PAT McCORMICK. Born 1935.

Transcript of OH 1454V

This interview was recorded on January 13, 2007, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program and the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum. The interviewer is Dorothy Ciarlo. The interview is also available in video format, filmed by Dorothy Ciarlo. The interview was transcribed by Sandy Adler.

NOTE: Interviewer’s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets.

ABSTRACT: Pat McCormick, a Sister of Loretto, describes the development of her political values through her early work in Latin America and tells about her twelve years of weekly prayer vigils and other actions of civil resistance with regard to the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. She describes in detail a protest action in which she and another nun drove through the Rocky Flats gate and, while in a restricted area, poured human blood on crosses that had photos of the world’s poor on them, resulting in her arrest and imprisonment for two months

[A].

00:00 (This is an oral history with Pat McCormick. Today’s date is January 13th, 2007. We’re meeting at the Garden of St. Elizabeth’s, is that the correct way to say it?)

Gardens at St. Elizabeth’s.

(Gardens at St. Elizabeth’s, which is where Pat works. We’re doing this oral history for the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum and the Maria Rogers Oral History Program of the Carnegie Library. My name is Dorothy Ciarlo. Thank you so much, Pat.)

You’re welcome. Thank you that we could do this.

(Yes.)

Good.

(The first question, as I promised, is, when and where were you born?)

I was born in Harmon, Illinois, which is northwest of Chicago, born on a farm in October 1935. I am the third-oldest of 11 children, and so went to public grade school and then a Catholic high school, and that’s where I met the Sisters of Loretto, the Catholic community that I belong to, so I’m a Sister of Loretto, and we also have co-members in our community of different denominations.

(Just going back a little bit, did you know from early on that you wanted to join the—?)

Well, I think I probably was attracted to the women and the way the women were and the way they cared about their students and cared about education for their students. And I was especially impressed by how personal they were, caring about my family. Also, we are an American order,

North American, founded in North American in 1812, and so there was something very natural and attractive about the way the women lived their lives and what they taught us. Probably my first education regarding racism was from those sisters. I remember at times being in conflict with my father about the black issue, African American, because his experience was certainly one of segregation. He didn’t have the opportunity to know any African Americans. I can remember that conflict with my father.

(What were your parents like? They were farmers?)

Yes, they were farmers. We had a very, I think, happy childhood. So many of us in one place, we always had playmates. And they were—as I look back on it, my mother and father really gave each of us a lot of confidence, with discipline; respected choices that we made; and even if it was a hardship for them, with career decisions that we would make, they would encourage us to do that. My father was more liberal than my mother, and with time, my mother became a co- member in our community, and then, because of the influence of my friends— My father died quite early. He was only 66. And Mom had about 20 years of being a widow. But she didn’t sit home, she then did a lot of traveling, came and visited with me for about 20 years before she could no longer travel. And during that time became very familiar with the things that we in our community care about, which is social justice, peace, social justice. A lot of people issues. The way my parents raised us fit in quite well with what I saw in the lives of the sisters.

04:28 (How did you happen to—was it just kind of accident that you happened to go to a school run by these sisters?)

No. My mother had gone to that school herself.

(What was the name of the school?)

It was then Community High School in Sterling, Illinois. And my mom’s mom and dad sacrificed for her to go to that school. So then when it came time—we could not afford for all of us—we had to go by bus, because we were in a farming community, so they could only afford to send us to the high school. In fact, my brothers and sisters were just talking about being in a country school where three of us were in the same room, first, second, and third grade. The next set were fourth, fifth, and sixth, then seventh and eighth, and then there was the high school. By the time we got to the high school, our parents then decided to send us to a Catholic school. But it was with great sacrifice. My mother—at that time the priests used to pay people to sing at these masses, and my mother used to leave home—my sister and I were responsible for getting everyone else ready for school—and she would go to these parishes, and that’s how they paid for the bus tuition. And so we always knew that my mother and father made great sacrifices for us to have that education. And then my oldest brother went to a Catholic college, and another brother went to a Catholic high school away—didn’t go to—it’s now called Newman High School, but at that time it was Community High School. But my mother had the history with the sisters.

(At what point did you go—from high school, did you join the community immediately?)

Yes. I graduated in May of 1953, and I entered the community in September. So then I went to Kentucky and studied there and then we were sent to St. Louis, to Webster University, where we got our degree before we went out to teach. And then I went to Fort Collins to teach. I taught both grade school and middle school there. Then I was asked if I wanted to be—I was about 29 years old—and I was asked if I wanted to be the superior—at that time we still called them

superiors—the superior of the community in Fort Collins at St. Joseph Catholic School, or did I want to go to Latin America, to Bolivia. And I said I wanted to go to Bolivia.

So I was trained—I went in 1965, studied Spanish at Loretto Heights College here in Denver, then went to Cuernavaca, Mexico, and studied there for four months. There were 72 of us from every country in the world.

(And were they all of the same religious order, or different?)

Oh, different. Men and women, lay people. It was run by Monsignor Ivan Illich, who was quite a—

(Can you spell that?)

I-v-a-n I-l-l-i-c-h. He had an intercultural center, and it was there—it was also during the time— I remember while I was there two—three—very important things happened. Pope Paul VI came to the United Nations, and it was at that time that he said, “Never again war. War never again.” So that was 1965. And at that same time, Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit [well-known Jesuit peace activist] and his brother, but Dan especially at that time—he lived in New York, and Cardinal Spellman, the Catholic Cardinal of the New York diocese, banned Dan because he was opposing the . He got the Jesuits to exile Dan. And while I was in Cuernavaca studying, Dan Berrigan came there, and I talked with him.

Ivan Illich very much wanted Dan to speak with everyone about why he was exiled, and he refused to do that, because, he said, it would only make matters worse. So then what Dan did was, he toured all of Latin America, which was the worst thing they could have done, because then he became more and more—we say concientisaba about the poverty of the world and also U.S. policies at that time. Because Illich was teaching us all about how the United States was really exploiting—what imperialism was doing to the rest of the world, and most especially to Latin America.

And so Vatican II was going on. We in our community, we had Mary Luke Tobin, who was the Mother General at that time—

10:04 (And who has gone on to become very active as well.)

Yes. And she died recently, at age 93. So we had that kind of change that was taking place in our lives in religious life. We religious women and men were being told that we really are for the world, we are there to serve the world, and not to internalize and only take care of ourselves. The Vietnam war was going on, and we were learning about Latin America.

And so I went then to Peru for about nine months, taught in a boys’ school there, and became more adept in the language, and then went to—was asked to be the coordinator, not the superior, but the coordinator, in La Paz, Bolivia. And so I did that, and while—

(How would that differentiate—is that different from being a superior?)

It’s less directive, much more communal. It’s “We will meet together.” My task was to go and help the community decide what to do with the school that we had there, because we had been doing team teaching with the Bolivian women, the teachers, so we were teaching them

pedagogy, teaching them how to get away from rote, which many of the Latin American—they have no books, and so the teachers would just read from the book and the children would write it, but there wasn’t a thinking process. So some of the women who came were teaching new math, and they were teaching the teachers new math. We were teaching to religion classes, we were teaching the Gospel of Jesus, because it was recognized as a private Catholic school, but it was for the upper echelon, because of course the indigenous people could not afford to send their children.

And so we were teaching, I remember well, teaching classes about the miners, that they were dying at age 38 and that they were indigenous, and I remember well that one of the students was the daughter of a socialist who became very good friends of mine, Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz. And he eventually became Minister of Interior, and he eventually nationalized Gulf Oil. And while I was there, his daughter was in the class, and I knew that she was delighted to know that someone had some of the same views about the indigenous people in Bolivia that her father had.

(How long were you there?)

I was in Bolivia—well, I was there for about five-and-a-half years, in Bolivia, and I was in Peru for about nine months. So I came back in July of 1971. But while I was there, I was very radicalized, because the U.S.—George Bush Sr. was the head of the CIA at the time. Che Guevara was trying to organize so that the country would be their own country. He was trying to do that throughout Latin America. And the young people, there were about 72 of the university students who decided that they would see if they couldn’t become leaders of their own country. So they were in the jungle trying to decide how they were going to do this. And really, because of the intervention of the CIA, they were all killed except three of them. And one of them was a friend of mine.

And so, while I was there, I participated in a hunger strike that the mothers of those 72 conducted, and there was no other North American in the hunger strike at the time. I very much didn’t want to be the North American, but I talked with the community and said that in conscience I felt that because we were so responsible that we needed to—someone from North America needed to be part of the support for those women. So I participated in that. And the result of that was that the parents of the school put a lot of pressure on the principal, who was a friend of mine, another Sister of Loretto, and so as a result I decided to quit at the school so as not to cause that much difficulty for the continuation of the school.

(The school could come under pressure from—?)

That’s right. Well, and the parents should have recognized that this was not a political act, it was a human act. It was something that was a terrible injustice. And so as a result of that, I did that in—I don’t know, it might have been early 1971, and so then by July—and the university students had been saying to me, “Pat, the problem is not here. The problem is in the United States. You need to go home.” I had stayed in touch with Dan Berrigan all that time, and Dan kept saying, “Come back and join the . Come back and—” So in 1971 I did come back.

I was very radicalized. It was very difficult for me to come back, because in the community, I then was on the staff of the community—

(And this was—?)

Here in Denver. I came back to Denver. So it was very, very difficult, because unless you went through that experience, it was very difficult to explain. But we in Latin America—we had some women in Chile, we had some in Peru, and we had some in Bolivia—and all of us were saying what was happening and what the United States was doing under cover. And so many in the community didn’t believe us. They just thought, you know, they’re kind of out of it. My own mother said to my father, “What’s wrong with her? She’s different. What is it?” And I remember my father—I was in the truck with my father one time when I was home visiting. It was in 1968, before I came back. He said, “You better cool it with your mother.” [laughs] And he didn’t do that kind of thing very often, because my father was so much more liberal and he understood a lot. He was very supportive of César Chávez. Because of his health he had to move to Ute [?], Arizona, and César Chávez was doing organizing down there for the United Farm Workers.

So when I came back then to Denver, what I then did was, I became involved with the United Farm Workers, and that was the first time that I was arrested. I was on the picket line in Applewood against Gallo wine. That was my first time to actually be arrested.

17:33 (Did you do that on your own, or as part of the community?)

Oh, no, I did it as part of—another Sister of Loretto was with me, a very good friend of mine. We always—so many of us in the community are part of this kind of resistance to U.S. policies that is already going on in the Denver community or the St. Louis community or wherever. For example, we’ll go to the Martin Luther King march on Monday and many of our friends will join us and we will carry a big banner that says, “The Loretto Community Honors the Memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” And friends will join us. And then many times we—so we were part of movements that are taking place, and we still are.

(And at that time, was the community—what size was it?)

At that time the community was about 1,200. We constantly were meeting, because the same kind of communal decision-making that was taking place in Bolivia was taking place every place in the United States, through Mary Luke Tobin and through her assistance. So the community kept studying and we were part of national religious sisters’ movements. We were constantly being asked to fill out questionnaires, we were constantly being educated about Vatican II and about being part of the modern world. At that time we changed from habits to regular dress. People were given a choice in our community to do that. No on was forced to do one way or the other. But that was a big time of change, big change.

And then we also—we were coming into assembly every year and just looking at all of the ways that we could be of greater service to the world and to our own communities, wherever we lived.

(Now, when you said there were 1,200, the Sisters of Loretto, that was throughout the country?)

That’s throughout the country.

(So the community in Denver was smaller?)

Yeah, there might have been 80 of us here at that time, because we no longer had Loretto Heights College. And the other thing we did was, we passed a resolution, if you want to call it a resolution, but it’s something we have lived by, and that is, the individual life of the sister is

more important than any institution. And by saying that, that gave everyone the opportunity to choose her own work, rather than stay in schools because Catholic priests wanted us to fill this school, at very low pay. Now, we didn’t care so much about the very low pay, but we did want to make sure that people were choosing the kind of work that they felt most called to. We had always put a lot of emphasis on people being well educated for whatever they were doing.

20:55 (So each individual as a part of the community did have the option of doing what she wanted to do?)

But she did it through consultation. She didn’t just go off and make the decision by herself. She did it in communication with and according to the principles we had agreed on and according to the vows we had made. So it was always within the realm of service, mission, poverty—meaning simplicity of life—and communal discernment.

So anyway, how I got out to Rocky Flats.

What I did was, then, I decided—I had a couple of experiences of religious authority overreaching its power and trying to say that it could tell me whether or not I could keep a job according to what I thought, what I believed regarding justice and peace. So I decided, I’m not going to work any place where someone is going to decide my salary on kowtowing. And I decided then to get training in the medical field, so that I could still pay the rent, but I wouldn’t have that kind of authoritarian misuse of authority. So I took training as a nurse aide at Swedish Hospital.

I was doing a lot of resistance at Rocky Flats at that time, because I had already decided in 1979 that I would go to Seattle, where the Trident [nuclear submarine], the resistance to the Trident was taking place with Jim and Shelley Douglas at Ground Zero. And so I went there for four months in ’79. I went from September to January of ’79, to get experience with that kind of resistance. Then I came back to Denver and at that time decided to live near the Catholic Worker, which is the foundation for much of the resistance from that has taken place for at least 40 years, had been taking place for 40 years.

23:27 (Going back just a little bit, can you remember when you first heard about Rocky Flats?)

I probably heard about it through American Friends Service Committee. Pam Solo was a member of the Sisters of Loretto at that time. She’s now a co-member, but she was at that time, and Judy Danielson. And they were beginning to ask questions about, what is this that’s taking place out there? And they began doing the examination. So occasionally I would go out to the Flats before I went to Seattle. I would go out—

(—with other people?)

I think it must have been with the prayer group. That was about, I would say, seven or nine denominations at that time, different ones coming together. I don’t really know who started that, the prayer vigil.

(That was on Sunday?)

It was a Sunday. It was every Sunday afternoon at 2 o’clock, yes. We would meet at the Catholic Worker—let me go back for a minute. So then when I came back from Seattle, that was when I

decided to both join the Catholic Worker community, live near the Catholic Worker community down in Five Points, and to begin going out to Rocky Flats on a regular basis. So by January of 1980, I was then committed to go out every Sunday afternoon. And our goal was to pray there.

25:03 And as I indicated when we met for the Cold War Museum [October, 2006, event at the Rocky Flats site], initially we spent a lot of time—after we would pray, we would spend time talking with the guards and getting to know them. It was always pretty pleasant, you know. Sometimes it wasn’t. I can remember one time kind of yelling at someone. It was a great school in learning about nonviolence and learning about our own violence. Because I remember well one of the Mennonites walking up to me and talking about how violent that was to do that, to yell at that guard.

So it was always a learning experience to be there, to pay attention to how we felt about the workers, how we felt about those driving in. There wasn’t that much traffic, and the gates were closed, of course, because we weren’t supposed to go in, but we would be out there on other occasions, and the workers would be going in, or we would have signs, and we’d have to pay attention to how we were relating to the workers. So for a long time, we had that kind of rapport after the prayer with the guards and got to know some of them by name and all of that.

Then, the more we resisted, and the more we were arrested, then the more we ended up in court. We would tell our side and the guards would tell their side, and our perception was that the guards at times were lying about what really had happened at the time of the arrest. And so eventually they were given orders by security to stay 200 feet away from us. So then they always had to park and just sit in their trucks. They couldn’t come over and talk with us.

(Were the arrests, that was part of the Sunday prayer groups?)

No.

(That was later?)

Well, it could be—I mean, we did that for 12 years. I was part of that for 12 years. So sometimes—I mean, all the time, we were meeting in between this going out on Sundays. We met as a resistance community, prayer and resistance and contemplation community, and talked all the time about, what is the best next thing to do? So at different times people would say, “This is what we plan to do.” We would pray together about that. As you know, there was the large encirclement. Sometimes there was large . Now we call it “civil resistance.” But then—because we’re not really being disobedient. We’re being obedient to what we feel we are called to do in conscience and what is good for people.

So there were times when we went as groups. We would have what we called affinity groups. There would be eight or ten of you who together would plan what you were going to do when the arrests were going to take place. You always had—within that affinity group, there might be four people or five who plan to be arrested because of what’s happening in their lives. Because you always had to think about the consequences of being arrested. Then there might be four or five others who are going to be support persons while you’re in jail, or who will be in contact with you, etc. So that kind of action was taking place many times, too. So we would go inside the gate, and then we’d be on—and we were far away from Rocky Flats, the plant itself—

(You were in the buffer zone?)

We were in a place where we were supposed to not be, and then we’d be arrested. So those kinds of arrests took place. Then you had, you know, like Patrick Malone and all of what they did on the tracks with the tent, the teepee.

(That was in ’78 and ’79?)

Mm-hmm. Yes. But I mean, all through that time, from let’s say ’77, ’78, during all of that time, there were different forms of resistance. And so then, in 1982, Sister Pat Mahoney and Sister Marie Nord, a Franciscan Sister and a Sister of Blessed Virgin Mary, was her community, they drove into the Flats and they didn’t know whether or not they could get in without showing some form of entry. So they made badges. So when they were arrested, then, they were charged and convicted of a felony for falsification of a document.

30:32 (So they made something that looked like a badge?)

That’s right.

(That was Pat Mahoney and—?)

Marie Nord. N-o-r-d. So they served time in federal prison for that. They were in prison when the next year, 1983, Mary Sprunger-Froese, who is a Mennonite woman—she’s a member of the Mennonite community and she lives in Colorado Springs, and I can give you the spelling of her name. She’s married to a Canadian, so her name is Sprunger and his name is Froese, F-r-o-e-s-e. Sprunger; her’s is S-p-r-u-n-g-e-r. She’s still a member of the resistance community in Colorado Springs. There’s a strong community there, still. Bill Salzman is a part of that. Everybody in Colorado who knows anything about resistance knows about Bill Salzman.

So anyway, Mary and I started planning that we also would drive into Rocky Flats. So we prayed for a long time. We met. We went to the Catholic Worker soup kitchen, where friends of ours, doctors and nurses, came one evening. I invited some Hispanic friends of mine who had children in the military at the time, and they came and they gave blood. We gave our own blood. Different people gave blood. And then we carried that blood, we put that blood in a baby bottle, which is kind of a theme that we have in the resistance community nationally, that you carry your own blood in the bottle of the infant, of the one who will be born and who’s being affected by all of these nuclear weapons. So the whole resistance, of course, is to the triggers that were being sent to Los Alamos to be put into the bomb.

So Mary and I, we also, each of us, made a small cross, about this long and this wide, and we put pictures of people from all over the world, colored pictures of people all over the world, who were being affected by the U.S. policy of manufacturing nuclear weapons, and we carried that cross.

We met out at the Arvada Mennonite Church and met with the community and prayed there, and then she and I got in a car that had been given to us, loaned to us, because we never knew if we were going to get automobiles back if we did that kind of thing, and this particular one, we always joke about this, this particular car would not go in reverse. And so we knew we couldn’t make any mistakes. So we went not to the west desk, but to the east desk—I mean, not the desk.

(Entrance.)

Entrance. We didn’t go to the west gate, where we usually prayed, but we went straight to the east gate from Indiana [Street]. And we went at the time when people were driving in, when they were going in. We had no badges. We had decided that if they stopped us, we would get out of the car, right there, kneel down, and pray and pour our blood on the crosses right there. But in fact, we were just simply waved in. There was no check at all. Now, this was only one year after those other women went in. And you know, we were always hearing how expensive security was, and we always said, “You are wasting your money trying to secure nuclear weapons. The only way to secure them is, don’t have them exist.” And we still say that. The only way to be secure—national security is based on non-existence of nuclear weapons.

So we drove in and looked for a place to park and drove up to one of the parking places. There was a fence in front of it. My recollection is that the plutonium building—I don’t know if it was 770—but we could see it. We could see one of the buildings. There was a security guard over there checking people’s identification as they went in. So they would walk through a gate and they would check it.

35:20 So we got out, knelt down in front of the gate, hung our crosses on the gate, and then poured the blood over the crosses and prayed. And we knelt there and we knelt and we knelt and we just kept waiting. What we were told later—I mean, what we assumed is that finally some employees getting out of the cars must have noticed and went over—I think maybe the guards must have told us that, because I wouldn’t have made that up. So they must have gone and said, “Call security, there are two women over there kneeling in front of some crosses.” So we knelt there and waited, and the head of security at that time was Sonny Cruse, whom we knew from the encounters at the gate. And he was very upset; very, very upset. Because he knew us, and angry that we were there.

So they handcuffed us, put us in a van. Now, this was Ash Wednesday, which in the Christian community that’s the beginning of Lent, the beginning of the time of repentance, and that’s why we chose that day.

(And what year was it?)

1983. And so they handcuffed us and then they tore the car apart, because they were positive that we had a badge in there somewhere, that we had false identification. And we kept saying to them, “We didn’t have any. We came in without it.” They tore the trunk apart. They opened the hood. They tore the seats, everything. They could not find anything.

So then, while we were sitting in there, Tadlini, and that’s his last name, he’s a security guard, T- a-d-l-i-n-i, I think— anyway, he came over to the van. I was sitting on this side, near the window. I said, “Hi, Tad.” Because we had talked with him often. I said, “Hi, Tad, how are you?”

And he said, “What are you doing here?”

And I said, “Well, it’s Ash Wednesday.”

He said, “Oh, I forgot to go to mass this morning!” [laughs]

And I loved that! I thought it was such a wonderful human—and I said, “Tad, this could be your mass, OK?”

We were then taken in to the Denver County Jail and booked.

(To Denver County Jail?)

Yeah, because in the beginning Jefferson County used to deal with all of that, and finally there were so many arrests, Jefferson County said, “We are not going to—This is a federal offense, so you’ve got to figure out—“

(So that shift had already been made?)

That shift had already been made, right. And also, I forgot to mention that when Pat and Marie went in, it was in the newspaper—I remember this so vividly—it was in the newspaper, the first time, they called that a “bomb factory.” That was the first—because most of the time people thought that there wasn’t anything going on out there related to war. And I remember so well when we first started going, there was this big brick sign in the field that said, “Industrial plant,” or industrial something. So I always think it was wonderful that Pat and Marie had the courage to name the truth.

(So they called it a bomb factory and the newspaper—)

—printed it, yes. So this consciousness was taking place all the time. Every time we went to court, what we tried to do was tell the truth about what was happening there. And the research had been done, so it was always their word against our word, the federal government, the Defense Department against our word. Now, we’re doing the very same thing in this that the three Dominican Catholic sisters have done, they are doing the very same thing by being in court and talking about international law, that the United States is guilty of breaking international law by manufacturing nuclear weapons. And so is every other country that does that.

39:53 (You’re speaking now of the three sisters that recently—?)

Yes. But I’m talking about what we did with Rocky Flats. The peace community—most especially the Plowshares community out of , the Berrigans, who for so many years, Liz McAlister—for so many years they have been saying in the courts that the judges are co- opted. The judges should be doing what is good for the country and what’s good for the world related to nuclear weapons.

So anyway, Mary and I decided to not get out on probation, not to pay the bond, and so we stayed in jail for two months. Because it was a misdemeanor in our case.

(It was a misdemeanor because you hadn’t—?)

It was not a felony. We did not have that—so we were at Denver County Jail for one month, and then—at the beginning of March, Dan Berrigan was coming to Denver, and he was going to give a talk at Loretto Heights College, and I had such hopes that maybe he could come out there to see me, to Denver County. But just before he came, five days before he came, they moved us. I haven’t been in jail much at all compared to a whole lot of peacemakers, but it is a terrible experience to have them come and get you and not tell you where you’re going, and they refused

to do that. And some of the most valiant peacemakers have sometimes spent two and three months going from one prison to another and nobody knows where they are. It’s a terrible experience.

So we were in the van, handcuffed, and they would not tell us where they were taking us. We were going north on I-25, and I thought they were going to take us maybe to Wyoming or beyond. They couldn’t take us to Wyoming because it had to be Colorado. But I kept watching and watching, and finally they turned east, and then I watched and watched, and we ended up in Greeley. So then we were in Greeley for another month. We were in Greeley for Easter, because we got out—it was two months.

A friend brought Dan Berrigan up to Greeley to see me, and it was St. Patrick’s Day. I got to— because he’s clergy, it got to be a personal visit rather than through the grate. And so I joked with him and said, “Here I am all dressed out in orange on St. Patrick’s Day.” But really, it was a very spiritual experience for me to be in jail for that time, because—well, first of all, I had always been fasting. I fasted a lot during that time. In fact, some people yesterday were fasting because of Guantánamo. I fasted on Thursday. Some people fasted yesterday. Because on the 11th it was exactly five years that they took the first Guantánamo prisoners.

So fasting and repentance and forgiveness are always a part of our own experience of nonviolence. So I had for years and years had only two meals. I didn’t ever eat a noon meal. And so once I got accustomed to what the jail situation was like, I asked them—because there was never any privacy, and it is a thousand times worse now, but I asked them if I could skip the middle meal, and then I was locked into a kind of a gathering room, and then I had some quiet time. So that was good. And it just was a very good time to really be in solidarity with some of the prisoners and experience what women are going through. It was funny, in the Denver jail, we slept in a dormitory, and I was next to a Hispanic woman who was in there for a DUI, and she said, “My mother feels very confident that I’m sleeping next to a nun.” [laughs]

You just got to know their stories and some of the hard things. And also, the pecking order. I had not—I guess I was too naïve to think that there would be within the system a pecking order, but of course it’s human nature, and there is.

44:55 Anyway, I do remember coming out—I lived right next to the Catholic Worker. I came out, and I have no idea where they came from, you know Johnny-Jump-Ups? The flowers? The base of the entrance into my kitchen door was filled with them. And I had never had any before. It was just absolutely wonderful. And I remember, because right outside my door, the men and women used to stand in line for the soup kitchen. And I remember feeling such solidarity with them, and how very difficult that is, to have to beg your food every day, which I didn’t have to do, but it was that vulnerability. Because in prison, in jails, you’re very vulnerable, very vulnerable.

Then, once I was out, I just continued out at Rocky Flats. During that time, of course, we were also dealing with Central America and El Salvador, so we were at times also doing actions out at Lowry Air Force Base, so we were arrested there also. I had a very good friend who was in El Salvador during the war, a Sister of Loretto. She was a pediatrician and went there to establish a clinic. So during those Reagan years, we were doing a lot of resistance.

And so we just stayed at Rocky Flats in the prayer vigil until—I remember it was in February, I think February 2nd, that we had our official last vigil. Because even when they said they were going to close it, we kept going until we were sure.

(So that was for many years, closing it until, the late ‘80s?)

No, when did they close it? We stopped in February of ’92. That was our last—we had a regular ceremony of our last vigil there.

(So from ’83, when you and Mary went into the plant, through ’92, you continued?)

I continued, oh, yeah. As soon as I got out. And the other thing that I wanted to tell you is that I was then—all the time that I was doing resistance out at Rocky Flats, and I was employed at Swedish Hospital—because I worked on the surgical floor after I had the training— I would tell those women, “Any Monday that I’m not at work, any day that I’m not at work, it’s because I was arrested.” And they gave me full support. Then when I went into—I mention this because women were always very supportive of what we were doing, what I was doing. When I was getting ready to do the action in 1983, I talked with my bosses, because then I was doing home care. I was going from home to home. And I talked with my bosses and told them what I was going to do. They held the job, and when I came back, within four days, I was back at work. And so there was that sense of solidarity among women during that time of, “we have to do something.” So then—

(Just going back a minute, when Sonny Cruse—he was the one who arrested you?)

Yes. He and the other security officers.

(You said he was angry. Did you feel he was angry with you or—?)

Well, as I look back on it, he was angry that what he was responsible for had been breached. And then when they got our statements, we were in jail, so we had no way to make any statement to the paper. What came out in the paper was that we ran the gate.

(That was not accurate.)

It was not true, no. But given the amount of money they were spending on security, he wasn’t about to say, “They came in without any—” You know. And we had no way to tell our side of the story. But you just do your best to tell the truth wherever you can, the truth as you experience it. Sonny did—he drove us, he himself, I think, he drove us to the jail, and he did calm down after a bit. It was just that initial terrible frustration. But it’s just absolute proof that if people are determined to do something, whatever the motive, they’re going to do it. So don’t have something there that is going to be of great danger to everyone.

So that’s basically—and now, of course, we just continue all the resistance of nuclear weapons. So as I say, I have been a very strong supporter of the three Dominican sisters [who entered missile silos in northern Colorado to pray and protest the poised nuclear weapons and were arrested] over these past four years. And it basically stems from my relationship with Dan Berrigan, because I have such respect for him and his brother Philip, who died of cancer.

50:47 (Do you still have contact with Dan Berrigan?)

Yes, mm-hmm. I hear from Dan once in a while. I was in touch with him frequently around the time of Luke Tobin’s death—her imminent death and then her death. He had lots of respect for Mary Luke.

So we continue, you know, as very best we can. It’s been difficult with the Iraq war.

(You meant the current times?)

Being a peacemaker these days, a nonviolent peacemaker, is very difficult with this war, because we’ve been a part of all of the resistance to the war, and as is clear, the president pays attention to no one. So I thought it was very courageous of the women [the three Dominican nuns] to do what they did. Very, very courageous, at a time when he was determined that people would not counteract anything about weapons of mass destruction. And they were saying, “Here it is. We have them.”

(They were drawing attention to our weapons.)

Our own. Our own. Yeah.

(Have you had direct contact with them, visited them in prison?)

Oh, yes. Well, no, they aren’t in prison any longer.

(That’s right.)

They served three years. One served two, one served two-and-a-half years, and the other served three-and-a-half. Ardith called me this morning, because they are still working on not in conscience being able to pay the restitution. So they have been trying to be as creative as possible about how to deal with that, and as you know, they did the food drive recently and it was rejected, and so they gave the food where they could. But she told me this morning that given what the postage has been that people have spent to send cans of food to the prosecuting attorney, Robert Brown, that they think that they actually raised, had donated, about $6,000 worth of food. And then in addition to the postage, she’s saying that it’s something closer to $12,000, because people are sending cans of food. And the restitution itself is $3,082.

(And the restitution, as I understand it, was supposedly because of the cost of repair?)

Yes. That’s right. And they estimated that they actually—because they were very careful how they got into the missile silo, and so they estimated that they probably caused $310 worth. But when the Humvees came, they knocked down everything, and then also the blood cleanup, they exaggerated that. Everything was exaggerated, so that they could get it over $1,000. Because they couldn’t charge them with a felony if it weren’t over $1,000.

Is there anything else you wanted to ask?

54:21 (We have just a few more minutes. Could you talk a little bit about what you do now?)

Yes. I continue in health care.

(You’re not still living close to the Catholic Worker?)

No. Mostly because that has become so what we call gentrified. The gentry class has moved in on the poor. And so now I live in north Denver. As I mentioned to you, I always try to live near where I work, because simplicity of life is important to me. And having lived with the Bolivian people, they really have been my gauge all these years. They were the reason that I fasted every Thursday for a very long time. Because I came back to the United States on a Thursday.

So anyway, what I do here, I worked in hospitals in rehab after people broke hips or had knee replacements. I worked with orthopedic doctors and nurses and physical therapists. I’m a physical therapist technician. I worked in hospitals until the computer world took over and I found that I was being told what to do with people by computer rather than by a human being, and I didn’t want to do that.

So I came here, to the Garden of St. Elizabeth, which is owned by St. Anthony Hospital, and I asked if I could create a position of helping people stay healthy; the elderly, help the elderly to do prevention work. So I do one-on-one work with people. They work on a NuStep, which is like sitting in a car and you do your arms and your legs at the same time, the treadmill, the Therabands, weights, lots of walking. And I find the one-on-one is so crucial, because people say to me all the time, “If we didn’t do this together, I wouldn’t do it.” And I have some people in wheelchairs, some people who have MS, some people who—the great thing about the NuStep is, it has a swivel chair, so a person in a wheelchair can actually get in.

It’s always been important to me—I mean, I admire people who beg for their living. You know? There are lots of my peacemaker friends who do that. I guess having grown up in a family where you had to pull your own weight, there’s some of that that’s still there. So I make a living and then what I do is budget, and then I send to the community what I don’t need for paying rent and all of that. Then I’m in communication with community members all the time, and part of small groups.

(We have about three minutes left. Do have any thoughts about what the Rocky Flats, getting into Rocky Flats, what it meant to you? Or was it just part of the whole picture of resistance for you?)

Being in Bolivia changed my life, and so I came back determined to say no to U.S. imperialism. So Rocky Flats was a way for me to say, “This is just a terrible waste of human resource, those workers,” I mean, Tadlini died of cancer. The two Kelly boys, we were in touch with them, from the Teamsters union, they both—one of them I know died, for sure, Pat and Jim. So the reason we put those pictures on the cross was because we said, “People in the world are being deprived of resources that are necessary. The poor of the world—this is happening on the backs of the poor of the world.” And we have a history of going into countries and stealing resources so that we can have the level of lifestyle that we have, and that’s an injustice.

(Maybe that’s a good place to stop.)

OK. Great.

59:03 [End of interview]