Jim Schermbeck Interview, Part 1 of 3

TRANSCRIPT INTERVIEWEE: Jim Schermbeck (JS) INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT) and David Weisman (DW) DATE: October 10, 2002 LOCATION: Lubbock, Texas TRANSCRIBERS: Melanie Smith and Robin Johnson REELS: 2232, 2233, and 2234 Please see the Real Media video record of reels 2232, 2233, and 2234 from our full interview with Mr. Schermbeck. Please note that the recording includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Note: boldfaced numbers refer to time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview. "Misc." refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

DT: My name is David Todd. I'm here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. It's October 10, 2002. We're in Lubbock, Texas. We're currently taping on reel 2232 and talking to Jim Schermbeck, who has been assistant activist for many years and has been involved in the protest against the Comanche Peak Nuclear Project, as well as against TXIs efforts to burn hazardous wastes in their cement kiln. As well as other projects that I imagine we'll get into. But I want to take this chance to thank you.

JS: Oh, thank y'all.

DT: We usually start these interviews with just a question about your early days, school days, and where you might've first gotten exposed and interested in the environment or outdoors, public health?

JS: I think, for me, there's not a clear and easy answer to that because I didn't come to just the environment as an issue. I came to social justice in general. When I was in junior high, the Vietnam War was still going on. I was, for whatever reason, reading papers at that point. My mom would sit down every evening and read the evening version of the Fort Worth Star Telegram; they were still putting out an evening paper at that point.

And I watched the evening news and just got int involved in the debate over Vietnam when I was pretty young, and Kent State happened when I was twelve and that crystallized a lot of feelings that I had about what was going on. And then I started collecting maps and, oh, articles from the paper about Vietnam and things like that. And I one thing led to another and I just ended up as a 14-year-old volunteer in the McGovern campaign in 72.

And then, after that fiasco, got involved in doing a boycotting Safeways on behalf of the farm workers. There was a big farm workers or big but there was a chapter of the farm workers group, support group, in Fort Worth. One of my friends' mother was very involved in that and so by the time I was in high school, I was out with sandwich signs on in front of Safeway telling people not to buy table grapes from Safeway because they were non-union.

And during this whole period, my dad had some land in Colorado that we would go to in the summertimes and I'd also, during this period, grown up every summer going to a farm my the family farm on my dads side in Kansas. So, every summer I was either in Kansas and probably among the last people of my generation to actually hand milk a cow and churn butter and bale square bales of hay and things like that and then we would go to this land in Colorado, which was up in the Collegiate Peaks, near the Continental Divide, very beautiful country.

And I guess I came to the to environmental issues through the back door, I always looked at them as social justice issues and my spin wasn't exactly it was, of course, in terms of preserving natural environment and so on, it was also about people getting poisoned by what was going on.

And I saw, I think, early on the relationship between those kinds of social justice fights Id been involved in and what was going on with the environment. And and, plus, there was just an explosion of information activity around the environment with the war winding down and then finishing, really a lot of the nations attention and a lot of the what was left of the left then, attention was focused on domestic issues.

And I think that all combined to get me involved in environmental issues, although that's not what I started out doing. I mean, in high school, besides boycott lets see, we boycotted grapes, we were taking up money for the farm workers. We would do little shows in front of social studies class about the fact that they about the short the back-stooping tools they would give these guys, the the farm labor situation in general, things like that.

So, the environment was not the first thing I got involved with, but I think when I did get involved with with those kinds of issues, I brought a slightly different perspective than somebody that was coming, maybe, from the Audubon Society or or Sierra Club or something like that.

DT: Can you go to this a little bit more, the connection between social justice and environmental justice, if that's the connection you're making?

JS: To me, they're just one in the same I mean, people get shat on in all kinds of ways, and they're usually people that are down low on the food chain. So whether it's farm workers who are getting shat on by growers and exploited by huge corporate growing companies or whether it's people who live downwind from a smokestack getting shat on by a large company that's putting things out in the air that they really shouldn't be doing, it's the same sort of issue.

It's people being taken advantage of or being abused in ways they shouldn't be. It's just that with environmental health issues, it's probably a much more insidious kind of being shat upon. It's something that can give you cancer, it's something that can make you ill, it's something that can change your hormonal balance. There's all kinds of things that are going on in peoples bodies because of the things that we put out into the environment that we are just now beginning to know. We're just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of knowing what all this crud has done to human beings.

But I think the the issues the same, it's economic power. It's it's somebody saying I can do this from a high-level office suite and so they do it until somebody brings some kind of accountability and resistance to that idea. So, to me, it was environmental issues, es- especially environmental health issues, are always exactly the same kinds of social justice stuff I've always been involved with and it particularly if you do an analysis of like where most of these facilities end up, they m- usually end up in poor to lower income neighborhoods. You know, you certainly wont find a hazardous waste incinerator in Highland Park or an exclusive enclave like that, and there's a reason for that.

DT: You said that your introduction to some of these public justice issues, social justice issues in the late sixties and early seventies, came about through reading the newspaper, watching what was on TV, collecting maps as you said. I'm curious why this information that was available to many 12, 13, 14 year olds influenced you...

JS: Because I was a nerd. Because I was the biggest nerd that you ever, I gue, I was kind of a hippie nerd, I guess, at the time. I I don't know, I've asked myself that a lot. I think its the fact that my mother taught me to enjoy reading so that I've always read books and I always collected books. I can remember going out to a bookstore with a fra mom of a friend of ours mine and he would buy stuff that was geared toward 11 and 12 year olds and I would be buying these like man and the landscape anthologies and things and I don't know why.

I I just was involved in current events a lot sooner than most people are, if ever, in their lives. And I don't know that if that's just because I was watching the news more or I felt more in kind of the zygeist of the times and getting involved with that or what. I don't know, I I don't know.

It it it would take many more hours on the couch than we have here to to tell you why, as a kid, I was so interested in that, but I was. And I think music was a big part of that, too. I mean, there was there was a whole culture at that point, you know, hippie culture that was against the war and had a lot of music, had great looking girls, all kinds of factors that come in to play.

And there was as as I suppose in every city of any size, there was a gathering point for those folks every weekend at Trinity Park in Fort Worth. In Lee Park is where it was happening, I guess, in Dallas, but Trinity Park was kind of the hangout point. And I just was more attuned to that, I guess, earlier on than a lot of my peers. But I think instilling a love of reading and watching my mother because my parents had divorced and I was living with her watching my mom read the paper religiously, watching Walter Cronkite show the body counts every evening. That had an effect on me.

DT: You said that some of the social justice issues that were going on in the United States and around the world touched you. I'm curious when you started to focus on things that were happening in Texas and in Fort Worth. You mentioned going to Safeway, but that was about conditions in California.

JS: That's right.

DT: When did you start bringing it home to what was going on locally?

JS: Probably well, I mean, it depends on what you def- define as locally. In high school, I and another friend of mine and a friend of mine were were trying to run for student body president and vice-president. Principal wouldn't let us because we were we had posted these manifestos up all over school that were too radical for him. Too radical for Principal Mandervel.

And, you know, anybody could sign up to run and we I'm not sure we expected to win, but we kind of wanted to run and give them hell about things that were going on there in high school. And he just would not have any part of that and said, no, you can't run. And I said, well, there's something wrong with that. You can't just do that, I'm a student in the school, you can't just tell me I can't run. So I had a great social studies teacher at the time, and I'm not sure he intended to to let it lead to this, but he kind of whispered in my ear, you know, hey, there's there's this group called the ACLU, you might want to give them a call and...so I did.

I gave them a call and they hooked me up with an attorney in Fort Worth, a guy who later became, I think, a D.A. A good a good lawyer. And I told him my story and he said, you're right. They cant do that. And so he wrote this brief and sent it over to the school superintendent's office, I guess, and they were kind of surprised because they hadn't realized the principal had done this. And got the principal in trouble, I guess, and they all backed down, ran, lost, because and this is important, I think, at the at the point where I had a chance to go up to and address the school, after all this, I kind of backtracked a little bit.

I wasn't as dynamic and forceful, I think, as even the manifestos would've, you know, lead somebody to believe. After all this, and taking on the school in that way, it kind of surprised me and I was a little taken back and I kind of wilted there at the end. I was also running against the first woman first girl that had ever run for student body president, so it was all kind of a progressive, you know, mess in terms of voting for people. But I got a a seat on the student body.

There was also something that happened around that time that I'll never forget. And has nothing to do with anything, I think, except authority figures. I was like 13 or 14, my hair was down past my shoulders, but I still, you know, I was skinny as a rail then as only very young people can be skinny. And was going back and forth on an airplane to my dad's house a lot by myself. Went one day to Love Field, and I guess this is right after the first Palestinian hijackings of planes and things, but went to Love Field and and my mom went off to go get a drink or cup of coffee or something.

So I checked myself in and at the at the ticket counter there, got a boarding pass. And then these and then these two guys came up and said, would you come with us? And they escorted me, by myself still, into this like ante room, little room off to the side somewhere and started interrogating me, as if I was a potential hijacker. And we got like a minute and a half into this and I was kind of bullshitting them, I guess. I don't know, I don't know what kind of attitude I copped as a kid then. But I do remember we hadn't gotten very for fa far into this when there was this what are you doing to my son in there? That kind of thing.

And my my mother comes in and throws open the door and says, what in the hell is happening? And explains my age and everything else and and these guys kind of look bashful and are looking down at their shoes a lot. And I just remember thinking of that as being very hilarious because they thought I was much older than I was, I guess, and, you know, anybody at that point with long hair was a target, I don't know. But it was just a a great example of them getting it wrong and also my mom.

Being very mom-like and and coming after the guys. And she was just she was on a tear. And you didn't see her like that very much, that was also, I think, why I remember that. I mean it was it was a very strange moment for her, to see her like that. But in terms of domestic issues, In one of that happened before I got involved with nukes, I guess. Because that's the issue...(misc)

DT: We were talking earlier about some of your earlier escapades and I was wondering if you could try to continue to talk about what was going on, I suppose in your teens, and particularly if it was affected by what was going on locally and environmentally?

JS: Well, I often say that I was born to do this and that I was that that I was trained to do this in that in high school actually the last year of junior high and and all four years of high school, I was in competitive debate at a public school, which was unusual at the time because a lot of public schools didn't have a debate program. But I we I happened to luck out in that the school that I went to not only had a program, it had one of the best coaches around.

And so I got involved in competitive debate and that meant out meant going out and researching topics, you know, very a lot of deep research, a lot of first-hand reports and not just periodical stuff but, you know, deep government reports. Book Brookings Institute type of things, that that stuff. And that was great training because it made you ask the right questions and it made you it made your bullshit antennas very adept.

Because you could hear then answers to questions that weren't really the answer to the question and know it. And you could hear what they were leaving out or what they what people were not saying, or what they were saying. And clarity of language became more important, I think.

And in fact, nukes, were a energy in itself, was a topic one year in debate, and nukes, in particular, was a topic. So I had researched this topic and not really come to any, you know, revelation about it as a kid. I had researched it as part of a larger energy thing going on that year in debate and it just didn't register to me as a huge thing at the point at that point. But the debate training itself was really good.

DT: Was it more of an academic interest?

JS: Absolutely, yeah. But but but you gotyou know, in if you stay in it long enough you get to the point where you're in cross-examination debate, which is like the the highest level, and you actually have periods where you're up there with another person and you're cross-examining them and they get to cross-examine you. And it was just really good practice. So that all happened in high school.

And then I go away I didn't want to debate in college, I was completely burned out on it. And so I went and and my graduating class in high school was like 5 or 6 or 700 people, the whole school was huge and my graduating class was huge and I wanted to go someplace that was not huge as a school. So I turned down a couple of offers to go places to go debating and stuff and went to Austin College in Sherman, which was an artsy-fartsy liberal arts college in in Sherman, Texas, just about an hour north of Dallas.

And was I'm I was pretty sure going to be a lawyer or something. I didn't I wasn't sure what, but that, you know, was pre-law, something. Well, my freshman year there was pretty uneventful in terms of anything political. It was between my freshman and sophomore year that things changed. It was in 1977, in the spring, that the first occupation at Seabrook, New Hampshire took place. And Seabrook was a place where they were building the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, just north of Boston. And I was still reading the papers pretty regularly, even in college. I was getting the Dallas Morning News every day and reading that.

And the fact that, I guess at the time, gosh, 2000 or more people got arrested at this nuclear power plant site really amazed me. Because it wasn't anything if you go back in time, the war was over, there wasn't really a huge social issue that was bringing that amount of people to anything approaching civil disobedience on that scale anywhere in the country then.

It was really kind of eye-catching to me to read about that and to learn that this whole thing was going on and it wasn't even on my radar screen. So I I remember I had this wall where I clipped out funny articles, or strange articles, or important articles and stuff and would tape them up up there and this Seabrook occupation, that got a space on that wall. So that that college let out that year and I went back to Fort Worth and met some folks, in particular, a woman named Kim Bachelor, who I had known in high school, she was a year or two ahead of me.

She was a friend of a woman in my class and a sister, also, to somebody in my class that I knew fairly well. And she was one of the people that I had boycotted Safeways with. So I also had a huge crush on her. And and and if people tell you that they get involved on strictly political terms all the time, they're just lying through their teeth, because a lot of times it's it's romance that's playing a a part in it. But, so we kind of started hanging out together that summer and in line one night to see a movie and I cant remember the movie that we were going to see we just started talking about this Seabrook thing. And she told me, well, you know, there's this nuke being built down the road from Fort Worth.

And I had no idea, had no idea. And I said, no, I didn't know that. And I said, maybe we should do something, maybe we should find out more about this stuff and and find out what these New Hampshire people are about and this sounds kind of exciting and and tell me more. So we did some research, I started getting things, writing off for materials, trying to do a little bit more research, subscribed to something called Wind Magazine, which I don't think is around anymore, which was a great magazine out of New York, done by the War Resistors League.

And by the summer in the end of summer of 1977, we had founded this group called the Armadillo Coalition of Texas because at the time, you have to understand, it was all regional based. I mean, the whole ethic of that movement was to be a regional, indigenous resistance to what was going on in your part of the country. It wasn't so much the country was focusing not on international things because we had just gone through ten years of that with the war, and people were very focused back on things in their own backyard.

So you had the Clamshell Alliance, you had the Abalone Alliance, you had the Oyster shell Alliance, you had the Sunbelt Alliance up in Oklahoma, you had all these regional alliances. And of course, the the armadillo was, at that point, a real symbol of the counter-culture coming out of the sixties and seventies. And we just decided to adopt that and to and the initials spelled out ACT, so it was a good thing that way, it was a good name that way. And we sat in Kim's living room, I think myself, her, and Lon Burnam, who's now a a state representative from Fort Worth and just decided we would found this group.

And as the very earnest young man that I was, I spent just hours doing this founding document, you know, explaining the reasons why we were doing this and so on and and modeling it after, you know, I don't know, the Declaration and Cont stuff and all kinds of things and by the end of that summer, we went to the Fort Worth City Council Meeting that was talking about a rate hike to pay for Comanche Peak because they had this neat little thing called construction work in progress where they could just charge off whatever they were overrunning at the plant there to ratepayers on a regular basis and they were asking for another rate increase to pay for Comanche Peak. We went down there and and talked in opposition to it that was our first act of resistance to the plant.

DT: Were you alone in contesting the plant and the rate hike?

JS: At that point, yeah. That point, we were we were the only folks down there talking against it, yeah.

DT: What sort of reaction did you get from the crowd and the council?

JS: Oh, you can imagine. I mean, you know, thank you very much and they pass it. We didn't you know, it wasn't any kind of organizing campaign to defeat this thing, it was just kind of our coming out party in terms of declaring opposition. But, from that point, we did grow pretty steadily, and during this whole time, the anti-nuke movement gained a lot of momentum around the country because there were these alliances and coalitions springing up everywhere.

There was a real sense of momentum that you I think is very rare nowadays. I don't know, I'm not involved in the PETA stuff and and some of the other things that have taken off, but there was just a real sense that history was behind this and things were happening every day and, you know, this was a nationwide movement and these were your brothers and sisters in other places and it was just it was an incredible feeling.

DT: What was the big opposition? Why were you all concerned about the plant?

JS: Well, the more you that was, you know, the more I researched it, the more I discovered things that I hadn't known and didn't research very well the first time around in high school, the whole issue of low-level radiation. It wasn't the potential for accidents, with me anyway, that was the big deal, as it was with other people, I guess.

It was the day-to-day operation of these things and the kind of insidious nature of of routine radiation releases where, over a period of time, there were a certain number of people that would be sacrificed through through cancer or through other kinds of things. It was a mathematical formula, in fact, there's an article that I kept for the longest time, published in the paper, that said, you know, operation of the Comanche Peak Power Plant is expected to result in 15 cancer deaths over its operating lifetime. I mean, they had this down to a formula.

DT: And this was among the workers or the general public?

JS: Among the general public. And its because when they fuel and refuel, they let a certain amount of radiation out. When the piping goes bad, or any you know, any number of ways that the radiation can get out of that containment building. Plus the fact that it the more of those plants you build, the more processing plants you need, the more places you need for the waste. It becomes a nuclear economy at that point.

And there's the old thing, you know, metaphor about a frog who's in how do you boil a frog. And you don't pour all the hot water on the frog or in the pot at the same time because he'd jump out. What you do is put him in a little bit of warm water and then you turn up the heat, and you add more, you turn up the heat a little bit more, so its gradual. And then the frog is dead. That's the way I kind of looked at the issue of radiation.

In the more of these places existed, the more facilities they needed to support them, the more radiation got into the environment and pretty soon were living in a sea of radiation that wasn't naturally based at all, it was a new it was something that could define, you know, how evolution took off from that point on. For all exposed to new levels of radiation, what does that do to human physiology in terms of birth defects, in terms of how we adapt to that and so on.

And just the whole fact that although it you know, I'm sure this goes on in other industries, the whole fact that they had worked it out to such certainty that there were going to be, not 14 and not 16, but just 15 cancer lives were going to be lost from the operation of Comanche Peak. That was really infuriating and mystifying to me. And this whole corporate approach you have to remember at the time, this was right after not too far after Nixon announced Project Independence. Right after the oil crisis, you know, and nuclear powers going to be our answer to the oil crisis and everything.

And there were going to be 2000 new nuclear plants across the country. And if you saw these maps, I mean, it was like, you know, every little borough was going to have one of these nukes and that meant all kinds of other facilities trailing along and and it was just there was a whole nuclear economy being proposed. And there were like these floating nuclear power plants that were going to be built out in the gulf, and by Florida, you know, and these nuclear plant parks where there'd be more than you know, there'd be like 5 or 6 of them in a row or whatever.

And just kind of a strange combination of Disneyland engineering and kind of the best and the brightest mentality brought to this particular field of of nukes that combined to have a corporate arrogance about it that was just amazing to watch. And they were so they were so sure of it was it's just, you know, too cheap to meter, absolutely safe, nothing to worry about. And the more they said that, the more suspicious you became that not all was right. And sure enough, you you read people like John Goffman or Earnest Sternglass or Rosalie Bertel, those guys, and you learned that, in fact, all was not well.

That, in fact, those scientists had done work that had been ignored by a lot of people but showed that low level radiation was indeed a problem. So that kind of thing that was the main concern for me. Low-level radiation and the kind of corporate arrogance that said, you know, were going to build this plant, we don't care who we hurt in the process, we've already figured out who's going to be hurt. It's just a matter of picking out the names now of those fifteen and so forth. So that it was also, obviously, from the first, though, also an economic issue because we showed up at this rate hike hearing.

And and that would come into play later, but at first it was a safety issue, it was kind of a corporate issue. And it was, you know, if they had had an accident, they were just south of Dallas-Fort Worth and predominant winds and so forth and it was a it was going to be a big deal if they did have an accident there. So the more I researched about it, the more I I got into these into these works by scientists who had actually done the research that I hadn't read about before and they were telling me that, yes, there was an increase in cancer around these plants. If you looked, there was a big increase in cancer among workers at these plants.

Just the whole branch of this about uranium mining on native lands. At the time, there was a lot of uranium mining going on in the States here, most of it was on Indian Reservations, and most of those guys were not giving any given any kind of air breathing apparatus at all. They were basically sent down into these uranium mines, you know, without oxygen, without anything. They were coming back, dying by the scores. There was just a whole fuel cycle involved; it wasn't it wasn't just Comanche Peak.

It was the plants that made the fuel for Comanche Peak, it was the trucks that transported that fuel there, it was the places wherever that waste was going to go, where there fuel rods were going to go after Comanche Peak was through with it. All that stuff was part of a nuclear cycle that opened my eyes to what was going on.

DT: You mentioned that there was a good deal of uranium being mined in the native lands in the southwest. Was there any talk about the uranium that was being mined in the South Texas (inaudible)?

JS: No, we brought up, much later, after, I guess, two years after that, or it was 1979, 1980, when I started learning about it. I actually did a an internship down in Austin under John Bryant there when he was still a rep from Dallas, before he was a Congressman. And started researching the uranium mining industry in Texas and found out how much there was in Texas and from that, grew some efforts on my part to to bring an awareness to it. We actually had a walk from a south Texas uranium mine up to Glen Rose in 80, 81, I believe, that I initiated and started in and, I mean, that's a whole 'nother story but that's yeah, I mean, there was...

DT: Tell that story.

JS: Well, it was it it was a little-known facet of the nuclear industry in Texas, nobody knew about this stuff. And but if you went down there and looked at it, you knew it was going to be a problem. It was huge it it was, just the scale of things for one thing. Chevron had a mine down there and I think Exxon did and, you know, the usual suspects all had a piece of this action. And you you looked at these mine tailings and sitting in pools and it was just so obvious what a terrible problem this was and was going to be in terms of disposal.

Because it was sitting out in the middle of nowhere, there were just big pools; there was no hardly any lining. You know, it was seeping into groundwater, it was getting into surface water, it was just it was just a mess. It was like a regular mining operation, which is fine, except you were dealing with uranium, you know, and everything was radioactive. And plus they had some, I think they had some yellow cake processing down there, if I remember right.

We took a tour, I think, where there was some yellow cake being processed down there, so it was a fairly advanced industry down there. And we there was just a few of us when we started out at this walk. It was just this came after a lot of years of opposition, like at least three or four, maybe, in 80, 81. So I'd been at it three years. And I just got tired of doing nothing about this and I just said I I wanted I'd been reading a lot of Gandhi and I just said, I just am going to go walking and I'm going to meet people and I'm going to tell them about this problem and I'm going to get some press and this will be it's just, you know, the earnestness of the young.

It was just something I felt like I had to do and this was action, it wasn't just sitting in your room talking about it, doing it. It was actually getting out there and getting involved, and a kind of self-sacrifice, because we were going to walk every bit of the way from South Texas up to Comanche Peak. And some days, some stops we had help on, some days we just camped. Some people took us into their houses, we made contacts in weird ways, anyway, we got down there. We started this out, there were three of us. Evan, myself, and Roxanne and Elder.

And, they were from Austin, I was from here. And we had decided the night before, we were the we were very into affinity groups. There was this whole structure in the anti-nuke movement called affinity groups that was a very familiar, as in family, structure where you had groups of ten or twenty people who were tight knit, knew each other, had been meeting with each other before the action took place, almost an extended family approach to it, which was unique, I think, in terms of how protest movements operated up to that point. Or at least, you know, was new to me.

And it wasn't just going to a rally, it wasn't just you know, it was part you were a family, you were part of a member of a family. So we called ourselves, I think, the Beans and Squash Affinity group, because that's what we were eating, beans and squash, a lot of beans and squash. At the last minute, the night before this walk started, we decided to go up to San Antonio and buy a yellow rose bush and we were going to plant this bush outside the uranium mine that we were going to start off this I think it was Chevron mine.

And we had I had gone down there and kind of put this leaflet out talking about what we were going to do and dropped it off at the local Catholic Church. And there was this nun that we had called Sister Xerox, who had made sure that this leaflet had gotten to the sheriffs office, the mayors office, every city council person in this town knew this was going on. This was Falls City, by the way. It was one of the biggest uranium mines down there. But she had made sure she was not at all an ally, as it turns out. And she had made sure that every official in that town knew we were coming.

So we started off from our camp and walked, literally walked a a mile, I guess, out to the plant, the whole time with a a sheriffs car like twenty or thirty feet behind us. And he must have been bored to tears. And we got out there and we surrounded this we dug a little hole on public ac access property there, outside the gate of the uranium mine, planted the tree. I was still nominally a Christian then, and and and was going to ch you know, had been in chap participating in chapel in school and stuff and so I read a Bible Bible verse there and we said a prayer. And it was just amazing the aura that surrounded that little gathering there. And you could tell that because people there were all kinds of authorities around it.

Besides the sheriffs car, there was guys from the plant and I don't know who else in terms of authorities making sure that we were not going to throw bombs or something like that. But they gave us a lot of space. You could just it's hard to describe, but you could just feel the energy coming from that group and over the years, I've just noticed this is this is something that happens when things are clicking right or you have you're there for the right reason or peoples energy are in the right place, whatever kind of metaphysical thing is taking place there. That yellow rose bush and us three around it wa, had some kind of force field going on.

And we ended that ceremony and started walk started on the walk, you know, whatever it was going to be, three or four hundred miles. And again, all back to town and like for about a mile out of town, this sheriffs car was following us, thirty feet back or so. And things like that happened all through this walk. More people joined us, you know, showed up out of nowhere. People that I had never recruited, didn't know about, just heard about it and joined us on the way. I remember one time, we had a guy, Charles Perez, who had come without a coat and it was raining and we were right on Austin and I-35, and it was raining and cold, this was like October, so about like now, you know, first fronts coming in.

And we didn't have any extra clothes or anything to give the guy, he had just shown up and and it was nice weather when he had and now it was bad weather and he didn't have a coat or anything. I remember walking down the access road of I-35 and Charles out in front of me, and this car pulls up and I'm just watching this from the back the car pulls up, this arm comes out of the car with a coat on it and gives it to Charles and then drives off. And that kind of stuff happened all the time on that walk.

DT: Were you carrying placards or sandwich boards, I mean, would they have known?

JS: No, well we had a banner, which is one of the props that didn't make it here today that I still have. It was a banner that said, Walk for a Nuclear Free Texas, it had a some boots on it, and then part of the sun, anyway, it was homemade and...But no, I don't think we were having that wasn't displayed or anything at the time because it was raining, we put that up. It just came by and this arm shot out and there was a coat attached to it and it drove off. Another time, a woman that I was just adored from in all kinds of ways, was joining us.

She didn't know where we were, she kind of had an approximation of where we would be that day because we had a schedule we had to keep to more or less. But she didn't know where we were, and we happened to be in Belton that day at a convenience store getting a drink because we'd just come off I-35 and we were taking, I think, 6 up to Glen Rose, or whatever that highway is. And and I mean, it was midday, we could've been anywhere on that highway and she shows up, having hitchhiked a ride down there, stopping at this convenience store.

I mean, she found us without any trouble, you know, just right on, just amazing stuff like that. We got up here to Comanche Peak and there must have been 50 or 100 people waiting for us then. And we all planted spiderwort seed outside the gate there and had a good time. But that walk was it was one of the most spiritual things I think I've ever done. And it just because of the purity of motives and where I was and where other people were at the time, I think, accounts for that. I think I'm much too cynical now and withered to experience anything like that again. But at the time, it was quite something to to see.

And it did bring a little bit more notice to those uranium mines than they had gotten before. And since then, of course, that whole industry has gone bottom up and they've been left with these huge tailing piles down there and they still don't know what to do. And in fact the local people who were so hostile to us at that point are now saying, you know, what were we thinking, and you were right, and and it is a big mess and it still hasn't been cleaned up. I think they're spending millions and millions of dollars to try to either bury that stuff or clean it some way.

I haven't kept up with it in a long time, but, yeah, so that's uranium mining in Texas. Who would've guessed? And its all I think its all gone now because the whole domestic uranium mining industry has gone downhill because there's not that much demand and there's so many cheaper imports coming in, which is another great, you know, irony to this because nuclear power is going to be our domestic source of energy that was going to keep us dep you know, independent.

And it turns out that you have to import uranium from like South Africa, which was at the time was not a very good source. Or Russia, you know, or any number of other places that weren't too great, they weren't particular allies of ours at the time. And so the whole idea of energy independence by way of nuclear power just fell apart because of that industry going downhill and everything. But anyway, so that's uranium mining industry.

DT: Let me ask you something else. This is early 80s that you've been talking about and I think that you prefaced it by talking about the problems of chronic, low-level radioactive waste, or radioactive emission exposure. In 79, I think, Three Mile Island had a partial meltdown and I was wondering if you had some concerns in Texas about a similar catastrophic failure?

JS: Well, not only that, it was a very weird time very weird spring, because China Syndrome had just come out before that before Three Mile Island. And so and I was we were out there leafleting after every showing in Fort Worth and Dallas. We would, you know, we would stand outside the theater there at Seminary South Cinema 1 and 2, which is entirely closed up now, and hand out a leaflet saying it could happen, you know, this thing is real, it could happen here, you're you're only 40 miles from a nuclear power plant, here, have a leaflet, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We picked up a lot of people that way. We recruited a lot of folks that way. So then, when it happened, I can remember exactly the day it happened and it and and and I was with my then-girlfriend trying to find her an organizing job with Acorn down in Dallas and we turn on the radio and it was going on and I said, this is it, this is it. It's it's finally happened. And followed that, you know, as as the whole country did, very intensely. And thought that it was going to result in a lot more damage than it ended up resulting in, thank God.

And then, we had already scheduled a rally and an occupation, our first civil disobedience at Comanche Plant was for that was for June 10th. So all of that was already in play. And so, I was talking about momentum earlier, it just was incredible. People, you know, flocked to the issue. We had a symposium at the First Unitarian Church, we had a picket at TU headquarters over in Dallas. We had this huge protest during an international day of nuclear protest out at Glen Rose and then the week after that, we had our first occupation. So, while I had not been that I had not been as concerned about the accident potential as I had about just the routine stuff coming from these things, certainly now it was spotlighted and...

DT: What do you think were the biggest risks of a catastrophe or some sort of major...?

JS: Oh, it just depends on the plant. I mean, just just this last year, this whole thing at a plant in Ohio, where they found a a boric acid leak that resulted in the steel being rotted away by the boric acid. I mean, its a whole, its a continuing nightmare, I mean, this were just now in the like the mid-life of these nukes, of the whole nuclear power cycle here. We still have to concern ourselves about dismantling these guys and the waste issue still hasn't gone away despite the Yucca Mountain vote.

It's just we're very early on in trying to deal with this stuff even though its been 40 or 50 years since the first one came on line. We're just very this stuff is all very new still. And the phenomenon of dealing with aging reactors. Nobody has a track record of dealing with these reactors when they're 20, 30, 40 years old. And they want to relicense them for another 20 or 30 years. So that's an issue. It just depends on the plant, you know, later on, when I, I went to D.C. for a what was called a Washington semester in 80. My grad yeah, my last my senior year, in the fall. Now I, I went there, to D.C. to basically get closer to some Seabrook demos that were going to demonstrations that were going to be taking place.

It was kind of my way to hitchhike up the east coast to get closer to these big demonstrations that were going to happen. But I ended up, while I was there, doing an internship for a couple of these guys who were writing a book on Three Mile Island. A kind of, In Cold Blood version, narrative version of Three Mile Island and what had gone on. A couple of them, I think, a guy is still a producer at 60 Minutes.

I forget his name, but these guys were were writing this book and they asked me to research the documents over at housing over at HEW Health Education and Welfare, about Three Mile Island. There was a whole library over there of transcripts about what was happening in the control room during that time and so on. Man, it was an education. It was amazing to read these transcripts and what it because it was much worse than anybody had imagined. The chaos in the control room. There were literally... (misc)

JS: There were literally, in in these transcripts, it's there were literally people reaching over other people to press any knob or dial that they think will help. They're you know, this guys down over here punching these buttons and this guy up here is turning this dial and none of them know what each others doing. I mean, they're just it's like being in a kitchen with somebody, except its a nuclear power plant. And you know, and like something boiling over and everybody's trying to react to it and nobody knows what the other guys doing.

And the conversations between the plant operator and the governor and just it was just a fascinating look inside the monster. And it just confirmed, of course, everything that I thought. But it was just really good good chance for me to go and know first hand what had happened there. And after I'd read that stuff it was so obvious before and and it made so so much more obvious after that that despite all their precautions, it's still people that have to do this. It's still people supervising people, it's still people inspecting things, its still people. People are not perfect.

Because were not perfect, there's no it nuclear technology is so unforgiving in terms of perfection. You have to be perfect all the time, you have to be on the spot, you have to know what's going on. You have to measure this, you have to make sure of that, and as long as its up to people to do all that, its never going to get done 100%. It's it's just not because people are not perfect. It's just the mishmash of perfection needed technology with imperfect people that came into very clear focus during the accident, but also just reading this material up in D.C. It was just very fascinating and I'm glad I did it. And I, I don't know.

DW: Now you do that and it makes you either more scared, more frustrated, more what? Because having that information and power now, you know, do you not sleep at night? Is it that much worse than before?

JS: Well, I was up in D.C. to, you know, to try to take over the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, that was the plan that Fall. That we were not going to be these wimps that just got arrested at the fence line, we were actually going to go in and block and sit down and make it sure that they were not going to be constructing the thing. It it you get in a game of sorts when you try, in a movement like this, where you escalate and the press dares you to escalate because they don't want to cover the same action as last time because that's old news.

They just don't they don't want you to just go out there and get busted on the row because what does that accomplish? And they've already covered that. So you're in a contest with yourselves to escalate or find new ways to excite people about what you're doing as well as the press, but you're also running a get running up against the reality that as you escalate that, your oppositions also going to be escalated. So when I got up there in D.C. and was doing this research, well, yeah, it it just confirmed everything I knew and and made me more determined than ever not to try to let Comanche Peak go online and how I expressed that that fall was going up to Seabrook and participating in that occupation.

I had missed the first two, the big one in 77, I think there was one in 78, and this was going to be a controversial one in 79 because this was done by a faction of the Clamshell Alliance, it wasn't exactly an authorized occupation on the good old non-violent sense of the word. It was going to be a more testy version of that. And we, in D.C., I was there not very long before I found a local group to plug into. I was going to American University and we got an affinity group up from American U. and some D.C. people to go up to New Hampshire with which turned out to be a great again, a great fama, great extended family of people that partied together, that went had saw each other socially and then went to these actions together.

And we all did whatever, how many hours ride it is from D.C. to New Hampshire and got there and spent the night around a campfire thinking about what the next day would bring, how we would do this. Because this was going to be people were bringing tools this time, people were bringing fence cutters, people were bringing types of things like that. It was not going to be your usual just sit down and get busted type of arrest. And they had divided the army that was there and there was an army of protesters there into a north and south flank of the plant.

This p, this plant, like a a lot of plants, sits right on the oceans edge. And there's marshy land around it. Beautiful setting, I mean, they build they always build these things in the most beautiful places. And I'll never forget, as the sun was coming up that day, it was kind of a marshy area that we had to go across, there was the plant with the fence, here was the sun coming up in a full, yellow circle over here. Here was a full moon setting over here, bright white disc, they were completely at equidistance in the sky. That was the best moment of the whole day.

You got there to the plant and these guys had not, it was just a revelation. Apparently, the south side was much more vigorous about testing the the police line in the fence, they actually tried to get in there with fence cutters and tarpaulins to keep the water cannons off and so on. And they got beaten back by the police. That was the testier bunch. We got put in with the pacifists from like Maine and Vermont and who, when we got to the fence line, just stopped. And nobody was testing anything, nobody was trying to get inside because there was it was ob, I mean, inside the fence line, it was shoulder to shoulder police.

And state troopers from all the New England states. You would not believe this, but Rhode Island has the most fascist state trooper did at the at the time, state trooper organization. They actually goose-stepped in these high boots and and hats that they had. They looked just like, you know, brown shirts in 1938 or whatever. Anyway, they were shoulder-to-shoulder police inside the fence, so it was obvious that if you were going to try to do something, you would get beat up. But, hey, that's what we were there for.

Well, the this north side was very pacifistic and I was it was pretty disappointing the whole day because no movement I mean, we didn't get inside the plant, we didn't do anything but sit outside. In fact, in our affinity group, there was this woman, this aspiring Barbra Streisand-type, that that got to know this colonel on the other side, this National Guard colonel that was kind of directing things. And, you know, we would as was the want at the time, you know, there were a lot of songs being sung and things like that because there was absolutely no action taking place so, so this woman decided to belt out some Broadway tunes.

And it was a very surreal and and you know, she got to be buddy with this colonel and this colonel would like do requests for her, and you know, like Everything Coming up Roses, and, you know, other Streisands greatest-hit type of things. And she had the I mean, she had a big voice, I mean, a big voice. She was very good. But it was very surreal to watch this performance going on for the benefit of this National Guard's captain or colonel or whoever he was on the other side.

DT: Did you sense a sort choreographed...?

JS: Well, our side was I just don't think that people knew what to do, there was no leadership there. And I felt kind of funny because I you know, I was kind of a just passing through so I didn't want to take contr, you know, and you you you would have thought that somebody had a plan and they would've had something, you know, like a Plan B, what if this happens, this we're going to do this. Didn't seem to happen that way. Things were very violent on the other side, I mean, people were getting shot with water cannons, people were getting hit over the head with batons. On our side, it was, you know, Barbara Streisands greatest hits.

So, at the at the end of the day, we all kind of congregated over to the gate, the main gate part on the highway there through town in Seabrook. I'll never forget this moment. We had completely caught them off guard on the other side, because when we when as a whole, as the whole group rounded this corner on the highway, there was no National Guard there, there was no State Troopers there, there was nothing there. For a moment, for like five minutes, ten minutes, we had the place to ourselves and there was this gate, and there was a place underneath the gate where you could go under and get actually on plant property.

And I said, perfect, this is, you know, let's go. This is what were here for. This is what everybody traveled here for, let's get on plant property and do some occupying and and try to force the issue. And when somebody tried to do that, everybody yelled at him, said, no, no, no, we don't want you to do that. Come back over here, you're going to get beat up, come on, (misc). It was a revelation to me. It was just people really didn't want to do that. We had come all this way and here was this opportunity that was staring us right in the face and yet, for some people, for some reason, people just didn't want to do what we had come there to do.

DT: Do you this was due to the non-violent protocol or was it fear or what?

JS: I don't know what it was. I think it was fear, I think it was exhaustion from the whole day having gone the way it was maybe for each side, I don't know. But, to me, it was kind of the end of an era. It just it just deflated my whole balloon that I I remember coming back from there thinking just shaking my head, thinking, what in the world was that all about then, if people didn't if people had come there with the notion of what they were going to do. I mean, it was very clear.

I mean, you could not have arrived at this demonstration without knowing it was going to ratchet up, you know, the aggressiveness of the protestors. If you if you came knowing that, and you didn't act when the opportunity presented itself, what were you doing there and what was I doing there? What had I been what had I been so excited about, you know? It just it just struck me as very wrong and while I continued to participate in actions after that, they were of my own making for the most part. They were down here in Texas or they were things like out in Diablo Canyon where we didn't get busted, we were just harassing folks on site and so on. So I don't I don't know I think that was the last time I ever participated in anything like that in that way. (misc)

[End of Reel 2232]