Write-In Participants Help Put the Voice of the People in the Mails

More than 200 people gathered at UC Irvine on Saturday for an exercise in participatory democracy--in the art of writing letters.

The event was The Great American Write-In sponsored by Women For:, an Orange County advocacy group that supplied pens, stationery and stamps to all who came.

Write-In organizers Molly Lyon and Gail Reisman also invited 23 interest groups--including the Sierra Club, the National Organization for Women, OWL (Older Women’s League) and Amnesty International--to set up tables, distribute literature and suggest topics for letters and public officials to write to.

The event took on the appearance of a street fair moved indoors.

Around the edge of a University Club meeting room, tables laden with literature were decorated with red, white and blue helium balloons. Behind the tables, Write-In workers wearing outfits that matched the balloons discussed their causes, passed out leaflets and offered petitions protesting everything from Social Security cuts to apartheid in South Africa.

Messages to the White House

Over coffee and sweet rolls, the letter writers studied sample letters, chewed the ends of their pens and wrote as many as five letters each on topics of their choice to county supervisors, state legislators and the White House.

Fund-raiser Denny Freidenrich of Newport Beach wrote a letter to the President on Saturday, but declined to tell the subject, saying: “This is between me and my president.”

But, he promised, he was following to a T a set of guidelines that Women For: had given to all writers.

“I’m going to write legibly,” Freidenrich said. “I’m going to be brief and to the point. And I’m being courteous and reasonable.”

At a table nearby, Marsha Lyon, 34, an office systems analysts from Newport Beach, was writing her first letter to a legislator since 1980, when she had written to support the nuclear-freeze initiative.

“To be honest, I usually don’t take the time,” Lyon said. “On my own I’m basically just lazy. I’ll vote and I’ll work for a candidate. But just on my own, to write a letter? I won’t, unless there’s the structure to guide me.”

A few of the letter writers wondered what good their letters would do. But former Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, who wrote a letter to U. S. Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) objecting to President Reagan’s budget, offered a realistic view.

“If it’s part of a larger outpouring of letters, it’s like water dripping on a stone. I think it has an impact,” Agran said.

Letters Made Impact

Fifth District Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, there to congratulate the letter writers, said that letters always made a strong impact on him. “One handwritten letter and one typed letter, signed, are the two best ways to communicate with elective officials,” he said.

“You can get someone dedicated to an issue, but if you don’t have any telephone calls or letters, you really question how serious they are.”

Organizer Lyon said that the event had grown out of a Women For: tradition of writing to legislators at the close of each monthly meeting. One day, she said, she and Reisman thought: “God--we have 40 letters here. What would 400 be like?”

By early Saturday afternoon, Lyon knew. Instead of just 400 letters, she had about 600, she estimated.