Lives of Peace Marchers Change With 5 Years of World Events

Five years ago, 59 San Fernando Valley residents closed up their homes, quit their jobs and marched across the country for nine months in the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament.

The Valley contingent of nuclear weapons protesters was a large part of the 300 hard-core hikers who started March 1, 1986, from the White Oak Recreation Area in Reseda and arrived at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on Nov. 15.

Many participants credit the persistence and support of the Valley group with keeping the march going despite setbacks of icy weather, desert heat and the sudden bankruptcy of the parent organization just 2 1/2 weeks into the march.

About 160 former marchers--including 15 from the Valley group--met for a five-year reunion in Carpinteria. Some came from as far away as Maine, Texas and Hawaii to take part in the anniversary event.

They talked about world changes that have taken place: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of communism and George Bush’s call for nuclear weapon cutbacks. Mostly, they talked about changes in their own lives: marriages, divorces and children.

“I believe we had a little something to do with the world changes,” said one of the reunion’s organizers, Bea Novobilski, 61, who lived for 33 years in Van Nuys before the march but moved to Santa Barbara afterward. “But there are so many personal changes too.”

Some marchers dropped out of the peace movement, and some began their own marches. Many left the Valley, and others settled back into their lives with new priorities.

In the past five years, 12 marchers have died--in car accidents and from cancer, AIDS, suicide and old age. Van Nuys activist Abe Boxerman died at 76 after open-heart surgery while the march was still in progress. His wife, Nahoma, said he wanted to do the peace march before he slowed down.

Liz Marek lived in Canoga Park before the march and moved to Venice before she died on the Pan Am flight that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people. Valley friends collected money to plant a tree in her name at the crash site.

Since the march, participants have had 15 babies, including the son of Karen and Jim Smith, who married on the march and owned property in Sherman Oaks but are now divorced. Jim Smith is now living in Ventura and looking for people to join in a co-op living situation.

When Novobilski left the Valley, she never planned to move back, although her daughter lives in Van Nuys. Novobilski was employed for 22 years as a social worker at Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar and had never walked more than a short Sierra Club hike before the march.

“I read about the march one day when I had a real hard time at the office, and the next day, I told them I was retiring,” Novobilski said. She sold her Van Nuys house and volunteered to wash dishes during the cross-country trek.

Soon after the march, Novobilski said, she fell into a deep depression and was put on antidepressants.

“I lost my family when it ended,” Novobilski said, referring to her fellow marchers. “I was with hundreds of people who were closer to me than my family, and suddenly, I was alone.”

She traveled to France, Turkey, Chile, Easter Island, Venezuela, China, Pakistan and Italy. “Finally,” she said, “I decided I can’t work with the sick, needy or hungry again. I’ve learned I can’t help everyone.”

Novobilski said she’s not ready to volunteer for another cause. “For now, I’m pretty selfish, but that’s my choice.”

In much the same way, Imke Bomer, 41, felt exhausted after the march and needed a rest from the peace movement, but she kept finding herself drawn to it. She sold her house in North Hollywood in 1989 and toured her native Germany, showing slides of the march. She joined 13 other Valley residents on a march through the Soviet Union in 1987 and still cries when she reminisces about the tender moments she shared with the Soviets.

“When I came back, I changed gears, I looked in at myself,” Bomer said. “I was not satisfied with going to an office and making a few bucks.”

Bomer now sells antiques in Santa Monica. “It’s the ultimate recycling,” said Bomer, who also spends time planting trees with TreePeople and raising funds for other peace marches. Her main cause is caring for a 93-year-old friend.

“Sometimes I feel so hopeless for the world, but I pull out of it and go on and do what little I can,” Bomer said. “I’m amazed what other marchers are doing, but I choose not to stick my neck out anymore.”

Charles Davidson, 29, wasn’t sure what he would do after he returned home to San Fernando. “I wanted the march go on,” he said. But to pay debts, he worked at a ski resort in Park City, Utah, and lived out of his car as he tried to sort out his life. He returned to the Valley for six months, he said, but “I couldn’t take it. I didn’t have the spirit connection with people like I did on the march.”

One of his friends on the march, Ken Hess of Glendale, moved to Maui and invited Davidson to visit. They spent two years developing a waste compost plant and community recycling program in Napilihau. Their business makes fertilizer, construction blocks, floor mats, cellulose insulation and fire logs out of trash.

“Neither of us had much business sense, and neither of us knew what we were doing, but we used the organization principles we learned on the march,” said Davidson, who returned with Hess to the reunion and showed newspaper clippings about how the business is supported by residents and civic groups.

“I’ve never considered myself an environmentalist, but we’re doing it,” Davidson said.

One of the youngest marchers, Jesse Looney, now 8, came to the reunion with his mother, Jennifer Lehman, 39. When she left Sherman Oaks five years ago, Lehman never expected to return. Now she’s back, only a few miles away in Burbank, running an acting studio.

“I try to bring the enlightenment and creativity I felt on the march to my classes,” Lehman said. “I try not to politicize my classes, but it creeps in.”

Lehman, like Colleen Ashley, were paid staff members of PRO-Peace, which started the grand-scale national march with 1,400 people. Both volunteered--along with 300 others--to continue to march after PRO-Peace went bankrupt as the marchers crossed the Mojave Desert.

Ashley, 41, said she became so involved in peace activities after she returned that it almost ruined her marriage of 12 years. Her husband, Dennis, a piano tuner, joined her on the march with their 6-year-old daughter, Jessie.

“It was a strain on us because I was in a leadership role throughout the march, involved in all the politics, while he was walking and taking care of the kid,” said Ashley, who moved to Ventura and formed the California Peace March, which traveled from San Diego to the state’s northern border in 1987.

One day while on the cross-country march, “Dennis and I were arguing about something, and we heard Jessie say that Mommy is going to work to take down all the nuclear weapons,” Ashley said. “Suddenly I realized I had this big responsibility. That’s why I had to continue to be involved.”

Since the march, Valley resident Jerome Eisner, 74, has had heart bypass surgery. He remained in the area, moving from Canoga Park to more rural Calabasas, where he is now training to walk the 26-mile Los Angeles Marathon in March.

“The march taught me to get involved,” said Eisner, a retired medical insurance salesman who is still active in peace and environmental causes. “Get involved in anything, just get involved. For me right now, it’s walking four miles a day and keeping physically fit.”

Other marchers who returned to the Valley were Ann and Dick Edelman, who said it took them some time to readjust to their home off Mulholland Drive above Studio City.

“After sleeping in a tent for the good part of a year, it was pretty stuffy to sleep in a bedroom again,” said Dick Edelman, 67.

Edelman, a psychoanalyst, returned to his Beverly Hills practice, but he said he never resumed the same frenzied schedule. “I don’t have the same number of clients I had before the march, but I’m just not committed to that same tense pace.”

Now the Edelmans are not as actively involved in the peace movement.

“It’s so funny how you get bogged down in grocery shopping and little day-to-day things so quickly,” said Ann Edelman, 68, who kept a journal on the march. “I’m not nearly so rigid as I was before. I met people I would not have normally met and learned to appreciate them--young, old, different lifestyles, single parents, people who live in the mountains. I also listen to people closer now.”

After she returned, Ann Edelman gave lectures about the trip, an experience that helped her readjust to normal life.

The Edelmans’ upper-middle-class Valley friends, however, don’t know many details of the couple’s involvement in the peace march. “There’s no point in telling our friends,” Dick Edelman said.

“They just don’t understand. They can’t identify with it,” Ann Edelman added. “And there’s only so many pictures you can show.”

Another couple returned to their Northridge home and started their own monthly peace marches throughout Los Angeles. Mordecai Roth, 71, a retired dentist, went on the Great Peace March and, upon his return, was honored by the Los Angeles City Council for his ongoing involvement in peace activities.

“Something seemed to be missing when we got back,” Roth said. “Everyone in this town seemed so angry. We got disenchanted with L.A.”

Soon after, he married his longtime love, Lenore Gaudin, 58, a nurse who accompanied him on the march, and conducted prenatal classes for pregnant hikers.

Gaudin feared earthquakes, and Roth hated the city, so in 1989, they bought a 31-foot trailer and toured the country to find a town they liked. They picked Sun City, Ariz., with a population of 40,000, and bought a house the size of their Northridge home for $90,000.

“We moved to an ultraconservative retirement community, and sometimes we seem to buck our head against the wall talking to people,” said Roth, who after a sabbatical from the peace movement is now involved in a local peace-and-justice committee. “People are aware of the need for change, but they are very naive.”

Roth rediscovered a talent for sculpting, which he said he hadn’t tried in more than 35 years. He showed off his bronze casting of peace marchers at the reunion.

Gaudin, now a nurse consultant, lectures to women’s and medical groups about the high incidence of infant mortality. “I’m not ready to retire, I still want to have an effect,” Gaudin said. “On the march, we worked harder than we ever have before, and we want to keep that momentum.”

Mim Broderick, 73, of Studio City was also a marcher. Before the event, she said, she was not an activist. Now she is involved in senior citizen rights and abortion rights.

“I’m more vocal now than ever before in my life,” Broderick said. “The march made me learn that each person counts, so I make a conscious effort to compliment people, and they’re so surprised. It doesn’t take much to be nice to people.”

She wonders sometimes if all the blisters she suffered were worth the walk. But, she said, “five years ago, people could hardly pronounce ‘global nuclear disarmament.’ Now the missiles are coming down. Maybe we didn’t turn the world around, but I think our voices were heard.”