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On the West Coast, near Los Angeles, the mayor and city council of middle-income Thousand Oaks unanimously declared Oct. 15 to be "a day of community effort for peace"; the University of Southern California, long one of the most protest-proof of universities, has taken the lead in the area's M-day movement; Harry Evans, a Western-region official of the United Automobile Workers, insists that "my contacts with the workers in our union convince me that the majority of workmgmen today want us to get the hell out of Viet Nam." Six months ago, he admits, that was not so. Now, "some think there has been just too much killing and they want it stopped," he says. "Others have kids that will be eligible for the draft pretty soon."
The biggest Los Angeles rally was planned for U.S.C., with Black Leader Ralph Abernathy, the U.A.W.'s Paul Schrade and Senator Alan Cranston as speakers. Women Strike for Peace organized a vigil at the veterans' cemetery in West Los Angeles. At suburban Whittier College, Richard Nixon's alma mater, there were to be no classes during the M-day campus rally. A Canoga Park housewife, Mrs. Diane Steffin, finds M-day a happy outlet for the antiwar feelings she has had since 1965. "Until now," she says, "there didn't seem to be any way short of going to college and joining in a riot." In Northern California, Berkeley emerged as the biggest center of protest; however, groups other than the familiar hot-eyed types long associated with campus unrest became involved this time. An organiza tional meeting last week on campus turned out a preponderance of "dormies" and "Greeks" not normally on the side of activism. Late last month the Berkeley city council, usually bitterly opposed to student-led causes, voted 5 to 1 to back M-day in principle.
Antiwar sentiment was not nearly so pronounced in the Midwest. In Chicago, TIME Correspondent Sam Iker stopped 16 people at random in the street, and discovered that just two had some idea of what the Moratorium was about. The only Chicago businesses that planned to close were nine art galleries. One reason for this heartland attitude may be last week's disruptive outbursts in Chicago by the extremist "Weatherman" faction of the S.D.S. (see story, page 24), which led to head-busting that in the Midwest eclipsed publicity for the nonviolent M-day protest. Still, even here, support for the Moratorium seemed to be shaping up with more force than there had been any reason to expect. Gordon Sherman, head of Midas-International (auto parts and mobile homes) and chairman of Chicago's chapter of the Business Executives Move for Viet Nam Peace, encouraged employees to take part in M-day; his group planned a silent hour-long vigil of executives, heads bowed, at Chicago's civic center. Girls from Barat College of the Sacred Heart, a small Catholic school, agreed to pass out antiwar leaflets on Chicago commuter trains.
Crumbling Promise