Visionary With a 25-Cent Plan for Peace on Earth

I was gnawing on a $6 turkey sandwich the other day at a local eatery--wondering why a turkey sandwich cost $6--when he walked in.

He was at least 6-foot-3, but seemed taller. He had a flowing, handsome gray beard a good foot long and wore a suit with tiny black-and-white checks and a pastoral Panama hat. He moved with stately grace, rather the way I would imagine John Muir moved. Or Aristotle. He looked well into his 70s.

I stopped eating and watched him move from table to table, gently interrupting lunch customers with a baritone entreaty of some sort. At one table, three middle-age secretarial types gave their heads quick, fearful little shakes without making eye contact. At another, a businessman regarded him with surprise, then scowled and shooed him away. At a third table, a lone young woman gave him a brusque “No, thank you.”

I assumed the stranger was asking for spare change. I was debating whether to give him any--that Panama looked new and expensive--as he approached my table. His voice was deep and rich, his manner humble--and somehow benevolent.

“Pardon me, sir,” he said. “Would you like to buy a plan for world peace for 25 cents?”

His hand clutched a few dozen pamphlets.

“Well, sure,” I said. “I think that’s worth a quarter.”

His head dipped and nodded slowly, for emphasis.

“It sure is,” he said.

I gave him a quarter; he thanked me and moved on. I glanced at the pamphlet’s title: “A Prescription for World Peace and Prosperity.” Inside were reprints of letters sent to then-President Reagan, President Bush, former United Nations Secretary General Javier Perez De Cuellar, then-Soviet-President Mikhail Gorbachev and current U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

Each letter explained, in different wording, the author’s plea for--and notions on how to achieve--world peace. The ideas were often inarguable, if short on specifics:

“(We must) stop meddling and interfering in the internal affairs of other nations,” the author wrote to Reagan.

The letter to Bush read: “The function of national government is prosperity with happy, healthy, industrious families in a cooperative international family of nations.” (The President might have done well to pay attention to that prosperity stuff.)

To Perez De Cuellar, the author cryptically noted: “I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting.”

He wrote to Gorbachev: “There is nothing basically wrong with a human being or nation that a little adjustment will not correct, but we have to be willing to adjust.”

And he advised Boutros-Ghali: “Fear should not be our motive in thinking, acting and destiny.”

Each letter was signed “Stanley Arthur Grovom,” which, I assume, was the name of the gray-bearded stranger. I looked up just in time to see the manager of the restaurant confront him and suggest he take his pamphlets elsewhere. You know-- Get lost! We don’t want any of that world peace crap around here!

I made a note to stop eating there.

And I sat wondering about the stranger as I watched him lope off through a parking lot and disappear around a corner down his own private highway. I wondered if he really knew war as few other men and how that experience apparently had induced him, in his twilight years, to turn into a Johnny Appleseed of world peace pamphlets.

I remembered another guy who had approached me, many years earlier, with a similar theme. It was on a brisk, wind-swept day in 1979--during the holiday season, in fact--in Santa Monica’s Palisades Park, high above the choppy blue Pacific. He was a bright-eyed imp of a man in a beige suit and brown tie who introduced himself merrily as “Victor Uman, the Celestial Visitor From the Planet ‘Wisdom.’ ” He had spied my notebook.

“Are you writing down the great inspirations for future generations?” Victor asked, standing in that edge-of-the-world strip of quiet and repose. “You know, my friend, when you make your work a pleasure, life will yield its greatest treasure.”

Victor was also a good 70, although he gave his age as “between 20 and 150.” He spoke mostly in rhyme. “My slogan for today’s time is ‘Stop crying, but never stop trying!’ ” he said, and, “ ‘May it be a time of reason, in every land and season! May higher ethics evolve, for every problem to solve.’ ”

Victor gave me a cassette titled “The Celestial Visitor From the Planet ‘Wisdom,’ ” which contained a skit he had written about the day the world achieved permanent harmony, and his “Seven-Point Message for Building the Peace of Mankind.” He left me there amid those seemingly deathless palm trees, declaring: “If you can make every day Thanksgiving/Then you can enjoy living./For a thankful soul/Attains a most harmonious goal!” And he disappeared down his own private highway.

I remembered yet another time, when my friend Bernie and I ran into a salty-looking, white-bearded old guy on the Huntington Beach Pier one night. One look at us and the old boy seemed compelled to speak. The scene reminded me of a verse from Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

I pass, like night, from land to land

I have strange power of speech

The moment that his face I see

I know the man that must hear me

to him my tale I teach

This ancient mariner regaled us with nothing less than a lecture. He must have spoken for a half-hour. The topic? I suppose you could say it was “world affairs.” He was clever and bitter. The recurrent theme with which he knit the lecture’s salient points together was the word rat . As he acerbically, even poetically, assailed all that was wrong with the world (greed, chiefly, was his target), he would somehow always manage to get back to the word rat .

The most spectacular example: He was cursing domination by power-grubbers, using the blanket label “royalty.” “Royalty!” I remember him shouting, a craggy finger pointing toward the dark ocean, “ Roy-Al-Ty . . . Roy ! Al ! Ty !--take the first letter of each syllable, and what have you got? Rat! Rat !”

They all stood together in my mind--Appleseed, who had interrupted my turkey sandwich with wishes of world peace, the Celestial Visitor and his message of long ago, the Ancient Mariner and his dissertation on rat .

In the poem, the Ancient Mariner is cursed to spread a message that boils down to “be kind to animals” because he had once, on a whim, fired an arrow into an albatross. I pondered the albatrosses that had led these men to spend their last years bestowing messages of empathy and cooperation on strangers.

I thought it would be nice to somehow send them a message back for their efforts and concern, especially on behalf of all those people who never listen to them, never buy their pamphlets, who frown and shoo them away or kick them out of restaurants. That message, I think, would be “thanks.”

And although I concluded that buying a pamphlet for a quarter probably wouldn’t really have much of an impact on world peace, I figured that at least it might help keep one good-hearted old gentleman in sunny Panama hats.