“If we remember those times and places — and there are many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”
— Howard Zinn
Frances Crowe died a year ago, on Aug. 27, 2019, just five months after we’d celebrated her 100th birthday. She wanted action, people in the streets, not a party. So some 300 people marched from 33 Hawley St. up Main Street carrying signs and banners calling out the critical issues of the day as well as longstanding issues that concerned Frances throughout her life.
Her house on Langworthy Road was legendary. It was there, in the basement that Frances facilitated group counseling sessions on draft-resistance for hundreds if not thousands of young men during the Vietnam War. It was the first office of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Western Massachusetts. The spacious living room was a frequent meeting place for groups large and small, a place where a lot of “good trouble” was hatched. But that was over; the house was emptied and put up for sale.
Family members and friends sorted through decades and decades of “stuff” Frances had accumulated over her long and active life. The obviously “significant” items went to her already established archive at Smith College; family memorabilia went to the family. Household items — furniture, kitchen utensils, books, the daily stuff of Frances’ life — would be sold at an estate sale. It was difficult. Everyone who has emptied the house of a dear one knows how wrenching the process is. First you lose the person, then you lose everything else.
Dragging my unhappy self through the house one day, I spotted “the hat” sitting on the living room floor along with other things to be sold. I’d never seen it before, but I knew it immediately. Cone shaped, made of bamboo and covered by now-brown-with-age cotton hand stitched onto the frame, it’s one of those quintessential hats pictured on the heads of women in the rice paddies of South East Asia.
Is it authentic, from Vietnam? I have no idea. I didn’t know Frances in 1972 when Women Against the War, dressed all in black, painted their faces white, tied their hats onto their heads, and knelt at the gate of Westover Air Force Base, presenting a vision of Vietnamese women, with signs that read: Please Don’t Kill Us.
I know the story well. It’s included in Frances’ biography, “Frances Crowe: Finding My Radical Soul.” (Haley’s) About a week after the women’s action at Westover, Frances heard on the WHMP morning news that an active duty pilot stationed at WAFB, Lt. Donald Dawson, was refusing to fly any more B-52 bombing missions in Vietnam. He was the first pilot to refuse his mission and he was facing a court-martial. They interviewed his mother in Danbury, Connecticut. “I went right to the phone,” Frances writes, “I got the numbers of all the Dawsons in Danbury and started dialing them.”
She got Donald’s mother, who gave Frances Donald’s APO number so she could contact him. “I went right downstairs,” she writes, “and got a packet of stuff together and mailed it. He received it en route out of the battle zone as he was being court-martialed and returned to Westover.”
Frances got a long letter from Donald Dawson in August of 1973. He was on R&R at Westover in 1972, he wrote, the day the women were kneeling at the gate. He’d been instructed to stand nearby with his assault weapon in case they tried to enter the base. Seeing the women close-up, dressed as they were and pleading for their lives triggered his emotions and later that evening, he began weeping uncontrollably while watching a movie with his wife.
He was unnerved and when he arrived for duty back in Thailand some days later. Dawson told the chaplain and then a psychiatrist that he couldn’t participate in the war any longer. He was done with killing. He was court-martialed. But inspired and encouraged by Frances, he fought for, and eventually received a conscientious objection discharge from the military.
Frances Crowe was a woman of action who never wore down — even after 60-plus years of active struggle for a world without war or nuclear weapons, for a better, more just world. In this better world, this storied hat worn by a major league peace activist at a history-making event would be a valued, significant item, more valuable than the sports or war memorabilia long-treasured by the marketplace.
The struggle for that better world continues, and the hat? The hat is safely tucked away waiting to assume a place of honor in a better world.
Claudia Lefko lives in Northampton.