UCSB New Chancellor's Welcoming Ceremony

UCSB New Chancellor's Welcoming Ceremony


-------begin retyped document:


MESA SCHOOL PRESS RELEASE

July 9, 1987

Regarding July 15, 1987 Wednesday:

U.C.S.B. Gathering at Noon

To commemorate the 42nd "birthday" of the atomic bomb (July 15, 1945 near Alamogordo, N.M.), and to welcome Dr. Barbara Uehling, the new U.C.S.B. Chancellor whose term of office begins July 15, 1987, people will gather for one half hour at noon around U.C.S.B's eternal flame memorial peace monument (at the southeast lawn of Ellison Hall), in a "Peace and Liberation Ceremony" conducted by American Peace Movement organizer David Crockett Williams, C.L.U., of the Mesa School, to venerate the theme "May the Light of Knowledge Illuminate the Correct Path to End this Age of the Threat of Nuclear Annihilation".

The ceremony will be opened with the prayers of Rev. Gyoten Yoshida-shoni, a Japanese Buddhist Monk from Nagasaki, whose efforts to build a Peace Pagoda memorial peace monument in Santa Barbara as part of the Santa Barbara and Yalta, U.S.S.R. sister city program are being coordinated locally by the Mesa School, Williams' d.b.a. since 1985. Yoshida-shoni came to the U.S.A. walking in the 1976 Continental Walk for Social Justice and Disarmament, and thereafter he opened a small temple for Nipponzan Myohoji in Los Angeles. He led the five routes of the World Peace March of 1982 which concluded with one million people walking to Central Park in New York on June 12, 1982, in support of the then United Nations Second Special Session on Disarmament (SSDII). Thereafter he walked from Moscow, U.S.S.R., to Vienna, Austria, whereupon he built a beautiful Peace Pagoda there on the bank of the Danube River. Afterward, he was invited to London by the Greater London City Council to build the peace pagoda there on the Thames River in Battersea Park. Here in Santa Barbara, Yoshida-shioni has so far met with Mayor Lodge, City Councilman Lyle Reynolds, and City Parks Director Jerry Ambrose, all of whom heartily supported the idea of the Peace Pagoda, and so several possible sites are under present consideration.

After Yoshida-shioni's celestial drums prepare and open the ceremony from 11:45AM-Noon, opening remarks and welcome will be made by Williams, who will then introduce the Santa Barbara Peace Resource Center's executive director Michael Lindemann for his brief message, which will be followed by an offering from Bob Phares, recently returned veteran of the June 14 to July 4, 1987, Leningrad to Moscow International Peace Walk, and who was the oldest Santa Barbaran to walk from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., with the 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament.

The gathering will conclude with a ceremonial empowerment of the new chancellor by spiritual leaders of the local American Indian descendants, with the assistance of Wonono Rubio, U.C.S.B. Student, American Indian Student Association activist, and Chumash [spiritual practitioner].

Handouts will be distributed after the ceremony announcing information, ideas, and events to help the cause of true peace, harmony among all life and free natural abundance as paradise on earth, by recognizing natural law.

The above proceedings will be videotaped, for possible worldwide distribution via the Canadian Seneca Satellite Television Network courtesy of Mark Ward, a freelance videographer and former U.C.S.B. student.


---------end of retyped press release


Note that the original had "medicine person" which was replaced October 5, 1987, with [descendant] where above now replaced by [spiritual practitioner]. Wonono participated in the Spiritual Run to Diablo Canyon which departed August 6, 1993, from the UCSB Eternal Peace Flame after it was re-lit November 9, 1987 by the mayors of Santa Barbara and its new sister city Yalta USSR, and after installation of the Hiroshima Peace Flame on the monument on January 11, 1990. Wonono was also one of the main co-coordinators and strong walkers who participated in the Global Peace Walk of 1995, also organizing and doing benefits and promotional events in Santa Barbara in late 1994, traveling with the walk on Yamato's bus to the Unity Gathering for the mutual prophecy fulfillment ceremony August 28, 1994, four days after the birth of the first White Buffalo Calf, Miracle Wonono went as the GPW'95 advance arrangements person to New York City in December making liaison arrangements and he walked with the group from NYC starting on Martin Luther King's birthday from the UN January 15, as far as Oklahoma in April of 1995 before coming back to Santa Barbara and then participating at the walk's ending ceremony in San Francisco on June 20. In recent years he has become the Chairman of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation. He participated in the small ceremony with Victor Skyeagle Lopez in his very late lifetime where this beloved Chumash elder offered his prayers at the UCSB eternal flame monument for it to be relit as an eternal peace flame, which it later was.

After this press release, the invitation to David Krieger as president of the then newly created Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was referred to its Vice President Frank Kelly who did take part and spoke at the ceremony where he explained to the gathering including several Japanese Buddhist Monks that he had been the speechwriter for President Harry Truman, which was a somewhat electrifying coincidence, ie, to have been announced on this occasion.