19 More Arrested in Protests of Meeting on Arms Programs

For Robert Yaller, a 75-year-old resident of Leisure World in Laguna Hills, anti-war activism is not a project he undertook late in life; he has worked for more than 50 years to promote his staunch beliefs in world peace.

“The anti-war movement is not a new thing,” he said in an interview Thursday.

Yaller, who retired to Orange County 12 years ago after a 40-year career as a journalist, is program chairman of Concerned Citizens for Peace, an organization begun three years ago by Leisure World residents to protest war and nuclear weapons.

The group has 450 members, all Leisure World residents, who meet at least once a month to discuss their common goal: halting the nuclear arms race. This week, about 40 members joined a peaceful vigil at the Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel in Costa Mesa to protest the 26th annual Winter Convention on Aerospace and Electronic Systems (WINCON), a meeting of military and defense industry representatives to chart future weapons programs.

The vigil, in which protesters surrounded the hotel carrying candles and placards bearing anti-war slogans, drew 1,400. On Wednesday morning, 25 demonstrators were arrested for blocking a bus carrying WINCON delegates to a closed meeting at the Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro. Another 19 protesters were arrested Thursday, among them Mary Lou Brophy, an anti-nuclear activist and unsuccessful candidate in the 42nd Congressional District last November.

Picketing Planned

She and 13 others were released on their own recognizance shortly after their arrest by Costa Mesa police. The other five chose to remain in jail Thursday night as a further protest of the WINCON meeting. Twenty-two of those arrested Wednesday were arraigned Thursday on charges of obstructing a public driveway. The other three arrested Wednesday were released on their own recognizance.

Tim Carpenter, a spokesman for the Alliance for Survival, the anti-nuclear group leading the weeklong protest, said five women from the organization will picket the hotel lobby today before WINCON holds its only unclassified session of the three-day convention.

The response to this year’s protest of WINCON has encouraged anti-nuclear groups in Orange County. Yaller attributed the turnout, which was almost triple the number of last year, to better understanding of the ramifications of further nuclear arms buildup.

“We’ll all lose” in a nuclear war, he said. “We either coexist or we don’t exist. ‘Peace in the world or the world in pieces’ is a slogan we like to throw around. A lot of us are grandparents, and we feel we have to leave a planet for our children.”

Yaller, who dates his pacifist views to 1932, when he was a college student, did not serve in the military because of polio, but he raised funds during World War II to help children orphaned by the war.

Robert Kalin, 73, co-chairman of Concerned Citizens for Peace, also did not serve in the military and like Yaller has been concerned with the continuous improvement of nuclear arms since the end of World War II.

Kalin, who is a retired musician, joined the anti-nuclear group when he moved to Leisure World two years ago. He is concerned, he said, with leaving a peaceful world for his two grandchildren and sees that kind of concern as the main reason senior citizens in Orange County and across the nation are taking an active part in anti-nuclear protests.

“People are becoming concerned with the danger of even an accidental outbreak of hostilities because of the proliferation of nuclear weapons,” Kalin said. “It just so happens that I am interested in staying alive. If it weren’t for that, I’d be out playing golf.”