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By Frank Cordaro, “What’s Happening”, May 1981 issue Via Pacis, p.3
Click to access 1981-3-may-v-p.pdf
The Armed Forces Day parade in Des Moines on May 16 brought together two very different perspectives on patriotism. By the time the parade was over, fifteen people had been arrested for trying to march in the parade without approval. Nine of those arrested were from our CW community.
The whole thing started when the mayor, Pete Crivaro, and City Councilman Archie Brooks pushed to reinstate an Armed Forces Day parade here after eight years without one. The parade was discontinued in 1973 because of the anti-war sentiment at the time. The parade this year was billed as an open event inviting the whole community to be involved. Councilman Brooks was quoted in the DM Register of May 7, 1981, “If people want to protest they can participate if they stay civil…. They could even be in the parade; it’s for the whole community.”
The DM Mobilization for Survival organized our own entry in the parade, a mock funeral procession featuring a child’s coffin flanked by mourners, with a person dressed as Death to lead the way. We also hoped to leaflet alongside the procession to explain the funeral.
“The best way that we can honor those veterans of past way,” our friend Bill Basinger, spokesperson for the MfS and himself a veteran, told the press, “is to make the public aware of the horror of modern warfare and the almost total civilian destruction in any future wars that this country might enter into.”
Major R.J. Mockenhaupt, the organizer of the parade, had other ideas. He let us now that under no circumstances were we going to march in his parade. In fact, it was never clear one way or the other whether we were going to be allowed to march or not. An hour before the parade, we were given permission to march if we did not use the coffin. We agreed but were informed that the Major had changed his mind again and were refused entry into the parade. Most of us felt that this was clearly a freedom-of-speech issue, and when the final denial was given, fifteen of us decided to push it to the point of arrest, while a larger group followed the parade along the sidewalk leafleting.
The star of the parade had to be seventy-five-year-old Larry Hutchison, a World War II vet, who led the funeral procession in full uniform, carrying a sign that said, “Nuclear War Is Insane”.
We were arrested two blocks into the parade and were booked on charges of parading without a permit and disobeying an order of a police officer. The incident merited a front page story with color photo in the Sunday Register. We are being represented by poet/ lawyer Curt Sytsma and the Iowa Civil Liberties Union. The trial date is June 25.
A good time was had by all and we will keep you posted on the outcome of the trial.
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