan Saxe, and Katherine Powers) were involved in a bank expropriation attempting to the fund the anti-war movement which ended with a police officer killed. Gilday was tried and found guilty for the killing of the Boston police officer. He was sentenced to death but his sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment. Among the others involved in the action, Valeri became an accomplice to the state for a reduced sentence, Saxe and Powers both became fugitives before serving their time and getting released, and Bond died as part of an explosion in the jail.
Lefty, the last one remaining in prison, passed away on September 10, 2011 from dementia and Parkinson's at age 82. At the end of his life, he was placed in an isolation cell — a “medical bubble” — for throwing an empty milk carton at a guard. He spent the last months of his life alone, separated by a window from medical staff, who placed manila folders across the glass so they didn’t have to look at him.
