The Gumps: Martyrs of Nuclear Age : For Joe, Into Action After a Life of Good Intentions

Those somber, restless days, Joe Gump thought often about the man who came running to Jesus. He had always obeyed the Commandments and now he wanted to know if that was enough for eternal life. No, there is something else, Jesus told him: Sell all you have, take up your cross and follow me. And this had made the man go away grieved, for he had many possessions.

So did Joe Gump, actually. He was not rich. But he did have a fine home in the Chicago suburbs and the worldly clutter of 59 years. At an age when most men readied themselves for a soothing retirement Joe was reexamining the fabric of his life, ready to undo the weave. Something had happened.

On Good Friday, 1986, his wife, Jean, had broken into a missile silo near Holden, Mo., and poured blood in the shape of a cross along the concrete. For this, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison. “Maybe if Christians really believe in love thy neighbor, they belong behind bars,” she told Joe. And that turned over in his mind and would not come to rest.

Some of their friends and family, even a few of their 12 children, thought Jean had taken her pacifism way too far. But had she really? At times, Joe saw her as his courageous scout on the frontier of history. The world drifted along the edge of nuclear war--and how much had that ever concerned him? “Christ gave us a model to follow and we live so far from it,” he said.

He could see his entire life as it stretched back from the present into the spark of his youth: all the good intentions and all the compromises. Clarity comes to muddle, and over time you say never mind to this and never mind to that until a stubborn question comes to hover: Why did you forget so much?

Joe’s parents had come from a farming village in Germany to settle in Chicago. He could recall the early mornings, riding his bicycle to St. Raphael’s. He and the other altar boys memorized the Latin responses by rote. The priest raised the chalice; the boys rang the tiny bells.

As a teen-ager, he had met Jean Dalton on a blind date. They were wed in 1949, a Catholic marriage, a union as holy as that of Jesus and his Church. They named rooms in their home after the saints. Mornings they would go to Mass. Domine non sum dignus . . . Lord, I am not worthy . . .

Was anyone worthy? Jean and Joe wanted religion to mean more than the common brick facade of St. Martha’s near their home in Morton Grove. But where did the Cross and the world come together?

Surely, it must be in acts of peace and charity and justice: Chicago’s dreadful slums rolled on mile after mile. People went hungry, so the Gumps brought them food. Children were cold, so the Gumps found them clothes.

Racism was everywhere: in schools, in businesses, even in churches. The Gumps marched for civil rights. They picketed realtors who would not sell to black families.

Yet the weighty obligations of faith never made them dour. The Gumps were a jovial couple. Their parties were something: the jitterbugging in the dining room, a martini in your hand. And all those kids, one around every corner. There was life in that house--and it was grand.

Joe’s career moved up steadily like a blue chip stock. He was a chemical engineer, working for a company that made control panels for factories. Smart, affable, diligent: he was put in charge of manufacturing.

Of course, more responsibility on the job meant less time for social causes. A new division of labor fell into place. Jean became the family do-gooder, Joe its breadwinner.

They watched the world speed by from different windows. Nuclear power is going to lead to catastrophic meltdowns! Jean would say. And Joe would laugh. Get off the soapbox, Jean. Don’t you realize all that stuff has quality control?

Joe had confidence in corporations and engineers. Good people with good minds do good work, he would tell her, and the two of them would go around about it for hours: acid rain and PCBs and the China Syndrome.

In the 1980s Jean fixed especially on nuclear weapons. “They mean to blow up the world, Joe,” she declared, as if to challenge him: Maybe you ought to look into it instead of following the ups and downs in your Wall Street Journal.

She marched and lobbied and even got arrested, protesting against defense contractors. That was her new thing: civil disobedience. She took Joe to hear two people who had hammered on prototype computers being built to guide nuclear submarines.

“They’re on a big ego trip,” was his blunt reaction. “Anyway, what’s the point of busting up something that’s so easily repaired?”

“The point is maybe to wake somebody up,” she replied.

But Joe was not ready for awakenings. Only Jean’s trip to the missile silo--only Jean’s arrest--would set off the alarm. In the somber days after, in the long months of 1987, he reviewed it all in his mind.

She had been right. In a lifetime of church-going, they had never come to grips with the most serious questions. For one, what is the meaning of Thou Shalt Not Kill in an age when weapons can destroy the world?

Instead of providing leadership, the church meekly followed along, trying to blend in with society. “They want us to toss our contribution into the basket on Sunday and go merrily on our way,” Joe said.

He had been wrong about engineers, too. The fact is, these days people cut corners. In college, they had called it dry lab: Why do the experiment when you already know the result? Just fudge the data.

That kind of short-cutting had led to all those faulty pipe fittings in nuclear power plants, Joe figured. It had put deficient O-rings on the doomed space shuttle. And it was no doubt there in the assembly of our bombs.

What’s more, his own life was not so blameless. His company had made temperature-sensing devices for nuclear reactors. He had faithfully paid his federal taxes, tithing to the arms race.

In so many ways, he was like the rich man who had questioned Jesus. He obeyed all the basic rules, yet somehow missed the main point. Just what did it mean--take up your cross and follow me?

If he had followed anything, it was the corporate line. When the bosses wanted someone pushed out, he helped with the paper work. When there was funny stuff on a bid, he went along.

That was the way of his whole generation, swept up in a river of excuses. It had observed the nuclear buildup--more than 50,000 warheads, 1.6 million times the power of the Hiroshima blast--then failed to do anything about it.

Damn it, what could you do? Jean had tried so many things: the peace candidates, the marches, the sit-ins. All seemed so feeble against the military, the government, the corporations--all those shapes in the fog.

Still, was prison a sensible protest? Maybe some problems are just too big, some evils too invincible. He brooded. And he might have left it alone had his family not been German.

Questioned Relatives

So many times, he had questioned his aunts and cousins over there about why they hadn’t done something to save the Jews. They’d just shrug: “As if to say even good people had to live with terrible things.”

Was he that way, too? He wasn’t so sure. He weighed his choices. The kids were grown. He was relatively free to follow his conscience. If that led to prison, maybe it wasn’t so unreasonable a thing.

Joe began going to weekend retreats with others considering a so-called Plowshares Action, doing symbolic damage to a nuclear weapon. They studied up on the literature of missiles: first-strike strategies, explosive yields, hard-kill capabilities. It was riveting stuff.

The superpowers keep raising the ante and betting the planet in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. The idea is to keep the other side too afraid of the consequences to launch an attack. The doctrine is known as deterrence.

But to Joe the logic had a terrible hole. We try to preserve our safety by threatening ourselves--and everyone else--with extinction. Our will to survive depends on our willingness to commit nuclear suicide.

Acknowledging the dilemma, the superpowers convened periodic arms talks, haggling about the chessmen on the overcrowded board: removing one, adding two. Then they’d go off and invent new pieces.

It is always the same outmoded game of partisanship and it ignored that: The only defense against the ultimate weapons is no weapons at all. Loving one another has become a practical necessity: love your enemy or die.

Why can’t everyone see that, Joe asked. And when old friends invited him to dinner, that’s the way he steered the conversation: The darn politicians! The stupid generals!

Bill and Mary Ellen Grear could hardly believe this was the same Joe Gump they had known for 30 years. Somehow the clay was wet again, the shape changing.

Bill wondered: Can’t he be satisfied with TV and golf and church on Sunday, like everybody else? And anyway, it’s up to God, not man, to decide whether there will be a nuclear war, Mary Ellen said.

Joe wanted to sell the house. The behavior was all too familiar to the Gump children. Just like Mom: the weekends away, the bleak talk, the secrecy.

Dad was going to get himself arrested, too. “The only question was which religious holiday he’d pick out,” said daughter Marge.

Joe had one in mind. At 5:15 p.m. Central Daylight Time on Aug. 5, 1987, it would be 8:15 a.m., Aug. 6, in Hiroshima, the precise moment of the 42nd anniversary of the bomb.

That same day marked the feast of Transfiguration, when Jesus’ divinity was revealed to his disciples. His face shone, and the Lord said: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

It was then Joe would go to the K-9 missile silo near Butler, Mo., intent on stilling the thermal pulse of the nuclear genie.

Just as his wife had done 16 months before, Joe broke through the chain-link fence around the unguarded silo. He poured blood from baby bottles into the shape of a cross on the concrete. The red turned quickly to brown in the dreary heat. Then he smashed some electrical outlets with a 3-pound hammer and snipped the cables to the alarm system.

The heavy work of pounding on the geared tracks beside the silo’s massive lid was done by Jerry Ebner, 37, who lived in a Catholic Worker house in Milwaukee. He brought along a guitar. They sang hymns when the work was done, waiting to be arrested.

Repair costs amounted to $12,855.01. Their trial took 2 1/2 days. The two defendants, acting as their own attorneys, called no witnesses except themselves. They explained their thinking and then asked this question: Why should disarmament be a crime?

A verdict came back in less than 25 minutes. They had gone downstairs for coffee and were never able to finish. Joe later asked U.S. Judge Howard Sachs “for the harshest sentence that is in your power to give.”

But the judge thought that in these cases longer prison terms only provoke similar crimes. He ordered 30 months time for Joe Gump, 40 for Jerry Ebner.

So be it, Joe said. “I am no longer complicit in the nuclear policy of the country. Whatever else that’s done, it’s not in my name.”

Yet, after all the anxiety, it was over too fast: a few speeches to 12 glum-faced strangers in the jury box. Had any of them understood?

Jerry Ebner scribbled down the jurors’ addresses from the case file. He wrote each a letter. “Even if you thought we were totally wrong, please tell me why,” he asked.

None of them replied. “It’s not my place to answer his letters,” juror Dorothy Cooper, of Kansas City, would explain later. “They knew what they were doing. They knew the law.”

Besides, these men didn’t grasp the realities of the world. “If we lost our missiles, then what?” the juror said. “We’d be defenseless. The Russians would like that, wouldn’t they?”

Prison strips life down to basics: others are free, you are not. Choosing to be there may have once seemed an act of faith, a stand for principle, even a connection with history. But the days go slowly and lash at your decisions.

Jean Gump had four co-defendants. After being locked up, three of them promised to always obey the law and pay for repair of the missile silo. They asked the judge to reduce their sentences and were freed after 10 months.

“Nuclear arsenals are . . . not the only thing to have a claim on my conscience,” reckoned John Volpe, 42. He returned to his wife and three children. He now lives in Upstate New York.

“Maybe it’s better for me to help the poor day to day than devote myself to these big worldwide problems,” concluded Darla Bradley, 25. She works for a poverty program in Chicago.

Ken Rippetoe, 26, was tormented by the way their sentences had been set--six years time and five more if they didn’t pay restitution. “I wasn’t about to stick out another five years for a measly $425,” he said.

And if he was unwilling to do that, then the entire logic of a symbolic action broke into pieces like bold words into a jumble of syllables. He helps out now in his father’s motor parts store in Nashville.

But the Gumps--the grandparents from the suburbs--have stayed on. Is there a more worthwhile way to spend our retirement? they ask. Is there any better work for a Christian?

These days, Joe is a meter reader at the federal facility in Sandstone, Minn. The Gump children have never seen him so relaxed. He has grown a beard and writes poetry. He practices yoga, his body folding flexibly into tantric scythes.

Always before, a certain amount of him had been veneer. “I trained myself to give off an air of competence and ability,” he says. Now he smiles a lot more and proclaims a “wonderful freedom from agendas.”

Jean Gump is in her 27th month, 17 longer than Joe. The officials at the women’s prison in Alderson, W. V., let the two of them talk by phone four times a year. A counselor stays in the room, listening.

She, too, seems tranquil. At the beginning, she had thrown down the gauntlet, telling everyone to be like her. Then she realized people need to work things out in their own way, in their own good time.

Prison is not so bad; she has made friends. “I miss Joe terribly, I’d be floating if we could be in prison together,” she says. “But there are wonderful people here.”

So much of what she knew before has gone topsy-turvy. The stories these women tell! They’ve been pushed around all their lives: too many rotten men, too many bad turns on the road.

Jean is pretty much an anarchist now. She thinks that all institutions--churches or governments--are consumed with trying to hold on to power. Laws cater to society’s elites. Public offices are places of corruption.

And the concept of patriotism, that’s just the state’s way of convincing the masses that war is in their interest: we’re good, others are bad. The truth is, it’s all a ruse for making more money.

Through the centuries, the great wheel turning, people have never learned to care about each other. Now look at the stakes. “We could be gone in a puff,” she says. “Do you trust the men in charge?”

Day to day, her every idea is evolving. In this openness, in this inwardness, possessions have lost meaning. After all, what is really essential? We need fresh air, clean water, warm clothes, nourishing food.

Before Joe was locked up, she told him to sell her engagement ring, and he gave the money to charity. Later, the kids took what they wanted from the house and put out the rest in a yard sale. Sell it all, Jean ordered.

Deep down, maybe the parting wasn’t so easy. What became of Grandma Knudsen’s crystal sugar bowl, Jean wanted to know. And Aunt Florence’s afghan with all those colored squares? And the good cutlery?

So little evades soul-searching. It is like a return to the relentless probing of youth. There you are, always impaled on the question marks. Yet without the burden of the questions there is no way to the answers.

She’s not sure how much of a Catholic she is any more. Surely, she believes people are made in God’s image and in that they are very good. But how much of the rest is just superstition and pious nonsense?

Even so, she meditates each morning, using the Scriptural readings assigned by the church to that day’s Mass. Following that, she works in the prison’s plant nursery.

Some nights, she plays bridge. Or she goes to the pipe ceremonies of the Native American women. They smoke tobacco and chant about harmony in the universe.

Then Jean Gump settles into the bottom bunk of a 6-by-8 foot cell. She lies there through the night, adamant as a missile in a silo, sealed away for now and purposeful always.