Taking Their Message Across America

“Have you heard about PRO-Peace? Five thousand people are going to march across the country.”

With two American flags flapping on the lapel of his preppy sports coat and armed only with leaflets and exuberance, Tim Carpenter, 26, looked more like a choirboy than a young general as he approached a flock of Huntington Beach churchgoers on a recent Sunday morning. The military comparison is hard to avoid, though, because PRO-Peace, the organization Carpenter helps lead, resembles nothing so much as an army gearing up for a campaign--something on the scale of the Normandy invasion.

According to David Mixner, the veteran political organizer who founded PRO-Peace and conceived “The Great Peace March,” the organization owes a good part of that aggressive pacifist style to Carpenter and a cadre of his cohorts, who got their combat training in the often inhospitable trenches of Orange County.

“They play a very crucial role in all this,” Mixner said. “Tim brought the skills that he used in Orange County to PRO-Peace, and with astounding success. . . . I don’t know what I would have done without him. He really is one of the bright young graduate organizers in the country. . . . This group of Orange County people is playing a very prominent national role.”

A co-founder of the Alliance for Survival and Orange County’s best-known anti-nuclear gadfly, Carpenter said he first got word of the Great Peace March less than a year ago while protesting at the annual Winter Conference of Aerospace and Electronic Systems (Wincon) gathering in Costa Mesa. At the suggestion of David Stein, probably Orange County’s hottest Democratic fund-raiser, Mixner took Carpenter aside and asked him to be a part of the little project he had cooked up.

“The inside joke with me in the Alliance was that I was always saying we could do the impossible,” Carpenter said. “But when (Mixner) talked to me, even I was amazed at the numbers he was throwing around.”

Those numbers are: Beginning March 1, 5,000 people are going to spend 255 days walking 3,235 miles across the United States from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Their goal, according to PRO-Peace literature, is to reach 65 million people with the PRO-Peace message, “No more nuclear weapons. Period.”

Another figure that came up was $2,000, Carpenter said. That would be his monthly salary . “My entire last year with the alliance, I made $2,222,” he said.

“He was real excited and jumping up and down and going, ‘It’s this peace march, and we’re going across the country,’ ” said Wendy Sharp, Carpenter’s girlfriend and the first person he told about Mixner’s offer. But Sharp had doubts that Carpenter would accept. After all, she had often heard him chide activists who retreated from Orange County to organize in Los Angeles, where “progressive politics” is less of an anomaly, she said. “I kept thinking, ‘Tim leave Orange County?’ I just didn’t believe it. . . .”

Carpenter, however, was impressed with Mixner’s idea, and he knew that if a “peace movement” could be put together in conservative Orange County, anything was possible, he said.

Last March, Carpenter accepted the position of field director and moved into an apartment 10 blocks from the PRO-Peace offices near Beverly Center. Over the months, half a dozen other activists from Orange County joined the PRO-Peace staff, which now stands at 112.

PRO-Peace (People Reaching Out for Peace) is divided into six divisions, with the Orange County contingent concentrated in the “Field Division,” explained deputy director Allan Affeldt, 27, who was born and raised in Orange County and will soon be staying at the march’s primary campsite at the White Oaks recreation area in the San Fernando Valley.

Pointing to a map in the mildly chaotic PRO-Peace office, Affeldt explained that the march route had been laid out “according to demographics.” With that determined, the first item of business for “Field” was setting up regional offices, he said.

After a lot of phoning and writing and flying around, the Field staff established regional offices in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, New York City and Washington, and state offices in Las Vegas; Springdale, Utah; Omaha; Des Moines; Osceola, Ind.; Pittsburgh and Boston (the only office not on the march route). At the same time, Affeldt continued, staff members were at work getting endorsements and teaching representatives across the country how to make the PRO-Peace pitch.

For example, immediately upon “coming aboard” at PRO-Peace, Tim Carpenter put together round-table discussions with “peace and justice” people in Los Angeles. Soon thereafter, he took off for Washington to recruit and explain the PRO-Peace plan at a demonstration of 50,000 people calling for “jobs, peace and justice.” From there, he went to an “anti-’Star Wars’ convention” in Golden Springs, Colo., then to Chicago for another peace-type gathering. At each stop, he added the names of people and organizations to the already substantial mailing list he had accumulated while working for the Alliance for Survival, he explained.

In April, the field staff sent out more than 6,000 letters asking for support, and another 4,000 to 5,000 went into the mail in May, Carpenter said. A staffer or volunteer then followed up each letter with a phone call. “We audited ourselves once, for budget purposes, and we were each averaging 15, 20 calls an hour,” he said, holding up a thick phone log.

The endorsements started arriving in the return mail and, with each response, a staffer asked the endorsing group for its mailing list, Carpenter continued. Eventually “hundreds of thousands of pieces of literature” on the march had gone out, each of which was followed by a phone call and sometimes a visit from a PRO-Peace representative, Carpenter said.

“We took the blueprint of how we (the Alliance for Survival) organized in Orange County and took it across the nation. We were always attentive to (wearing) suits and ties, and to going to the audiences where you wouldn’t expect to hear a ‘peace and justice’ event, whether it’s a Rotary Club or Lions Club or a city council meeting. We organized around the belief that it’s time we stopped talking to ourselves,” Carpenter said.

Although the PRO-Peace list of 200 or so endorsing organizations is laden with the sort of groups one might expect--the West Los Angeles chapter of Librarians for Nuclear Arms Control has given its nod of approval, for instance--it also includes labor, religious, minority, women’s and campus organizations, ranging from the American Jewish Congress to the U.S. Students Assn.

“The success of PRO-Peace is that we’ve really reached the mainstream,” Carpenter said, talking at his standard rat-a-tat clip as old Phil Ochs protest tunes played on a stereo. “We’ve been very attentive in the Field Division that each of the regions is organized around local needs, local constituencies. In Iowa and Nebraska, the farmers are going to lead us through with their tractors. In Chicago, schoolchildren are going to lead us. In Pittsburgh, we’re going to be led by steelworkers. . . . In Utah, the “downwinders,” a group of radiation victims, will lead us. . . . In Nevada, we have an organizer who’s talking about escorting us with marching bands.”

Carpenter said that although the veterans of the alliance’s Rapid Deployment Peace Force still spend time “in the trenches,” utilizing the budget-conscious “person-to-person contact” routine (“Most of us leaflet four or five nights a week, and if I’m stuck at a stoplight, I still jump out and hand out brochures”), most of their time now is spent pondering the countless final details of the campaign.

Richard Hamel, 25, who worked with the Alliance in Orange County, spent his first few months at PRO-Peace setting up a system for processing the detailed, eight-page applications that potential marchers have to complete. Last month, though, he acquired the title of assistant director of transportation, and since then he has been out at the White Oaks encampment, getting ready to take care of the “hundreds if not thousands” of out-of-town marchers who’ll be calling the PRO-Peace hot line requesting a ride from an airport or bus station.

Then there are the logistics of the march itself to consider, Hamel said. “What we’re doing is moving a city every day. To move a city, you have to be organized. We’re trying to find the best way to do it.”

The PRO-Peace staff has already figured out, for instance, that they’ll be using motor homes and trailers with expandable rooms for on-site offices, and they’ve leased and purchased trucks to carry water for the total of 1.275 million showers they project the marchers will be taking; trucks to carry a “general store,” a library and kitchens; a school bus to ferry children to a traveling day care center; flatbed trucks for the concerts and lectures that will take place, and a truck for the low-power portable transmitter for radio station WQO, which will transmit on an AM frequency along the way, Hamel explained.

And the whole affair will have to be set up and torn down daily at sites from the Mojave Desert to the Rockies to New York City, he added. “Every day it will be a whole new ballgame.”

Michele McFadden, a 39-year-old author of children’s books who lives in Orange, wrote a column for the Alliance’s newsletter before joining PRO-Peace last June. Her title now, in typical PRO-Peace bureaucratese, is “documentation coordinator”--which means that she is in charge of the myriad brochures, flyers and manuals that the organization produces, and that she writes, edits and serves as staff photographer for the “PRO-Peace Profile,” a newsletter that will continue publication throughout the march.

“I’m sometimes just overwhelmed by the size of the task we’re trying to accomplish,” McFadden said on what she called a particularly hectic afternoon at PRO-Peace headquarters. “In a normal corporation there’d probably be a team of four or five people to do what each person here does.”

Only the camaraderie of the people with whom she works “and the absolute imperative of the issue give me the strength to keep coming into L.A. every day,” she continued. “I would never make this drive or put in these hours and be away from my son so often for money. . . . For me, this is like being a soldier and doing your part.”

At a recent Tuesday morning meeting, the field division seemed more like the Joint Chiefs of Staff working out the logistics of how to secure safe passage for their infantry.

“Good news on the Mormons front,” Carpenter said, explaining that a retired Marine officer was going to meet with Mormon leaders in hopes of assuring smooth sailing through Utah.

Roger Bloom, who left his position as editor of the Huntington Beach Independent to join PRO-Peace and now commutes to Los Angeles each day from his Huntington Beach home, reported on door hangers that will be distributed in the neighborhoods along the five-mile route the marchers will take from the Coliseum to Los Angeles City Hall, where a big send off rally will be held.

And Elaine Gordon, 57, who moved to Los Angeles from Irvine, announced that efforts were being made to contact every Chamber of Commerce in every city and town on the march route. The idea is to let them know that much of the food for the projected 3.825 million meals--as well as some 20,000 pairs of shoes and many other supplies--will be purchased along the way, she said. “Peace is profitable,” someone chimed in, unable to restrain the apparently uncontrollable urge around the offices to mimic bumper stickers.

If there are any morale problems as the big day nears, no one at PRO-Peace lets on. Staff members seem unfazed by the fact that the projection for marchers has fallen far short so far, with only 1,500 marchers confirmed less than two weeks from the takeoff date. Nor does anyone admit concern that most people, upon hearing about PRO-Peace, still ask, “Are you the guys who are going to link hands across America?” a reference to the nationwide Hands Across America hand-holding event planned for May 25.

Media coverage is just beginning to gain momentum, they explained, and with that, public awareness will increase. “It’s going to build and build. By Denver, we’re going to be turning people away,” Carpenter said, adding that in just one day recently, he was interviewed by Vegetarian Times, New Age Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Time and Newsweek. Reporters for several metropolitan papers will be trekking along for all or part of the expedition and reporters for local papers will join in for a day or two along the way, staffers said.

Somewhere in the back of their minds, though, don’t they worry that the whole thing will backfire, then fizzle out? That it will be seen as just one more publicity stunt in an escalating series of media events that are pushing the point to absurdity?

This question pushed the ever-cheerful Carpenter as close to the point of bristling as he seems to get.

“This is not one more publicity stunt,” he said. “We’d be here if the media wasn’t focused on us. We’re people who are dedicated to nuclear disarmament, just as the people who went out to free the slaves were dedicated. Just as Martin Luther King, who liberated a people, was dedicated. My only concern is that we might be too late. . . . As we’re meeting right now, we’re putting in place first-strike nuclear weapons. For the first time this country is preparing to wage, fight and win a nuclear war. The hourglass has been turned, as far as I’m concerned. . . . We have two or three years to decide whether or not we’re going to make it. After that, most experts tell us we won’t even be able to monitor (weapons systems)--that arms control will be obsolete. That’s why there’s a sense of urgency in our organizing. . . .”

Carpenter is a fairly small, mild-mannered man, and as the result of bouts with both cancer and severe arthritis, he moves awkwardly at times. But sometimes his absolute confidence makes him come across a bit like Gen. George Patton addressing his troops.

“If you look at it realistically, with the amount of time we had and the amount of money we spent, this is a real lean, mean organization,” he said. “The people we’re taking across the country will go back as organized individuals who are going to organize, mobilize and agitate their communities until we take down nuclear weapons. The march is simply the first step. We’re going to continue in a sustained, disciplined effort until we succeed.”