Story Previews (click a title to view)

• A Desperate Passion
  by Helen Caldicott
  It was on a cold spring day in May 1977 when the wind cuts straight through your clothes, the daffodils were not even out and the ground was still brown and muddy. I had moved to live in Boston from Australia six months earlier and was only just acclimatizing to the New England weather. We,…
• Arthur Harvey and the Greenleaf Harvesters
  by Paul Gunter
  Arthur Harvey was the founder of the Greenleaf Harvesters, a guild of blueberry and apple agriculture workers named after the New England Quaker poet abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. Read about Whittier’s connection to Hampton Falls, NH athttp://www.ritro.com/sections/people/story.bv?storyid=3649 . Anyways, the guild “twithed” its earnings each season (20%) and pooled the money into a fund. At…
• Atomic Power and Nuclear Weapons: Flip Sides of the Same Coin
  by Paul Gunter
  Public Service Company of New Hampshire headquarters sits on Elm Street in the middle of downtown Manchester. It was August 9, 1976, Nagasaki Day. Ron and I were fresh out of Hampton city jail from the August 1st action at the Seabrook. My wrists were scabby with handcuff cuts from the dragging we took through…
• Bird Dogging the Duke
  by Jay Gustaferro
  We wanted Massachusetts to intervene against the Seabrook nuclear power plant at the federal level. Attorney General Francis X. Belotti wanted to but Governor Michael Dukakis was on the fence. So, I accepted Tom Moughan’s invitation to birddog Dukakis the weekend he announced his run for second term. We knew it was going to be…
• Burnt Toast: Trouble in the Nation’s Breadbasket
  by Paul Gunter
  Ron Reick and I organized to take a horse drawn wagon across the state of New Hampshire from Hinsdale on the Connecticut River to Seabrook to raise the public awareness of the first Clamshell occupation of the nuke construction site scheduled for August 1, 1976. Steppingstone Farm over in Marlow generously loaned us “Dick,” a…
• Clam Magic
  by Court Dorsey
  Early in 1977, a group of young activists in DeKalb, Illinois began a self-study seminar created by The Movement for a New Society (MNS) called the Macro analysis Seminar. We were all a part of a network of affiliated projects centered around Juicy John Pinks, a restaurant and coffeehouse that included a food coop, Duck…
• Diane Garand Video Interview Transcript with Peter Kellman and Renny Cushing
  by Renny Cushing
  Renny- What’s the date? According to this… it’s not on the film. Peter- It’s the 18th of September 2004. I am here with Diann Garand formerly of Salem, New Hampshire. Renny- And you’re formerly from Salem, New Hampshire, too. Right Peter? Peter- Formerly I lived in Salem. We were and currently. When Diann lived there…
• EFFE, Jobs, Energy & the Clam
  by Richard Grossman
  In spring 1976, I moved from California to Washington DC to become director of Environmentalists For Full Employment (EFFE). EFFE’s task was to counter corporate state propaganda that safe energy threw people out of work, was anti-progress and bad for the economy. We also built alliances among workers and environmentalists. I had worked for the…
• Frances Crowe video interview transcript 6-26-07
  by Frances Crowe
  with Sharon Tracy 6-26-07 My husband Tom was a radiologist and was a founding member of Physicians for Social responsibility in this area. Back in the 60s we were working to stop the testing of nuclear weapons. I was running around trying to corner the powdered milk for this area (because the radiation was concentrating…
• FRANCES CROWE’S STORIES
  by Frances Crowe
  EARLY DAYS My husband Tom, a radiologist, was a founding member of Physicians for Social responsibility in this area. Back in the 60s we were working to stop the testing of nuclear weapons. Radiation was coming down in the Albany area from the bomb tests out west. We collected baby teeth and the Tooth Fairy…
• From South Meeting House
  by Renny Cushing
  Building and operating an atomic plant on an earthquake fault in Seabrook, in a densely populated area just 45 miles from Boston, and requiring ratepayers throughout to New England to pay for it, is an assault on the health, safety and economy of our region. The nuclear industry shattered the very foundation of our democracy,…
• Gloucester Resistance
  by Jay Gustaferro
  Gloucester resistance to the Seabrook nuke is amazingly broad-based, from ditch diggers to college professors, and even a disillusioned NRC official. One active group was the Fishermen’s Wives Association, formed because the men were out to sea so much of the time and needed a group to speak for their interests. They were astute and…
• How our Affinity Group got its Rather Odd Name of Honet Locust
  by Bob Brainerd
  The first meeting of the group was at Northeastern University. It was evening, and wewere sitting under a tree recently planted in the new courtyard on Huntington Avenue.The tree was a Honey Locust – probably named because of the honey-shadeof its leaves. As I recall – possibly with the aid of a romanticizing memory –…
• How the Clamshell Alliance Got Its Name
  by Renny Cushing
  The Clamshell Alliance got its name from the testimony of a SAPL witness, who testified that one of the effects of the cooling system, a total mortality system taking in more than a billion gallons of water a day, could destroy the “neuritic band” of pelagic clam larvae. By the way, the Clams can and…
• How Ya Gonna Keep ‘em Down on the Farm?
  by Kristie Conrad
  I grew up smack in south central NH, in dairy country, where we would often awaken to find cows had once again broken through the fence and generously left behind evidence of their presence all over our front lawn. I grew up sheltered from the harshness of much of life, though I do remember that…
• Legacy
  by Berri Kramer
  I was a student at Kent State in 1971 when National Guard troops openedfire on Viet Nam war protesters and killed four of my fellow students. I was one of the 1,414 at Seabrook in 1977. After I was arrested, theycouldn’t keep me in jail for too long as I was pregnant with my first…
• Mass. Municipal Wholesale Electric Co.: On Being a Nuclear Flak
  by Wesley Blixt
  I was a nuclear flak. From an industry perspective, I was neither well-prepared nor eager to promote the magic of nuclear power . . . and, it certainly was NOT what I had signed on to do when I went to work for the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company – MMWEC – in February, 1977….
• Nukes and Passion
  by Cathy Wolff
  I was chopping onions for spaghetti sauce one winter Sunday evening, listening to the radio. It was one of those NPR variety shows. The host was chatting with people in the studio audience. “What do you do for a living?” he asked one guest. “I’ve taught English composition for 30 years,” a weary voice replied….
• Nukes’ Achilles Heel
  by Adam Auster
  The landmark 1977 Clamshell Alliance occupation launched a national grass-roots antinuclear movement and changed the public debate on energy. Then-President Richard Nixon called for 1,000 nuclear plants by the year 2000. Just over one-tenth of that number were built, and none after Seabrook, which was, like others, so over budget that they bankrupted their owners….
• Renew Fight Our Efforts Against New Nuclear Power
  by Diane DArrigo
  My Past Experiences with the Clamshell Alliance and the Need to Renew Fight Our Efforts Against New Nuclear Power My first tasks when I started working at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in January 1986 were to support the Clamshell Alliance in two ways. One was to help set up the Whistleblower Center to…
• Role of Music in Actions and Organizing
  by Charlie King
  Grass roots movements create culture. How else do we get the story out? How else do we feed our hearts and souls for the long haul? When I went to my first Clamshell rally (Autumn ’76) there was music – Pat DeCou and Tex LaMountain singing with beauty and passion about the promise and the…
• Same As It Ever Was
  by Paul Gunter
  The same threats and boondoggles that mobilized the Clamshell Alliance and an anti-nuclear movement around the world in the 1970’s are only more apparent today.Nuclear power presents more problems than solutions to global warming The history of nuclear power over the past 50 years is marked by nuclear accidents and an increasing number of near…
• Seabrook: A Political Community Mobilizes
  by Susan Glovacki
  Journalists at the time described the “military efficiency” and “discipline” of the 1977 Clamshell Alliance occupation. What they were seeing was the power of a nonviolent movement, of people committed not only to a cause, but to each other, to communication with “opponents,” and to the community created from that conflict. People came to Seabrook…
• Seacoast Anti-Pollution League
  by Robert Backus
  As a then young lawyer, I started work on the proposed Seabrook project on June 28, 1972: the date of the Watergate break-in. I stuck with it right through the abandonment of the second reactor and the final licensing of reactor one in 1996. Indeed, I haven’t quit yet. Originally, I represented two of New…
• The 1977 Seabrook Occupation: Discipline, Humor, and the Power of Nonviolence
  by Arnie Alpert
  My first trip to Concord, twenty years ago this month, changed my life.  I arrived on a Monday morning with a group of near-strangers in the back of a National Guard truck. We were among the 1415 arrested the previous day at a nonviolent occupation of the Seabrook nuclear construction site. For the next two…
• The Barefoot Projectionist
  by Charles Light
  We didn’t have many meetings at the Montague Farm, so it was something of a surprise when Sam (Lovejoy) asked us – the dozen or so hippie farmers and novice anti-nuclear activists who lived in the big sprawling farmhouse – to a meeting. A few months earlier, over Christmas, 1973, Northeast Utilities had announced their…
• The Clamshell’s German Connection
  by Arnie Alpert
  Here is a Clam story of which I was not aware. This comes from my colleague, Joseph Gerson, at AFSC in Cambridge. Prior to his time at AFSC, Joseph and his wife, Lani, were on the staff of War Resisters International in Brussels. Joseph writes: About Lani’s role: She was the principle organizer of the…
• Thirty Years After: Lessons of the Clamshell
  by Al Giordano
  Act Three was great in Reinhardt’s play —Six hundred extras milling.Listen to what the critics say!All Berlin finds it thrilling.But in the whole affair I seeA parable, if you ask me.“Revolution!’ the People howls and cries‘Freedom, that’s what we’re needing!We’ve needed it for centuries —Our arteries are bleeding.’The stage is shaking. The audience rock.The whole…
• Western Massachusetts Region Clamshell, Trainers, and MNS
  by Diane Clancy
  What do liberation, process and a safe environment all have in common? For me, they all converged in Clamshell Alliance. In Western Mass some of us had been meeting regularly in Greenfield to stop nukes and support alternative energy before Clamshell got started. We had already fought and stopped the proposed Montague Plains nuke. A…
• When I was called a Clam
  by Lee Daneker
  I participated in the April 30, 1977 occupation at Seabrook as a result of my then-wife working at in a non-profit energy/environment policy center in Washington DC. She found out about the occupation and wanted to be part of it. She persuaded me to go along, and so she, I, and another friend went together….

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