Clear-eyed, compassionate, a platinum heart — these are some of the words friends and family use to describe Beth Ann Danon.
“I’ve always said that she was a very young soul. Everything delighted her. It was so easy to make Beth laugh,” said longtime friend Susan Sussman of Middlesex. “She spent so much of her life giving to other people, whether they were friends or family. She was the person you could always rely on.”
A longtime lawyer and activist who lived in Hinesburg, Danon, 68, was a fierce advocate for equal rights who helped win health care benefits for same-sex partners of faculty and staff at the University of Vermont.
She succumbed to a recurrence of endometrial cancer last Friday morning surrounded by those closest to her.
Kate Mulgrew, a longtime friend, was one of them. They were in Shelburne at the house of Danon’s sister, Mary Kehoe. Mulgrew said she and Kehoe came into Danon’s bedroom early Friday and found her gasping for breath. “So we both climbed into the bed on either side of her and held her. And that was it.”
“It was the greatest, most unconditional, profoundly satisfying relationship of my life,” Mulgrew said.
They met during their first year at New York University. Danon was pre-med and Mulgrew, who would go on to star in “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Orange is the New Black,” was studying drama. They were having dinner in the mess hall, which soon cleared out.
Mulgrew said she looked across the room and saw “this beautiful girl, a cloud of black hair, blue eyes intent on her book of chemistry.” Danon looked up and caught her eye.
“I said, ‘Irish Catholic?’ She said, ‘You got it.’ I said, ‘Drink?’ She said, ‘You bet,’” Mulgrew recalled. “And that was it. Out the door we went and we had our first drink together at the Cedar Tavern. That was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.”
Danon was born in Chicago in 1954. She and her four siblings were steeped in the activism of the time, thanks to their late mother Joan Smith, a prominent academic who served as dean of the University of Vermont’s College of Arts and Sciences. (Danon’s stepfather, Peter Welch, was sworn into the U.S. Senate days before she died.)
“We grew up on picket lines,” Kehoe said. “When most kids were singing children’s songs, we were singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’”
One of Kehoe’s childhood memories growing up in Chicago is having Pete Seeger, Julian Bond and other leaders of the civil rights movement singing in their living room.
Their mother was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the ’60s, “so we grew up in that environment. It’s sort of in our DNA,” Kehoe said.
Danon’s career was as rich and full as her personal life, according to friends, and her passion for activism and justice shone through both.
Kehoe remembered a cold January day in 1969 when she and her sister ate cheese sandwiches in the middle of an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. Danon organized that trip from high school in Chicago and wrote an article in the student newspaper encouraging people to go.
“I went down there with her, there was a bus organized, obviously there were adults involved but she was really spearheading it,” Kehoe said.
Between college and law school in New York, Danon became a bit of a bohemian, Kehoe said, living in lofts possibly not up to code, waiting tables and dating an artist with whom she’d spend time at a Sag Harbor cabin that did not have running water.
“That was a period of her life where she stepped away, as many people did, from political foment. But when she went to law school she became much more reenergized doing work in the domestic violence field,” Kehoe said.
After graduating, Danon moved to Vermont to be close to her family. She began her legal career as a law clerk to Vermont Supreme Court Justice Frank Mahady, and returned to activism.
“She was so dedicated. She went to all the women’s marches and never missed her opportunity to lend her voice to movements of the kind,” Kehoe said.
One of Danon’s key achievements was the UVM equal health care benefits case but she was very quiet about it, said Kehoe, who is also a lawyer. “So much of what she did I was completely unaware of because she had such good standards and never tooted her own horn.”
Danon practiced law for 35 years and was most recently a partner at Kohn Rath Law in Hinesburg.
“She was really one of the kindest people you’ll ever meet,” said Roger Kohn, a partner at the firm. “She was always concerned about people and appropriate causes, very active in the community and did a lot of work for nonprofits.”
Danon eventually served as president of the Vermont Bar Foundation, as a member of the Vermont Employment Lawyers Association, as president of the Vermont Trial Lawyers Association (now known as the Vermont Association for Justice) and was a longstanding member of the ACLU of Vermont.
Karen McAndrew, a retired lawyer in Shelburne, said she often worked on opposite sides of cases as Danon “but it was never antagonistic because Beth was so kind and civil.”
“She was a lovely person who practiced law with extraordinary empathy. She often represented people whose legal problems were complicated by other issues such as mental health issues or social isolation. And she took amazing care of them,” McAndrew said.
She said she often referred cases to Danon because the latter never turned anyone away. McAndrew recalled a suit against a medical provider who had dismissed a client from his practice. Not only did Danon agree to represent the person in what was a challenging case but she took him home with her one night so he could get to a hearing on time the next day.
“She certainly was active on behalf of equal rights and disability rights and so on, and I admired her for that,” McAndrew said.
“Beth accepted cases simply because her client needed help. She was never interested in making money,” her sister wrote in her obituary.
Her illustrious law career and activism aside, friends and family remember her as a person who deeply valued her friendships, was non-judgmental and knew how to really live life.
Sussman, who once shared an apartment with Danon in Montpelier, said they took trips to Montreal and enjoyed the arts and music together. Danon particularly liked opera. “She just made you feel happy and good because she was such a light spirit,” she said.
Sarah Quinn, of Jericho and Hinesburg, met Danon when she needed a lawyer but said they became fast friends. Quinn was a dog trainer and said Danon loved her dog Lilly, a golden cockapoo. Danon was heartbroken when Lilly died in April 2022.
“Her life was led amazingly,” Quinn said, her voice breaking. “She was always willing to help anybody, anytime. The biggest thing I’ll miss is her smile, her laugh.”
Another longtime friend, Eileen Blackwood, said they became friends and then worked together as partners at their law firm Blackwood and Danon, handling many discrimination cases. Together they joined Kohn Rath Law in early 2009.
“She had incredibly close friendships with people and she would do anything for her close friends and her clients as well. She was just willing to give her time,” Blackwood said.
In the pandemic, Danon was one of the first to reach out and spend time with her.
“She was so funny, too. Everybody talks about her laugh,” Blackwood said. “She rarely said a negative word about anybody. She was always finding the good in people and working to help them be their best selves.”
When Kehoe’s spouse, Steve, died in 1985, she said Danon immediately came to Vermont, missing class, “because she was so worried about me.”
Soon after, Kehoe ran a race in Boston and Danon came to support her. Leafing through old photographs from the race, Kehoe found that her sister had a hand on her shoulder in every photo.
Mulgrew said she was often “dumbfounded” by Danon’s equilibrium, her level headedness. “I can imagine in the courtroom she was devastatingly good because she never lost a step and her grace notes were pure and silver. So she could turn a mind and many heads within the course of a conversation. I’ve seen her do it.”
Danon was married for 10 years and was a doting aunt to 10 nieces and nephews. And she had many friends.
She attracted all sorts of people but especially those with problems — a friend with personal issues or people with mental health issues and had “this uncanny ability to analyze a problem,” Kehoe said, noting that their mom always thought she should have been a therapist.
According to Mulgrew, Danon was diagnosed with cancer two years ago and fought it. Last July she fractured her leg in an e-bike accident. That’s when doctors discovered the cancer was back. “And then it was off to the races. But it galloped and I’m grateful for that,” Mulgrew said with tremor in her voice.
After living her last months with those closest to her, Danon died with her sister and her best friend by her side. Looking back, Mulgrew wondered if that’s how she planned to go all along, given her fight with cancer and her need to never be a burden to anyone.
“Nothing was ever stated about it, of course. It went so quickly. But I think now that’s exactly what happened,” said Mulgrew, who lives in New York and the Outer Banks, which is where the two friends shared their “last jolly drink” last June.
“She came down for a long week,” said Mulgrew, her best friend of 50 years. “We sat outside and had Manhattans on the deck, and watched the geese and the osprey. And she said, ‘Oh my god, it’s so magnificently beautiful. Isn’t life terrific?’ And I said, ‘You know it is, my love. You know it is.’”
They made a pact to each other, as they do on every birthday, Mulgrew said, “that one must not die before the other because I cannot imagine life without you. And yet off she went. I think she had to go.”
A service will be held 4 p.m., Jan. 21, 2022 at the First Unitarian Universalist Church, 152 Pearl St., Burlington. Donations may be given to the Vermont Bar Foundation or the Chittenden County Humane Society.
Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story misstated the name of the Vermont Association for Justice.