Students’ ‘Moving’ Tribute to Peace : Laguna Beach Pupils Exchanged Letters With Marcher

Dear Kevin, I hope the Presedent (sic) takes down some missiles. I hope there will be more PEACE. I hope some day that people make enough birds that there will be no more war. Love, Katie (Zentner, age 9)

Five times during this year’s eight-month, cross-country Great Peace March, the first- through fourth-grade students of Laguna Beach’s Community Learning Center wrote individual letters, mailed together in thick packets, to “their” peace marcher, Kevin Henry.

Wednesday night, the students delivered their sixth and last packet of letters to Henry. But this time, they made the delivery in person.

Henry, 23, who had frequently answered the children’s letters, was the featured guest of the small, alternative-education program’s winter holiday gathering. Surrounded by students, he briefly described his journey.

Then he took questions from the boys and girls who had raised funds to buy and process film with which he documented what teacher Ellen Tanney called “a walker’s-eye view of the country.”

“When did we run out of food? We never ran out of food,” Henry told the children.

“When did we run out of money? Well, about three weeks after we started out on the desert, we ran out of money.”

“How many countries did we go to? Just one.”

“Was it fun? Yes, it was fun.”

“Challenging? Yes, very very challenging.”

“Why did I go?”

He paused. “I went because since I was about 15 I’ve dreamed of a world at peace, without nuclear weapons, without wars, with employment for everyone . . . where everyone lives in a house, not a tent. That was my house, over there!” he added, laughing and pointing to the small, rather grubby pink and gray tent he had set up near the school stage.

Whenever a packet of the children’s letters reached him on his journey, “myself and all my friends would sit around and read the letters, and they were very, very inspiring,” Henry told the students’ parents. “I think all of you should be very proud of your kids.”

Dear Kevin: After the peace march is over, are you going to march back to California? We changed the rooms by moving things around . . . Your friend, Justin (Starow, age 8)

Dear Kevin Henry: Do you want to do that again? Circle the word yes or no . . . . What are you going to ride on when you come back? A airplane or a bus . . . circle the word. Love, Carolyn (Kittell, age 7)

Henry was introduced to the center last February by Jean Bernstein, a member of the school’s advisory board and a founding member of the Alliance for Survival’s Laguna Beach chapter. Bernstein said she made the introduction because “I thought it would be wonderful for those children to have a real connection to somebody who was involved” with the peace march.

(The learning center is a 57-student, 4-year-old program that encourages and requires parents to be directly involved in their children’s schoolwork. It allows students to move through subjects at their own pace. Located on the Top of the World elementary school campus, it is part of the Laguna Beach Unified School District.)

Throughout the year, the children were thrilled to get Henry’s responses to their letters, Tanney said. “It was like having a brother away at college” who stayed in touch, she said.

When Henry was home (he left the march twice for a few days’ break and once for a six-week break), he visited the school to give the children details of experiences he had described in his letters.

Dear CLC: Seeing Gary, Indiana, was a very shocking and upsetting experience. The town was once a thriving industrial area. Now it resembles Berlin at the end of World War II . . . . It’s a very dirty, polluted, haunting place . . . Kevin. (Aug. 22)

Henry has been back in Laguna, his birthplace and lifelong home, since Nov. 19. He’s now working part time as a night clerk at a Laguna motel to earn money to pay off debts, and he’s finishing the first draft of a novel he had started three years ago.

Wednesday afternoon, he greeted a visitor to his mother’s canyon house, where he’s living. Tall, thin, with a mop of short curly hair, Henry wore a UC Irvine alumni T-shirt that read: “Once an anteater, always an anteater.” In one ear was a small earring stud.

Henry had majored in English at UCI, with a creative writing emphasis, and graduated in June, 1985. He said he always knew that he wanted to do a year of service after he graduated. The Peace Corps was a possibility, but when he heard of Pro Peace, the David Mixner organization that originated the march, the walk “seemed like the natural thing (for me) to do.”

After he had filed his April, 1985, application with Pro Peace, he had second thoughts about taking part because he thought the organization’s view of the march was “too yupped out, too sterile, (because) its ultimate goal was to reach out to people through the media,” to portray “this herd of elephants going across the country (with) people watching.”

Nevertheless, he decided to go. When the Mixner organization ran out of money and the group stalled in Barstow not long after beginning the trek March 1, Henry said the project was gradually transformed into the vital, “grass-roots thing (it) needed to be, where we were talking to people, inspiring people all across the country.”

When the march got under way again, he said, the going was sometimes grueling. In Nebraska, widespread exhaustion caused three-fourths of the marchers to “take a vacation.”

Henry was among those who left temporarily, returning to California to spend six weeks recuperating and earning money. He rejoined the traveling “Peace City” 10 days before it reached Chicago. His mother, Eleanor, used up her three weeks of vacation from her clerical job to join the marchers on the last leg of their journey from New York City to Washington, D.C.

Dear Kevin: Would you like to do that for ever? CONGRADULATIONS! (sic) YOU MADE IT. I’M PROUD. I’M HAPPY! I’LL SEE YOU IN 90000 YEARS. FROM, BEN (Edwards, age 7)

Henry said he was excited when Bernstein first suggested that he exchange letters with the students. “I was also apprehensive that I might be talking over their heads. But I wasn’t. They understood everything I said. I didn’t have to talk down to them at all.”

He said he hoped that his interaction with the students would “inspire them and make them think in different ways. It’s hard these days, when kids are being bombarded with messages on ways to compete,” to convey the concept that “we’re humans first, and we’re all humans, and if the boat sinks we all drown.

“When they’re in their formative years, that’s when (people) should be learning cooperation and peace, and that we’re all part of the human family and not just U.S. citizens.”

Dear Kevin: We miss you a lot. We hope you go around the whole world so we can be free. Love, Kim (Young, age 6)

Henry was not alone in his initial hesitation to begin correspondence with the school. For their part, the students were sometimes unsure of how to relate to the peace marcher.

Whitney Cohen and Sara Lepere, both 9, said that from the beginning they thought Henry’s walk “was amazing.”

“I wondered how he could have that much self-confidence” to undertake the march, Sara recalled, and Whitney said she at first felt awkward writing to him.

“The first time it was like, I don’t know this guy, what do I say--’I liked your tie’?” she said, giggling. But “after a few letters I felt really great about it because I loved what he was doing.”

“I thought it was pretty neat,” Randy Ingram, 8, said of Henry’s walk, “because there’s a lot of nuclear weapons in the world. Here’s someone who’s marching across the U.S.A. trying to disarm weapons. I thought it would do a lot of good.”

“If you still have nuclear weapons, if someone sets them off, there goes the world (but) if the President would listen (to the peace marchers’ message), he could get out a deal with Russia and everything would be over, like that,” Randy said, snapping his fingers for emphasis.

Dear Kevin: No matter what the weather’s like, keep walking, because the person who built the first nuclear bomb didn’t care what the weather was like . . .

That letter, which Henry has temporarily misplaced but knows by heart, was among the first batch he received from the students, while the marchers were regrouping in Barstow.

He put the letter, which was from a third-grade girl, in his journal and carried it in his backpack, taking it out to read “whenever I was feeling really down, when I had walked 22 miles in the rain and put up my tent in the rain, and the tent was full of water, and I’d go, ‘What the hell am I doing out here,’ ” Henry recalled.

“The letters kept me going.”