Daily Nexus
University of California, Santa Barbara
Tuesday, October 13, 1987
[photo, not shown here, captioned:]
UCSB student Karan Moore examines the eternal flame
outside Buchanan Hall
[highlighted text block shown:]
"We are rejuvenating the hopes of the sixties...by relighting
this monument for the actual cause of world peace."
--- David Crockett Williams III
---begin retyped article text, headlined:
Santa Barbara, Yalta Mayors to Relight Eternal Flame
By Lynn Loechin
Reporter
UCSB's eternal flame monument, presented to the school by the graduating
class of 1969, will be relit by the mayors of Santa Barbara and Yalta,
Russia, in a ceremony on October 30.
American Peace Movement organizer David Crockett Williams III hopes
to bring the campus community together for this gesture of world peace.
"If the students...get behind the idea of relighting it, the activity of
working toward getting it relit would bring everybody together
in the cause of world peace in a very sort of magical way," Williams said.
Williams was inspired by a Japanese teacher whose idea was to build peace
pagodas around the world. "When I saw the monument on campus, and it
has a plaque to Martin Luther King and John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy,
I thought, well, this is a kind of memorial peace monument; all three
of these men stood, in their own way, for the cause of world peace,
and here is an eternal flame...and it's out. I thought to myself,
"It should be lit,'" he explained.
In 1984, while coordinating the annual Isla Vista Fall Festival, Williams
led a prayer for peace at the eternal flame monument. He promoted the
idea of relighting the flame and in January 1985 then-Chancellor Robert
Huttenback had the flame relit. However, the wind continually blew it out,
so eventually the gas was turned off.
Proposals are now being made by the UCSB facilities management
department and the political activist group Scientists and Engineers
for Responsible Technology regarding a way to keep the flame lit.
One idea was to put an electric spark on the flame so that when
blown out, the flame would automatically be relit. Another proposal
utilized a sort of hurricane lamp to completely defeat the wind.
Williams proposed the idea of the mayors of Santa Barbara and Yalta
relighting the flame together at a Sister City Association meeting during
the summer. "(Santa Barbara) Mayor (Sheila) Lodge liked the idea of
relighting the flame as "a symbolic gesture, and a very appropriate one."
Reflecting on her recent trip to the Soviet Union as part of the Sister
City Program, Lodge said that "people are people everywhere. They
have the same desires that we do. They are particularly well aware
of what war means," referring to the Soviet Union's loss of 20 million
people during World War II.
"They are clearly very anxious for peace," Lodge continued.
"It...makes me think of something that President (Dwight) Eisenhower
once said, that 'The people want peace so badly that the governments
are going to have to get out of their way and let them have it."
When discussing the peace movement in the Soviet Union, Lodge
explained that the "desire for peace is a given, but you don't have
the kind of activity (there) that you have here, when people protest
the development of Star Wars, for example."
Although the declaration has yet to be ratified, Yalta was suggested as
a sister city for Santa Barbara partly because of the many similarities
between the two areas, Lodge said. They have similar size, population
and climate and are both scenic tourist spots by the sea. Both cities
have a mountain range in the background, and even have some
similar problems, such as their water supplies, Lodge added.
The visit by the two mayors and their delegations is scheduled to take
place between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 pm on October 30. In addition to
relighting the flame, this visit will include a lunch at the UCSB Faculty
Club for the visitors. After leaving the Santa Barbara area Nov.1,
the Soviet delegation will proceed to Los Angeles, where it will
visit Disneyland.
"We are rejuvenating the hopes of the sixties, which have been more or less
dashed...by relighting this monument for the actual cause of world peace,"
Williams concluded.