discuss football scholarships. He speaks nearly an hour trying to figure out which schools in Texas, Arizona, and Utah are suitable for players on his team. You can see those qualities as he chats with a girl who ran away from home last month, keeping the entire conversation light as he weaves a fresh thread of connection between her and the school by promising to buy her a Coke on her birthday next month; or as he keeps order among the kids who are hurrying to lunch by gently ordering a boy who’s been shoving forward in line to go back upstairs and walk down again in a more gentlemanly fashion. The same qualities are evident when he conducts the meetings at the Newberry Elementary School—sessions which are so orderly, so informative, so democratic that sometimes you feel you’ve been transported back to the New England of your civics- class fantasies. There is a throb of passion in his voice as he insists that Med Ed must take responsibility for its mistakes—and when he goes on to argue that the decay of the idea of responsibility is destroying the fabric of American life. As a teacher, he doesn’t like- the example the utility is setting for his students. For, in high school, he always tells kids that they are accountable for heeding rules—that they can't blame their home life for tardiness or for bad grades or for the fights that occur in the corridors. He punishes those who misbehave. He is convinced, for that matter, that the government should be responsible for balancing its budget, just as he and his wife are responsible for balancing their budget. He thinks that couples should be responsible for pregnancies instead of ending them in abortions. In conversation after conversation, he returns to this belief that democracy itself depends on the accountability of individuals and institutions. Sometimes, his restraint vanishes completely, and his raw anger begins to flare. At a Public Utilities Commission hearing in early May, he stood up and insisted that Met Ed’s attempt to pass the cost of the accident at Three Mile Island along to the consumer was "like the Germans asking survivors of the holocaust to pay for a rest home for SS officers.” He sometimes says now that he—who never understood political activists—would feel like staging a guerrilla raid if Reactor Number One is reopened. "Maybe people around here are just too polite,” he reflects. "Maybe that's why they put those reactors here in the first place." Minnich, like the rest of the area’s new activists, has been pretty much ignored by the national antinuclear movement. Even though a contingent of people from the region led the march at the May 6 Washington demonstration and there was a brief appearance by a pregnant woman from Middletown, those almost seemed like token gestures. The kinds of wrenching experiences that Julie Reigle and the Hursts describe, the medical traumas that obsess Dr. Leaser and Dr. Barnowski, the anger that consumes Mickey Minnich. were al) obscured by the avalanche of rhetoric and scientific information delivered by the superstars of the antinuclear movement. But the startling fact is that about 3,000 people from the Harrisburg region were at the rally. (Often to their own astonishment: “ I never thought that the day would come when I’d have to do something like this to protect my home,” said one elderly woman from Middletown. No one mentioned their increasingly militant, broad-based battle against Met Ed, or their petition drive— which has now garnered about 6,000 signatures—insisting that both Unit One and Unit Two remain shut down. During the civil rights movement, organizers were always careful to focus attention on the activities of local leaders like Fanny Lou Hamer of Mississippi. During the antiwar movement, peace groups used to scour America's villages to find their equivalents. Now. in Goldsboro, Etters, and Middletown, such people exist in abundance. Indeed, they are a base for a movement which, in time, could change the entire area's political life. It’s ironic that they’re almost as invisible to the progressives who organized the Washington rally as they are to the power companies. These days, Minnich is trying to form alliances with energy activists—and to channel his anger into a concentrated attempt to learn as much as he can about nuclepr energy. He's filled a ledger book with the names of organizations and individuals he has read about in books or in the newspapers—lobbying organizations, agencies that furnish scientific information, Nader-inspired groups that can provide information about how to fight the utilities. When he has a spare moment he'll telephone one of them with a request for advice, or for someone to speak at the Newberry forums, or simply for a brainstorming session. One of those conversations, with a consumer activist from Philadelphia, resulted in a plan to form a statewide coalition against the power companies at a meeting that will take place at Penn State this month. Minnich is also involved with the local antinuclear group called Three Mile Island Alert. He respects its members' scientific intelligence, and the fad that they prophesied—and fough t—the disaster tha t jeopardized his life. But he feels uncomfortable with the freewheeling, somewhat anarchistic, ’60s-tlavored style that characterizes the group. He believes in leadership. in organization, in defining goals and priorities. “ Maybe that's because of my background,” he says. “Those are qualities a football coach needs. Maybe they limit me sometimes. But I'll tell you one thing. If I stay in this fight, I want to win.” One evening I was buying a newspaper at Reeser's Grocery Store in Goldsboro. Across the river, beyond the marina where summer people keep their boats, the cooling towers seemed immense. Maybe that’s why Whitey Reeser, 57, and his daughter Paula Watters, 29. have always felt somewhat uneasy about the plant. In any case, since it was built, Whitey—who works a day shift at the Mechanicsburg naval depot teaching people how to work fork lifts—has become fascinated with alternative forms of energy. He’s leery of the complexities involved in solar energy because he feels that the utility companies and the government will control that system, too. Instead, he thinks that people can get all the power they need from windmills—simple devices —which they or their municipality would own. On the walls of his store, there are dozens of newspaper articles and advertisements about windmills. He loves to show them to his customers. He is. I realized, a throwback to the kind of backyard inventor who nourished in the Nth century. then virtually vanished in the past few- decades as government, the military, and big business have subsidized, centralized, and defined the terms of science. That evening in the store, his daughter Paula was talking about the air-raid drills that look place in almost every American school in the 1950s. She recalled the stark fear she used to feel every time she had to hide under her desk. Then she made a remark that seemed to distill much of the fear, the hurt, and the anger that the accident at Three Mile Island has created here. "In those days." she said. “ I was afraid we’d be invaded by a foreign country. It never occurred to me that here, in Goldsboro, we would be invaded by Americans." Reprinted by permission o f Village Voice and Paid Cowan © flews Group Publications, Inc.. 1979. Continental Breakfast starting Nov. 1st. MELISA'S KITCHEN 239-4121 3553 S.E. HAWTHORNE Unique Internationa! 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