Jim Schermbeck Interview, Part 2 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 REEL: 2233 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. You can select Interview Start in the Table of Contents to skip this section.
  • DT: Jim, if you could maybe give us a little bit of background about how civil disobedience and some of the tactics that you used, whether it was up at Seabrook or down here in Texas, how they might have originated in Europe?
  • JS: Well, there was this significant movie that I saw at the time that I think was part of all that was in Germany, where this started, where the idea of occupying plant sites and actually stopping construction of nukes started. There was a place called Wyhl, its W-Y-H-L, I think. There was this really bad 16mm movie called Reaction at Wyhl. And Green Mountain Distribution put it out, I don't even know whether they're still around or not.
  • But this was like a home movie of what had happened at this German reactor site. They, the town, the community had actually crossed over the fence. This was before much was built on the site, [or] given but they'd actually crossed over the fence onto plant property, and set up a whole community, a whole village.
  • They had a school there, they had a meeting place, they had, like, a bakery, they had a whole community. They existed on this plant site and prevented any construction from going forward.
  • And it was examples like that that inspired the Clamshell and other people in the country, in this country, to try to do the very same thing. That never happened here, but that was what the inspiration was: to actually occupy a plant site, forcing construction to stop, and pushing the issue in that respect as a huge resistance movement, much like the civil rights movement.
  • You know, integrating buses from one end of the country to another, integrating restaurants, taking physical action to change the circumstances, change the law.
  • To change the context of what was going on. So, it wasn't just a pipe dream to begin with, that this could happen, I mean, it had actually happened in Europe. Uh, I guess the first occupation, or second one, at Clamshell, in Seabrook, were the closest that this country ever saw to that kind of thing.
  • I mean, thousands of people occupying the site, they stayed there for a long period of time, relatively speaking. You know, they had institutions on site, they had an on-site paper for a week or whatever it was at Seabrook there.
  • And then they got busted. And so that was the model that all of us had there, and that model was adopted by people literally every almost every place there was a plant site, it seemed like, that model was in existence.
  • Whether it was in California or Louisiana or Texas or Kansas or Oklahoma or South Carolina, that was the model. So when that happened, we formed, Kim and I and Lon, formed the Armadillo Coalition and didn't think that civil disobedience was going to be our first act.
  • We felt like we needed to do something else first, educate people and so forth, so that's what we did. But it was never ruled out as a tactic by the group. It was just something that we didn't feel like we were up for the first thing out of the gate.
  • Maybe we were wrong, maybe we should've done that first thing out, but we just didn't...we didn't. The Armadillo Coalition became quite successful, I mean, considering, you know, relatively speaking. It had a chapter in Fort Worth, had a chapter in Dallas, had a chapter in Denton.
  • I had a student group up in Sherman. There was one down in Waco for a while. So that we had these rallies, these demonstrations and so on, and at some point, we, I remember, we were at what was then called Zoo World, which was this radio station in Dallas called the Zoo, which was the main rock and roll station in town and still very counter-cultural.
  • It's hard to see that now, imagine that now in this culture. But at the time, it was like hippiedom on the airwaves, you know. Like we would do actions over at TU and they would dedicate songs to us, you know. We'd be able to call and request and stuff and they had this like alternative culture fair every year called Zoo World.
  • And we had a booth there, every year. And the first year we had a booth there, we had a booth and there was this group down the way called CASE that had a booth.
  • And I had never heard of these folks before, I kind of wandered down, and that was the first time I'd ever met Mavis Belisle. She was staffing and Mavis--I'm not going to say manning--she was staffing a booth for CASE, and we got to talking and, you know, asked what are you all doing?
  • What's in well, were doing the regulatory side of it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, working with Juanita Ellis, doing this and this and this. What are you all doing? Well, were doing this, you know, thing, all with the Clamshell, blah, blah, blah.
  • Well, it didn't take very long for Mavis to get involved with the Armadillo Coalition, it was more her style of things. And she was the heart, or one of the core people in Dallas, for that group. And she was just a very good person. She was a mentor of mine almost immediately, and kind of a co-conspirator.
  • I think I've traveled in a car with Mavis more miles than anybody I've ever known, even my wife. We've traveled from one end of the country to the other, going to conferences, going to actions, and it was all on the Catholic Church's card, too, it was great.
  • She worked for the--she was an editor of the Catholic Church paper there in the Fort Worth diocese. And she had a--they gave her a credit card and a car. And so, a lot of anti-nuke organizing that went on in North Texas from 1977 through 80 something, the Catholic Church paid for.
  • At any rate, CASE was on the scene already and that's how I met Mavis at that booth, and we got to talking to each other, and she became an Armadillo Coalition of Texas person. And she never dropped out of CASE or anything, she still kept contacts, but they just weren't doing anything.
  • They were just sitting around waiting for the permit to come back up when they got ready to open it up and they were going to fight that. Meanwhile, we were out there trying to rabble rouse people to resist that fact to even build the plant in the first place.
  • DT: Can you explain a little bit about what CASE's argument was against the [garbled]?
  • JS: Well, CASE was going at it from a strictly regulatory point of view about the fact that it wasn't being built correctly, which would be a concern, you would think, at a nuclear power plant. If they don't build it correctly, there's a problem or two, potentially. So they were concerned about trying to stop it, or at least trying to build a better nuke, I think.
  • You would have to ask, and I'm sure you have, Juanita, if you haven't interviewed her, she's somebody that you should interview. She's a strange person...she was this housewife in Oak Cliff who got involved in this. And she has an amazing story. And going into her house during those years was like going into a canyon of boxes and papers.
  • Things literally piled from the floor to the ceiling and you would wind your way through there to the kitchen part where there was a place to sit down around the kitchen table. Everything else was kind of filled with documents and boxes and legal papers and so on.
  • DT: Related to?
  • JS: Related just to Comanche Peak. Because they had started back in 1974 and, in fact, she and an airline pilot, I think his name was Bob Pomeroy, got followed around. There was a whole scandal about how they were followed and surveilled for what they were doing.
  • And if you've ever seen these--I mean, they were the most milktoast people ever. So you can imagine what they were doing, how they were freaking out about us. And at any rate, they were...had already fought the nuke on the beginning side of it, trying to deny them a construction permit, and now they were waiting for another permit hearing to come up. That wasn't going to come up for a long time.
  • DT: They were waiting for the operations permit?
  • JS: Exactly. And a way to challenge it because that's all they knew. They just knew how to challenge it from a legal point of view and, and Juanita wouldn't just...she would just rather die than go protest anything. I mean, she never hit the picket line, she never did anything like that. I mean, the most she did was write letters and get involved in the legal part of it.
  • And that was you know, some people just are not cut out to do that, some people, like me, seem to fall into it without any trouble at all. So Mavis was looking for something more active to do, especially with everything that was going on nationally.
  • I think she sort of recognized us as kindred spirits and decided to hook her train to our or her wagon to our train for a while. So we became buddies and between Mavis and I, decided that it was time after two years of doing this educational stuff, it was time to do an act of civil disobedience, to escalate resistance.
  • This was a very controversial decision on our part. We tried to get the Armadillo Coalition to go along with us on this, but a strange coalition of liberals and socialist worker party people prevented this from happening.
  • Liberals, because they were scared to death about doing anything that radical at that point and...you have to remember, in 1979, I don't think anyone had been busted in an act of civil disobedience like since the civil rights movement. I can't think of any movement in Texas where there was an organized civil disobedience campaign.
  • So they were concerned about how many people get turned off, and plus, you know, we would get shot the minute we tried to go over the fence. Everybody was afraid of some redneck sheriff in Glen Rose getting a itchy trigger finger and people getting hurt.
  • And then the Trots, the socialist worker people, Trotskyites, were all concerned that it was not going you know, it was going to turn off the masses and that, that was no way to organize a revolution. Most, some of the most conservative people in the world are calling themselves socialist worker party folks. So we had this we kept trying to do this through the Armadillo Coalition and this, it just, it wouldn't happen.
  • So it was a tough, it was like giving up a baby almost, a child, because I had birthed this group. And we decided to form, at that point, something called the--Mavis and I did called the Comanche Peak Life Force.
  • There was this term that Gandhi used, "satra-gaha," a term that was a life-force equivalent meaning other people were kind of using that there was a truth force, I think. That was a little bit too presumptuous for me, even then. I didn't claim to know "The Truth," I just knew how to claim my part of the truth.
  • But I did think that we were a force for life, as opposed to that plant which was, to us, a death machine. So we called ourselves the Comanche Peak Life Force and we brought in somebody from Oklahoma, we brought and actually people who'd done this in Oklahoma, at the Sunbelt Alliance, to come in and teach us nonviolence and how do you do this kind of protest?
  • How do you pull off a CD--civil disobedience--action like this. And had the great fortune to have a guy named Bryant Hunt and some of his guys come down and spend a day with us and teach actually, a weekend with us, I guess, and teach us and train us.
  • And again, I think that this probably went on like for the sit down strikes at GM in the thirties, and the civil rights movement, I know that it was true. But in terms of how widespread it was, the anti-nuclear movement was very particular and strange in that it actually went to a great deal of trouble to teach people how to participate in these actions.
  • You actually went through a nonviolent training session that covered everything, you know, how to react to tear gas, and how to react to an arresting officer and what should your attitude be, and,you know, no weapons, drugs, alcohol allowed, blah, blah, blah.
  • There were whole manuals that were given out at these actions about how what to do and what would be done and what would not be done and I dont think anybody had done that up to this point in terms of a mass movement like this. It was very grounded in nonviolence.
  • And so we got the training for this and we had a small core of people that we started out with that were also kind of refugees from the Armadillo Coalition who felt like we did. And then we started to advertise and we started to offer trainings on weekends at parks or at people's homes that we did ourselves.
  • And pretty soon we had about, I don't know, a hundred, two hundred people that were interested in doing this action. Now, as it turned out, there were only about 50, I guess 48 people that got busted the first time. So, there were that many that got busted and a whole lot of people doing support because people did not know what was going to happen to us when we got busted.
  • So the breakaway was painful, but I knew after that, after we formed the Life Force, I just I never paid any more attention to the Coalition. It kind of had a life of its own after that and I pretty much committed all my energy to Life Force stuff. And we had our first occupation on June 10, 1979.
  • We also had the--just a good break--when we had a lawyer named Louis Pitts come in and help out. He had been helping out at Barnwell in South Carolina, a lawyer. Has the most lilting Southern accent you have ever heard in your life, just the sweetest talking guy ever. The bluest eyes you've ever seen.
  • Had to beat the women off with sticks. He liked Texas because of that because he found a lot of dates down here, he stayed with us quite a while. And he went into town and talked to the sheriff and the judge and everybody, all the authority figures in town about what he called "greasing the operation."
  • As in greasing the rails. And so he was going to in and grease things and talk to the sheriff about what was going to happen so it wouldnt be a surprise. So that by the time we got out there, it was a very choreographed action.
  • But still, at the same time, kind of a big deal, kind of a precedent, because nothing like that had ever happened before. You cannot imagine, it was, you know, I've often thought of these...these World War II films, you know, where they're in like the bomber, the bay of the plane, about to parachute out and, you know, there's like the Jew, and the Catholic, and the Polish guy, and you know, there's always somebody named Tex.
  • And it was just like that in terms of spirit because you were jumping off into a big unknown. Looking back now, it seems kind of silly but people were getting busted that had never gotten busted before in their lives.
  • Like my mom would say, you know, I don't mind you getting arrested, I just wish you'd wait till after you'd graduated. People that didn't know what was going to happen to their, you know, businesses if they got busted or to their college degree programs, or something.
  • So it was like a big unknown and people get very close when they're about to encounter something like that. And so, you know, the night before, we had found this piece of property in Glen Rose, right in the middle of Glen Rose that this guy had let us have. Oh, God, what was...What was his name?
  • A guy who actually used his property on weekends. Had a trailer on it, had this old crumbling original wooden structure, a house, that somebody had built there like in the 1880s or earlier sometime, and the rest of it was clear land and it dropped down to the Paluxy, you were actually on the banks of the Paluxy River there.
  • Really neat spot. And down at the banks, there was this slope and the trees were there and the night before there were like, you know, a dozen campfires going and people were singing and people kind of nervous about what was going to happen the next day and talking to each other and the next morning, we all circled up down by the river, sang a song or two to kind of get our spirits going.
  • Talked to each other to try to reassure each other and said, just said, let's go, let's load up. So we all loaded up, went down there, had these make-do ladders that took us over the fence, we lined up, we marched to the front.
  • There were lots of people that we had no idea where they came from. They just kind of like they did in the first couple of battles in the Civil War, people came out just to see what would happen and eat lunch and stuff. That's what happened there.
  • Glen Rose-ites and other folks from around the area just showed up to see what happened, to see if we really would get shot or something. And so we lined up, we had our affinity groups in order, we climbed over the fence using these makeshift ladders
  • and got over there, sat down, and sang or chanted or sat, did whatever we had to do until Sheriff Larimore came by, who was just the nicest guy, I have to say. Louis had done a good job, plus I think this guy was semi-sympathetic to us. He was a younger guy and he was just...
  • ...he kind of smirked half the time when he was dealing with us. And Sheriff said, OK, ladies and gentlemen, you all are now officially under arrest. Would you please accompany me over to the bus that's waiting for you here.
  • Because they had buses waiting for us, to put us all in. And we said, yes, sir. We got up, we went into the bus, and he took us down to the jail. Now, Glen Rose is like the second smallest county in the state of Texas, I think.
  • Doesn't...didn't have much money even then. Now with the plant it has quite a bit of money, but, its jail could not hold 48 people. There was no way that we were going to go to jail in Glen Rose.
  • So he wrote us a ticket, we go, we went inside, we got fingerprinted, he wrote us out a little ticket and that was the end of it, as far as the dramatic arrest was concerned.
  • And while it wasn't a big deal in the capital K cosmic order of things, it was a big deal for this area because it was the first campaign of civil disobedience against anything like that that had taken place. So the headlines, you know, were great, it was great news, you know.
  • I remember seeing this one San Antonio paper headline that just, you know, at the time, they had these tabloids in San Antonio, I think they still have one or two, but they're just sensationalist, kind of New York Daily type things.
  • And the headline was Sixty Nabbed at in Plant. You know, like we were trying to sneak in or something. And they even got--they even inflated our numbers, which was great, too. You know.
  • But it wasn't nearly as dramatic as all that, it was very orchestrated, very choreographed. We went over the fence, we got arrested, we got a ticket, we left. Then, there was a trial.
  • And we had wanted to go to trial and Louis was going to be our lawyer. And the trial was much more interesting and much more, much more interesting, much more lasting in terms of its impact than the occupation was even, for that town.
  • The Glen Rose courthouse, Somervell County Courthouse, doesn't even have inside bathrooms, it had an outhouse. And the courtroom itself was not air-conditioned.
  • So you had this Inherit the Wind quality to it, everybody had fans in there, and the locals were out there and and intermixed with the locals were people like me that had hair down to here and beardfull beards and everything.
  • It was quite a mix of folks. And we had a six-person jury, and on that jury was a hog farmer, a primitive Baptist minister, not just a Baptist minister, a primitive Baptist minister, that's what the church called itself.
  • Couple of women, I forget what they did. One of the ancestors of the founding fathers of the town, I mean, this was a hard core Glen Rose jury. And at the time, the strategy was to do something called uh, uh, a defense of necessity, a necessity defense.
  • And this is where if you're on this side of a fence and you see somebody drowning on that side of the fence, you can hop over that fence, trespass and break a law in order to save a life or do a larger good.
  • And this is what we were claiming we were doing at Comanche Peak. We were trespassing over their fence in order to call attention to a larger problem of the plant.
  • And in doing so, we had to explain what the danger of the plant was. And so, the judge--God bless Louis--the judge allowed us to present this defense. He could've said, no, no way, its just a straight ahead trespassing defense.
  • But I think everybody--it was such a novelty then, and it was such a big deal in this small town that they were kind of fascinated with it. And they were as curious as anybody about what was going on. So they allowed us this defense.
  • And we got to bring in Rosalie Bertel and Earnest Sternglass and John Goffman in to testify for us in little Glen Rose. And so they got up on the stand and talked about how bad radiation was and so on and so just tremendous education project for the whole town, plus the media was covering it.
  • Well, the D.A. didn't know what to do. He didn't want to argue the merits of nuclear power, so he didn't bring anybody up, any scientist or anything the company, I'm sure, offered him at the time. Nothing like that, he wasn't going to have any of that, it was just a straight-ahead trespassing case.
  • Plus, then, at every chance he got, he had 7 or 8 pictures all from the bus, they took pictures of us when we got ticketed and arrested. And they were Polaroids, and he had, of course all 48 people, there were nuns that got arrested, there were older folks, there was now, perfectly reasonably looking folk that got arrested, it wasnt just all hippies.
  • But, for his purposes, he had 7 or 8 photographs of the longest-haired, most-bearded guys, all guys, that got busted, and I was one of them, that he would lay out in front of the jury every chance he got.
  • whenever he was explaining about something that was going on with this case. And we were, we were kind of the poster boys for the hippies that had invaded town there and blah, blah, blah.
  • Well, we also got a chance, some of us, they chose, I guess, there were three or four or five of us that got up to testify on behalf of the whole group. And Sister Patricia was one nun from Dallas...
  • I think Mavis might have been one, I'm not sure about that. There was a woman who was pregnant that testified from Austin. And there was me that also testified, and at that time, I was still, you know, doing chapel and directing it and I could talk all about how this was a New Testament type of thing to do...
  • ...and maybe somehow take the edge off that photograph a little bit, give them some background to it.
  • DT: What was the New Testament argument?
  • JS: Well, I think it's just that if you're, of course, that's twenty years ago, or so, so it takes me a while back, but I was very into a kind of Martin Luther King approach to Christianity where it had, you know, if you if there's a wrong out there, it's your duty to protest it in a very nonviolent, Christian way.
  • And it'd be unchristian for you not to do it. That and...and here was love as a message, basically. We're all about loving people and loving our enemy, and not holding any, not even being angry necessarily at the company, they were just trying to make a buck, blah, blah, blah.
  • So I got up there and and, you know, I had been in debate and gotten honors in high school, and blah, blah, blah, so maybe I wasn't exactly the hippie they might have thought that I was when they first saw the picture. That was the point of the testimony at any rate.
  • So it was just a grand time. I mean, we sat there in that, in that courthouse, all week long just amazed because these, these locals had never heard anything like this coming out of these scientists about low-level radiation and the history of workers and just all kinds of great stuff.
  • And sure enough, they voted four to two to acquit us, it was a hung jury. And when they announced that, it was just an amazing uproar in the courtroom.
  • This came like, they sent it out to the jury at like, oh god, 12 or 1 in the afternoon, and the jury stayed out till late, late in the evening, I mean, it was dark when they came back and said and said, we just can't agree on a verdict.
  • And the whole place erupted and filed out into the courthouse yard, around the courthouse there. The hog farmer came up and shook our hands, tears in his eyes, about what he had found out. Just an amazing sight.
  • Just...it was just an amazing thing that happened. It was transforming for us and for them, as well. And that was probably the highlight of that whole chain of events down there in Glen Rose.
  • We had more occupations after that, but that was the only time where we got to...you could be sure that was the only time we got away with that, arguing that defense, and doing it that way with that result.
  • All the other times were not nearly as dramatic. We had another occupation that same year in Thanksgiving, we had like a hundred people busted, again ticketed and so forth, but we never got trials out of that that were like that one.
  • People were there right after on the anniversary of Three Mile Island in 80 and got busted and I think that was and then in July 4th in 1980 was the last full-scale occupation that we tried to to pull off.
  • And that was different in spirit and strategy and everything else. You went from having that completely choreographed experience that I talked about earlier to the point, just a year and a half later
  • ...where we snuck on in the middle of the night, set up camp without them knowing about it, were determined to stay on site for as long as we could, to disrupt things as long as we could without getting arrested.
  • So it was not choreographed at all. And we had gone out onto plant property and scouted it out, knew where we were going to set up camp at. There were a couple of guys who wanted to take a canoe across the lake there and try to land on that side.
  • That accounts for the imagery...I don't know whether you can see it or not but the imagery that we did, oh, it's covered up now. But, there was anyway Washington crossing the Delaware was on that poster. And decided just to reclaim July 4th as our own day to do this action at.
  • And it was the summer of 1980, where we had like 60 days in a row of 100+ heat. It was the hottest summer ever in Texas recorded. So there weren't a lot of out-of-towners there and we were trying to promote this action to everybody on the east coast and stuff.
  • Come on down to Texas and it was like, no way in hell are we going to go down there and broil. So we didn't have as many people, it was kind of demoralizing because we didn't have as many people as we thought we might have. But we did it anyway.
  • And within the first 24 hours, there were helicopters buzzing all over the place, it was it was closer to a paramilitary operation without the rifles and ammunition than it was the first kind of occupation that I described.
  • And that was, kind of, generally the way things were moving in the movement as a whole. Things were getting you know, this whole idea of escalating tactics and pressing the issue and not being satisfied anymore with just going across the fence and getting busted and saying, thank you, and let us have our ticket and go away.
  • It was more challenging. And so within the first I think, the first day, some of us, they sent Rangers out, they sent Texas Rangers this time too, no more Sheriff Larimore. They weren't going to let him handle this. It was Texas Rangers and it was more than one Texas Rangers, dont buy that one Ranger, one riot slogan.
  • And they were all overweight. And you can imagine, in the noonday sun, over 100 degrees, a fat Texas Ranger, he doesn't want to mess with you at all. They were already in a very bad mood, very bad mood.
  • So we took...they came and tried to land a helicopter near our camps. We all scattered in different directions and one of a group of us took a wrong turn and ran smack dab into a Texas Ranger, and who busted us.
  • And so I just decided, and I'd been doing this for a while anyway in these actions, that I wasn't going to cooperate with the rest. I was going to go limp, and I told them that. And they kind of looked disgusted at themselves and at me, and realized kind of what that meant.
  • And they dragged us out of the bush there into a clearing. And waited for the helicopter to land because we were going to be transported by helicopter into this holding pen that they had set up inside the plant at this point.
  • They had they had a little fenced in area that was like the Comanche Peak prison for the day or something that they had set up, that they were bringing people in there. I guess there were, I don't know, five of us that got busted at that particular point or so.
  • I think Mavis may have been in that group, I forget, it's kind of all hazy to me.
  • And they pulled us out so they pulled us by our ankles, pulled us out of the bush and laid us in this open area, and the helicopter landed, and I think they could only take two or something at a time, or three or whatever it was.
  • And they were saving us for last. There were a couple o--this guy named Joe there with me and we both had decided to go limp and not cooperate with the rest. And we tried to explain to these guys, you know, nothing against you, it's just our way of protesting the fact that we don't want to leave and were trying to disrupt the system and whatever else excuse we had for doing that at the time.
  • And they had special plans for us. And so when they had taken the other guys awayII dontI dont think they did this to Joe. They put Joe on first, but because I red, you know, I had very red hair at the time and the relationship between authority figures, particularly police, and redheads is not good at demonstrations.
  • They can point you out, you know, they pick out who they're going to give trouble to on the police line there while theyre talking amongst themselves and that happened more times than I can count.
  • And these guys had done the same thing, they just decided that they were going to, either somebody had told them that I was a ringleader or something like that or I was smarting off too much. I don't think I was, but I may have been.
  • And they were going to do something special for me. So instead of taking a direct line to the helicopter, they grabbed me by--this one guy this one Ranger grabbed me by the ankles and started dragging me in an indirect line to the helicopter.
  • And that indirect line had a huge cactus plant right in the middle of it. And I had a backpack on, of sorts, a little one, but other than that, it was very thin clothing because it was July in Texas.
  • You know, a T-shirt and some Army fatigues, some used, very thin Army fatigues. And I can remember seeing that thing coming up and realizing what was happening and just putting my head back and looking directly into the sun.
  • And I can't explain you know, it could be a physiological thing, it could be a mental thing, I don't know what happened. But I just remember feeling the most, the best sense of ease that I've ever felt and then just looking directly into the sun and saying, everything's going to be all right, its going to be cool, and having some voice tell me that.
  • And we went over the cactus and I got a bunch of cactus in me. And I rode to the little Comanche Peak prison with that in me. Spent the rest of the day in that impoundment with people picking cactus out of me.
  • And it turns out that there was a particularly deep one in my rear end that was abscessing after a month a so, so I had to actually go see a doctor about taking it out because it was such a problem.
  • And so I go, I, you know, I didn't have a family physician at that time, it'd been years since I went with my mom to the doctor, so my I think my stepmom had a doctor she recommended on the west side of Fort Worth, completely, I, you know, didn't know him at all and I went in and explained, I need this thorn removed from my backside.
  • I get in and the physician's assistant is somebody I went to high school with, and so I have to explain this story to her and anyway, it was a weird thing and I got it out of me and and it's been sitting in this thing ever since. I mounted it.
  • There was also a quote at the time about one of the plant people, or one of the Texas Rangers, basically saying, "they're just a thorn in our side." So that also kind of amplified the mythology around it.
  • And later on, when I was doing Texans United work, we had a thorn award that we were giving out in honor of this, that I would give out to people. But that was a strange experience. And we sat there in that compound and we got booked, finally.
  • We didn't, a couple of us didn't want to make bail, we went on a hunger strike, so we spent the next week or two in the Granbury, in the Hood County jail, in Granbury there, on a complete hunger strike. They tried to say that we were eating the stuff and it wasn't true.
  • And in jail, in the Granbury jail, the trustee in charge of cooking was somebody that knew me from high school. And I was trying to tell him, look, it's nothing personal, it's not that your food isn't any good, it's just that, you know, were doing this for a political reason, blah, blah, blah.
  • That was the only time, I think, my dad came down to visit me when I was in jail there that week or so. And that was pretty interesting because he had stayed away.
  • It wasn't that he didn't support it but he just wasn't an active participant. And he actually came down and like dropped off a book or two or whatever and that was kind of neat.
  • DT: Your parents were supportive?
  • JS: They were. They were remarkably supportive. I don't know if I would be as supportive now, with my child, the way they were.
  • And my da, I found out much, much later, after he had died as a matter of fact, that he had ended up integrating the federal lunch spot in the federal building in the Sixties. He had gone in with a black guy and actually sat down to have lunch in Fort Worth at the time, which I didn't know anything about.
  • So I guess maybe it's genetic, I don't know. He never did anything that activist when I knew him. He was a Democrat and he was certainly anti-Republican and anti-Nixon because they were messing--he was a federal government worker in HUD--because they were messing with his programs.
  • But he never went to any rallies or did anything like that. He didn't get involved in any anti-war stuff at all. My mom was not that way at all. She was very civic minded, she belonged to a neighborhood civic club and was interested in neighborhood stuff but never got involved in anything like that.
  • But they were completely supportive, I was just very surprised about that. I guess I was surprised, I mean, there's not much they could do about it at that point, I was over 18. I was going to do that and I guess they figured that out, that I was going to do it anyway.
  • But, yeah, they were they were very supportive. But anyway, that action was the last occupation of Comanche Peak that happened in the last action that I got busted for at plant site. There were actions after that.
  • I guess the best one was when kind of the last remnants of the Life Force in, I guess it would've been 81 or 82, got together and did a demo down at what was then Dallas Power and Light headquarters, now its TU headquarters.
  • Where we decided to take energy appliances, energy-consuming appliances and stuff, and blockade the building and sell Comanche Peak to the highest bidder to pay ratepayers back. It was a ratepayers' auction of Comanche Peak.
  • So we took a refrigerator and like a stove, and load them on a trailer, we had this old car that somebody had donated to us, that we put lemons all over on and we were more than successful.
  • We actually, we struck in the early morning hours; we had chains that wrapped around these appliances and then on the doors and people inside were actually blockaded. We were a fire hazard for like an hour because people could not get in or out of the building.
  • One of our people got up on theon alike a second floor balcony, pseudo-balcony that's on the building there, and started doing his auctioneering from up there. And he was the last person to get arrested because they actually had to get a hook and ladder to come and get him off of that.
  • It was a crazy action and then we did one at TU headquarters, upstairs in the executive suites where three of us got busted there.
  • DT: What were you doing there?
  • JS: We were protesting Comanche Peak and the fact that it was still being built and I forget the event that triggered it, there was something that had just happened that triggered our response to that. But, within the Dallas County Court system, of course, they were not going to have any of that necessity defense business, none of that nonsense was going to happen in their courts.
  • So all that went straight through, we got sentences, you know, we did our time. It was just not a very pleasant experience. We didn't have Louis anymore as our nice friendly country lawyer, we had these guys that were assigned to us that had no idea about this necessity defense and this nuke stuff.
  • You know, they were usually assigned to heftier criminal types than us. There was one time when we were out in front of TU where I was arrested, literally, for standing on the sidewalk.
  • We had just gone through--oh, I know, it was, it was the action that...we had had fourteen days continuous occupation of the Comanche Peak site. We started on July 4th and we ended on Bastille Day, I think.
  • Ten days, maybe, continual occupation. And on Bastille Day we had a news conference saying this is the end of the occupation, blah, blah, blah. Had it in front of the TU building and the whole conference was over and stuff and we were just talking amongst ourselves, me and another woman, Roxanne, the person I'd been on the walk with, and we actually got arrested for standing on a sidewalk.
  • We were not moving fast enough on the sidewalk for this Dallas policeman. And they... I'm sure this didn't endear me at all to them, but as they were arresting me, I couldn't help but laugh. I was laughing the whole time.
  • Because I knew it wouldn't stick; it was just you know, the law is whatever the cop says it is on the scene, but there was no way they were going to make this bust stick. There was just no way. So I was laughing all the way down there and I'm sure that just pissed him off even more, but it was just, you know, it was just hilarious.
  • It was just too unreal. So we did things like that, but after a while, even that petered out. The actions around the rate hikes and stuff, and that all fizzled out. We did, we went out of state a lot, we went to Diablo Canyon and participated in that occupation.
  • We'd go over to the Whip site in New Mexico and help those guys out. We were, we'd go to New York, we got more involved as the freeze, as the weapons issues came about. When I got involved with the nuclear power plant issue, man, the weapons issue was like verboten, you dont want to turn off people by talking about the need to disarm nuclear weapons.
  • You know, that'll run people away. We just want to talk about power plants. Well, all that changed in the 80s, you know, people--the freeze movement developed, and people really were wanting to talk about nuclear weapons.
  • And so we'd send like a hundred people up to New York for this action that we did in conjunction with the big disarmament rally, peace rally. I think it was like half a million people, maybe the largest peace rally ever in the country.
  • And as a component of that, they had a CD action at each of the embassies of countries that held nuclear weapons at that point. And we picked France, because France was a son of a bitch.
  • They were still testing, they were really arrogant about it, and we knew people were going to get busted at the British Embassy, and the American site and the Russian site, those were all predictable. But we felt like the French needed to be taught a lesson. So the Texas contingent took the French embassy on.
  • And whenever we went out of town, we always got this rep, you know, as hard core Texas type, you know, we knew how to party, we knew how to get things done. We were not ideological at all. I mean, that was great.
  • We were all...we were just about the action and we didn't have the politics splitting us in two. We didn't, you know, it was very solid. And so we had a good time shutting down the French embassy there, and it was a righteous action. And met some beautiful French women in the in the process, who were joining us.
  • And it was just a great day. We had planned on getting these boxes, these moving boxes and putting people inside the moving boxes so they couldn't come and cut the chain. Anyway, there was this whole strategy about putting people inside boxes, cutting holes, and so that they wouldn't be able to just load us up.
  • And we had made these arrangements for sending all these moving boxes up to New York via, you know, UPS or whatever, on the bus or whatever, they didn't get there on time. So, I don't know, to this day, there still may be like 50 big moving boxes there at Grand Central Station or somewhere waiting for us to pick them up.
  • But the action went off pretty well. The cops in New York could not have been nicer and I found this out doing a Wall Street action, too, that when I was up there before at American U. You know, they were really cool at that time about handling, because they were very experienced. The whole thing about...
  • DT: In Washington, D.C.
  • JS: In New York. You know, they were very experienced in this kind of thing. And that's what it takes, you know, they knew that we were not a threat to them personally and they knew all about this stuff.
  • And they, you know, they had just the right attitude about it, so when we got on this bus, after we were booked for doing the French embassy action, you know, the guy was like giving us a tour, a rolling tour of New York. You know, there's the Brooklyn Bridge and my dad worked on that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they just took us into Chinatown and let us off.
  • And that was it. And they were doing that to thousands of people that day. And it was great because Chinatown was happening and we spent the rest of the day hanging out at Chinatown. It was just a great action, and got a lot of press about it and stuff aand made a big impression on everybody there.
  • DW: That's actually a question I have is--we've heard a lot about how New York is a big city, not like Glen Rose. In Dallas and Glen Rose, what is the response of the media and is your story existing here for us in the Glen Rose paper, or was it beside the El Paso tabloid you mentioned? Channel 4 news, Channel 2 news?
  • JS: Oh, yeah. DW: Maybe you could describe a little about your workings with the media, for or against?
  • JS: Oh, well. Theres one...I know people outside the area who will never appreciate what this means, but this was for us, for me, personally, an indication of how far we had come. The night before, I guess, the second occupation, the one that had happened around Thanksgiving at Comanche Peak.
  • Somebody had a TV, like a DC-powered Tor some kind of little TV there at the encampment. And Harold Taft, Harold Taft, this guy who has been doing weather since like before there was weather. He was doing weather for Channel 5 in Dallas-Fort Worth; he'd been there for since like 1949 as the weatherman.
  • He was God, when it came to weather, I mean, there was nobody else you listened to in Dallas-Fort Worth but Harold Taft. Harold Taft. Harold Taft was on the night before, using his weather charts and stuff to explain where the radiation would go if there had been--if there was an accident at Glen Rose.
  • They were giving Harold Taft time to explain because of wind directions and meteorological conditions, where would the radiation go if there was an accident at Glen Rose? And it was great, because it was obviously it would be going north toward Dallas-Fort Worth and all of north Texas there.
  • An amazing thing to have God explaining what would happen to the local populace if there was an accident at Comanche Peak. That was, for me, like the highlight. That was even better than getting on the front page.
  • The first time we did it, it was big news. The second time we did it was not quite as big of news. And after that, it was not quite as big of news. And you know, the more we did it, the less newsy it was.
  • This is what I mean when you get caught in a cycle sometimes. Activists will, with trying to escalate their tactics to get the press to come back and cover it because the press thinks, at that point, it's old news. You've done that before, show me something new.
  • So the first time we did this down here, it was big, big press. And the second time, it wasn't quite as much and so on.
  • DT: So the story for them is the demonstration, not the underlying issue?
  • JS: Right, exactly. Exactly. And that's what made the Harold Taft part so good. And like the trial that happened so constructive because that was the education part that was getting out and changing people's minds. It wasn't the fact that they were getting busted, we were getting busted. It was the fact that all this other stuff was coming as a result of that.
  • So, yeah, I mean, the difference is that we were very big news, obviously, in the community the first time we did it and then we got to be kind of old news after that. And I think that's, that works that way regardless of what news market you're in.
  • DT: How did your demonstrations sit with the TU, the Texas Utilities executives?
  • JS: You know, they thought we were all kooks, I'm sure. There was a period when I was corresponding, though, with a guy named T.L. Austin, who was CEO of TU at the time. And himself a committed Christian.
  • And I was trying to correspond with him on that basis by saying, you know, if you're really, if you're really serious about your religion, you need to check this out from a different point of view. Here's what I'm talking about, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
  • And we corresponded politely back and forth about it in a very sincere way, I think. I mean, I think those guys still don't know what they've done. Still can't appreciate--you know--a lot of these plants got built because some executive at a utility company played golf with another utility company executive and this other utility company executive bragged about the nuclear plant they were getting built and this guy said, well, were going to get one of those, too.
  • It was like buying, you know, a new Caddy or something. It was a status symbol among utilities at that, in that era, to get you a nuke. Because if you didn't get a nuke, you were just going to be some Podunk utility, but with a nuke, you were, you know, a bigger entity.
  • And a more fascinating entity, and a more high-tech entity, and so on. So Im sure that's what happened here, you know, and Brown and Root was involved in the construction and if you know anything about Texas history, you know how intertwined with the power that be,they are, and...
  • DT: Can you explain a little bit because they were also the contractor of, I believe...
  • JS: STNP [South Texas Nuclear Project].
  • DT: Right, STNP. Yeah. Oh, yeah
  • JS: Well, they were Lyndon Johnson's, you know, official-unofficial construction company. If you've read Robert Caro's biography of Johnson, they struck up a relationship because the Mansfield Dam right outside of Austin and never quit. You know, they built the tiger cages in South Vietnam, they built the nukes, and Dick Cheney is now head of Halliburton, which is contains Brown and Root.
  • So there's a long history of those guys being involved in a lot of bad stuff from the git-go. And I'm sure that was part of it. I mean, we had no ideayou know, a nineteen-year old Jim Shermbeck from Fort Worth, Texas had no idea what was going on behind the scenes between TU and Brown and Root and the cities that were involved and so forth.
  • So I'm sure they thought that we were kind of like a fly that they could just kind of swat and get rid of and so forth. We were not as much of a threat to them, I think, as they thought their own bad economics were.
  • Because as it turned out, the economics of that thing is whatis what was seriously damaging to that company and to the other partners that were in that. I mean, there were, there was a whole group of co-ops, for instance, of rural co-ops that had bought a percentage of Comanche Peak that later pulled out because the economics got so bad.
  • DT: Can you explain the difference in that culture?
  • JS: Well, these things...we talked about how perfect the technology has to be. You have to invest a lot of money into perfecting this technology. And if something doesn't go right, it takes a lot of money to fix it. And there was an instance here, excuse me, when they realized that, you know, they had two reactors down there and they were supposed to be mirror images of each other.
  • Well, they built one to look exactly like the other one, so it wasn't a mirror image and they put the containment vessel in wrong so it had to do a 180-degree turn on the containment vessel, and that took, you know, millions of dollars to do. It just...because you're dealing with the with radioactivity, because of all these precautions, you have to spend a lot of money.
  • Everything takes a lot of money, everything takes a lot of labor. If you have an--I remember reading, if you have an accident, even a minor one at a nuke, at an operating nuke, you know, it takes 60 guys running in for two minutes, staying there, and then coming out to deal with it.
  • Because you don't want to overdose them on their radioactivity. So instead of just having one guy go in there with a wrench, going in there and turning a screw, you have to have 60 guys going in there, you know, turning thewrench a couple of times and then coming back out because of fear of radioactivity.
  • Well, multiply that on the scale of things down there, that these plants were the biggest that they had ever built, they were what was then called third generation nukes. They were completely experimental, nobody had built them that scale before, they were all out of proportion scale-wise. It was just a recipe for cost overruns, and sure enough, almost out of the gate these guys were experiencing one cost overrun after another.
  • The only thing that kept them in the game was this process called construction work in progress, which they could charge all these overruns back to rate payers as they went along. And everybody sucked up and went along with that. You know, what would happen, and it was...it everybody knew this game. The utility company would demand a 30% rate hike, let's say, and everybody knew that that was twice as much as they were going to get, so they'd half it to 15% and theyd get exactly what they'd wanted all along.
  • That's exactly the pattern that went for years and years and years. But the economics of that plant was what was really its weakest--its Achilles heel, as it were. So as Life Force stuff petered out, I was still interested in opposing it.
  • So I--but I was also interested in getting another life because I'd seen where this was not getting us anywhere, the plant was still going up. I had seen this nuke go from just barely visible on the horizon line to now being these two huge, two- hundred fifty tall, foot tall, three hundred foot tall domes. It was very demoralizing...
  • and I said, there's got to be a better way. There's got to be something that we can do. So I started looking into the economic part of it. It was 1984, I was enrolled at UNT, trying to get my degree in radio/TV/film.
  • And Ralph Nader hits town, along with Jim Maddox and Anne Richards and a lot of these other people. And Ralph Nader decides to set up a Public Citizen office, a branch of his national group. And he's looking for people to work for him.
  • So I drop out of school, and I go to Austin for a year, to help open up this Public Citizen office there and write a report for them that was called Risky Business, that was all about how much ratepayers were going to end up paying for these nukes. Not just Comanche Peak, but for STNP as well, Palo Verde that El Paso had bought in as well.
  • So, and Gulf States, Gulf States, east...southeast Texas had bought into a Louisiana plant. So it was all, as far as I know, the first study of its kind in this state that actually took nukes from an economic point of view saying, how much will this cost the economy, how much will this drain out of the economy. And it was a tremendous amount, billions and billions of dollars because you had a multiplier effect and so on.
  • And I am terrible at math, but I managed to get through this exercise with a lot of help from a lot of different people. And we like had the very beginnings of a computer, you can imagine, it was 1984, it was just very, very, you know, 5-inch really floppy disk, that's where the term comes from. Very slow. But we managed to pull this off and we released this report and it got a lot of good publicity and it kind of started a whole new phase for me of attacking the plant from an economic point of view.
  • And I came back from that, back up to north Texas and decided I wanted to (misc)
  • DT: Could you continue, please?
  • JS: Well, so, starting around 1985, I tried to put together a new type of model. And it was called the Comanche Peak Citizens Audit and it was going to be taking senior citizens' groups, church groups, neighborhood groups, and putting them into a force that could change how the cities were paying for the nuke...make them stop paying for it.
  • Let the utility run out of money, maybe stop it that way. And during this time, the operating permit hearings began because it was getting close. They wanted to open this thing in like '88, '89 or so. And so Juanita Ellis and CASE were getting now more active again after being moribund for a while, they were climbing back into the game.
  • And they were getting assistance from the...what was called the Government Accountability Project; it was a D.C.-based group, Billie Guard and some of those folks. And they were working with their own whistleblower stuff, because a couple whistleblowers had stepped forward and said, these guys are not installing this stuff right, theyre mucking up, and they would go right to Juanita and they would blow the whistle on these guys.
  • And that's what brought Billie and them in because they were specialists in dealing with whistleblowers. They were lawyers and organizers on behalf of whistle blowers.
  • So we, I never worked with Juanita directly, but I worked with Billie. And the strategy was that we would try to drive up the cost and try to deny them funding, kind of dam the river in terms of money, while they would try to drive up the cost in terms of correcting these things that the whistle blowers brought forward.
  • And this was a semi--this was just getting underway, really, '85, '86, '87. It more or less coalesced; we had printed material out there, we were starting to make some in roads with decisionmakers in the area...
  • and then in 1988, I went down and got the paper that day, and the headline was that the nuclear power--the Comanche Peak opponents-- had settled with the company and the NRC. And it just blew me away.
  • Nobody had told any of us that were working on this strategy that were still opposed to the plant about any of this. It was all done in secret.
  • There was a CASE board meeting that was secret that Mavis, I think, was still on the board or was not invited to, I forget the circumstances exactly, but all very hush hush. Juanita got a place on the Texas Utilities board; she got paid for her legal expenses plus; and we got left out in the cold.
  • And so, that was it. That was the end of my organizing against Comanche Peak because at that point there was a green light and there was nothing that was going to stop it.
  • DT: CASE was the only group that had party status?
  • JS: That had party status, that's right. And that was a real mistake on our part because we trusted them to do that part of the fight while we were doing the outside organizing, the economic part and so on. The rabble rousing still around the cost issues.
  • Betty Brink was a member of a group that thought they had party status, but I guess they didn't. I forget how all that played out. There were legal ramifications where they tried to get back in the game after that, but they were not allowed.
  • Basically, once Juanita made that agreement, it was all over. And I've never talked to her about it at all, but it's, I think, she was one of these people that I don't think could have...she had to be involved in the nuke somehow, and she knew it was going to get licensed so the way that she was going to be involved was to be involved after the fact.
  • You know, she couldn't imagine a life without Comanche Peak, and this was her way of extending her involvement in that. That's my pseudo-psychological analysis of her decision.
  • Billie Guard, to my mind, is still a traitor to the cause and, like I told you earlier, if I ever see her, she's going to get a big right-handed from me, just for being kind of the architect. I don't think Juanita would've done that without her being there. But everything changed on that day. I was literally a zombie for the next week or so, just walking around not knowing what to do after that came down.
  • DT: This is a good starting point...I mean stopping point... [End of Reel 233]