Operation Goliath wanted to make a big noise, so it took its anti-abortion protests to little Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. But under the onslaught of outsiders, resentful residents united in their opposition to the demonstrations. : A Town Stands Fast

They weren’t making much headway in the big cities.

They descended on abortion clinics in Wichita, Kan., New York City and, most recently, Buffalo, N.Y. for prolonged periods, but theirs was just another voice in a chorus of urban malcontents.

So anti-abortion activists decided to pick a town, any town, where they could be a big noise--a sonic boom in a silent river valley.

Two years ago, they came to Dobbs Ferry. They called themselves Operation Goliath.

Says Tom Herlihy, who abandoned electrical engineering in 1984 to crusade full time against “baby killing”: “We decided to make it the place.”

And they did.

The protesters came Saturdays and Tuesdays to this village on the Hudson River, seven miles north of New York City. They picketed the Women’s Medical Pavilion, the only place where doctors perform abortions in the village. They offered “counsel” to dozens of women attempting to slip past them on the sidewalk. They went through telephone books, mailing residents postcards covered with pictures of dismembered fetuses. And they picketed a Roman Catholic church, even during funerals.

But the crusaders’ most consistent activity--almost every Saturday--was to block the gates to the parking lot and front door of the clinic, a nondescript office complex on busy Ashford Avenue. And if they weren’t dragged off to jail, they’d end the Saturday vigil by marching the quarter mile from the clinic to the heart of Main Street, chanting and waving photos of bloody fetus skulls.

“Our purpose was to bring abortion to Main Street and get the people to rise up and join us,” says Herlihy.

So they came to this unsuspecting little place to make a stand, at first bewildering the town, then panicking it--and, in the end, angering it.

Ultimately, Main Street stayed home.

Out-of-the-way Dobbs Ferry was caught up--and remains tangled--in one of the most divisive issues in America. After hundreds of arrests and dozens of traffic jams and disrupted weekends, the residents of this bedroom community of 10,000 have come to realize there is no quieting the zealous, no deflecting the demonstrations.

Not only have the anti-abortion forces invaded the town, but they also have caused the village to raise taxes, costing the average taxpayer an extra $35 a year.

But Mayor Donald Marra insists the protesters have failed on one critical level: They have not split the community apart.

“There are plenty of people in this town who are pro-life and probably as many who are pro-abortion,” says Marra. “But without a doubt, there’s not a person in Dobbs Ferry who is not now anti-demonstration.”

On that, he adds, “There is unanimity.”

The cops couldn’t handle the crusaders at first.

This is a town where a crime wave consists of more than one stolen car on a summer weekend and where the police chief can count on one hand the number of murders since he came on the force--34 years ago.

“Four,” says Chief Frank Perilli, “four murders in 34 years.”

But Operation Goliath, the weekend activists in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area who are determined to wipe out abortion in Dobbs Ferry, has changed the modest crime record.

In the last four years, there have been 1,000 arrests, and to show for it, Perilli has four metal file cabinets devoted to the records. (The previous 50 years of police records fit into a single cabinet.)

During the first massive demonstration in June, 1988, Perilli, then a lieutenant, arrested 174 people.

“I signed every arrest form myself, not realizing I would have to identify all 174 people in court. It was a mess. There were only five people found guilty because I could only identify five of 174. The rest got thrown out,” says Perilli, laughing.

But the 22-man, one-woman police force learned the routine, seeking help from departments around Westchester County. And at each successive demonstration, they became more professional.

They learned to videotape each arrest, both for identification purposes and to prevent brutality claims; they’ve also invested in 100 pairs of handcuffs and color-coded them according to various charges. They became so savvy about handling protesters who refuse to give their names that police elsewhere now send them photos of protesters known to travel nationwide fighting abortion.

If there’s an unlikely star in all this it is Bobby McNicholas, the town mechanic who developed an expertise at picking locks and cracking open the most complex devices fashioned by the protesters to chain themselves together. McNicholas has become so renowned for taking apart Kryptonite bicycle locks that Chief Perilli had a video made of him in action. As of this week, 27 police departments, from California to Florida, have requested copies.

“It’s been a lot of hard work, carrying limp people from early morning to late night, getting through the locks, having people on both sides scream in your face,” says Det. Bob Cunningham. “But we had a job to do, and we did it. Whether we’re against abortion isn’t the point.”

Despite the arrests, the uproar and the successful closure of the clinic at least half a dozen times, Tom Herlihy concedes Operation Goliath has failed in its goal “to arouse the villagers to stop the killing.” But, he adds, it has forced them to choose sides.

“The purpose we have is to dramatize the struggle,” says Herlihy, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., as he often does. “We felt this community had turned its back on a horrible moral eyesore, equivalent to a toxic waste dump, and we believed if we made enough noise, at least the Catholics would see it.”

In fact, parishioners at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, a few blocks from the clinic on busy Ashford Avenue, had seen it since it opened 21 years ago. Several had complained to the then-mayor and the Village Board of Trustees but got nowhere. For years, they spent weekends holding silent prayer vigils at the clinic. But when outsiders--mostly organized by Operation Rescue, the nationwide anti-abortion group--started coming to Dobbs Ferry, the locals stayed home.

Sacred Heart’s pastor, Father Terry Attridge, has been reviled by the protesters for not joining them. But he says he felt the protests didn’t solve any problems and, in fact, created them.

“I’m against violence,” says Attridge, “and there’s emotional violence when you show fetal parts to young children or people parked at a light in front of the clinic.”

Like the pastor, a young Dobbs Ferry mother who brought her toddler one day last week to a park across from the clinic says she abhors abortion for religious reasons but would never “throw myself in front of the clinic like that.”

“Everything about Operation Goliath repulses me,” she says, asking to remain anonymous. “They don’t really care about life. They stop traffic near a hospital. They pass out a plastic fetus with its arm and head ripped off, around the elementary school. They run commando raids. Their war zone is our precious neighborhood. They can go to hell!”

Herlihy, who at 44 has a toddler himself, says that people like the young mother focus on “perceived inconveniences rather than the problem of children being killed.

“I wish these people had been aroused on the other side, but they haven’t been, in part because of the press reaction to us,” he says. “The people of Dobbs Ferry have been bombarded with articles about what nuts we are.

“But,” he quickly adds, “we’ve at least done one thing: We’ve shown the town that there is an abortion mill and you can’t turn your back on it. This is a 15-round fight, and this is only the second round. We’ll be there indefinitely. You can come back in 5 or 10 years and do another story, because we’ll still be in Dobbs Ferry.”

At last Saturday’s protest, however, there were fewer than two dozen people picketing in the cold and rain. They included the four freckled-faced Winter kids, ages 3 to 13, who came with their grandparents; Kerry Babcock, 37, who left her five children in New Jersey to “sidewalk counsel,” and Dan Brewster, a 30ish Manhattan financial consultant who hasn’t missed a weekend in Dobbs Ferry in years.

After the march to Main Street, Brewster was leading the others in prayer when a man whizzed by Village Hall in his van and screamed obscenities out the window.

“What we’re doing is part of the great American tradition that goes back to the Boston Tea Party,” Brewster explains. “People who try to shout us down just don’t get that.”

The drive-by outburst is not unprecedented, but it’s also not typical.

Unlike in Buffalo, where abortion advocates have generally outnumbered abortion foes recently, the vast majority of people in Dobbs Ferry have avoided confrontation with the Goliath protesters.

Many citizens felt the tension between free speech and the freedom of women to maintain their privacy, and didn’t want to get in the middle. Others simply didn’t want to be reduced to “screaming back,” says Magda McCarthy, among the founders of the Our Town, Our Choice Committee, which was formed to squelch the anti-abortion crusade.

McCarthy was swept into the effort after her 6-year-old daughter came home excitedly one day and said, “Mommy, they’re killing babies near the park!” Apparently a protester had stopped the little girl and told her this.

“I was so outraged,” says McCarthy, who had just moved from Baltimore to Dobbs Ferry because her husband had a new job in Manhattan.

McCarthy, who labels herself “pro-choice,” says the Our Town, Our Choice Committee tried to get the Village Board to pass a resolution to contain the protesters, by either controlling their numbers or keeping them farther from the clinic. But the board didn’t want to get into a protracted constitutional battle in court.

The committee kept pressing and eventually board members approved a resolution condemning the protests and supporting Roe vs. Wade, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court abortion decision. The committee also put together an 800-signature petition and had it published. But just as the protesters seem to be spent, McCarthy says, “we’re tired too.”

The taxpayers of Dobbs Ferry are also spent in other ways: Last week the village board passed a $6-million budget with a $50,000 line item for police overtime and court costs resulting from Operation Goliath.

The previous year, it approved a $130,000 budget to fight Goliath, although less than half was spent.

“I’d much rather be spending that $50,000 on a five new basketball courts or repaving a street,” says Marra.

The 43-year-old mayor, an industrial arts teacher by profession, grew up in Dobbs Ferry and laughs when he’s told that Goliath was called “the most exciting thing to happen to Dobbs Ferry since the American Revolution.”

Although his family doesn’t date that far back here, his great-grandfather came from Italy to Dobbs Ferry in 1893 to work in the gardens of the great Hudson River estates, and Marra grew up on the grounds of one of those estates, where his father also was a gardener.

“It was so wonderful for me growing up in such a diverse but cohesive town with so many different types of people,” Marra says. “It’s really what Dobbs Ferry prides itself on the most--and really what held us together through this whole thing.”

Marra, who has been on the Board of Trustees since 1982, became mayor in 1989. Shortly afterward came the call to arms to ardent abortion opponents nationwide to target Dobbs Ferry. The town was bracing for 4,000 to 6,000 protesters, probably an exaggerated number. In addition, the mayor’s home phone and address were published in national Operation Rescue literature, and he was overwhelmed with mailings and calls. The protesters even made huge signs insisting he be excommunicated.

“That personal part was the hardest,” Marra says. “But I never got an unlisted number.”

And in the same way, Marra says, the village stood firm. Although Dr. Steven Kaali, who owns the clinic, is not a popular figure in Dobbs Ferry, Marra insists that not one voter has urged him to kick the doctor out of town. Kaali, who was not available for comment, has received bomb and death threats and his home in Greenwich, Conn., has been picketed. He once was arrested for throwing liquefied horse manure at two protesters demonstrating near his home.

Randi Fallor, who was director of the Kaali’s clinic for six years and who recently left to raise her own child, says that no amount of harassment will drive Kaali out of Dobbs Ferry.

“If he was even wavering a little bit, seeing the solidarity in the community will probably keep him there,” Fallor says.

She also says the number of abortions performed weekly at the clinic--about 50--remains the same.

“People think women are sucked into abortion,” Fallor says. “That’s what Operation Goliath wants you to believe. But in Dobbs Ferry there is a will, and we provide them with the way.”