Bill joined with the others to buy a $350 print and book it, free of charge, to churches schools, Rotary Clubs, nurses' associations, community centers, and whoever would let them show it. As the group’s initial participants began to speak before different organizations and to invite others to help, they drew on the morning meetings for emotional sustenance. Support also came from other activists in nearby communities. In Charleston, the Freeze campaign joined with a small, largely black local of the United Electrical Workers to hold a 150-person peace march—despite freezing rain. In Columbia, the Carolina Peace Resource Center provided the Florence and other groups with information, films, slide shows, and a calendar of statewide activities. And in June 1983, the state’s Methodist ministers endorsed the Freeze. But until the walk, Florence citizens had no public vehicle for expressing their sense of community. Just as different local groups inspired each other, so efforts like that of Florence made it possible for the national Freeze campaign to coordinate coast-to-coast “walk-a-thons" that October. A California office provided posters, advice, and general know-how, and the marches passed on part of the money they received. The actions built each organization as well as a broader movement. The Florence group now called itself the Pee Dee Nuclear Freeze Campaign, named for the nearby river. Participants joined by twos and threes as the mailing list grew from thirty to eighty to 150. Jack Boyce, however, had now retired to North Carolina. The Methodist minister rotated 180 miles west to Greenville. But new people filled the gap. Drama teacher Denny Sanderson became the organizational hub: carrying the campaign office in his briefcase, sandwiching march logistics between endless rehearsals of the student play, and using his broadcasting experience to prime advantage on the Florence TV show, “Pee Dee People.” A cost. Others gathered pledges, called local printer ran off mailings and fliers at various media, and helped in whatever ways they could. Of course the walk encountered resistance. Letters to the paper talked of the “darkness of Communist hell” and said ministers should not “promote moral causes,” but rather “preach salvation only by Jesus’s love for sinner and hatred for sin.” Police were urged to revoke the march permit. A prominent Presbyterian berated his pastor for participating. I caught an echo of this backlash when I went, along with Bill Cusak and Ingram Parmelly, to view the site where the Air Force bomb had fallen in 1958. We walked past a low barricade of branches and broken TV antennas that Bill Gregg—the man whose home was destroyed—had erected to keep out the marchers. Ingram said he understood why—given the draining fight the Greggs went through—they shied away from inviting further controversy by offering their land. The house was gone, marked only by wooden posts, a broken flower pot, sheets of crumpled tin, and thin young pines struggling to reclaim the site as forest. The hole held stagnant water, surrounded by red and blue shotgun casings and the perforated Budweiser cans of their owners. A stove, an old sink, and sheets of rusted metal rose jaggedly from the water, folding back Ijke crumpled insect wings. Six months earlier, the local radio station played their twenty-five-year-ofd tape of the accident report with great fanfare. But when Denny asked to use the tape at the rally, the station manager (whose anticommunist rhetoric would have warmed the heart of J. Edgar Hoover) said it was lost and unavailable. Bill and Ingram discussed buying the bomb site and a narrow access corridor, so citizens could gather without triggering the Greggs’ harassment. We sat quietly, thinking of how apoc- alypse had so discreetly grazed this modest community. Ingram—not a lace-curtain Episcopalian but a husky coal miner’s son—recalled growing up in The South's oldest newspaper, the Augusta Chronicle, described protestors as "shiftless failures as human beings," who were either "knowingly helping America's enemies," or "venting their spleen on an orderly society with which they cannot cope Tracy City, East Tennessee. His father died in the mines, and Ingram said he might be alive today had the company cared as much about safety as it did about profits, or had the union stood up to them as they should have. He thought the real betrayal of the South had come “when they convinced the poor whites that blacks were their natural enemies, that everyone in the Confederate Army was an aristocratic officer, and that when your grandaddy fought with Robert E. Lee he rode side by side instead of following with the shovel for manure.” As a butterfly skimmed the water to alight on a twig, shouts came from the road, kids yelling “Eat shit.. .goddamn Communists.. .eat shit!” We saw a flash of them running through the woods. “I wish they’d hang around to let us talk to them,” said Bill, then he decided to check the cars. After Bill left and walked slowly down the pine needle path, Ingram told me, “One of the things that happens with people shouting at us as they drive by, and kids yelling ‘goddamn Communists,’ is that there’s a recognition that things aren’t quite right, but a real uncertainty about what to do about it. The verities of land and property, home and hearth have been so clear here for so long. And we still remember losing a war.” He said the march would bring out support and make people listen, but that the group would also “catch a little hell before this is over.” He remembered when Vietnam was at its height, and he was dean of men at a small college near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Visiting generals paraded through explaining “how God and Lyndon Johnson wanted America to kick ass in Vietnam.” Finally a student CALL 4B7-6COO! "BOOKED SOLUKa.k.a. books 5241 U.Way N.E. 522-8864 Left Bank Books 92-Pike 622-0195 10 Clinton St. Quarterly
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