Lewiston is a former textile mill town from Maine's heyday. Now like most mill towns (usually along rivers) across the state they are either boarded up or renovated for low cost apartments, art studios, warehouses, restaurants and the like.
We prefer to go to busy intersections each month and standing by the Androscoggin River bridge was certainly a good spot.
Right next to where we set up is a huge veterans memorial park with an airplane, a tank, and 7,000 names of Maine soldiers who have died over the years in America's many foreign imperialist wars.
Not long after we arrived a man drove up and parked next to where I was standing. He ceremoniously announced he was the big cheese that runs the veterans memorial and that we could not have our protest there. He made sure to attempt to impress me by saying he is a veteran. I immediately told him I was a veteran as well from the Vietnam war era. I told him we were not moving from the 'public sidewalk'. He then insisted we had no right to be there again.
By this time he was getting under my skin so I told him that 'You vets always talk about how you went to war around the world in order to protect our freedoms back home. But now you want to take away our freedom to publicly protest.'
He had a young kid with him in the car and I next said that 'you are surely not showing this kid that you believe in democracy.'
I knew his next step would be to call the city police and within a couple minutes after he drove away I noticed a Lewiston cop car pull up on the other side of the street to check us out. We were all on the sidewalk so the cop just moved on. About half an hour later another cop car made a pass but kept on going.
My guess is this man was some level of an officer while in the military who got used to ordering people around. You can usually sense these guys right away. But my 3 1/2 years in the Air Force during the war, stationed at Travis AFB in California which was an airlift base for the US war on Vietnam, gave me my fill of such men.
When I went into the military in early 1971 the war was going strong and it was there that I made a transition from growing up as a Young Republican Club Vice-President in the conservative panhandle of Northwest Florida to the anti-imperialist that I am today.
Protests against the war were regularly held outside the base gates at Travis. Also the 'GI Resistance movement' was active inside the base. My first roommate in the barracks was one of the organizers and often held meetings in our room at night. Both anti-war and anti-racist Black Panther GI's came to these meetings and were directly responsible for my change from a right-winter to a leftist.
The transport planes from Travis ferried troops and weapons to Vietnam and when they returned carried the body bags of dead GI's - lined up daily on the runway just across the street from my work place.
My mantra when I left the Air Force in mid-1974 was that 'I don't have to salute officers anymore.'
After an hour the ten of us walked over the bridge and had a late lunch together at a nice Irish pub. We discussed why we come to these protests and reviewed our upcoming monthly schedule which now includes the following. Join us if you can.
- Saturday, June 6 in Norway, Maine by the high school at 1:30 pm
- Saturday, July 11 in Brunswick for a protest of the Navy Blue Angels airshow at the former Navy base at 9:00 am
- Saturday, July 25 in Bangor (Time & place TBA)
- Saturday, August 1 in Lubec (next to the Canadian border) at 1:30 pm







































