‘The Great Peace March’ Forming Up in L.A. : Activists Are Gathering for 3,235-Mile Trek Across United States Starting From Coliseum

They are strangers to each other--Don Leith and his daughter, Prudence, Leslie Nanasy, Stephen Nelson, Connie Fledderjohann and Jerry Eisner. They live, work and study at varying spots in the county. They have different life styles. They lead separate lives. They share, however, an extraordinary set of plans for the coming year. They plan to march across the United States together on “The Great Peace March.”

The plans:

On Feb. 15, they will arrive at the White Oak Recreation Center at the Sepulveda Basin in the San Fernando Valley. They will camp out there, learning the logistics of the march, becoming initiated into the system of “marcher government.” From there, on Feb. 24, they will walk to Griffith Park, camping in the carrousel area until March 1, when it will come time to walk to the Coliseum, where 100,000 people will see them off.

Then off they will go--to Cal State L.A. for the first night. To Washington, D.C., for the 255th night.

They will have covered 3,235 miles at a rate of 15 miles a day, six days a week.

They will be part of a projected group of 5,000 people who are undertaking the Great Peace March for disarmament. Their aim is to create enough organized pressure to stop the arms race and, as the people at PRO-Peace headquarters on Beverly Boulevard say of existing nuclear weapons, “take them down.”

The tents are being sewn, the mess kitchens have been ordered . . . And David Mixner, the chief organizer and director of the march, is feeling confident it will all happen, he said at his office recently, despite the fact the majority of the marchers have yet to make their final application.

“I’m real comfortable,” Mixner said. “The marchers are going to happen. The bulk will come in January. The application is extensive. There are 20,000 out. I’ve never been more confident of anything.”

Nevertheless the clock seem to be ticking fast. With 728 applications in at last count, another 700 rotating slots reserved for groups to fill, and another 300 for staff and visitors, that leaves 3,300 to go. Is everyone at PRO-Peace as sanguine as Mixner?

“Oh, no!” he laughed. “There are two camps. Those who’ve been organizing for a long time, like myself, are comfortable. The newcomers to it--no,” he said.

(Mixner has been organizing for causes and politicians for 25 years. One of his more notable accomplishments was as one of the four coordinators for the Vietnam Moratorium in 1969.)

After months of exhaustive organizing and logistical planning, PRO-Peace (People Reaching Out for Peace) started actively recruiting in late October. Mixner said he would have preferred it had all applications come in by mid-November, but that is not the way life goes, he said, adding that it was typical for people to postpone and delay ironing out details of their personal lives: “A lot of people are at that stage now--’What do I do about my taxes? What do I do about my cat?’ ”

Mixner’s cats, Pablo Neruda and Justice, will not be making the trip, he said, much to his regret. They will keep the home fires burning, since Mixner is having someone live rent free at his home rather than put the cats in a kennel.

PRO-Peace spokesman Howard Cushnir sounds confident too, although he admits the organization has what he termed “a Herculean task” to pull off in the next few weeks.

Recruiting Stepped Up

A phone survey they made of people who had asked for applications indicated that 30% intended to apply--more than enough for the march. Since most of them have yet to do so, PRO-Peace has stepped up its recruiting, sending out follow-up recruiters and people to lend fund-raising advice to those having difficulty coming up with the $3,235, or $1 per mile, sum the march is asking each participant to raise to help defray the costs of the march, which are estimated to reach $21 million.

“In some ways I’m in a panic,” Cushnir said, “but when I think about it long and hard, the march is a fabulous idea and it is happening. It’s not a numbers game. We have every intention of meeting our goal of 5,000. If we don’t it does not diminish the project. The strength of the march is really these individuals who are dropping everything to make this statement. They’re an inspiration to us here.”

A look at some of those who are dropping everything to make the march:

It took Prudence Leith, 13, two months to decide whether to go on the march with her father, Don, or stay home with her mother, Faith, and sister, Dawn, 18. When she finally announced her decision to go with her father, she was in tears. And in describing it one recent afternoon at the Leiths’ home in Whittier, sitting with her family around the Christmas tree, she started to look teary again.

“Don’t start crying again,” her mother teased her gently. “You can’t start crying every time you talk about it.”

It is not that she doesn’t want to go. She is excited about the march; excited about the prospect of graduating from eighth grade and starting high school while walking across America. (PRO-Peace has arranged an independent study program for credit with the Oak Meadow School in Ojai. She will either participate in that or make arrangements with her own school, South Whittier Intermediate.) She is excited about all of it. But hers is a very close family, and, even though her mother has promised to visit them along the way, she knows she is going to miss her family.

Sacrifice Is Important

And her friends, some of whom wish they could go with her, some of whom think she’s crazy. And her cat. And the house and normal everyday luxuries and, she concluded her list, “just being inside.”

“For me it’s right here,” Don Leith said, speaking of sacrifices and looking at his wife. “I’m going to miss my wife a lot more than my job, that’s for sure. In my mind, the sacrifice is one of the most important aspects of this. The threat of global nuclear destruction is something worth sacrificing over.”

As for his “motley crew” of three dogs in the fenced-in area on the front lawn, he said, “I’m telling you, my dogs are going to wait right at the gate.”

He is a gardener. His wife is a copy editor for the Orange County Register. In business for himself, he is in the process of selling his accounts. He has a full-time job lined up for January and February, taking inventory for a company. He and Faith have been doing inventory work part time for the past few months, raising money to finance the march.

“There’s a lot of cynical people that don’t believe they can make a difference. And that’s all the more reason for me to go,” he said. “I want to help people feel empowered again.”

He wants to do what he can to stop the arms race. His concerns go beyond the threat of nuclear war, he said.

“In my mind, people are dying from the arms race right now,” he said, due to military expenditures, indicating that it was at the expense of of domestic needs. “It’s just money being thrown down a black hole.”

His concern grew out of his interest in environmental issues, he said, saying he would prefer to be working for the Sierra Club. He became convinced, however, that the threat of nuclear war is the greatest environmental issue, and more imminent.

Don and Faith, ages 37 and 39 respectively, first became politically active over the arms race, they said, in 1982 with Proposition 12, the bilateral nuclear freeze initiative.

‘A Chance for a Sliver’

“Then we were just asking for a little--for the governor to write a letter to the President requesting a freeze,” Faith said. (It passed and Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. sent the letter to President Reagan.) “The march is asking to take them down. If we ask for the whole pie, maybe we have a chance for a little sliver. We didn’t get anything the last time.”

It is “we” with the Leiths, regardless of who is going and who is staying at home.

They read about the march last spring. The decision to participate seems to have come gradually and the whole family disagrees just when they decided it was “go.”

When they were interviewed at PRO-Peace, they said, a psychologist who was present raised concerns about Prudence. She was clearly attached to both parents. She was entering puberty. She needed, if not her mother, some older woman she could confide in. The Leiths know such a person, a young woman, who will fill that role, they say. It is just not possible for Faith to go herself.

“I’d love to go,” Faith said. “I can’t do it as easily. I just became a copy editor.”

This is not an affluent family, but money concerns seem low on their list. The way Don Leith figures it, they’ll be in good shape financially when he returns. Their landlady has lowered the rent by $100 a month in support of the march (some of her family members are marching also). The car payments will be paid off by the time he returns. Leith will be able to decide whether to return to gardening, or finish college and think about the plans for a teaching career he shelved a long time ago.

The Leiths dread being separated, they say. However, they are certain that their marriage will survive the separation and the changes such an experience will bring. After 15 years, they say they have leveled off at a secure place.

Preparing Themselves

Don and Prudence have begun preparing themselves. He walks about five miles each night. She walks back and forth to school, a total of five miles. They would buy their gear, they said, during the after-Christmas sales.

Prudence comes from a family that has raised her on the issues, discussed matters of world concern with her. It does not necessarily follow, however, that she would choose to march across America during that all-important adolescent year that bridges elementary and high school.

“Well,” she said. “I just want to live a normal life, I guess. I don’t want to turn 30 and have a nuclear war. I want to live.”

Last October, Stephen Nelson wrote a letter to his parents in Illinois on five pages of lined paper that started out, “I am so excited to share with you my plans for 1986. The best way to begin is to describe my views on politics and the world.”

Nelson, 39, is a computer systems analyst married and living in Long Beach. He is a Vietnam veteran.

The letter, occasioned by his decision to go on the march, reads more like a public manifesto than a filial message. It details his views on the waste of Vietnam and the pacifism it bred in him; on the inevitability of nuclear war if the arms race continues; on the belief that enough people acting together can change things. Only in the last paragraph does he solicit his parents’ opinion and mention that although they will miss each other a lot, his wife, Nancy, is happy for him.

His parents were not happy, he said. Not until they assured themselves that Nancy, his wife of 10 years who teaches dance exercise and works as assistant manager of a clothing store, really did support him.

“Now they’re behind me,” he said, explaining that his wife considered going, but that a knee injury prevented her walking long distances.

He will be leaving her in a financial lurch, he said. She will either have to take a roommate or move, he said. Normally his income, about $35,000, is their main support. He was laid off from his job, due to company cutbacks, he said, and just taking temporary work since then, because of the coming march.

What the future holds for him after that will be greatly influenced by the march, he thinks. Staying involved with the peace movement in some way has already become a real possibility, he said.

He’s had a few second thoughts about what he is taking on, he admitted, but mainly they have been confined to the life style the march will dictate. He is a very private person, he said, and likes solitude.

Nevertheless he’s going. He has examined his motives, asked himself if he’s trying to escape something. He has reached the conclusion it is important that he go. His background in computers only intensifies the urgency, he said. He sees a “computer error” accidental nuclear war as a distinct possibility.

He believes the march has a chance to make a difference. Something has to be done, and while he believes it has to be a worldwide effort, it makes sense to him to start here.

“The United States is half the problem,” he said.

“I read an article about it last April. I knew immediately I wanted to do it,” Connie Fledderjohann said of the march. A licensed marriage and family counselor who specializes in post-accident therapy involving deep muscle massage and psychotherapy, she is 55, divorced, the mother of four grown sons and two grandchildren.

A lifelong walker, which she attributes to growing up in a small town during World War II when gas was rationed, she had always wanted to walk across the United States.

“A great weight in my decision was the walk itself. Certainly I was in agreement with the cause itself,” she said, adding she has become more knowledgeable since her involvement with PRO-Peace.

Concerned since the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, it remained a hazy awareness, she said. She never felt there was anything she could do about it.

“This makes me feel maybe I’m making a bit of a difference,” she said. The attention the march will draw, both through the media and through the encounters between marchers and citizens along the way, will be more important, she thinks, than direct pressure on government.

A Transition Period

The march has come at a point in her life when she feels in a transition period, she said, and she thinks she is probably typical of many marchers in that.

“I’m ready to make a move and not quite sure where to go. This will be an opportunity to give it a lot of thought for a long time. It’s going to give me some breathing room,” she said, saying that she is keeping any plans for her return “completely open-ended.”

She gave up her office some months back and started practicing out of her apartment in Westwood. Next, she will give up the apartment and “farm out” her belongings among friends, since the landlord will not allow a sublet. At least, she said, she will have some money to come home to, since she is paid as court cases are settled.

In good shape to start with, she has been taking the physical demands of the march seriously, working out daily, riding an exercycle 20 miles a day, walking eight miles or swimming laps. She hopes other are taking it as seriously, she said, since the demands of weather, climate and terrain, to say nothing of psychological and emotional stresses, will be severe. She wants to be able to enjoy the experience, she said.

It may have surprised some at PRO-Peace, she said, but not her, to discover a good number of older people signing up.

“We’ll have an advantage over the young people in some ways. A lot of the difficulties are going to be psychological and emotional. Having lived a little longer we’ve been through a little more. It’ll be a little easier for us.”

She is ready to go.

“I feel myself shifting gears, really getting ready to leave.”

If there is one word that comes to mind when Jerome Eisner thinks about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, it is arrogance .

“The arrogance of it. After the five billion years it took us (the evolving universe) to get to this point, it is so arrogant to consider blowing the thing up. To think the planet could cease to exist just like this,” he said snapping his fingers, outraged. “It’s kind of weird and scary. I think we can do something about it.”

At 68, he is going on the march.

Three years ago he retired as a manager of Bankers Life insurance company. He set up his own corporation and sells group medical insurance, maintaining an office at Bankers Life on Wilshire Boulevard.

“I’m not pushing very hard though,” he said at his office, “since I became a volunteer for PRO-Peace.”

He read about the march in April, and thought the planners were out of their minds. But the idea remained with him.

“But God, I started to think, if it could be done, that would be just the thing that could turn it around.”

He had always been involved in the peace movement on an academic or pedantic level, he said, keeping himself informed, showing up at protests, “lending my body so it would look as if a lot of people showed up,” finding himself disappointed that the media often ignored it, that the message did not seem to get to Washington.

Although not normally very active physically, he said, “I’ve led a charmed life from a health point of view,” he said of his ability to make the march. “I’ve had ‘no significant departures from good health’ as we say in the insurance business.”

Tried Out the Heights

Months ago he started walking three miles a day. He is up to 10 per day and it takes him three hours. Last September, he went to the Adirondack mountains in New York and tried out the heights and the cold. He has begun working on dropping his weight from 173 to 153. In general, he does not think the march will be a problem. Nor, he said, does his doctor.

His family--he has a wife, two children and a granddaughter--have been supportive, he said. They are used to his doing what he wants to do. His daughter is widowed and she is living at home with her parents. Having the daughter and granddaughter in the house will probably make his absence easier on his wife, he said.

“I really look forward to it,” he said of the coming experience. He has a youthful sense of wonder about him, and talking about the march brings it out. “In addition to the social significance of it, when you stop to think of it, when else in a lifetime would a person be able to walk across the country in such a fantastic way. To hear the birds sing. And to go in such style. I’ll be teaching about Star Wars along the way too, as we fan out to the communities. A little ego gets into that, too.”

Here he is, already past retirement age, much of his life behind him. Yet it seems he is about to embark on the biggest thing in his life. True?

“You know,” he said, his face lighting as he spoke, “it will be a very high point in my life. I think a guy could really go happily after completing that march.”

Leslie Nanasy wishes March 1 were here already. She is 22, a graduate of the Fashion Institute, and, she is on a leave of absence from her junior year at UC Irvine.

She dropped out to go on the march, she said. And since she had to raise money for the march, and for the gear she will need, she dropped out early. She has three free-lance jobs designing patterns, enabling her to work at night and build up her walking ability during the day. She also works occasionally as a human research subject for an audiology project at the Brentwood veterans hospital, and part time at Physicians for Social Responsibility in Santa Monica.

She grew up in Long Beach, where her father is a longshoreman, her mother a waitress. She lives there now with her mother and brother, doing her free-lance drawing out of her bedroom/office.

“Sewing for peace,” she laughed. With PRO-Peace planning to put everyone’s skills to use on the march, she has already been dubbed its official seamstress, she said.

She became concerned with the arms race, she said, through a science class she took several years ago. In it she saw the film, “The Last Epidemic,” about the effects of nuclear war and it devastated her.

She remained concerned, but there she was, she said, a clothing design student, someone without much impact.

Then she attended a conference Physicians for Social Responsibility held in Anaheim.

“I was so relieved that that many professional people were as scared as I was. It was scary to see that much evidence, but a relief to know I wasn’t crazy.”

She began doing volunteer work for PSR, and then got a job there. She enrolled in a Global Peace and Conflict Studies program at Irvine. Last summer she was one of 400 Americans to attend the Soviet Union’s annual Youth Festival in Moscow. “Meeting with people and making friends with people who are supposed to be your enemies--(regarding them as enemies) did not make sense after that.”

She has received a lot of support from her friends, she said, including some Europeans she befriended at the youth festival. They’re encouraged that she is going and that the march is happening, she said.

“That really helps, having that moral fiber behind you,” she said.

Support is not universal, she said. Her brother thinks she is “nuts,” she said. “He feels nuclear war is inevitable and I’m wasting my time. He’s one reason I want to go, to show there’s something you can do. I think it will do a lot of things that demonstrations in the past have not. It’s so grand. It’s on such a grand scale, you can’t ignore it.”