2,000 Plan to Walk to Washington : Peace March’s Tent City Rises in Reseda

Thirty-five bright yellow geodesic pup tents and one red-and-white circus tent sprang up in Reseda Monday, signifying the first step of the Great Peace March to Washington.

In three weeks, there will be 1,000 or more tents, organizers said Monday morning.

The march, intended to promote disarmament, will begin March 1 at the Los Angeles Coliseum. It is scheduled to end Nov. 1 in Washington.

For the next three weeks, the 2,000 people who plan to make the first leg of the march, across the Mojave Desert, will be gathering on the grassy field at Victory Boulevard and White Oak Avenue, just west of the camouflaged trucks of the California National Guard’s 144th Field Artillery battalion.

The connection was only coincidental, said the event’s press secretary, Carol Kinsey. Pro-Peace, the Los Angeles-based organization sponsoring the march, will use the city-owned White Oak Recreation Center as its staging area.

The 35 tents pitched Monday will be used by about 75 paid staff members who will be gearing up for the march.

Most of the tents had small paper names attached over their openings.

The one called “Looney Bin” belongs to Jennifer Looney, 33, of Sherman Oaks.

Looney, an actors’ agent and producer, said she was between jobs when she saw an article on the Great Peace March.

“It just would not leave me, the idea of walking across America for nuclear disarmament,” she said.

Now, as an assistant to David Mixner, founder and executive director of Pro-Peace, she will handle administrative details such as sending thank-you notes to the mayor of each city the march passes through, she said.

Looney is taking her 3 1/2-year-old son along for the walk. She said she will keep a daily journal so that, when he grows up and asks, “Mom, what was all that waking up every day in a tent all about?” she’ll have something to show him.

Plans outlined at a press conference Monday morning suggested that it will be a message of self-sacrifice, but not without its self-indulgent touches.

As campgrounds go, this one looked pretty upscale Monday.

The two-man tents, each embroidered with a Pro-Peace insignia, were especially designed for the march, Kinsey said. By the time the march hits Denver, there will be 2,500 of them in six colors, she said.

On the road each night, the tents will be arranged into a pattern of six round towns, each consisting of six wedge-shaped villages, each a different color, she said.

Kinsey said she was embarrassed by the comparatively dull appearance of the striped circus tent that will serve as dining and meeting hall for the swelling bivouac. She said the group soon will receive six more elegant pavilion tents made for the march.

Each village will have traveling showers and a kitchen equipped with a large selection of shiny stainless-steel pots, Kinsey said.

The tents and other equipment will be moved in a convoy of trucks. Marchers will have to carry only their lunch, Kinsey said.