Some weeks earlier, an enterprising Irish student of TV production named Cormac had tracked me down on the net. He had discovered that in 1967 I was part of a large antiwar protest in Buffalo New York, organized by Quakers from near New York City, during which we walked across the Canadian border near Niagara Falls.
Sure, I remembered. We were carrying medical supplies for Canadian Quakers to distribute among wounded civilians on all sides of the Vietnam War; my stash was a packet of band-aids.
It was illegal for Americans to do this, under something called the Trading With The Enemy Act. So our border walk was open civil disobedience, and we were prepared to be arrested.
But we weren’t arrested. I didn’t recall publishing anything about this protest, one of many from those years; so how did Cormac, who emailed me from Ireland, know about it, and why was he interested?
Turns out there was an Irishman named George Lennon living near Buffalo at the time. He joined the border protest and noted it in his diary.
Now, 43 years later, Cormac and two classmates were making a postmortem documentary about George Lennon, based on this diary. (Decades earlier, Lennon had been part of the Irish war for independence from Britain, then later emigrated to the U.S., where he evolved into something of a pacifist.) Surfing for material, they found one mention of the Buffalo border protest: turns out it was by yours truly, buried in a talk to a Canadian group of Quakers, back in 1997, which I had since uploaded to an obscure web page (and completely forgotten about).
Which once more goes to show the marvels of the internet, the glory of google, yada yada.
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