FAR OUT - Transcript

Newsreel [music]

NARRATOR:  Anti-war demonstrators protest US involvement in the Vietnam War, in mass marches, rallies, and demonstrations.

Central Park is the starting point for the parade to the UN building.
The estimated 125,000 Manhattan marchers include students,
housewives, beatnik poets, doctors, businessmen, teachers, priests, and nuns.

Makeup and costumes were bizarre. [music]

Before the parade, mass draft card burning was urged.
Demonstrators claimed 200 cards were burned, but no accurate
count could be determined.

Reporters and onlookers were jostled away on purpose.

Although mostly peaceful, shouted confrontations were frequent\ and fiery during the course of the march.

The anti-war marchers were picketed by anti-anti-war marchers, who were hawkish
toward the parading doves. [music]

Civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. leads the procession to the United Nations, where he urges UN pressure to force the US to stop bombing North Vietnam.

President Johnson, meanwhile, let it be known that the FBI is closely watching all anti-war activity.

TITLE: [music] A Green Mountain Post Production

CARD: [Animated map] In 1968, a group of radical journalists from Liberation News Service (LNS) left New York City for the country.

CARD:  They founded two communal farms: In Montague, MA and at Packer Corners in Guilford VT.

CARD:  Their story shows how 1960s counterculture transformed American life.

RAY MUNGO:  Our whole idea of moving to the farm was to get away from the cities, to get away from politics, to get away from the news. We didn't have a television set, we didn't have a telephone, we didn't have indoor plumbing  We were going to start all over, like refugees from World War III or something.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Life at the farm was like paradise. It was just amazing to be here. We really understood how great it was. Here we are on this incredible farm and the land was just unbelievably beautiful and a lot of us were city and suburban kids being exposed to nature and its glories for the first time.
NINA KELLER: I wanted to be organic, anti-nuclear, mother, feminist, writer. What were we, early 20s? And everything you do when you're that young, you're learning really for the first time. So we were learning intimate relationships, parenting…

VERANDAH PORCHE: I wasn't really brought up to live in my body. I wasn't brought up ever to go outside. And to me, it was just so exciting to learn how to pee outside and to identify the plants that were here and just to split wood.

RAY MUNGO: My mother came to visit in the car and she thought I was completely off my rocker. This is what your grandmother fled when she ran away from that farm in Quebec in 1920. "What the
hell is the matter with you? You're shitting in the outhouse. What's the matter with you? You've got a college degree. You went to college to do this?"

HARVEY WASSERMAN: We were just kind of old enough to know that this was a pretty amazing experience.

[music] SONG MAY DAY

Winter's done, back to the landers.
First blush of May is peeking through.
Loosen the guy wires, come and meander.
Climb up to our cosmic view.

Tie a tongue, sheets to the May Pole.
No need to know what stories they tell.
Lovers in transit, spin out of control.
So dance, tell your story…

CHARLES LIGHT: …Reminiscing about the first May Day in 1969.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: Who can remember? There were so many
drugs.

SUE KATZ: I remember colors.
 
VERANDAH PORCHE: Somebody got the idea.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: That we were going to have a party for Spring.

VERANDAH PROCHE: But it was really amazing that we did get through the first winter.

TOM FELS: Probably the first time that all the farmers got together, ever.

VERANDAH PORCHE: The quote, un-quote, hippie farmers.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: The hippie farmers, right?

CHARLES LIGHT: The meeting of the tribes.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: We had the Johnson Pasture, we had the Montague Farm.

[music] MAY DAY SONG

VERANDAH PROCHE: We had a rule, you know, you climb the hill, you don't look back till you reach the top. Then you look over the sort
of self-involved little valley here. It looked like the only place in the world.

[music] SONG FIXIN’ TO DIE RAG

CARD: But first, there was Marshall Bloom and Liberation News Service (LNS)

SONG LYRICS: Well, come on all of you big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
Got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam.
Put down your books, pick up a gun.
We're gonna have a whole lot of fun

And it's one, two, three,
what are we fighting for?

NARRATOR: Man, it's wild. October '67. LBJ's sending more troops to Vietnam and goddamn it, we're gonna stop it. I get a call from this crazy guy, Marshall Bloom, saying, "Hey, come to Washington. Let's start a news service. Stop the war. Overthrow the government." I'm 20 years old and I hate the war, so I say, "Hey, why the fuck not?"
Marshall's an incredible freak. He gets up at this meeting, announces that we're starting Liberation News Service, and burns his draft card.

RAY MUNGO: So I'd known this guy, Marshall Bloom, for only a couple of months now, and in just a couple of months, he had shanghied me away from a graduate prize fellowship at Harvard University. He had moved me out of my native New England down to Washington, D.C., where we were living in a slum, with a bunch of crazy people. I had seen him go out to Minneapolis to the USSPA convention and provoke a riot, and then we had this meeting at the Pentagon of all these counterculture people. Another riot, you know. I began to realize
that, God, anywhere Bloom goes, riots follow.

NARRATOR: Just after that, Verandah Porche joins us.

VERANDAH PORCHE: I just moved into Ray's room, and Ray and I had the chastest of all relationships, but it was more like that we were kids.

NARRATOR: We print all kinds of stories. Shit about the war, drugs, sex, and rock 'n roll.

RAY MUNGO: Within a year of Liberation News Service's birth, it went from nothing to 300 newspapers or 400 newspapers or something like that And a readership, apparently in the millions.

VERANDAH PROCHE: For me, the News Service was so exciting, and I had, I want to emphasize that I really had no skills to bring to this. I wasn't a journalist. I wasn't a reporter. I was their poet.

RAY MUNGO: Bloom was, of course, the mastermind of the whole thing. Marshall was definitely the heart and soul of Liberation News Service.

VERANDAH PORCHE: I really felt as if the News Service was not a sexist operation, which was why I liked it. Whereas so many of these
left organizations were just run by dinosaurs.

CATHY ROGERS: And in comes Verandah, in her ballet slippers and this kind of little short dress and sits down next to me. And I happened to be typing "The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm," which was going out on the Liberation News Service.

ALLEN YOUNG: We were very committed to a lot of the same things, but I mean, there were differences in political ideas between me and Ray and Marshall, and then LNS kind of grew, became bigger. We moved to New York. I think that this split developed. It was not unusual for left-wing organizations. Raymond's book, Famous Long Ago, summarizes it all rather neatly as the virtuous caucus and the vulgar Marxists.

RAY MUNGO: This schism developed, this violently, virulently tortured schism between what I call the vulgar Marxists, which were
these new people who called themselves serious Marxist revolutionaries, ideological, political, fucking serious. And the original LNS crowd, which was much crazier, zanier, gayer too.

VERANDAH PORCHE: We had just come back from California to this meeting with really bad vibes of the New York Liberation News Service people basically wanting to purge Marshall. And they called him a fucking faggot. And I just hit the ceiling. I just said, you can't talk about people like that. You know, we're on the left.
We can't talk about fucking faggots. And that just nailed it down for me. I felt as if we owed those New York people absolutely nothing.

NARRATOR: We come up with a plan. One of our guys, Stevie Diamond, gets the Beatles to lend us the movie Magical Mystery Tour for a benefit. We raise six grand and secretly plunk it down on a farm in Massachusetts. We pull a disappearing act. We rip off the press, files, and office equipment and move it to the woods.

STEVE DIAMOND: Marshall started talking about a farm in the country. And I lived in New York City. I was a student at Columbia
and I was into journalism etc. And a farm, that just sounded like the furthest out thought from my mind. A farm? What is he talking about? Marshall and I took two or three trips up here, leaving Manhattan at midnight, getting here like at five in the morning and driving around madly looking at farms. It's like, how many farms and
locations can you see in three hours? Because we have to get back to New York, because there's going to be a meeting tonight. He came back on a trip where he had gone alone and said, "Oh, I saw the place. This is the place. You're not going to believe it. It's perfect. Every detail. It's perfect.” And it
was. It really was. 

STEVE DIAMOND The plan was to do the heist, i.e., steal our own
presses and files and desks and office equipment and secretly move it up here to the farm.

CATHY ROGERS: And before you know it, we were stashing money in our freezer, and loaded up the truck with the whole news service and
went to Massachusetts where this crazy guy, Marshall, had arranged to live on this farm, to buy this farm.

RAY MUNGO: The farm group is there in Montague, Massachusetts, on this farm. And the other group left down in New York City, with empty offices, completely stripped bare, jumped into a bunch of cars and drove up to Massachusetts and raided the farm. That is, they came and they took everybody hostage, and they held us as prisoners
and they kidnapped us and they beat people up and they kept screaming at us, trying to get the press back. But
Marshall wouldn't tell them where the press was.

VERANDAH PORCHE: Everybody from our house went down there to welcome them. When we were about to go, we were surrounded by pissed off New York LNS people and some borrowed thugs.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: They locked us in a room. And there was one guy who was blonde, very Aryan looking. And he had a whip in his hand. Can you believe this? And he was very Aryan looking. He was a real Nazi. And he was yelling at us and telling us that we had to stay in the room, and we had to stay in that room all night.

STEVE DIAMOND: And we drove up here and they, like nine or ten people, immediately jumped on our car, opened the doors right out here in front of the farm, pulled me out of the car, and Cathy, and brought us in the house. And there was like this
whole hostage scene going on.

VERANDAH PORCHE: They were beating up Marshall. And I can remember them pulling down his pants, you know, which was just part of
this whole incivility, shall I say.

VERANDAH PORCHE: In the morning, Marshall was trying to show them around the place, like, look how beautiful it is. And in the meantime, some of them were looking in his closets, to try to see what he had. You know, I think they really wanted to blackmail him on this gay thing.

CATHY ROGERS: That was a very strange entry into this empty 17-room farmhouse, with these people that I didn't know very well.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Within a short period of time after the move, the heist, an article appeared in the underground papers around the
country called "Who Stole the Cookie Jar?" And it was an absolutely brilliant and totally vicious attack on Marshall that was extremely well written and perfectly phrased in the vernacular of late
1960s radical hip journalism.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: I remember Marshall being devastated by it. When the Freedom of Information Act material came out in the late '70s, it turned out that that article had been written by an FBI agent. And I was just floored by, number one, the cynicism behind it, and, number two, by the sophistication of the agency that they could have pulled that off. And Hoover had personally initialed the article.

VERANDAH PORCHE: In Montague, people tried to put out the news service, but people sort of lost interest in doing it, because they wanted to be rural.

[Music]

CATHY ROGERS: We stole the news service, but then to actually do the news service was a whole other thing, because the farm life and not having furniture, not having heat, all these things. And especially as winter came.

CATHY ROGERS: Because I was the only woman, there was a way that I
was responsible for the home fires. What was true for me, which was a growing awareness, was there was something for me here, and it had to do with eating simply, feeling less anxious.

NINA KELLER:  Being with so many people in the same house, you didn't just get up and breathe and think. The place was not warm.
The food wasn't in the refrigerator. Everything was what we ground, milked, dug, or planted.

SUSAN MARENECK: Things that I remember most vividly were things like
trying to hack the ice away from the walks so that we could actually get in and out of the house and get to the wood. The whole controversy in the spring about whether the garden would be organic
or not, and plowing the field.

CATHY ROGERS: Fortunately, the first woman who came was Wonka. She wanted to have one bowl and one spoon and take the door off the bathroom and just have everything be very simple. And that sounded kind of interesting to me, and we spent an afternoon throwing my
wedding dishes against the rock wall in the back to demonstrate that we only needed one bowl and one spoon.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: We learned how to milk cows. We certainly learned how to garden, and some people learned how to do tractors. We could write, we could pontificate. It was really impossible to invent.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: We had a couple of people who had some skills. Laurie knew a little bit about wood, and Marty knew less about wood, but something about the woods. He had been an Eagle Scout or something like that.

VERANDAH PORCHE: And a Mountaineer.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: And a Mountaineer.

VERANDAH PORCHE: And Fenwick.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: And Fenwick. And so we
looked up to those guys. They were guys.

VERANDAH PORCHE: They had some know how.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: And we knew we needed to garden. We knew that we were going to be self-sustaining because we didn't have any money, really. We were going to have to get some cattle, some pigs, some chickens, so that we could have eggs and meat and live.

VERANDAH PORCHE: And we had to be literary.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: It was an intentional community, but it was sort of beyond… We had no intention. [LAUGHTER]

IRA KARASKICK: I had $500 saved up from my bar mitzvah.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Oh, you bought the Farmall A?

IRA KARASICK: Yeah. We got that with a set of plows.

TONY MATHEWS: We didn't have a hydraulic system, so every time you get to the end of the row, you'd have to lift the plow by hand to lock it up into place. It was a lot of work.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: We had a transcendental experience. Part of it was because we were taking good teaching drugs to help us get there.
But also was just being out in nature, in the sunshine, in the garden, weeding naked.

RAY MUNGO: We had gone from being politicos, living in Washington, putting up propaganda for the movement, to being hippies living on the land in Vermont. The political movement people pretty much disowned us. I mean, they really thought we were not serious people. We were not real revolutionaries. We also started a reaction of other people who were very much into what we were doing. And suddenly new communes were popping up all over the place.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Probably the most important political decision that was made here was to not use chemicals.

IRA KARASICK:I said, well, okay, time to farm. Let's get the fertilizer. Let's get the pesticide. And Cathy… wait a second. And she was adamant. And then we got into this big fight.

CATHY ROGERS: Marshall and others didn't want to poison the land, and it was a huge topic of dissension, but none of us really knew what we were talking about. It's like, it just gave us a way of knowing each other.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Next thing we know, we're in the worlds leading organic magazine. We were in an advocacy position, barely even knowing that it involved any of that.

CATHY ROGERS: The feeling of, oh, my God, you don't need to just flip a switch for heat. You have to chop wood. And there was something to me that was very bracing about that and really good about that. It was kind of throwing off all this sort of middle class, whatever we were supposed to be and do.

CATHY ROGERS: One thing about the farm that I thought later was we really didn't share an idea of why were we there. There was this assumption because of Liberation News Service, because of the times,
and we were all kind of counterculture, whatever that meant. But we didn't say what we were for.

NARRATOR: On November 1, 1969, some hunters find Marshall dead in his car ,with a vacuum hose hooked to the exhaust pipe. He was 25 years old when he died.

[Music] SONG NANCY

I cried, I cleaned, and I wandered around.
Stared stunned into space as my tears hit the ground.
Making my bed, I've gone singing the blues.
It won't bring you back,
but it helps see me through.

Oh, babe, why did you do it?
No one to see you through it.
And the night must have loomed so long.
So long....‚

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Then the morning of November 1st, I got up early.
I was walking around and the green Triumph just kind of barreled through. And I remember seeing Marshall. I waved at him and he didn't... He had kind of an otherworldly aura about him.

VERANDAH PORCHE: I had to go and see the car. And I remember driving to the field with somebody and seeing the newspaper in the car, you know, that he was reading the newspaper in the green of your Triumph, crumpling the news of massacres into a ball.

CATHY ROGERS: There was a feel of sharing our lives so closely in a way. And there was a lot of conversation about - we were the family.
But we didn't know the pain that Marshall was in.

RAY MUNGO: I think it took the movement down, too. I mean, I think we just felt completely defeated. I mean, Bloom's
death was the end of the road. We had to start all over. We had to find some new way to live.

VERANDAH PORCHE: Some of my favorite times were when he would come down this impossible road in his little Triumph and he would bop, bop, bop. And the dog, you know, both of them would just go poow!
Out of the car. And there was this big theatrical hoo-ha attached to it. And maybe we would burst into song. No matter how serious the task at hand was, you know, the political something. I mean, there was always time for Ethel Merman. As long as he could be Ethel Merman.

RAY MUNGO: Hello, my darling!

VERANDAH PORCHE: Oh, here we are. This is the moment we've been waiting for.

Yes, yes, yes. [RAY SINGING] 

You're a melody of a symphony by Strauss.
You're  Whistler's Mama.
You're an O'Neill drama.
You're Mickey Mouse.

VERANDAH PORCHE: You know what they said in the old days:
“She's dashing and he's petite.”

SAM LOVEJOY: When I got to the farm, there was, in the spring of 69, there was a great deal of isolation. Just this real insular, we're friends with the people in Packer Corners and at Wendell and up the road in North Leverett, but we're sort of trying to take care of our own. And there was no community outreach.

SAM LOVEJOY: I grew up in a small town, and my sense of it was -you gotta know the guy that runs the gas station, and you gotta know the guy that runs the store, and tractor parts place, and you got next door neighbors, and those people are going to be crucial to our lives here.

TONY MATHEWS: I determined to develop skills. I said to myself, you know, you've got to learn to work hard. I felt like I fit in and was part of a team. If that goes on too long, where you feel like other people aren't doing work, then resentment builds up. But, that's nature. That's what always happens, and did happen here, too. But, that wasn't what was in my mind for 12 years.

SAM LOVEJOY: We had to figure out, like, cutting hay to put bales of hay in the barn to feed Dolly. There's nothing to anchor a crowd faster than to have a dairy cow, which has to be milked twice a day and fed and watered. And in the winter, the water freezes. And so, a rhythm, an agricultural rhythm, immediately takes hold if you've got a cow.

SAM LOVEJOY: Then the focus was on the garden, and the first really hard-worked organic garden started in 1970.
VERANDAH PORCHE: There were farmers who reached out to us. They needed cheap labor, and we needed to learn how to do things. And so we toted hay bales and hauled sap buckets and hung around in farm kitchens.

EMERY EVANS: Many times they've been of great assistance to us here on the farm. I felt that if they could come up in here in the country with practically nothing to do with, and weather one Vermont winter, they'd be just about like the rest of us after that.

VERANDAH PORCHE: We wanted to give respect and we wanted to get respect.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: We would see strange cars coming by, sometimes just people cruising to see what the hippies looked like, and what they were or were not wearing.

VERANDAH PORCHE: There were certain people who were really ambassadors, like, Ronnie Squires, who was a gay guy who grew up on the dairy farm down at the bottom of the hill. And we took him in and he took us in, and likewise Fritz.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: Fritz did a great deal to be the front person for
the whole community because everyone just loved Fritz, and Fritz was a mensch.

SAM LOVEJOY: I think in time it proved to be true that those people that we got to know earlier on in the community were supporters of
ours. Not necessarily agreed with our politics, but understood that we worked hard. Those people weren't a bunch of malingering lazy goofuses that somehow got money from God-knows-where or they were trust fund babies or any of that stuff.

TONY MATHEWS: Steve was really the first ambassador to the greater community, because there was a little lunch counter community store in the center of Montague, with a really redneck guy, Lee Lund, who ran it. But they got to be tight, they got to be friends.

CHARLES LIGHT: The most important thing with Lee Lund was that he gave Stevie credit. [LAUGHS]

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yeah. With Rob Ripley, they were great.

TONY MATHEWS: He was born here, bought the farm next door, and had the sugaring house there. He was our mentor, especially mine.

CHARLES LIGHT: Well, I started the sugaring, but I was tripping on mescaline.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, so was he. He was our Dalai Lama, actually. I mean, Rob Ripley was a total Zen guy. I mean, just completely peaceful.

NINA KELLER: He was a human being who was not afraid of change. And the main reason was because we moved into his old farm, and he saw us working. And when he needed help, we were his crew. There were these few local farmers who we got along with. The community was very fearful of us. And their children were fascinated.

RAY MUNGO: I'm sure they looked on us like we were aliens from outer space. But, that old Vermont thing of you do what you want on your land and you don't bother me on my land and we get along just fine. One time, I was talking to some Vermonter about the problems of being a small farmer. And he looked me up and down.
I weighed about 115 pounds. And he said, "You may be small, but you're no farmer."

[music][CHAPTER HEAD: LOVE, SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

RAY MUNGO: I'm absolutely sure that Marshall's suicide was the thing that pushed me over the edge, because within the next year after his death, I came out of the closet with blazing glory. My editor was mortified that I had actually written down in print. He said, "People are talking about it, and it's not good. It's not good for your reputation."

RAY MUNGO: The hippies were not necessarily accepting of this gay thing. John Wilton and I were the subjects of a great deal of ridicule. Why are they throwing it in my face? If they have to be gay, why don't they just keep it to themselves like they're supposed to?

RAY MUNGO: [GREETING RICHARD WIZANSKY] There he is! Dahling, how are you?

RAY MUNGO: Well, we actually had orgies, but the fact is, very seldom.

VERANDAH PORCHE: Well, who did, Raymond?

RAY MUNGO: For the most part…for the most part…

VERANDAH PORCHE: Raymond, that is just...

RAY MUNGO: There was an orgy at Doug Parker's apartment in Boston one night. And it was all people from this farm. You weren't there.

VERANDAH PORCHE: I wasn't there. I wasn't invited.

RAY MUNGO: I didn't tell you about it.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: You know, there would be these late night conversations with lots of cigarette smoke and very manly, manly conversation. And boys in tight jeans, and certain boys admiring
those boys. But there was this difference between them. Just the tension of not being able to act on the way you felt.

RAY MUNGO: But coming out of the closet had its price, too. I mean, I fell in love with a straight guy and it drove me off the farm.
Unrequited love affair. I had to get away.

VERANDAH PORCHE: I mean, your farm was a lot more sexually charged. I know I always come across with being like Miss Prim here.

CATHERINE BLINDER: There wasn't that much fucking going on actually.
Well, enough....

VERANDAH PORCHE: Maybe it was just how Peter was always looking for beautiful women.

CATHERINE BLINDER: Maybe there was more sex at Tree Frog.

VERANDAH PORCHE: I thought so.

CHARLES LIGHT: We all did.

CATHERINE BLINDER: Oh, you did? [LAUGHTER]

NINA KELLER: Sex was in the air and people were sexy. Young people are just adorable. And those who branched out had a lot of fun, and a lot of complexities, and some were really tortured by it. But it didn't stop any of us from experimenting.

VERANDAH PORCHE: We were a very decorous commune, for a commune. We were basically exogamous. You know, if you weren't in a couple then you would go elsewhere for fly-by night or potential nested romance. And there were people who came through, who everybody slept with sooner or later.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: There was a lot of sex here. It just wasn't amongst ourselves.

VERANDAH PORCHE: Well, you were either a couple or…

RICHARD WIZANSKY: Take Out!

VERANDAH PORCHE: Take out! [Laughter]

RICHARD WIZANSKY: It was not easy to be gay in 1968. Those of us who were gay and are gay felt that a lot. No homophobia here. I mean, it was a place where we could be gay, but we just didn't talk about it. Yet, everyone knew that when we were going down to our cabin, we were going to be sleeping together. I mean, that's what we did.

JUDY RUBENSTEIN: After we got married with the Justice of the Peace in Greenfield, we went up to the May Day celebration. And I think we announced to everybody that we just got married, and everybody's attitude was, "Why would you want to do that?"

RAY MUNGO: You're not going to be married to 18 other people. People would become very unhappy with other people and stony silences would ensue, and romantic jealousies would occur. I admire us for taking the chance.

SAM LOVEJOY: People did some experimenting, and most of it actually ended up being a disaster, because of the tensions that would arise from it. People tend to couple up and I think that's what, you know, we came to realize and it's the rare person that can share
a lover with another person that you're living in the house with. It's a source of tension. Someone falls in love with the other person's partner, that the threesome tried to figure out how to live
with each other even though the relationship had shifted. The people either did figure out a way to balance out their own life or they found their own partner or they would leave. And many times
people would, you know, go stay at Packer Corners for six months or
Wendell or they would go to California on a trip.

CATHERINE BLINDER: But, you know, it all felt like part of the same thing. Like the sex that felt like it was political as well. And right.

[music] CHAPTER HEAD THE CHILDREN

OONA ADAMS: It was a wonderful place to grow up. It was kind of a complicated place to grow up, too. We had a huge amount of freedom. We spent a lot of time running around in the woods. We spent a lot of time really out on our own figuring out what we were going to do.

OONA ADAMS (Age 14): Having like all these imaginary friends. Building forts everywhere. 

SEQUOYA FREY: Building forts everywhere. 

OONA ADAMS (14) It's freedom to be able to imagine anything. I mean
to be able to sit down and like pretend that the stump is a record player or pretend that like there's a dragon standing next to you, or pretend anything you want.

VERANDAH PORCHE: We tried to respect them when they were babies in their wall mounted high chairs that each one of these kids was different and was going to have a story to tell.

SEQUOYA FREY: I remember it being really fun. I think I had a great childhood and I'm glad I grew up on a commune, you know, whereas before I would never have said that.

OONA ADAMS: Kids just had a very different point of, kind of, frame of reference than we did. We didn't have television. Although we used to go to our neighbor Ralph Rhodes' house and watch cartoons in the morning. That was pretty great.

SEQUOYA FREY: When I was in grade school I really felt embarrassed to say that I lived in a commune. We didn't have luxury things, like a washer and a dryer. I would be embarrassed if a friend came over and, you know, there was no, the bathroom wasn't normal.

OONA ADAMS: We didn't look like them. Our parents didn't do the same
things as they did. They weren't real happy to see us come into the schools. It wasn't a particularly easy transition, I think, for anybody. I really hated it. I really hated school. I felt
really uncomfortable. At root, there was this basic difference in understanding how the world worked and it's amazing how much that comes out even when you're five.

OONA ADAMS (14)L: When I was about 10, it became like this sort of pride, sort of a really wild sort of pride saying this is where I came from and I'm really proud of it because before I'd been so embarrassed that all of a sudden something clicked. 

OONA ADAMS: And I remember getting into a lot of fights about whether or not boys could marry boys and girls could marry girls.
But I mean we were in a lot of fights about everything. You know we were in this very weird situation growing up in terms of class. I mean we had less than even the working class poor town kids.

JANICE FREY: She always wanted to have me live in a nuclear family,
and be normal, until she was about 14, 15 years old.

SUSAN MARENECK: We allowed our children sometimes to fail, which a lot of children haven't been allowed to ever do. I think we allowed ourselves to fail.

VERANDAH PORCHE: In front of them yes. [Laughter]

JANICE FREY: Whenever I went to the PTA meetings and stuff, the principal would come up to me and she would just say, "Sequoia and
Eben are just such exceptional children. They really know how to relate to adults like friends." And I thought, "Gee, isn't that weird?" [Laughter]

OONA ADAMS: It was great to be around so many people. It was great to have endless adults to talk to. You know, people who had all different kinds of expertise, and when parents got sick of us, there were a million other people to spend time with.

VERANDAH PORCHE: She spent her first five years as a vegetarian. Her father was a very, very strict vegetarian, and I knew that she felt that he could tell that she was eating meat. We were separated by that time. Once she took the bite, and she asked me,"What is that flat meat?" And I said, "Oona, that's baloney." She said, "I want that flat meat." And so I let her have that flat meat and you know, all hell broke loose, but she had her flat meat. [Laughter]

JANICE FREY: Who was responsible for raising the kids, and who was going to discipline them, and things like that? I remember clearly a dinner discussion between Eben's father and a couple other people who lived here, who were trying to discipline, the kids, and Chuck
just stood up and he said, "You're not going to discipline my kid unless you love him too."

SEQUOYA FREY: My father died before I was born and I think, if I hadn't grown up in a commune, I can't picture what my life would be like. Growing up in a commune made me feel like I had a huge family, because there were so many loving people here. There's so much warmth.

SEQUOYA FREY: I want a piece of wood like this. Do you have any more wood, Peter? Peter would always give me, like, little carving tools and I'd go take a piece of wood and carve, like, a dragon in it or something. My monsters. Then I used that...what is that called?

PETER NATTI: Band saw.

SEQUOYA FREY: Band saw. That was scary.

OONA ADAMS: It's amazing. Now, all of the people who I grew up with are on the school board, and that's pretty great. There's no longer going to be a first grade teacher who uses the n-word. You know, it's a big change. It's a sea change really, that the dominant culture is now a culture shaped by the people who moved here in the '60s. People worked really hard at anything, whether it was revolution or dinner. And that's important. I work really hard. It's something that I really did take from this, is that whatever it is
you're doing, it's important to really do it, to be serious, as well as fairly ridiculous.

[Music] CHAPTER CARD RE-ENGAGEMENT WITH THE POLITICAL WORLD
THE ANTI-NUCLEAR FAMILY

SAM LOVEJOY: From the summer of 1970, to the summer of 1973, there were basically four growing seasons. The farm was, agriculturally, on enough of an even keel, a sort of operating organic garden, the tractors worked, the schedule to get hay, putting up fences and building greenhouses and the equipment and the waterline. All that stuff took a couple of years to get organized. And I remember thinking, where am I gonna go now? What am I gonna do now? What's going to be the sort of political thing that I know I'm going to get into?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: And then of course, that fabulous moment when they decided to build a nuclear plant four miles from the house. When I saw that picture of the proposed nuke on the Montague Plains, I just said, God, this is fantastic. Because we had the perfect skill set.
I mean, we had Dan and Chuck, filmmakers, and Anna, organizing and writing, and Sam and Nina. I mean, we're all perfectly geared for it. And Northeast Utilities never knew what hit them.

SAM LOVEJOY: Hi, I'm Sam Lovejoy and I live on Chestnut Hill in Montague, Massachusetts. And I'm just an organic farmer.

DAN KELLER: What was your first reaction to seeing the NU tower?

SAM LOVEJOY(laughing): I turned to you and told you, we're gonna have to tip it over, or someone was gonna have to. No, I pointed out to you that I thought it was distinctly the symbol, which was probably gonna have to get removed in order to get a movement going
here in the valley, to stop the Nuke.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: We were granted this remarkable gift of Northeast Utilities trying to build a nuclear plant four miles from the house. I knew instantly what was gonna happen. That this was gonna be a huge movement. It would be a hell of a lot of fun. It was a tremendous challenge. I knew we'd win right away. It was just too implausible to stick those two reactors on the Montague Plains. I mean, look at who we were. We were seasoned anti-war activists. Most of us were college educated or we had college level skills. We were a remarkable crew. It was almost like, hey, somebody just stuck us there and here we were. And Northeast had no idea what they were walking into.

SAM LOVEJOY: And then, by December 28th, when they announced the plant and no one had done it, and by February 22nd, and yet still no one had done it. And we had never gotten really any kind of movement off the ground to stop the plant in the local area. I just figured it was time. And I figured I was more than within my rights by that time because I was sure I knew enough that I could rightfully claim its unlawfulness.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: When we first started opposing the nuke, the assumption in the country that nuclear power was gonna take over was almost universal. And when Richard Nixon got on TV and said in 1974,
there'd be a thousand nukes, by the year 2000,nobody blinked.

RICHARD NIXON: I'm asking the Atomic Energy Commission to speed up the licensing and construction of nuclear plants. By the end of this
decade, we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign enemies, uh, uh, foreign energy sources.

ANNA GYORGY: Well, the main objections are: first, the health factor, which is the low level radiation, which is so dangerous over a long period of time. The Montague Plains is a beautiful and delicate ecological asset. It's an aquifer, a natural filter for the Connecticut River, so that any leaks or any radioactivity loose on the Montague Aquifer would affect the whole Connecticut River Valley.

SAM LOVEJOY: We had community meetings. I think the first one
happened at the end of the summer, and it was heavily attended.
There were hundreds of people there. We were trying to figure out every way to get in the newspaper possible, to raise the nuclear issue because there was a presumption on the part of the town of Montague that this nuke, it had already been built in their minds.
They were already spending the tax break. And by January, I was writing a statement to the police and to the world saying, this is why I'm knocking over the tower.

SAM LOVEJOY: And it was one of the quietest, clearest, cold nights. It was just crisp. There was not a sound in the air. And when I walked up to the tower with its strobe light blinking on and off,
it was like lighting the entire area. Like, I could see everything clearly for a split second, then darkness for a split second, then light for a split second. It was hypnotic. I went over to the farthest turnbuckle and I measured it up a little bit. And then I just set to work. And very carefully, I got it down to about an inch
from the end where it was just about to pop off. And then I very carefully stuck my crowbar in at an angle so that in case the thing took off, it wouldn't take my wrist with it. So I was like being incredibly careful and I was twisting it and suddenly it just let go. Boom, without notice.

SAM LOVEJOY: It made this like double wanging noise that carried up the cable. It did it, it repeated it twice. Wang, wang. And then the steel cable and the shock wave hit the top of the tower. And the tower being solid steel, the noise then echoed down through the tower, to the ground. And in addition to that, by then the cable
decided to start whapping around the tower. And the noise and the
amplification of the noise and steel on steel and everything. It was so noisy out on the Montague Plains there for about a minute, I'm
surprised the entire Montague didn't wake up.

SAM LOVEJOY: And nobody came. So then I said, "Oh, it's clean sailing. "This is ridiculous." So then I just undid the next two turnbuckles. The second one let go and it didn't fall over. And I said, "Great." And the third one let go. [Creaking noises] And the tower, I thought that I first observed the tower like move just a little bit. And then it seemed to move back. And as I just thought
that I was gonna have the chance to do that fourth turnbuckle, it swayed for the last time and it just started to go.[Crashing sound]
And then it just disintegrated midair, just kind of crumbled
down into pieces on the ground with this incredible giant crashing noise.

NINA KELLER: One of the best times was around the tower when Sam called a meeting to talk about it. We are a family. We are gonna have this huge impact potentially from the law, with our children. What do we all think? And can I do this, without everyone having an agreement, and knowing what's going on? And it was a great moment of real closeness and decision-making.

SAM LOVEJOY: That if I did it alone, and turned myself into the police and handed the police a statement, of why I did it, that that would be enough. And the property destruction issue would be ameliorated and it would be an argument about nuclear power on trial, not Sam Lovejoy as a property destroyer.

MAN ON STREET: I think he should have been in jail.

OTHER MAN ON STREET: With a rope around his neck.

THIRD MAN ON STREET: I felt it was unnecessary destruction, but in a way he had a point, you know. I'm not really against him, I'm not really for him.

STEVE LERNER: What was his point?

THIRD MAN ON STREET: To protect himself and the natural environment from destruction and radiation and things like that.

SAM LOVEJOY: And I just had to tell people that the raw gamble that was being handed to the citizens of Franklin County, and ask them if they wanted to send Sam Lovejoy to jail for five years, when they confront his act with the nuclear power plant reality. And then I had to walk into court and say to those people, “this man is not guilty of bad conduct. This man should be lauded for trying to stop an infernal machine.”

NARRATOR: Judge Smith noted at one point, "This is probably one of the strangest trials ever held in Franklin County." One of the minor issues of the trial set Lovejoy free at an unexpected moment. The first person to argue against this was Lovejoy himself. The judge, however, was insistent in his desire to dismiss the case.

JUROR O’NEIL: That's the reason why I think that the jury would have acquitted him. The Commonwealth didn't prove the point that he was malicious. And I don't think he was. I don't think he's that type of a man. He figured he'd sacrifice his own life, you know what I mean?
For all the existence of the community in this area.

SAM LOVEJOY: So he was like trying to protect my rights as an individual, and yet try and get this whole issue of nuclear power
somehow digested in his mind. And that confrontation in the judge was I think where we really won the trial, because he became
convinced that, not only was I sincere in my belief that
nuclear power plants were bad, but that maybe even I was
right in doing the act that I did.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Sam's knocking over the tower was huge. I mean, because it was the first real clear statement of the kind of
opposition you get your arms around. We had coined the phrase, "No Nukes." We had started the alternative energy coalition, Nuclear Objectors for a Pure Environment. It was all very cute, but this was a tangible act. It was the match that lit the fuse basically. Now, I speak to a lot of audiences mostly about renewable energy, and about stopping nuclear plants. But when I say that we were living on a farm, we were a bunch of hippies on a farm, nobody thought we could do anything. They came in, they wanted to build this plant and we stopped the plant. And now it's a nature conservancy, people applaud.

SAM LOVEJOY: My life became one trip after another. I was running
around all of the United States for three really intense years.

NINA KELLER: The anti-nuclear action took a lot of our close-knit family into the political arena and cows always needed milking twice a day and the chickens and the kids and just maintaining everything and that was hard for me because I wanted to also go and do that, but I wasn't going to because of the farm. I think we just decided, look, this is as important and we were told, you're doing just as important work as we are. I thought, oh great, okay, yeah, we are and we were.

JUDY RUBENSTEIN: I also found as a feminist, because I had been a feminist since the early women's liberation movement in New York, that the relationship between men and women at the farm, I thought,
was very imbalanced, because I didn't see the men doing the cooking, doing the cleaning up. They would sit around talking about their schemes and ideas and their films and their books and what they were going to do in politics, while the women did all the work.

CATHY ROGERS: And it seemed to me, at the time, that the men were sitting around the fire and smoking dope, and the women were more like getting to try our muscles around riding the tractor or planting a garden or something that was a little bit more empowering.

NINA KELLER: The men were doing the big farm work and the women were
doing the littler stuff and so I just decided, I'm going to learn how to do brake jobs. So I started learning the machine kind of work and started driving the tractor and hoping that the men would filter in where I was filtering out, and I wasn't at the same movie that they were at.[Laughs]

CATHERINE BLINDER: Because you know women's consciousness raising groups at the Common Ground in Brattleboro, and I remember that
Stevie Diamond was standing in our kitchen and we were going off to Brattleboro and we were feeling pretty cocky about this, and as we were walking out the door, Stevie goes, "Well, I guess that separates the women from the girls. And Jenny turned around and said, "Which ones are we?" And he goes, "I don't think real women would go to something like that."[Laughter]

VERANDAH PORCHE: But we were lucky here, because the very different vibe here, came from having all these gay guys, and having, I mean, Richard Wizansky is a pretty dominant guy, and he's pretty damn gay, and he was all over the kitchen.

NINA KELLER: Martha was talking with us about an anthropological phenomenon, where, in the villages she had visited, every woman had her own fire, and she said, "How can you women share the same kitchen? It's not anthropologically correct. 

JANICE FREY: Which we proved, over and over again.[Laughter]

JUDY RUBENSTEIN: One of the big conflicts that I saw was in the kitchen. The women, who had huge conflicts over whose kitchen it was. Because the women didn't have equal power, I don't think, at the farm. I think that the men, particularly certain men, were making the major decisions and calling the shots and everything was focused around them... it's always the oppressed people who start fighting with each other, and if the women individually had had more power, then they would probably have gotten along better.

[Singing]CHAPTER CARD: THE PLAY’S THE THING….AT PACKER CORNERS

VERANDAH PORCHE: There was such performative quality to the lives that we had. You know, it was life's great adventure, and how it goes on and on, and I wanted my life to be a poem.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: We were really cooking when we were doing theater here, these outdoor productions under the direction and inspiration and genius really of John Carroll, who lived here.

JOHN CARROLL: I can promise you this: we're going to give them excellent Shakespeare. That we know we can do. If we have to do it in street clothes, handing round one second hand college text of The Tempest, and on land. We'll do it.

RICHAERD WIZANSKY: His approach and our approach to doing it outdoors, and having Fenwick, who lived here, build the props and the sets for it in a very original way.

MARK FENWICK: I tried to build both a seaworthy craft, as well as a stable platform for actors. Most of the superstructure, I felled trees here and had them milled up at Emery Evans' sawmill.

EMERY EVANS: I think the plays are very well done. We have seen the last two plays, and enjoyed them very much.

SHOSHANA RIHN (Rehearsing The Tempest): Life gone, or in need of any action, would I not?

SHOSHANA RIHN: I love doing plays. I love acting. It's something new to me, as it is to just about all of us. Oh, it's tremendously
exciting to pretend to be somebody else. I can't say that it's part of the goals of this theater group to, that we do it because it will be a way of turning local folks onto us more newcomer folks. Though, that's a side benefit.

[Music]

JOHN CARROLL: When Joan calls 'Ceres,'then we'll take the dancing.

[Music]

PETER GOULD (REHEARSING):Now forward with your tale.

PETER GOULD: Everybody else in this play is dressed up to the hilt with long robes of velvet and beautiful swords and these jewels of empire. They think that Caliban is ugly. They think he's deformed,
just because of the fact he's naked.

SHOSHANA RIHN: And does things in a more primitive way. Doesn't have their refined European culture.

SHOSHANA RIHN: A few years ago, I was arrested at the store where I worked, by the FBI, and it turned out that I had been on the FBI's most wanted list for five years, over five years. I was wanted in
connection with a series of bombings that had been done in New York City in 1969. The bombings were directed at mostly corporations, but also some government buildings as well. They were symbolic. Attention getting, expressions of outrage at the war. There was about a million dollar bounty on my head. So I never went home. Ceased being Pat Swinton and became this wandering person.

SHOSHANA RIHN: At some point, after I'd been moving around for a few years, I was just tired. And I had been through Brattleboro a couple of times. There was something about Brattleboro that I thought, "What? Brattleboro's about a big enough town. They'd have a bunch of jobs there." And I didn't know a soul in Brattleboro.

SHOSHANA RIHN: Gradually, after living here a while, I started making friends, some of whom turned out to be the people at Packer Corners commune, where, after about another year or two, I was invited to live. It became an easy place to settle down into, because it was beautiful and people were nice. It was like a family.

SHOSHANA RIGN: When I knew that the FBI was hot on my trail, I decided I just wasn't going to run anymore. I couldn't live the
rest of my life on the run. And that, furthermore, I was even
getting tired of lying all the time. Of hiding myself, even to these
people that were becoming my friends. I knew it was going
to be trouble for them too. Would they like me to be someplace else when the FBI came?

SHOSHANA RIHN: So I recall, after I told them in a brief five minute thing, about who I really was, and what I was being sought for, there was a silence for a moment, and then everybody broke out into spontaneous applause.[Laughs] It was one of the more
lovely moments I can remember.

SHOSHANA RIHN: And indeed the FBI came, scooped me up. After I'd been in prison for a few months, bail was very high. The farm, the Packer Corners, put up Packer Corners. Put the whole farm on the line, as bail for me.

SHOSHANA RIHN: As the trial unfolded, and the evidence was put forth, and did not convince the jury, the public, of my guilt. And so, I was acquitted. And then, I had to decide where I was going to live. But, Vermont had gotten under my skin, in a way that I hadn't realized. One of the things I loved about living at the farm, was we put on these fabulous outdoor theatrical productions. And I discovered that I really loved acting. I think all those years of being undercover had helped me learn how to pretend to be somebody else. And I learned that I was a good actor.

[Applause]

FRITZ HEWITT: Would you like to park in here? Leave a really big aisle for everybody to get out.

[Applause]

ACTRESS: Are not you my father?

JOHN CARRO0LL (ACTING) Thy mother was a feast of virtue,
and she said thou wast my daughter.

ACTOR: Oh, It begins again. [singing]

Full fathom five, thy father lies,
But his bones are quarrelling.
Those are pearls that were his eyes. 
Nothing of him that will fade,
but will suffer a sea change. 

ACTRESS: Yay, all the creatures against your peace. You, of thy son Alonzo have they bereft, and do pronounce by me, lingering perdition.

[music][applause]

[music] CHAPTER CARD:THE BATTLES AT SEABOOK

If we could heed
these early warnings 

BILL TALLMAN: Seabrook project is two 1150 megawatt nuclear power plants located at Seabrook, New Hampshire.

SAM LOVEJOY: I was absolutely convinced that the opposition in New Hampshire was not going to lick that plant.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: When we went up to Seabrook, we had already kind of turned the corner here at Montague. The Public Service Commission against them, they got Public Service in New Hampshire. We got this lunatic governor, Meldrim Thomson, and it looked pretty hopeless, if you're just in Seabrook. But here we come up from Montague, and say, "Hey, you know, we can beat these guys." I think it had a big impact.

BILL TALLMAN: At this time, ladies and gentlemen, the Governor of the State of New Hampshire.

MELDRIM THOMSON; Thank you, Bill. This has to be one of the truly great days in the history of the state of New Hampshire.

SAM LOVEJOY: I got all these phone calls saying, "Hey, did you hear that the license got granted?" And I said, "Well, let's have an immediate meeting. We're going to have to use direct action in
Seabrook,” and they all agreed. It wasn't like there was any argument about that, and we had this meeting that happened like in a day or two. Between that meeting and August 1, when the first 18 people were arrested, those people were all trained in nonviolent action. We organized probably 30, 40 groups around New England. It was a phenomenal growth of energy focused on Seabrook.
It was as if Seabrook, to the occupation movement, the anti-nuclear movement, was no different than knocking over the tower in Montague.
It was like - the bell was rung, the license was granted, what
are we going to do about it?

[whistling]

BRUCE BECKLEY: I'm Bruce Beckley, Public Service Company.
You're entering private property. Beyond this point, you're trespassing.

PROTESTER: Can you all understand why we're here?

POLICE OFFICER: Yes, we can. Okay. All right, how long are you going to be in here?

PROTESTER: Well, we're prepared to stay here until the next rally, August 22nd.

POLICE OFFICER: Oh, we can't have that.

BRUCE BECKLEY: You're on private property. We've offered you a spot where we're already saving the trees, but we're not going to let you
go on the site and stay here tonight. You'll be subject to criminal trespass charges.

POLICE OFFICERS: Mass arrest. Let's go. We ain't got time to talk.
Let's go. You want to stand up? You're going out now one way or another. You need to go. Get the cameraman out of here. Make sure your camera stays that way, OK? Take your camera with you.

DAN KELLER: Are you saying that we can't shoot film here?

POLICE OFFICER: It has been requested that you leave, right? Do you want to be arrested, sir?.

DAN KELLEER: We're leaving.

REPORTER: Why is the press being asked to leave?

PUBLIC SERVICE CO OFFICIAL: I don't know. You're on private
property like everybody else is. You know what a public utility is?
It's a private company.

POLICE OFFICER: Let's move. [hand covers camera lens]

HARVEY WASSERMAN: By this time, the Clamshell had formed this umbrella group, happily involving activists from all six New England states, people who mostly had been involved in the anti-war movement, many of whom were living on farms. The only really clear divide in the Clamshell Alliance, as it was growing, was between people who lived in the cities and people who were on farms.

[crowd singing]
Now is the meeting time… Now is the meeting time 
[horse hooves on pavement]

POLICE CHIEF: This is disturbing conduct. I'll arrest you this time on riot control.

[singing] We shall not, we shall not be moved. 
Just like the tree that's standing by the water,
We shall not be moved. [chanting, sounds of heavy machinery]

REPORTER: Did you have any kind of problems getting in when you 
came in?

MELDRIM THOMSON: Not at all. Came right in. Of course, they were
saying a few things, but I think maybe the dogs barking hungrily at them kept them back.

CHARLES LIGHT: You don't want it to fall off.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: And so we start with 18, all New Hampshire-ites,
and we go, you know, on August 22nd of 1976, we had 180. It was almost built into the anti-nuclear movement. That it had to be nonviolent. There was the American Friends Service Committee in Boston. There was a Elizabeth Boardman who was very involved
in training people and who was a remarkable presence. Just this classic, white-haired Quaker lady who was just a vision to behold.

ELIZABETH BOARDMAN: If you role play that kind of a situation, and it becomes clear that one or two people are making all the decisions, you have time to think about that beforehand.

PROTESTEER PLAYING COP: This here is private property, it belongs to public utilities. If you try to come onto this property, I'm going to have to put you all under arrest.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: We successfully organized and trained about 2,000 people to go onto the site. What happened was quite remarkable. Meldrim Thomson, the extreme right-wing governor of New Hampshire,
was livid about our demonstration. And as far as he was concerned, he wanted to shoot to kill. The head of the state patrol was relatively sane, and understood that if they blocked us off the site, they were going to have 2,000 people sprawling onto I-95. And his decision, which was a wise decision, was to let us onto the site, and arrest us in an orderly fashion on the site. And Thomson hated this.

REPORTER: And you want to allow them to
come up the access road, the entrance road?

MELDRIM THOMSON: I'll leave that to the general.

MAJOR PAUL DOYON: We are not prohibiting them from coming in on the access road as long as they do not block ingress and egress.

REPORTER: I just want to know who is actually in charge of the operations here today?

MELDRIM THOMSON: I'm the Governor of the state. I'm here, and I am in charge.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Put yourself in their position. If you were facing
1,800 or 2,000 highly organized, dedicated people, committed to nonviolence, and committed to the idea of getting on this site and stopping the nuclear power plant, you would probably follow the line of least resistance, which was allowing us on the site.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: It was a gorgeous day, and everybody was just amazingly feeling high and liberated and successful. And there we were, singing and dancing, 2,000 people on the site.

ELIZABETH BOARDMAN: We have good news for us. We are going to stay on the site, and we are sorry for the trouble this is going to
cause you.

COLONEL PAUL DOYON: Well, to that end, I thank you for
the courtesy of returning and informing me. I would ask that you be
particularly attentive to the message that I'll be broadcasting to you within minutes.

[Over loudspeaker] You are hereby ordered to leave and vacate this place within 30 minutes.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: And so we organized, and we were very cooperative. Here come the staties with the school buses. And we were expecting
everybody to be arrested by two, three in the morning and home by eight in the morning. All of a sudden, in the middle of the night,
Meldrim Thomson shows up at the courthouse, and demands that we give $100 bail. Some people gave bail, but most people either said, "No, this is not part of the deal," or, "I don't have $100."

HARVEY WASSERMAN: In the morning, suddenly there are 1,100 or so Clamshell Alliance, hippie demonstrators being held in five National Guard armories in the state of New Hampshire. Now, if you're a reporter, is this a story that's going to knock your socks off? I mean, the reporters went crazy. Here you've got this crazy governor,
and you've got these hippie kids, they've got this nuclear plant nobody knows anything about, and they're dragged off, and suddenly they're in five National Guard. I mean, it was just--it was a field day, and that is how nuclear power became a global issue.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Thomson wouldn't relent, and the kids wouldn't relent. [crowd cheering]
After two weeks, we still had 550 people in the armories. It was a question, who was going to cave first, us or the governor? The New Hampshire taxpayers were livid because it was costing 75 grand a day, and Thomson was under tremendous pressure, but he finally
caved in and let everybody go.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: And by that time, the issue of nuclear power had been certified for debate. We had a vision of a world that could run without fossil and nuclear fuels, if only the money earmarked for those thousand nuclear plants would go to renewable energy,
we could remake the world.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: The other piece of synchronicity was the Toward Tomorrow fair at UMass in Amherst. It was the first major renewable
energy conference in the United States, and this is where it all came from. We coined the phrase "No Nukes" here, and we also were able to start to make a coherent argument for renewable energy.

GUY CHICHESTER: If you took $2 billion that it would cost to build a modern nuclear power plant, and you divided that $2 billion into the 200,000 households that there are in the state of New Hampshire, that is enough money to put a solar-powered space heating system,
solar-powered domestic hot water system, and a wind-driven electric generator on every single one of the 200,000 households.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: After that, we called another demonstration for June 24th of 1978, and this was going to be the granddaddy of all. We were going to have tens of thousands of people come to Seabrook
from all over the country. And suddenly our meetings were filled with all these earnest young people who didn't necessarily buy into nonviolence, didn't buy into the Quaker discipline, consensus became impossible. So, by the time we get to June, towards June, the Clamshell was really shaky, and we had a very serious faction that was arguing for property destruction. Clearly, something was going to give. Then, the governor went totally psychotic.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: In the middle of this, some of us became the moderate elders. The short term, the rubric was the founders, which became an epithet among the younger, especially the urban-based part of the Clamshell. The center was not going to hold, and from the other side, up comes Tom Rath, the Attorney General came to us
through the back channels and said, "Okay, I've got a deal for you guys. We will let you on the site, and you can have your rally if you will agree to leave after the weekend."

HARVEY WASSERMAN: This was perfectly designed to divide the Clamshell. The older, rural-based founders of the Clamshell said,
"Maybe we should look at this deal." And the other side said, "To
hell with you. Forget this. You're not going to sell out to the powers that be." It was exactly a mirror image because Meldrim Thomson was flipping out over this idea. He didn't want this at all.
He did not want to let us on the site. Finally, the Clamshell shattered. We found a way to cut the deal.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: We had perfect weather, and then Pete Seeger and Jackson Browne, showed up. We set up a stage, and 20,000 people came onto the site with picnic baskets and blankets and sleeping bags and tents. We had what was by far the biggest anti-nuclear rally in the history of the United States, and then everybody left. It was amazing. Everybody left, and nobody was arrested.

[SINGING]
If we could heed these early warnings, 
the time is now. Bright, early morning.

JACKSON BROWNE: Plutonium is the most deadly substance ever created,
and it doesn't go away.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: And then when Three Mile Island hit, in March of '79, we had a big rally in Washington with 100,000 people. The idea was to do some big concerts and do them in Madison Square Garden. And originally we were going to do two nights. We had Bonnie and Jackson, Graham, Crosby, Stills and Nash. James Taylor and Carly Simon signed on. Then we started having these meetings and formed an
organization, and Sam became the president of the production board.
And then Bruce signed on, Bruce Springsteen. And suddenly two nights
became four nights, and we sold out Madison Square Garden very, very quickly for all these shows. And then a fifth night was added.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: We decided to do a rally on Sunday at Battery Park City. Everything just mushroomed. It was just this huge thing. And here we were all these people, had been living on a commune in the
boonies since the late sixties, and suddenly, in the late seventies,
we're thrown into this huge cauldron of rock music and Madison
Square Garden and Manhattan. And then there's a film, and then there's a record album, and you know, it was like hopping on a rocket ship. It just was an incredible vector of power and force.

SAM LOVEJOY: Who are you people, you artists, to have any position on nuclear power, any political issue? What do you guys have as a stock line?

BONNIE RAITT: We can invite some of the more illustrious people that may, in fact, be sitting on the board to give the money away after the concerts to go around with us, because I don't think I know everything.

GRAHAM NASH: As a concerned citizen, and especially as a father,
I'm incredibly scared of the future prospects for my particular family.

JAMES TAYLOR: My great fear is that sooner or later an atomic weapon will fall into the hands of someone desperate enough to use it.

DAVID CROSBY: We respond to the outside world sort of slapping us in the face, and we react to it the same way you would or anybody else would. We just have a more effective way to do that.

JACKSON BROWNE: We're a bunch of people that feel a need to see something change and to promote certain values, certain principles,
and we're doing what it is in our power to do.

[Jackson Browne singing]
Some of them were angry,
at the way the Earth was abused,
by the men who learned
how to forge her beauty into power.

And they struggled to protect her from them,
only to be confused
by the magnitude of her fury in the final hour.

When the sand was gone,
and the time arrived,
In the naked dawn, only a few survived.

And in attempts to understand,
a thing so simple and so huge.
believed that they were meant to live

after the deluge.™

SAM LOVEJOY: We've gotta go for a quarter million, at least. We're having a rally, very explicitly so that people can hear some politics, understand why MUSE exists, and why MUSE is in New York doing these concerts. To raise money, but also we want to make available all this.

JACKSON BROWNE: Plus you have a shot at 20,000 people a night to tell them about the rally, and it's only a few days away.

BONNIE RAITT: I don't know if you know this, but there's going to be
an incredibly wonderful rally on Sunday at Battery Park.

[music] TAKING IT TO THE STREETS

[crowd chanting "No Nukes"]

[singing] Just give me the restless power of the wind
Give me the comforting glow of a wood fire.
But please, take all your atomic poisoned power a...
Take all your atomic poisoned power....
Take all your atomic poisoned power away.™

[singing]
Some may come and some may go,
It will surely pass.
When the one that left us here
Returns for us at last
We are but a moment's sunlight
Fading in the grass.
Come on people, now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now.
Come on people, now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now.‚ô™

HARVEY WASSERMAN: In a lot of ways, it was the Woodstock of the 70's. Five nights in Madison Square Garden, equaled 120-some thousand people, and then we had 200 thousand at the rally at Battery Park City. So the total was almost as many people as were at Woodstock. An experience that grew very clearly out of Seabrook, and out of the anti-nuclear movement.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Did it transform it? Yeah, I think it jacked it up a level. We wound up with a motion picture and a hugely successful record album. Those of us coming from the farm, it was like, Yikes!! What is this? And we were not prepared. We were just not prepared
physically, psychologically, spiritually, business skills. We were over our head. But we were the content. We were the people who brought the anti-nuclear message. So it took a long time to recover
from MUSE. Many relationships broke up. Many people just kind of staggered back to the farms. I think it had a very divisive impact on Montague Farm, because, you know, there were those of us who had been in New York and those of us who stayed home. And there was a divide. It just was a cultural divide. 

HARVEY WASSERMAN; One thing about the farms up to MUSE, we lived together. I mean, whatever it was, we had the same neighborhood, the same connections, the garden, the finances of the farm, the dinners. That all kind of went up in smoke with MUSE. I won't say it
permanently changed us, but it sure made Montague in the early '80s a very different kind of place. It was nowhere near the communal feeling at Montague after MUSE that we had before. 

HARVEY WASSERMAN: The important thing to remember about MUSE and what followed is that we were extremely successful in the'80s in shutting down the nuclear industry. By the end of the '80s, we were shutting operating reactors. 

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Moving from the Clamshell through the MUSE sort of
booster rocket, which sent our countercultural anti-nuclear message into the mainstream in a really big way.

[Music] CARD AFTERWORD

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Were we a family or were we an institution? The answer is very definitely yes. You know, there was always a balance we walked. And the community had its own power there, all the
relationships, the love between the individuals and who slept with who and who cooked the dinners, and how everybody fanned out and whatever. That was all very real. And then the nuclear thing and the
issues that we dealt with were all very real. And together they sustained us for a long, long period of time. Much longer than most so-called intentional communities that came out in the 1960s.

JUDY RUBENSTEIN: Well, that was, I think that was always the tension at the farm that I felt, that it was a group of very individual people, very highly individualistic people, who were trying to live communally. And I thought it was incredibly successful. I mean as far as they could do it, it was, it was a miracle.

NINA KELLER: Being at that place, for me ,was one of the greatest and the most difficult times I've ever had. The greatest, because I made some of my closest, beloved friends and relationships.

CATHERINE BLINDER: For me  it was the first time that I was around people who valued learning things, who valued reading, who valued a really good conversation.

VERANDAH PORCHE: It's important to me that people still do feel that
this is a place where you can come and stay for a week or a month and compost experience with us, that conversation is still a crop here.

CATHY ROGERS: And that was a quality at the farm. There was a permission to be who you were. You could choose how you were going to be. One of the things that was most important and life changing for me at the farm was meeting women who I could deeply share with that I could feel connected to.

RICHARD WIZANSKY: We are in some way still living together and I don't say that. I'm not making that up. It's not a fantasy. It's very real.

OONA ADAMS: As soon as I get to about Northampton driving north and I start to see the low lying hills, I relax. I mean there's a way that this landscape itself is my family.

VERANDAH PORCHE: It's a palpable tie that we've made with each other. And whenever I hear about the lack of that in the United States at large. Everybody thinks, you know, will this project build community? Excuse me, but you know, you make a list of what you want from a community and I'll show you around.

SUSAN MARENECK: I think we actually participated in a kind of hopeful idealism, at a time in the world, as well as in our lives, when a lot seemed possible. And I think most of us still hold that same hope that we had then.

[Music]MAY DAY

Do you remember
the banner years?

Kids split our lap,
death showed his face.

Love may return or disappear
Like peaches from the orchard
and "Amazing Grace."

Don't look down 'til you reach the top.
Don't look back at what's left behind.
Flying barefoot over the brambles,
Years are streamers intertwined.

Sing into the wind, come what may.
Let tomorrow be yesterday.
Singing to the wind
Singing to the wind
Let tomorrow be yesterday

Oh, singing to the wind
Singing, singing to the wind
Singing to the wind
Peaches from the orchard
And "Amazing Grace."

[music] WATERFALLS CREDITS


I went young to the mountain,
Not really destination bound
Getting lost in the waterfalls
But I was tumblin' to the ground.

The taste of you was in my soul
There was dirt upon my dress.
Getting back to work
Was not important,
I confess.

I just wanted that
That fast falling water.
Just like a waterfall.

I went later to the mountain
Really striving for the sights
Climbing with my friends
Seeking to attain a certain height

I talked about my days with you
My hope, my joy and pain
Getting on with work
Cause there was so much to be gained

But I miss that
Fast falling water.

POEM

We gather kindling
To earn our sleep.

God help us,
Refugees in winter dress
Skating home on thin ice
From the Apocalypse

    –Verandah Porche