Tag Archives: Rocky Flats

Ladon Sheats Peace Activist

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LadonIt was 1979, I was sitting in the Denver County Jail waiting for my second escape trial to begin. The cell block door opened and in walked six men. I looked them over as all prisoner do when any new prisoners are given free room and board at the local crossbar hotel.
 
There was something very different about these men, I saw it the moment I set eyes on them. They seemed so relaxed and peaceful in their posture unlike most men when thrown into jail, there was no “rat in a trap” manor about them, there was a peace and calm hanging around them like a halo. As I watched them from the second tier, I made a mental note that I would talk with them to learn the Why, What and Wherefore. It was not long before I learned their dastardly crime. The TV set up on the wall was tuned to the news channel, and their they were, all over the main stream media. Their crime was: These six men and one woman had cut a hole in the barbwire fence that enclosed ” Rocky Flats” the site where the triggers were manufactured for nuclear bombs. They then entered the property, knelt down on their prayer rugs and began to pray. They were praying for an end to war.

I have never been big on prayer because it seems never to fill the empty bellies of the homeless and seemed to be only so many words in the wind. The only exceptions I’ve ever seen in prayers, was when the preacher was praying for our coins to fill his pockets.

As I sat there watching these six peaceful men, my mind was exploding with thoughts. I had seen many men come to jail over the years, Robbers, Rapist, Murderers, Drug Pushers, and all sorts of petty criminals, but this was a new first for me. I had never seen men come to jail for their convictions. It was to be a lesson I would never forget, it was not long before I knew, they had something I wanted. I was that rat in the trap and I wanted the freedom they felt as they were locked in a jail.

I would spend the next month talking with them in my efforts to discover how they could remain so calm in the calamity they faced.

One of the first thing I realized was how unselfish their act was. I had four young children at home, their act was so that my children as all children should be allowed to live and grow in a peaceful world. This was a very deeply held conviction held by all of them.

In that month, one man, Ladon Sheats and I would become close friends. This was the secret he taught me.

For every human being born to this world there is a tragedy waiting at some point in their future, the size, shape and color of that tragedy is of little importance, but what is important, is how we deal with it.

If we are gripped with fear and panic, our minds have lost much of our ability to reason and deal with the problem. Stay calm, stay strong and stay standing for what you believe in. The morrow will fall to its own devise. We enter this world as a newborn, crying and terrified, with our mind and thoughts we can leave this world with a serenity and peace, this is open to each of us.

My relationship with Ladon did not end there at the Denver County Jail, he first gave me the freedom from fear and then within a few short years he gave me the physical freedom from prison for which I hungered. Some called it a miracle as at the time I was serving three life sentences.

Ladon was a true Peace Activist.

B 1934 D 2002

Activism home grown

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My siblings and I frequently talk about our “activist” upbringing. We grew up with parents who walked their talk. Our mom hung out with the radical nuns protesting around Rocky Flats. And I can’t remember a single Thanksgiving where we didn’t have a couple of homeless men sitting at our dinner table. Our parents introduced them by name and we were expected to be gracious and make interesting conversation.

Then there was Robin, a retarded young man who was obsessed with a pair of moccasins that we had in our front closet. My mom made a rule that the front door be always open so that Robin could come in for his moccasins any time he wanted. As a mother, I question the wisdom of this now but, at the time, we just accepted that at any time Robin might walk in and open our front closet. It wasn’t anything we worried about….just another one of mom’s people.

At the 1975 fall of Saigon, Divine Redeemer, our home church with hundreds of families, decided to sponsor a family fleeing Communist oppression. They asked that someone step forward to host a family of 8 people for several months. Guess who stepped forward? Much to our horror, my mom and dad did. We had 6 of our own children, aged 6 to 15, living in a small house and suddenly we had 16 people living under the same roof. They didn’t speak a word of English. We certainly didn’t speak Vietnamese. Our mom and their dad were able to communicate in broken French.

We reminisce about how our mom used to read little kid books to them, VERY LOUDLY, as though she could make them understand English if only she shouted. They used to stare at us and we back at them while she did this…all of us trying hard not to laugh.

Because my dad had been a part of the war in Viet Nam and a number of families we knew had been widowed during that war, we lost friends because of the choice we made to support this family. I didn’t understand this at all at the time. It’s taken many years for me to understand that to stand for something, anything, is to risk the wrath of those who don’t agree.

As kids, we remember it as crazy fun. We made Chef Boyardee pizzas and they chopped off the heads of weird little fish and made carrots look like flowers. We were all about the same age, they dressed weird, we dressed weird….we laughed and figured out how to communicate even without words. They showed us martial arts. We taught them to hula hoop. We laughed our asses off day after day.

Once, the 10-year-old girl, incredibly beautiful, her name was Ngoc (pronounced Nop), and I sat on the swing in the front yard. She placed her hand in front of my face, put up her index finger and said “Mot.” “Mo,” I said, knowing that she was counting. “Hai.” “Hi.” “Bah. Bon. Nam. Sau.” After she taught me to count to ten she grabbed my hand and rushed me into the living room where 15-20 people sat, always at the ready, listening to the Vietnamese singing American anthems, which was both lovely and hilarious since they didn’t really understand the words. “Ma cunry tis a vee. Swe lan a liverty.” Ngoc got everyone’s attention and suddenly 20 people were staring at me, a 14-year-old, not exactly at the age where I wanted a lot of scrutiny, and she said, encouragingly, “Mot.” I felt like throwing up but I understood that the stakes were high so with red cheeks I recited what I just learned. When I finished a loud roar went up….I swear there were even a few tears from the Vietnamese parents.

This family went on to become a success story. Ultimately, the boys, Phat, Dat and Loi, became Tony and Billy and Joey. They went to DU, studied engineering. Mom and Dad opened a successful restaurant on Federal Boulevard in Denver. The girls married Vietnamese men and carried on Vietnamese tradition on their new soil. Oddly, my two brothers married Asian women, one Vietnamese, one Thai.

This family had another baby after they came to the United States. They wanted to choose an American name to honor the country that had given them a second chance. They chose Helen. My mother’s name.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two decades “wasting” my time doing things that may or may not ever register on anyone’s radar. One of my inspirations has been Margaret Mead who said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” That’s what my family taught me….what I’d like to teach my own.