ROCKY FLATS ACTIVISTS. (Speakers include: LeRoy Moore, Kim Grant, Patrick Malone, Judy Danielson, Eric Wright, Harvey Nichols, Anne Waldman, Jan Pilcher, Pat McCormick)
Transcript of OH 1441A-B
This event was recorded on October 28, 2006, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program and the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum. A video of the event is available for viewing at the Carnegie Library, 1125 Pine St., Boulder, Colorado, filmed by Hannah Nordhaus. The interview was transcribed by Sandy Adler.
NOTE: Added material appears in brackets. The event was filmed outside on a very windy day. The wind, which comes and goes, sometimes interferes with the sound.
ABSTRACT: This recording documents an event held on October 28, 2006, on the site of the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant at which the teepee, which stood on the Rocky Flats railroad tracks during the year-long 1978 protest, was donated for use in the proposed Rocky Flats Cold War Museum. Activists who worked for the closure of Rocky Flats through many different approaches (civil disobedience, scientific studies, community organizing, governmental pressure, etc.) gathered at this October 2006 event for an afternoon of songs, speeches, and donations of money and artifacts for the museum.
[A].
00:00 [LeRoy Moore:] My name is LeRoy Moore. I work with the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. I also am on the board of the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum, which is in the process of being created. As you drove in here, perhaps you noticed back over that way, right where you turn to come in this way from the main entrance on the west gate of Rocky Flats, you passed a sign on a piece of land over there that says that is where we intend one day to build the building of the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum. The museum has the mission of telling the whole story, remembering the whole story of Rocky Flats. Part of that, of course, is what happened in the buildings that used to be visible over there but have recently all been taken down as part of the Kaiser Hill/Department of Energy project to clean up the site of the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. It was at Rocky Flats, in those buildings over there, that the plutonium pit, or the explosive plutonium core, of all nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal were manufactured.
One of the pieces of the story that the museum intends to tell is, of course, what happened there, on that site, with the people that were doing that work. Another piece of the story that the museum intends to remember and that we are especially acknowledging today, is the activity of people who resisted the activity that was going on inside the factory. One of the famous moments in the resistance of Rocky Flats was the occupation of railroad tracks leading into the factory. Just a few feet beyond where we are, there’s a railroad spur that cuts across, and that spur used the have an additional spur that led directly into the buildings of the factory it self.
Beginning in April 1978 and continuing for just about a year, there was a sustained civil disobedience blockade of the railroad tracks leading into the Rocky Flats plant. That’s a memorable event to me because I had moved to Colorado in 1974 to teach at the University of Denver, and I did not even know Rocky Flats existed. I had been paying attention to nuclear weapons, and to Gandhian methods of nonviolent resistance, but it was not until beginning in April ’78 that some people sat on the tracks at Rocky Flats. When they were removed from the tracks and arrested, others came and took their place. And that pattern of repeated replacement and continued civil disobedience went on for about a year, sometimes referred to as the “year of disobedience.” That’s how I learned about Rocky Flats.
I walked out of the academic world and into the activist world. I began to volunteer for the American Friends Service Committee, which you’ll hear more about later, at that time. I had no idea that I was starting a whole new career. [chuckles] But I did. Rocky Flats has become a second career for me. I’ve been working on the issue pretty steadily since that time.
In that period, 1978-79—turn around and look over there. See that skeleton of a teepee there behind you? You all saw it, probably, as you came in with the flags waving high. That is actually the skeleton of the teepee that sat on the tracks at Rocky Flats for about nine months during that twelve-month period that I referred to. That teepee was put on the tracks. It became the kind of most visible symbol of that long-time civil disobedience resistance in that year, and people driving along the highway here could see that the resistance on the tracks was still going because that teepee was there and they could see it from the road. It was not so far from here and it was a good bit further south, beyond highway 72, for a good bit of that time.
Unfortunately today, I have to explain this to you, it’s a little bit windy at Rocky Flats today, [laughter] and therefore the person to whom—who is donating, presenting this teepee as an artifact to the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum, and the museum has many artifacts, we have a lot of artifacts from the buildings that were part of the factory, and they’re stored in some storage lockers behind this building. We are today receiving artifacts from people that were involved in the resistance activities, and in particular the teepee from Patrick Malone. Patrick Malone, the person who is presenting the teepee today, came here from Atlanta, Georgia, and he’s going to talk about his experience back in 1978-79. Patrick is a native of Denver who now lives in Atlanta, Georgia. So welcome, Patrick Malone. Thank you. [applause]
06:23 [Patrick Malone:] Ho! Mitakuye Oyasin! All my relations! Thank you for the wind! We couldn’t do it without you. Long ago and far away, well, just a little ways down there, I was born in Englewood with my six brothers and sisters. Let me tell you something: when I was about 18 years old, we went to Washington Park to have a birthday celebration for my grandmother, who was turning about 95. We had 300 people there, and 200 of them lived in Denver—and their children are still here. That’s how I got here. If you look far enough out there, about 60 miles, when I got out of high school, Cherry Creek High School, in 1968, I lived on a ranch at the very edge of this Platte, the Platte Valley here. So I graduated from here. Then I went on to Colorado State University, where I took Protest 101.
Protest 101 was sit-ins. Hey, all you gotta do is sit in! Joan Baez came in, we took over the student center. I thought, “Hey, this is easy. I should be able to do this.”
Well, then, I went to the University of Colorado in Denver in the late ‘60s. Now, hey, they had Protest 200, man, let me tell you. We learned how to do a lot of protesting there. Later on— actually what happened is, that was the first place I ever ran for president. I ran for student body president, and in 1974 I was the College of Engineering senator. So yes, I’ve had much legislative experience.
I know what radiation is like. Is there anybody else here that knows what radiation’s like? I was a non-destructive testing radiographer. What that means is, I was like a super dental hygienist. I would take x-rays of metal with radioactive isotopes that came a out at a hundred curies. Oh! Ready? Oh! A hundred curies is pretty hot, let me tell you. We could go through two inches of metal in 30 minutes and get—
[LeRoy Moore:] Speak more into the mic. Some people can’t hear you. Hold it up there and speak right into it. People in the back can’t hear you.
[Patrick Malone:] People can’t hear me? Oh, that’ll be a first! I didn’t like that experience. Let me tell you something. I didn’t like the experience of using radioisotopes, because it was a very strange experience, let me tell you something. When I first came here in 1977, we had done a run out from Boulder. I think it was the fall of ’77. I had a real interesting experience. I hitchhiked from Colorado Springs, and I got a ride with a uranium miner. So I showed up at the west gate with three ounces of uranium ore. Boy, I’m glad they didn’t have a Geiger counter that day!
10:01 So when I came out here in 1978, I was working with Rocky Flats Action Group. I was a member of that organization in those days. I came to the west gate here and was handing out leaflets. We were selling buttons, bumper stickers, and tee-shirts with Environment Action Reprint Service, which later became Resource Service, a group called EARS. I did solar conferences and anti-nuke conferences with them for a couple of years, actually, up to that.
My friend Ben, somebody called him up and said, “Hey, you know, they did this occupation and now it’s over. We’re gonna do it again. You wanna go? You wanna go? You wanna go?” I said, “Hey, all right, let’s do it!” So when I came out on the second occupation was when they had the super-snowstorm, does that sound familiar, like, a couple of days ago? Boy, I thought that was funny. So I started in the beginning of May, and there was something about these railroad tracks. When I hit the railroad tracks, I thought, “You know, this is a crazy place to live. It’s just crazy. I mean, how many people do that? I don’t know anybody. Anybody have friends ever live on railroad tracks?” I thought, “Hey, this is cool.”
So when we started doing it, I thought, “This is something very different. Let’s just stick with this for a while.” So I decided to take a couple years off, turned out to be five years, and I decided to become a professional protester because, well, I couldn’t get the government to give me any money, and I couldn’t get the Russians to give me any money for being a protester, so I decided to sell buttons, bumper stickers, and tee-shirts with EARS, which I did for five years, and I made a lot of money doing that. I made at least $2,000 a year. [laughter] That’s a good living, man, let me tell you!
We did this, we did that. It was about June of ’78. I’d gotten arrested again. We had moved into the teepee somehow. I thought, “Wow, this is a perfect non-Euclidean solution to a geometric problem! Wow! Parallel lines intersecting in space. Wow! This is cool!” And all I had to do was sit down, a couple times get arrested. It was a little bit cold, a little bit windy. I went on tour in 1978, to the East Coast. I met a monk, a bald-headed dude, wears a saffron robe. Anybody remember him? That’s Sawada. I brought Sawada here. He was a good guy. I loved Sawada. We had some really cold times. I invited some people from Seabrook who rode bicycles from Boston, Massachusetts to Denver, Colorado. They were called the Solar Rollers. I had good luck. I was able to get enough people to come out and hang out, month in, month out.
Next thing I knew, it was December. I’d been arrested a few times. We were in court. We were driving back and forth. I thought, This is goofy. I’m getting up at the tracks. I’m committing a crime. I’m going to the courtroom and we’re talking about it right then and right there. It was like being in three dimensions at once. And I will tell you very mildly, it changed my life the first time I got arrested. As a matter of fact, I recommend that to anybody! And if you’d like, talk to me later, I think I can find some place where you can get arrested. When you get arrested, you are changing yourself, and that’s what we did to people here. We changed them. We made a change in their life. We gave them an experience that changed them for the rest of their lives. A lot of people said I was never normal after that, and they’re right. I haven’t been normal since then. I don’t think of things in the same way.
I got arrested here 10 times. It was wild, let me tell you. I did about six months in jail. I did six weeks, the hardest six weeks I did was in protective custody after one of the inmates tried to kill me. Of course, I don’t know, the system got their revenge. He and his brother later took the electric chair for other crimes they had committed. I got arrested about 10 times other places, couple times in Boulder. The last four times I was arrested was two here in 1983. I did Vandenberg in 1983 and I did Livermore Lab in ’83. I did that with Dan Ellsberg and his wife Patricia. I was changed. Lots of people are changed when they do things like this.
15:35 Now, you know, Denver has become a museum mecca. I hear you just built a really groovy museum here. I hear they’re gonna build another one right here, and they’re gonna have something that never happened in human history. That teepee represents something. That teepee represents the only time in human history when anybody put a teepee on a railroad tracks, anywhere, in any time. That’s it. I mean, how much more special can you get? Only time in human history. We don’t think it’s going to happen again. Hey, that sounds like a museum item to me. How about you? You guys want a museum? [applause]
I come from Atlanta. I live in Atlanta now. They’ve got a bunch of museums there. The Coke company has just recently donated that much land, except that much land is worth $2 million in Atlanta. They’re building another civil rights museum. What we’re building here is a museum that represents both sides of the coin: the workers inside and the movement. Because Rocky Flats was the trigger for the weapons industry. Rocky Flats was the trigger for the protest movement in 1978. We helped this thing get going. The tracks occupation gathered people, stimulated people so much that they went, “Wow! That’s cool! Let’s go do this! Let’s go do that!”
One of the things that Dan Ellsberg, when we talk, he talks about the hundred doors concept. He says, “You get a hundred people knocking on a hundred doors, talking about a hundred different things—” that’s what “movement” is all about. You don’t need a hundred people doing the same thing all the time. That’s just a bunch of people doin’ the same thing. Everybody here has their own personal motivations for why they were here, or why they’re here today, why they do whatever they do. And I want you to keep that sanctity. It’s your right to have a heart.
Now, I am very much for this, and as a matter of fact, the Rocky Flats Truth Force had a meeting at the old Mother’s Café this morning. They call it Dot’s, but we called it Mother’s. And those Rocky Flats trackees decided—well, where’s your hand? Raise your hand! Trackee! Oh, there he was! We had a meeting this morning and we pledged a thousand dollars to this. And not only that, I pledge that in the next year, I will try to help raise a million and a half dollars for this. Our half—the peace movement is going to contribute half of this—I will work until this thing is built if I gotta come out here and build it myself. To tell you the truth, we could do pretty well with just a bunch of teepees and put out little—I’d like to see a glovebox in the teepee, wouldn’t that be cool? Can we get one and put it out there? That would be pretty cool. [laughter]
Everybody kept saying, “You’re not stopping the train! You’re not stopping the train!” Well, I didn’t think we were gonna stop the train there. I didn’t think we were gonna close that. But I’ll tell you what: I enjoyed doing what I was doing. It made me feel good. And you know where it made me feel good? Right here. Because what I found out was, the heart is mightier than the sword. Yes, the heart is mightier than the sword. We were out here not with nuclear weapons or tank grenade launchers or nothing. As a matter of fact, we didn’t even like chains in those days. We were out here because we felt it was important to take our heart and put it right out there and say, “No, we don’t think nuclear weapons are a viable form of military strategy. We don’t think nuclear weapons are a viable form of using taxpayer money.”
20:05 I talked to somebody today, we had solar collectors on the teepee at one time! Ha ha! Can you believe that? In 1978 we had solar collectors on the teepee, and they had just ripped them off the White House! I want to encourage people to go to your local museum, because the next thing you know, this will be your local museum. This will be where you can come and you can do something like I did today. I’m out here with workers from Rocky Flats helping put up a teepee.
I think that we can work together and show our children—oh, by the way, I have five children. My youngest kid is ten years old. My oldest one’s 36. I don’t know, I just can’t say no. I want my children to live in a place where they’re not scared to death. We were scared to death of the nuclear war. I don’t want that to happen again. I don’t want to be scared to death of terrorism. I think this war stuff needs to have a little turnaround. Matter of fact, I heard there was a peace movement gonna happen.
Now, I’m gonna unofficially say something that no one’s gonna hear, but I heard that later on today that there were gonna be people who kind of went down and went to the tracks. And we may start off by just doin’ somethin’ as simple as sittin’ down. Now if you want to do something really complicated, you can lay down. You could lay down, put your head on one rail, put your feet on the other. And I will tell you something, that is an experience that will change you for the rest of your life. [whispers] And there may even be a teepee there! [applause]
22:08 [Kim Grant:] Thank you, Patrick. Thank you all for coming today. Good afternoon. I’m Kim Grant. I’m the president of the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum. I’m really pleased that you came out today to share in this special event. On Wednesday night when Patrick came to town and it snowed like it did, I was kind of worried about today, but I had to remind myself of that old Colorado maxim that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a day and it’ll change. It certainly did. And besides, I told myself, many of today’s participants didn’t let a little snow slow them down 28 years ago, now, did they?
Before I turn to today’s events, I’d like to back up just a little and speak to you about the museum and its purpose. The Rocky Flats Cold War Museum is an outgrowth of a project that was initiated in 1999 by the city of Arvada, for whom I work. At that time it became apparent that both the physical plant of Rocky Flats itself as well as the stories of the people who worked there and protested it were in danger of being lost. Sadly, many of those folks have already left the area or passed on. So it’s partly to their memory, then, that our efforts are dedicated.
The museum effort formally incorporated in June 2001 as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. We felt that maintaining our independence was crucial to telling the often controversial story in a fair and balanced way. At times that independence and commitment to the full story has rubbed some people the wrong way, but from the professional, historical, and museum perspective, it’s the right thing to do.
Of course, to do so we need a diverse board reflective of the many people, points of view, and experiences associated with Rocky Flats. Toward that end we’ve recruited people who administered and worked at the plant, who protested the plant, who wrote about it from a journalistic and academic point of view, and who lived in the communities that surrounded the former plant site. We’ve also for the most part enjoyed the cooperation of the U.S. Department of Energy and Kaiser Hill Corporation, who oversaw the dismantling and decommissioning of the plant. That process unfolded a lot quicker than we all thought it would. What that created was an imperative to act quickly to preserve artifacts and stories before they disappear forever. Let me share with you a little of what we’ve accomplished in those areas.
24:54 We have collected four large cargo containers—roughly the size of railroad boxcars— full of artifacts from the former plant site. We’ve collected thousands of photographs, paper documents, and related ephemera documenting the history of the site, including prehistory and cleanup. We’ve completed 90 professionally filmed, transcribed, and archived oral histories of former plant workers, community activists, and government officials. That project was funded in part by a grant from the State Historical Fund of the Colorado Historical Society, for which we are grateful. I’d also like to acknowledge that the project was done in conjunction with the Maria Rogers Oral History Program at the Carnegie Branch for Local History at the Boulder Public Library. We want to thank them for everything they’ve done to help make those oral histories possible.
We’ve also completed a feasibility and scoping study conducted by nationally recognized museum consultants that helped us shape the possibilities for a museum. We also conducted, again with the help of the State Historical Fund, an architectural assessment of the historic Lindsay Ranch property, which is a couple miles that way on the former plant site, that led DOE and the Fish and Wildlife Service to do some immediate stabilization work that would allow us in the future to use that ranch as part of the interpretive efforts on the plant site.
And recently—and perhaps most importantly—we received a conditional donation of 1.4 acres of land right over here from board member and long-time rancher, developer, and property owner Charlie McKay. This donation is conditional on us being substantially ready to develop the site by January 2008. And we’ve also been involved in the formation of a national nuclear and Cold War-themed museum and visitor network among former and present DOE plant sites. It’s called the MSVC Net, and the purpose of it is “to advise DOE on the preservation of its own legacy and cultural heritage.”
All of these accomplishments are fairly impressive, and we’re proud of the dedicated people— mostly volunteers—who have made it possible.
I’d like to take just a moment to recognize board members who are in attendance. If you’re a board member, raise your hand, please. [applause] Thank you. I’d also like to turn very briefly to the mission and vision of the proposed museum, and then we’ll get on with the body of the program.
The mission, as LeRoy alluded to, is to document the historical, environmental, and scientific legacy of Rocky Flats and to educate the public about Rocky Flats, the Cold War, and their legacies through preservation of key artifacts and the development of interpretive and educational programs. The vision of the museum is to develop our 1.4-acre site over there into a 15,000-square-foot scientific and technology-oriented museum with interactive hands-on displays and engaging education programs and symposia. We hope to introduce thousands of school children, Cold War scholars, and the general public to the history of the site, including its prehistory, geology, and wildlife resources, and of course the role the plant played in the larger cold war in the nuclear age—which we all know didn’t stop with the end of the Cold War. And we hope to cooperate with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Energy, including the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council, on which we are represented, in the development of this vision.
To get there, however, we need a lot of help and support from folks like you and a lot of other people. To begin with, we need more artifacts, and that’s part of what today’s events are about. If you have them, or know how to get hold of them, please let us know. We have people who will help you fill out a donor form for your artifacts under the tents so that we can properly document them and thank you for it. We have started to acquire some things already.
If you don’t have them with you, please let us know how we can get hold of you so that we can contact you and take possession of your items. In addition, we obviously need your financial support. Patrick, thank you for your generous pledge and commitment to help us raise funds. Because without that, it isn’t going to happen. Inside your booklet—mine just blew away a minute ago—on the other side of the program is a donor pledge card for use in making a financial contribution to the museum. Please consider doing so. And again, we have people here under the tents later who will take your check and your pledge card when you’re ready to make that commitment. But please do so. Time is of the essence. If we’re to meet the challenge of our conditional donation and leverage some possible federal support, we need to raise $3–$4 million over the next 15 months or so. This is a tall order, but one that’s doable. And while you’re at it, please contact your Congressional representative, and let him or her know of your support and interest in this project.
Again, thank you so much for coming today. I’d like to invite LeRoy Moore back up here to introduce some very special guests. Thank you. [applause]
30:46 [LeRoy Moore:] Are you able to hear still, I hope? I’m very, very pleased to see some people out there that I haven’t seen in such a long, long time. And I’m glad to see people that I saw yesterday. All of you are really welcome here today.
I had a conversation just a few days ago with Anne Guilfoile. Is Anne here? I’m not sure she is. Are you here, Ann? I don’t see you, anyway. She was telling me that in 1969, she and others had a demonstration here at the west gate of Rocky Flats. That’s one of the earliest that I’ve heard of. I think I heard of one other that maybe consisted of three people in 1968. But it’s kind of amazing, because not many people knew what was going on at Rocky Flats, that it was a nuclear bomb factory, part of a whole complex of such factories around the country that produced nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal. Not many people knew about it. It was found out around that time by many.
One of the first people that I met when I just got involved with the Rocky Flats work was a young woman who was working with the American Friends Service Committee, a national organization with an office in Denver. That organization played such a key role for such a very long time—from the early ‘60s until after production halted at Rocky Flats—played such a key role in focusing on nuclear disarmament issues and environmental and health issues having to do with Rocky Flats. I’m going to introduce you to Judy Danielson, who will talk to you about the beginning of that work with the American Friends Service Committee. Judy! [applause] Where’s Judy? I know she’s here somewhere. Ah, here she is! Judy is the purple lady today.
33:27 [Judy Danielson:] I just donated my precious tee-shirts. In 1972, Pam Solo and I were hired to be American Friends Service Committee staff in Denver. We were looking for ways to connect locally to American Friends Service Committee’s national campaign to stop production of the B-1 bomber. Dr. John Cobb, a professor at the CU medical school who was on our committee, suggested the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant because Rockwell, maker of the B-1 bomber, was bidding to manage Rocky Flats.
Pam and I had both been part of an earlier action where we went out to neighborhoods near Rocky Flats and knocked on doors and asked if we could spoon some soil and leaves from their backyards into our baggies. We said we would present suitcases of these soil samples— [discussion about the wind and the microphone]
We said we’d present suitcases of these soil samples—[continued discussion about microphone problems] to candidates running for Congress that year and ask them to have the soil tested. [there is a section that cannot be heard] ____ and notify the residents of the results. They were very glad to let us into their yards to collect samples. ___ of NCAR ___ been published ___ radionuclides in the soil all around the metro area, presumably from large fires that had taken place at Rocky Flats in 1957 and ’69. The plant was shrouded in secrecy since it was built in 1954, and it was just beginning to come to light.
Dr. John Cobb ___ Steelworkers Local ___ Rocky Flats right away. He told us about their safety concerns ___. They also were concerned that their jobs be protected. This led us to contacts with Colorado unions, and we began to talk about conversion of the jobs at Rocky Flats, not just closing the plant. We knew that in World War II production had been rapidly switched for war then back again to civilian goods when the war ended and that conversion was possible if there was a will. We also met with Governor-elect Dick Lamm and Representative-elect Tim Wirth, asking them to make Rocky Flats a priority when they took office. They put together a Rocky Flats Task Force with Jock Cobb as a member to consider the impact to Colorado and make recommendations.
36:55 In 1974 we joined with Maury Wolfson of Environmental Action of Colorado and formed the Rocky Flats Action Group, with a number of people here today participating. One committee printed up our Bible booklet, which was called “Local Hazard, Global Threat.” We planned actions and set up a speakers bureau. Interestingly, Environmental Action wanted to focus on disarmament, while we at the American Friends Service Committee, a peace organization, thought that environment was going to be the vehicle.
Pam was a visionary, a student of Mohatmas Gandhi, who had fought a nonviolent campaign and liberated India from British rule. She wanted to create a Gandhian nonviolent campaign to liberate us from the threat of nuclear arms and to begin a discussion in the whole community. This required defining the problem of the plant in a way that many different groups could own it, begin to see the connections and look for solutions. The strategy was to organize in as many communities as we could.
We had interesting meetings in the Cobbs’ home with Robert Williams, Rocky Flats manager; and Felix Owens, in PR for Rockwell; urging them to reconsider their role in nuclear weapons production. Felix said we were in more danger living in a brick home than working at Rocky Flats. I’m afraid both of these men have since died, while we are still here.
We began talks with Tony Mazzochi of the Colorado Health Department, who later became head of the Oil Chemical Atomic Workers union, and Carl Johnson of the Jefferson County Health Department, who was very key in a lot of the work. We testified at hearings, went to meetings, wrote letters to the editor, held our own hearings at the Colorado Medical Center. We met people like Kay Gable, whose husband Don had worked right under the ducts at Rocky Flats and suddenly died of brain cancer. His brain, by the way, was given to Los Alamos nuclear labs for tests, and later, when Kay wanted independent tests to be done, it was found to be lost.
Lloyd Nixon, a farmer near Rocky Flats, came to one hearing with his baby pig Scooter, who had deformed, useless hind legs, and told of his hens laying eggs that never hatched. On further inspection, opening the eggs, he found the chicks with curled, deformed beaks. They couldn’t peck their way out of the shell, and they died.
We were building a broad movement concerned about Rocky Flats. It included people opposed to nuclear weapons for moral reasons, environmentalists, workers concerned about their own health and also job security, neighbors of the plant concerned about health risks and property values, and social justice advocates who saw how the arms race stole resources from us all.
39:52 In 1978 we got approval from national AFSC to organize a nonviolent civil disobedience at Rocky Flats. We knew the plant was heavily armed and had battle-ready tanks underground. We didn’t know what risks there might be for participants, but we began to organize. We took our slide show to a National Mobilization for Survival conference of groups working to curb nuclear power, showed them the links with nuclear weapons and urged people to come from around the country. Locally dozens of people participated in the outreach to churches, schools, civic groups, and others. We invited a high-level Quaker delegation to come to visit our groups and invited Daniel Ellsberg to come early and meet with the Rocky Flats monitoring committee members, with the Governor and city council, and the Rocky Flats management. We organized a downtown rally before the one at Rocky Flats, where Stokeley Carmichael, of Black Panther fame, local Chicano leader and legislator Rich Castro, and others came to talk about priorities: weapons spending as opposed to spending on human needs.
As a result of national organizing that Pam and Mike Jendrzejczyk of the Fellowship of Reconciliation had been doing, Bill Ramsey drove a flatbed truck loaded with 55-gallon drums labeled “plutonium” starting at Savannah River, South Carolina, and traveling through communities that had production facilities for nuclear bombs as he came to our rally, talking about the issues. The National Resources Defense Council came and held national hearings on the dangers of nuclear weapons production the day after the rally. We did hold the wonderful rally here and the well-planned night of civil disobedience on the tracks.
When Patrick set up his teepee and Dan Ellsberg and other activists decided to extend the action we all had planned into a prolonged presence blocking the tracks, we worried that it and the committed demonstrators on the train tracks would be the focus instead of the issues, and that the campaign could be dismissed. I know this was a powerful, life-changing event for many people, and many of you have become leaders in this campaign and other campaigns for human rights and peace.
In some ways it made more difficult the task of building on fragile relationships we had developed with unions and other groups, but it was an important event for many. The AFSC continued organizing locally and nationally, and the campaign to end nuclear weapons production in this country seems more urgent than ever today. As more countries are vying to develop nuclear arsenals to protect themselves from U.S. threats of intervention in their affairs, the U.S. still has intercontinental weapons in silos here in Colorado, poised to hit and destroy any city and potentially set off chain reactions. We have our work to do to eliminate the “axis of evil weapons.” [applause]
[pause]
43:28 [LeRoy Moore:] This little microphone is not going to be helping you much. This whole event today is being videotaped by Hannah Nordhaus here for the museum, and this microphone is for the videotape, not for you, sorry. Can you hear me? Good, because I want you to hear me.
I’ve got a little artifact here. It’s a book called “Songs to Convert Rocky Flats.” This little blue book that’s in my left hand. And this book was actually put together by Judy Danielson, whom you just heard from, and her husband, Eric Wright, who is coming over here right now to lead us in songs. One of the things that happened is that the movement had music, couldn’t have gotten along without music. So: Eric. [applause]
44:53 [Eric Wright:] We’ve got just four songs. We’ve made it into a book called “Greatest Hits of ‘The Songs to Convert Rocky Flats’.” I don’t know if any of you people driving up from Denver came around this corner there noticed the herd of cows. They’ve been an important part of our movement for a long time. So one of my favorites is called “The Cow Song.”
[“The Cow Song” Tune: “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” Words: Terry Sorelle, Eric Wright]
In the foothills of east Colorado Where the grass grows delicious and tall The cows all agree with each other: They don’t like radiation at all. (So they sing:)
[refrain:] No nukes, no nukes. No radioactive junk in my milk if you please! No nukes, no nukes. We’d rather make ice cream and cheese.
The cows are our friends and our neighbors They’re part of the working class, too. Because of the fruits of their labors We’ve yogurt and butter for you.
[refrain]
The cows are like most other women As mothers they work without pay But as sisters united in struggle They’re working to see better days.
[refrain]
[Eric Wright:] Now, the cows aren’t close enough to sing along, so it might sort of bring them into the action if a few of you took on the cow line in the chorus. It goes: “Moo nukes, moo nukes—” Like that.
The cows don’t like strontium 90 (yuck) They say that it curdles their cream. But they’ll tumble the wealthy and mighty— Those cows have a socialist dream!
[refrain]
So Rockwell, stop making those triggers Before we’re all blown up or dead. And to use all the skills of your workers You can make us new milk trucks instead.
[refrain]
At the next Rocky Flats demonstration There’ll be one more affinity group. You’ll know them by horns and by udders. They’ll be our most militant troop!
Eric Wright: And as they drag them off to jail, they’ll sing:
[refrain]
[applause] Like many others, this song was stolen from the anti-nuclear power movement up in Oregon, I think it was. Terry Sorelle made up those words and we just altered them a little. The next song, we stole the whole deal. Steven Soderland actually wrote the words to this very famous tune written by Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger, I think. “There’s a Bomb Plant on the Hillside.”
49:11 [“There’s a Bomb Plant on the Hillside” Tune: “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds. New words by Stephen Soderland]
There’s a bomb plant on the hillside. There’s a bomb plant making atom bombs. Bombs filled with plutonium— Plutonium! It’s insane.
[refrain:] There are tactical and strategic ones. Come in your choice of megatons. And they’re all filled with plutonium And they all kill just the same.
And the government takes our taxes And gives them to the military. And the military give to Rockwell And Rockwell makes the bombs.
[refrain]
Then the bombs are put on missiles And stationed all around the world. And they’re aimed at human beings— Human beings! It’s insane.
[refrain]
No more bomb plants on the hillside! No more taxes to the military! No more profits go to Rockwell! No more radiation! When children, men, and women, Join hands for disarmament Then there’ll be no more bomb plants And we’ll all be much more sane.
[applause]
[LeRoy Moore:] As Patrick was saying when he spoke a bit ago, there are many sides. There were many sides to the resistance efforts dealing with the Rocky Flats plant. You’ve seen some of them already, and there will be more this afternoon. A crucial part was played by local scientists. I’m going to invite Professor Harvey Nichols, who is a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who did some important work having to do with Rocky Flats that led on to other things. Harvey, please come. Welcome, Harvey Nichols. [applause]
51:56 [End of Side A.]
[B].
00:00 [Harvey Nichols:] Let me say that I came to this country in 1964, at a time when the U.S. had a lot of worries and concerns about the USSR winning the space race. The U.S. had, perhaps characteristically, neglected science education and in desperation invited a lot of us from Europe, particularly from England, to come across and do postdoctoral work. I came to Yale and decided that I liked this country enough that I’d stay here for a while. I moved to better and better parts of this country, including here, where I ended up.
By 1974, the Department of Energy walked into my lab in the form of Dr. Bill Osmond [?], an alumnus of CU, who said he’d heard I was doing some work on airborne particles in the Arctic and would I look at something similar out at Rocky Flats. I said no, too busy, wasn’t interested. I thought Rocky Flats was a well-run government agency at that time. But he kept on, kept offering money and so forth, so eventually I said yes and went out to the plant with him.
I was just immediately shocked by the fact that the air samplers that were all around the perimeter of the plant were obviously not designed properly to do the job. They were also mismanaged in the sense that they were only sampled every two or more weeks, and so while you might have imagined as a member of the public that they were there to protect you and immediately warn of any adverse emissions from the plant—no way. As I studied these air samplers, I found that they were not collecting the sort of materials that we’re all familiar with around here—the pollen, for instance, as it comes off the forests and the mountains—not collecting those efficiently. So clearly there was something wrong with the type of sampler.
I became increasingly critical of the plant operation and had funding from 1975 to ’76. At this time I thought it was worthwhile getting citizenship. Although I was reluctant to give up my British passport, I thought I really needed to be able to talk on a level ground with our representatives about this hazard that I was beginning to understand.
In the winter of ’75-’76, I sampled snowfall around the plant site many times and was very surprised that the snow was radioactive. We knew there’d been contamination from the oil drums earlier, but we didn’t know anything else that might have caused this contamination. So it was a puzzle. I wrote this up in my report for DOE, sent a copy to our Governor and our other representatives, and it remained something to think about over the following years. But by the 1980s, I had begun to suspect that there were other emissions from the plant that might be the solution to this puzzle.
By the mid-‘80s, also, Jan Pilcher had put a little advertisement, a little article, in the local paper, saying that if anybody was interested scientifically in the Rockwell incineration project, where they were going to burn waste materials, would they please get together. So we did. Under her guidance, half a dozen of us scientists worked on critiquing this incineration project.
By the late ‘80s, by September of 1987, at a meeting at the State Capitol on health and Rocky Flats, I was able to get the admission from the Rockwell people, who were then the contractors of the plant then, that they were in fact emitting tiny quantities of very small particles of plutonium out of their chimneys, their smokestacks, on a routine, everyday basis. And so this was the solution to the puzzle. The snow had been scavenging out from the air around the plant the radioactive material coming out of those chimneys that had passed through the filters. So in fact there were microscopic and submicroscopic particles. You might almost say they were designed to enter people’s lungs.
I’ve had this confirmed. I did microscopic analyses of the numbers of plutonium particles. This I estimated over 30 years of operation of the plant to be approximately—it’s very, very approximate figure—something over 90 billion, with a “b,” 90 billion plutonium particles per acre laid down on the site. While you can estimate or guess that the great majority of those particles have blown away to some other site, that a lot of them have been buried in the soil and are not available—nevertheless, there must be still astronomical numbers of those particles still on the surface that of course are not part of the cleanup that’s been supposedly performed.
05:47 Fairly recently, with the help of Congressman Beauprez’s office, I got an admission from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife in asking them directly, “Has anyone else done work on snowfall and radiation emissions like that?” just to check my work, and the Fish and Wildlife people said as far as they knew, there was no other study of this nature. The stuff is still here.
As part of that, I want to say that it is very negative for the Fish and Wildlife Service to consider, as they are actively planning to do, burning vegetation at the site annually, almost a square mile every year, to get rid of weeds. The contamination, of course, is in the plants. It’s on the plants, by official admission, and we have sought to get samples of the plants. They’ve been denied to us through a totally nonscientific sort of “Get away from us” approach to this legitimate question.
To deal with the politics, finally, a number of years ago Dr. Alice Stewart, visiting us from Britain—she was a noted epidemiologist, now deceased—said to me in Denver that of all the systems that she knew in the world, the U.S. political system seemed to be the best for dealing with citizen worries about contamination. But I’m increasingly gloomy about this, and I’ll tell you why. The work that I’ve done over the last 32 years, I’ve reported to all the proper agencies and individuals politically. I’ve reported to—without the titles, just to speed things up—Mark Udall, Bob Beauprez and his staff, Wayne Allard and his staff, David Skaggs, Tim Wirth, Dan Schaefer, Bill Owens, Roy Romer, and many local politicians—so, a bipartisan group. I’ve been helped by them to some degree, but I’ve been disappointed, too, because while the refuge is clearly better than having a housing development here, I think it’s very clear that it should be off- limits to any recreational purpose for at least the next century, [applause] until we can—until advances in science can discover whether low-level radioactivity at the site, it’s undeniable, is in fact as hazardous to the health as we fear, or whether in fact there’s less to worry about. But the next hundred years or more should be able to tell us that. Paul Danish, retired County Commissioner, has said, “Let’s keep it off limits for at least 200 years.” So we’re very much in agreement there.
Most recently, Colorado Representative Wes McKinley, who was the foreman of the ground jury that looked into the Rocky Flats mess, has tried to get bills through our legislature in Denver to have notices at the trailheads, just informing people what the site was and did, just objective educational notices. This has been very strongly repelled, opposed by the usual suspects, but also by at least one major national and local politician who ought to know better. I’m not going to name him because it’s an election season, but that opposition was very, very surprising. He said that putting these notices up would only confuse the public.
So my conclusion is that our representative system has holes in it. Maybe this is no news to a lot of you. But in a case where we’re dealing with esoteric scientific knowledge, where our members of Congress are almost completely, 99 percent of them, not trained in science, and where you have an agency like the DOE with a long arm, great power, and a lot of money to push people around or do other things, we have a problem, and there will be consequences that I’m afraid the children, the grandchildren, and on and on through potentially 10,000 generations of the radioactive lifetime of plutonium will have to deal with.
[break in recording]
10:30 [LeRoy Moore:] —Colorado Daily—a daily newspaper is published in Boulder, for those of you that come from elsewhere—and that article was illustrated with a photograph of people sitting on the railroad tracks not so far from here back in 1978, ’79. The photograph wasn’t from both years. I forget which, it was from one of those years. Present at the forefront of that photograph is the late Allen Ginsberg, a poet from Colorado, Boulder, and other places.
I also have in my hand a book, another artifact for the museum, a book called Clean Energy Verse. Poetry from the Tracks at Rocky Flats. This book has a collection of poems by Allen Ginsberg and by several other people, including Anne Waldman from Boulder, Colorado, who is going to bring us “Poems from the Tracks.” Anne! [applause]
[Anne Waldman:] Thank you very much. Wonderful to be here today. Appreciated those bracing words from Dr. Nichols. I think it behooves us to stay incredibly vigilant. I remember coming out to a ranch nearby with my child and some of his friends. It had a kind of barnyard, and the owner there showed us the deformed animals that had been born near this site. The sense of it being one of the most—at one point I remember Nightline reported it was “the most contaminated site on the planet.” This idea that it could instantly manifest, we’re talking about almost a quarter of a million years, seems unlikely. So I just think as citizens of this community and beyond and with the situation going on with the endless war and the wars within the wars and nuclear energy back and all this Star Wars stuff back in the air, in outer space, it’s really important while we can and also to teach our children some of that.
But I do want to read. I brought some artifacts for the museum, including Allen Ginsberg’s Plutonian Ode, which was written actually I think it was in one night, completed on July 14th, 1978. It includes that famous photo on the tracks. It combines scientific info on the 24,000-year cycle of the great year compared with equal half-life of plutonium waste; counting Homeric formula for appeasing underground millionaire Pluto, Lord of Death; Jack in the Gnostic Box of Atoms [Aeons] and Adamantine Truth of Ordinary Mind Inspiration. That’s Allen’s own description of the poem. I’ll read a little bit of that. But I also brought along—this is a two-disk set, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg. It includes footage from an arrest here in ’78 with Daniel Ellsberg and myself and probably many of you, many others. There’s very good footage. It was filmed by an Italian company, a film crew, and it’s included in this document of Allen’s life. I think it was a key part of his life.
We came out here together in 1974, when we were founding the Naropa Institute, now University, and beginning the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. As the years went on, clearly we became very aware of the situation here and many people in that community stayed on the case for a number of years.
I’d like to dedicate this reading to an activist, Brad Will, who worked for indie media and was killed yesterday in Oaxaca, shot in the stomach. He was involved with protests there of Ulysses Ruiz. There had been a barricade for about four months with a lot of the indigenous people. He was a wonderful character. He’d worked on squat issues in New York and he’d spent a lot of time in this community as well.
15:12 So I’m going to start with my own—this came about—Allen had his big poem, and I remember going by his apartment near Marine Street. I thought, “Oh, I’ve got to get my anti- nuke poem together! Something’s got to come to me! Where’s the inspiration?” I saw this big bottle of megavitamins, so this is what came up out of that.
Mega, mega, mega, mega, mega, mega, mega, mega, mega, mega, mega death bomb Enlighten! Junk plutonium Love it? Hate it? We’ll all be glowing for a quarter of a million years Teeth glowing Underwear glowing Pages of words glowing Microfilm glowing Ah, the third lumbar glowing in pain And eyeballs glowing Poor monster, sad eyeballs Reincarnated for a quarter of a million years Mega mega mega mega mega mega mega mega mega mega mega death bomb Enlighten! I dedicate this day against megadeath This Plutos wealth plus Archia rule This rule of the wealthy This Plutolotry This worship of wealth I spell away I call on you to enlighten you Destroyer of sweet baby flesh Plutonium! Devil’s work! Plutonium! Rude warmonger Plutonium! You, born of Neptunium Born of distant dark celestial body names Mega mega mega mega mega mega mega mega mega mega mega death bomb Enlighten!!!!
[applause, cheers]
And from Allen’s poem, I’ll just read the last section, section 3.
This ode to you O Poets and Orators to come, you father Whitman as I join your side, you Congress and American people, you present meditators, spiritual friends & teachers, you O Master of the Diamond Arts, Take this wheel of syllables in hand, these vowels and consonants to breath's end take this inhalation of black poison to your heart, breathe out this blessing from your breast on our creation forests cities oceans deserts rocky flats and mountains in the Ten Directions pacify with exhalation, enrich this Plutonian Ode to explode its empty thunder through earthen thought-worlds Magnetize this howl with heartless compassion, destroy this mountain of Plutonium with ordinary mind and body speech, thus empower this Mind-guard spirit gone out, gone out, gone beyond, gone beyond me, Wake space, so Ah!
[applause]
18:29 And so, this was a little—
“I Remember Being Arrested”
I remember being arrested at Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant when I was wearing a red and white Hawaiian shirt, white straw hat with plaid ribbon, white pants with a gentle crease down the front. I remember the guards in their black action suits. I remember thinking, “They are just boys.” I remember the guards with their megaphones giving a countdown as we squatted on the Rocky Flats property. “You have ten minutes to evacuate the premises.” “You have nine minutes.” “You have eight minutes.” And so on. I remember what a beautiful day it was, how passive the mountains looked, how majestic! I remember thinking, “All this could disappear.” I remember thinking, “I was six years old when this place was built.” How it cost something like $250 million. How the word “trigger” is a funny word, the name for a horse, for a gun, not a bomb. I remember thinking the word “button” was also a funny word to use. I remember the 10-pound plutonium buttons extracted from fuel rods were shipped to Rocky Flats on trains. I remember we meditated on the train tracks and tried to stop the shipments of plutonium. I remember trying to sound intelligent when the microphone was shoved in my face and not just singing, “We shall overcome.” I remember thinking it’s hard to visualize plutonium, something that is invisible and doesn’t exist in nature. I remember that it comes from uranium. I remember trying to visualize bombarding uranium with neutrons. I remember trying to visualize the chart of elements as it hung on my high school wall while riding in the bus to the courthouse in Golden. I remember being with Allen Ginsberg in Chicago during the Chicago Seven trial. I remember thinking that I would demonstrate with him anywhere in the world. I remember being with Allen at a gay rights benefit in Aspen, how we were in a bathroom right before the reading and he needed to inject a needle with insulin into his arm. I remember Allen’s good cheer in the bus as we rode to be booked in Golden, also his gentle anger. I remember thinking how I wanted xerox colored paper with mantras on them. I remember I started chanting, “Om. Ein. Greng. Kleng. Chamenda Ye Bajai.” [?] I remember we chanted mantras then and we’re chanting mantras now, and we will keep chanting mantras for the rest of our lives. I remember thinking as we rode to bus to Golden that it was a particular kind of bus reserved for prisoners or mental patients. I remember making a huge circle of human bodies for miles and miles around Rocky Flats. I remember when I was pregnant I stayed away. I remember seeing the deformed calf born without hair at the stable where we would go horseback riding near Rocky Flats. I remember thinking I would go scatter some of Allen Ginsberg’s ashes at Rocky Flats. I remember looking into my son’s newborn face and wanting to save him from every possible hurt or damage. I remember thinking that the enemy may be invisible. I was in a rocking chair. I was holding him tightly. It was the middle of the night.
Thank you.
[applause]
21:34 [LeRoy Moore:] Thank you, Anne Waldman, and thank you Allen Ginsberg.
[Anne Waldman:] I wish he were here!
[LeRoy Moore:] Yeah. I think he is.
A while ago, when Harvey Nichols was speaking to you, he mentioned the person that I will introduce next. He even talked a little bit about where he met her, that Jan Pilcher had put an ad in the paper looking for scientists and others to help with this project that she had underway to deal with the incineration of plutonium-contaminated waste at the Rocky Flats facility— something that would certainly release those tiny particles of plutonium into the atmosphere all around here, of which Harvey spoke. This campaign was very, very interesting, and I hope Jan will tell us a bit about it. It was one of the most effective grassroots citizen-based activities locally that happened at Rocky Flats. Jan! [applause]
[Jan Pilcher:] Well, this is the first time the wind hasn’t blown in all the times I’ve been out here, over 30 years. I want to just honor and tell you that I feel honored to be with so many activists who are passionate in so many ways, either through art or through sitting on the tracks and getting arrested, or through doing activism by foot in the streets, which is one of the things I did.
I think it’s really important to have this museum. I was called by a young woman yesterday with the Boulder Daily Camera who didn’t know a thing about the museum. She was born after the era in which I worked. So it’s important for us to preserve the history of what we did, because history can repeat itself. We have new players in the nuclear age in North Korea and Iran. We’ve got all kinds of things happening that could make history repeat itself in many ways, and I think it’s important to preserve the lessons we learned and to preserve the history.
My history starts in the 1950s. I was also a child of the Cold War. There were duck-and-cover exercises in the elementary schools and we were passed out evacuation maps, in Denver. We were supposed to be able to escape the city in 10 minutes if we had warning of a nuclear attack by the Soviets. These are things that go deep in a child.
The other thing that happened in my youth that led me right here today was seeing the unreal sunrise of a nuclear weapon going off when I was visiting my grandparents, who lived on a ranch on the Nevada/Utah border, in 1955. In 1970, I read an article in the back pages of a newspaper written by a scientist who was studying fallout patterns from atmospheric nuclear testing. He correlated it with higher incidence of leukemia in children, especially in Utah near the testing site. I got really interested in the health issues, in addition to being a long-term activist for disarmament.
In 1976 I joined the Rocky Flats Action Group. A lot of the work had already been laid by wonderful activists like Pam Solo and Judy, and Maury Wolfson, who was my mentor in many, many ways. I took the slide show that Pam and Judy developed to all kinds of neighborhood and professional groups, and I came to believe that one of the lessons of my time in this was that to have an active, engaged citizenry, to be involved in decisions that last for a millennium, you have to have the free flow of information, and you have to have people educated with that information before they can take effective action.
25:22 The one year I’m going to talk about, the year of incineration, 1987, was just such a year. Incineration was nothing new to Rocky Flats. There were open pits out there where they burned uranium [?] chips from 1954 to 1968 in oil. They were unprotected, unfiltered, and they sifted [?] off the public, and no one has ____ noted ____. So it was nothing new to have incineration of ____. They took the ash and just dumped it above ground near Woman Creek. Later they buried it. So that was nothing new.
In 1987, in January, however, they proposed to do incineration of transuranic mixed waste. These are radioactive mixed wastes, for the first time, in a fluidized bed incinerator. Now, this is an instrument that burns, through chemical reactions, raises the substances up to about a thousand degrees and turns them into much smaller ash.
Nuclear waste has been the Achilles’ heel of weapons production since the beginning, and the plant was generating thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of tons of transuranic waste—pardon me, cubic feet of waste per year at the plant. This was just through the garbage of production, like clothes, oil, plastics, and so forth. Interestingly enough, in the year I’m going to talk about, the Governor of Idaho, Cecil Andrus, got on the tracks and turned back a boxcar and said, “No more transuranic waste can be coming up here. You’ve been promising us for years you would truck this elsewhere.” Nothing else had opened yet. New Mexico was still having problems opening up the WIPP facility. He turned it around. So we had activism from the governors who didn’t want this waste up there. Rocky Flats had a big problem.
We saw this, and we called a citizens’ meeting at the Arvada Performing Arts Center, and to our surprise it was packed to the rafters with people really concerned about this. Incineration is a really great issue to organize around. It’s understandable. It’s visible. And it’s stoppable. And that’s exactly what we tried to do in one year on this, with phenomenal success, in my estimation.
A woman named Joan Seeman, who was a Westminster citizen, and myself started a little offshoot group that opposed incineration called Citizens Against Rocky Flats Contamination. We walked all the streets in the neighborhood on that side of the plant and dropped leaflets. We rang doorbells. We went to churches. We went to neighborhood groups. We passed out leaflets, and we talked about incineration. And it was just a beginning.
Our arguments were these: there were two concerns. There was the possibility of routine emissions from minute quantities of plutonium and the possibility of a major accident, such as those of the 1957 and ’69 fires.
The plant countered with the fact that this technology was failsafe. They gave a number, a point with zero nines and then an eight, of millirems of exposure if they burned 9 days a month, 24 hours a day. And they actually got David Skaggs, a Congressman at the time, to endorse the incinerator. They said the HEPA filters, which are the filters that they used on all their production facilities, would protect us.
I realized that we needed some really strong scientific backup on this and talked to Harvey; Ed Martell, who is no longer with us; Gale Biggs, who’s still in town; Neils Schonbeck; and I can’t remember who else here. Joe Goldfield, wonderful Joe Goldfield, who actually built HEPA filters in World War II. They came up and presented to the citizen groups, to the state, to the health department, studies claiming that there would be major risks of explosion. Joe actually said that their system could suffer catastrophic failures, and he questioned Rockwell’s claims. The Rocky Flats managers also had no means for monitoring or controlling the emissions—or vapor gases, which they had not addressed at all.
At the same time, through our campaign by foot, through telephone calls, through letter-writing campaigns, we deluged the Colorado Department of Health with 1,500 critical letters. Roy Romer got enough letters—over a thousand—that he had to hire aides to answer them and held public meetings and met with us one-on-one. We gathered 18,000 signatures on petitions. We went to city councils who voted to go against the plant.
By the spring of 1987, then-Governor Romer, U.S. Congressman David Skaggs, and Denver Mayor Federico Peña all came out against the test burn until there were further public studies to be conducted. How am I doing on time? OK.
Skaggs ____ [rustling of paper] and then came out and said, “Well, we think this is OK.” But at the same time, they released information that the incinerator had already been used nine times since 1978, when it was built, and had burned 24 tons of toxic waste, including unknown toxic radioactive materials. I wonder how many lives were determined during this time. We certainly worked in alliance with other people, including Greenpeace, the American Friends Service Committee, the Rocky Flats [sic] Peace Center. With Sierra Club, we had legal resources. So KARFKA [?] and Rocky Flats or the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit against the plant, which further delayed the burn.
30:31 By October, information was leaked by a Rocky Flats worker to our group that during a routine July test of just common fuel oil, the incinerator had actually caught fire and burst into flame for 20 minutes and breached their viewing filter [?] and released substances outside. So we knew it wasn’t safe. A worker actually released that into a citizen’s mailbox, and it was delivered on to the media.
Actually, ironically, about a year later, in June of 1989, when the FBI was closing in on its raid, they [the FBI] had been flying airplanes over the plant with infrared film and had discovered that there had been a whole other level of [rustling of paper] _____. Let me see if I can find the notes on that. They had nighttime overflights and discovered that Rocky Flats’ toxic waste incinerators that had been shut down for safety reasons were still operating. It was in a strange time, one of the many strange years in this era. But the long and short of it was, we conducted a very, very effective citizens’ campaign. During it, for the first time, neighbors who lived near the plant—it was a big campaign for mothers. There was the Blue Ribbon Brigade from Westminster that wore blue ribbons to protest in a very mild way that their clean air might be endangered. We were able to meet with all kinds of politicians who had not been briefed in any way on Rocky Flats issues before. And we were able essentially to shut down this incineration, because they were going to have to do such a long-term study that the plant shut down production before they were able to get the studies done that needed to be done.
In summary: unrelenting public opposition killed a project by deferring it with the need for environmental impact statements. Incineration was made a mainstream issue. It drew a new constituency of more conservative homeowners, families, and local officials. We drew in the media, who really got to know the issues at the plant. I think a long-term benefit of this intense era of public activism is that we were able to legitimize citizen participation in the many, many health committees and other committees that examined the cleanup and ultimately the closure of the plant, because we’d made our presence known.
The waste issue, however, is still with us. I would just like to say in closing that no civilization can make reliable technical predictions about what will happen in just one single millennium. And yet we, in this country, or any country that is producing nuclear waste or nuclear energy, need to plan and implement strategies to contain waste for hundreds of millennia. So it’s not only an activity of scientists making well-informed best guesses, but it needs to be a democratic activity based on an educated and well-informed citizenry.
And we need to keep this effort going, as new efforts are determined around the globe. We’ve got efforts still going to open facilities elsewhere, to ship further waste. We’ve still got Savannah River, we’ve got Los Alamos with new levels of productivity going on. They are actually poised to build new pits if we need them. Toxic waste there is a terrible issue.
So I would just say in closing, my main lesson is that we need to cherish our freedom of speech and the freedom of information flow and we need to continue to give this to the citizens, whether it’s through media, through walking campaigns, through letter campaigns, to continue to keep people involved in the democratic process, which I still believe can happen, despite many setbacks. Thank you.
[applause]
[LeRoy Moore:] Jan Pilcher. This morning’s Boulder Daily Camera has an article about an event that’s happening today, this afternoon at Rocky Flats. I think it’s this one, this actual event. It has another photograph that was taken back in that ’78-’79 period on the railroad tracks, not so far from here, with people from the Church of the Brethren—the article says 500 of them, sitting on the tracks there. I don’t know if that number is exaggerated a bit. But I was glad to see that picture, and I was glad to have that acknowledgment of the fact that one of the forms of the resistance activity was among spiritually-based people. I’m inviting now to come up here and talk to us Pat McCormick. Where’s Pat? Right here! Oh, here she is. Pat McCormick, a Sister of Loretto, a Catholic order of nuns. She will tell you something about what she’s done. Thank you, Pat.
[applause]
35:25 [Pat McCormick:]
Thank you.
[applause] It isn’t what I’ve done, but it’s what the interfaith community did over a period of years. I think except for the blizzard of ’84, we were at the west gate every Sunday for 12 years. As far as I can tell, the vigil began in 1978. I participated sporadically until I made a weekly commitment in January of 1980. People from approximately seven denominations participated. We averaged between 7 and 20 people every week, every Sunday afternoon.
One of the most important presences at that time was Reverend Gyoshen Sawada—we all know him, of course, as Sawada—our Japanese Buddhist monk friend who frequently walked with other friends from Boulder chanting for peace. Two other consistent presences at the west gate were Jennifer Haines and Alex Mayer. Alex’s ashes are buried across from the west gate.
In the early years of the vigil, we were friends with the security guards. They would come and we would talk with them before or after the prayer. But as the resistance and the trials increased and court trials revealed the guards lying on the stand about our actions and about the arrest, Rockwell ordered the guards to stay 200 feet away from us at the time of the vigil. Vigiling was a continuous experiment in truth and nonviolence for all of us who participated each Sunday. We celebrated the closing of the vigil on February 2nd, 1992.
[pause]
LeRoy asked me to speak a bit about one of the actions at the Flats, one in which I participated. But before that, in September of 1982, Sisters Pat Mahoney and Marie Nord drove into Rocky Flats. They had made identification cards, and based upon that they were convicted of a felony. During their trial, they named and it was publicized that Rocky Flats was a bomb factory. I remember well when it was written in bold letters in the paper. And thus they planted the seed of truth in the public. Each of them spent one year in prison in Pleasanton, California, and Forth Worth, Texas.
The following February, 1983—first of all, we learned with security, that if we let some time go by, security would relax and then we could do whatever we needed to do once again. So in February of ’83, on Ash Wednesday, Mary Springer-Froese of the Mennonite in Colorado Springs peace community, and I met at Arvada Mennonite Church with those who were supporting us, and we decide to drive into the plant and to go to the east gate. We went in a donated car that would not go into reverse. [laughter] But based on what happened to Pat and Marie Nord, we decided to not have any identification. We had in the car with us homemade crosses covered with faces of the world’s poor, and we also had with us baby bottles of our own blood.
40:18 We were waved through the east gate as if it were a Bronco game. We were never stopped. We parked about 200 feet west of building 771, got out, hung the crosses on the fence, poured the blood over the crosses, knelt, and waited—and waited. And waited. Waited for security. Finally some employees went over to the guards and said, “You better get over to the fence, there are a couple of people kneeling in front of crosses, and I don’t think they’re supposed to be here.” [laughter]
Sonny Crews, whom all of us knew well, the head of security, and about eight security guards came and got us out of the car, handcuffed us, put us in their van, and then tore the car apart trying to find identification, which they never found.
When the media interviewed them—we were already in custody—but when the media interviewed them, they told them that we had crashed through the gate. So one of the things we learned about security is, the only way to have security at Rocky Flats was to stop producing the triggers. The ONLY way. And so today, with all of this emphasis on national security, we continue to say, the ONLY way to have national security is abolish nuclear weapons and abolish war. Thank you.
[applause]
[LeRoy Moore:] How about that? A disobedient sister!
[Pat McCormick:] Yeah, three others now! [?]
[LeRoy Moore:] Yeah, that’s right, that are maybe about to go back to jail. Sisters that sat, that occupied the site of one of the missiles in northeastern Colorado a couple of years ago. Thank you very much, Pat.
I was glad to hear you mention Alex Mayer. Alex would sit at the west gate. Not only on those Sunday vigils, but many other times he sat at the west gate. All of the workers coming and going got to know who Alex was, sitting there. I sat with him quite a few times. Alex made a flower garden across the road from the west gate, surrounded with stones, over there close to where the post is that holds up the traffic lights there at that intersection. That flower garden was destroyed two or three times and then would be replanted. Alex would tend it and brought water out every couple of days to keep the garden growing and the flowers blooming. It was a place we knew well. When Alex died in October 1993, his memorial service was held in this open field right over here, just inside the west gate, a wonderful event attended by many, many people, including Mark Silverman, who at that time was the DOE manager at Rocky Flats. Alex was known by all of those people.
A year after Alex’s death, his sister and—maybe Pat was in that group—several of us gathered together, people from the Catholic Worker community in Denver, and we sprinkled Alex’s ashes over there where the garden was planted and put a little marker there which you can visit across the road there, on the opposite side from the west gate. Alex’s last words to us—we had a party with him just a few days before he died were—He had Lou Gehrig’s disease, he was no longer able to speak, and he took out his pencil and in a very crude way he wrote down his last words were: “I’ll see you at the west gate. I’ll be in the wind.” So Alex, like Allen, is here today. Thank you, Alex.
Let’s have some more music.
45:05 [Eric Wright:] In your songbooks, this is “We Say the Nukes Have Got to Go.” This was a lot more fun to sing when there were bomb factories over here and you could imagine them tumbling down. When it’s just an old boring place for a museum, you don’t want to— [laughter]
[“We Say the Nukes Have Got to Go” Tune: “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho.” Words: Ted Warmbrand, Charlie King]
[refrain:] We say the nukes have got to go, got to go, got to go. We say the nukes have got to go before we all come tumbling down.
Here we come to Rocky Flats To link up hearts and hands, To sing out loud and sing out clear So the world will understand:
[refrain]
Some say nukes mean power. Some say nukes mean bombs. While some say nukes are what we need So Big Business can keep on.
[refrain]
You can talk about your needs of industry. You can talk about investment plans. You can talk about plutonium economy. But the people all over this land are singing:
[refrain]
Tell all your friends and neighbors: The hour is drawing late. We’re here to build the power. To determine our own fate.
[refrain]
[applause]
[Eric Wright:] This last one, on the other side, comes from Charlie King, a good old traditional song. His version was about the Clamshell Alliance, “Acres of Clams”
[“It’s the Nukes That Must Go and Not Me” Words adapted from Charlie King’s “Acres of Clams”]
I’ve lived all my life in this country. I love every flower and tree. I expect to live here til I’m ninety. It’s the nukes that must go and not me.
It’s the nukes that must go and not me, my friends. It’s the nukes that must go and not me. I expect to live here til I’m ninety. It’s the nukes that must go and not me.
I’ve swallowed enough radiation. It’s time I was standing my ground. I’m joining that great demonstration. We’re shutting that weapons plant down!
We’re shutting that weapons plant down, my friends. We’re shutting that weapons plant down. I’m joining that great demonstration. We’re shutting that weapons plant down!
Oh, Jefferson County’s in trouble. So it’s here that we’re taking our stand. Why sit home and wait til it’s rubble? Come fight for your freedom and land!
Come fight for your freedom and land, my friend! Come fight for your freedom and land! Why sit home and wait til it’s rubble? Come fight for your freedom and land!
Closing the plant is our mission, Ending the arms race our aim. We sing of our hopeful condition With millions who feel just the same.
With millions who feel just the same, my friend. With millions who feel just the same. We sing of our hopeful condition With millions who feel just the same.
Now Rockwell is just the beginning To convert all the nukes, every one. It’s a fight that the people are winning, A fight for a place in the sun.
A fight for a place in the sun, my friend! A fight for a place in the sun! It’s a fight that the people are winning, A fight for a place in the sun.
[applause]
50:43 [LeRoy Moore:] Thank you, Eric. I think Kim is going to come back. I want to say before he does that I want to mention a few names of people who I especially want to thank for all of the work they did so we could have this event actually take place today. I especially mention Anne Lockhart; Marion Galant, over here on the ground; Bob Nelson, Don Rohlf, both of them are members of the board; Kim Grant, of course, standing here and about to speak. I will refer to Roy Young. Roy Young could not be here today. He’s the guy that was sitting on the tracks in ’78, and he also runs Nature’s Own rock shop in Nederland, maybe you know that shop. Roy is in Philadelphia today, but he sent some artifacts, which are over here, including some amazing photographs. I’ll put them on a table so you can look at them later. Roy, I want to thank because he donated the poles for the teepee. He had somebody makes those poles, and Bob Nelson and I picked them up and brought them down here just a couple of days ago. Also Beverly Lyne, where’s Beverly? Beverly has been helping everybody be on time today. Susan Becker from the Boulder Public Library, who works a lot on the oral history project and who helped make sure that Hannah Nordhaus could be here today with the video camera for this event. And I know I’m leaving out a bunch of people. Thank you all, very much.
[applause]
[Unidentified voice:] Thank you, LeRoy!
[Kim Grant:] Thank you, LeRoy, and I would reiterate all those thanks and many others. Part of the challenge of any museum is trying to capture the spirit and essence of a historical event. I think we’ve done a little bit of that here today, and I thank you all for doing that. If you brought artifacts, please don’t forget to fill out a donor form. Don’t forget to send in your pledge cards. The words “vigil” and “sustained action” have been tossed around a little bit today. It’s going to take some sustained action and support and help from you and a lot of other folks to get this museum built. So thank you for coming, and help us get it built!
[applause]
53:21 [End of Tape B. End of recording]