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Article on Gail Curtis

published in the Manchester Enterprise, Nov. 28th, 2002 
by Marsha Chartrand

As Gail Curtis looks back on her life, she says that her first clear memory is of a celebration in her childhood home of Flint on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918.

“That memory probably is aided and abetted by the reminders of relatives and friends,” she admits, adding that she was but three years old at the time. “When the extras came out, a neighbor came over and asked if we wanted to go downtown and watch the hullabaloo.”

Getting her older sister and brother out of school, Curtis’ parents took the children to her grandfather’s drugstore in downtown Flint where they watched a spontaneous parade going by.

“My grandfather sat high stools in the window and we could see over the heads of people on the sidewalk,” she says. “What I remember most was a man, later identified as J. Dallas Dort, who was sitting astride the hood of a car, beating on a dish pan with a spoon in celebration.”

A few years later, as young Gail started school, she learned that this early memory marked the end of fighting in “the war to end all wars.”

“I was somewhat slow to realize that it wasn’t actually so,” she said.

It wasn’t until, as the mother of six children in the mid-50s, that she went to an assembly at the Rackham Auditorium at the University of Michigan. She believes now, that as she heard Arthur Miller speak, that it was then she had her awakening.

“It turned out that Miller had graduated from the University the same year I did,” she said. “And he had gone to Spain to protest the Spanish Civil War. He asked where all his classmates had been at that time.

“I thought, gee, I didn’t even know there had been an upheaval in Spain the year I graduated.”

It was then, she says, that she realized how lucky she had been.

“A father, a brother, five sons, and two husbands … all had been through a Second World War and not been threatened in any way.”

Her first husband and the father of her two oldest sons, John Bailey, died of cancer in 1948 and she subsequently met and married Lewis Kellum as she worked as a docent in the museum at the university. Together, the Kellums had four more children.

“I was busy with my young children and life was comfortable,” she recalls.

Still, she was haunted by her memory of the day of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“My shock that day was equal to that of Sept. 11, 2001,” she said.

Yet, a few years later she watched as her alma mater launched its Phoenix Project to provide nuclear power to all countries.

“I was pretty occupied (with family) but I kept thinking that some day I would understand … and I’d be able to do something,” Curtis said.

“Some day” came in the fall of 1960. Curtis’ oldest son was entering college and her youngest daughter started kindergarten. And one day she was reading the newspaper and saw a letter to the editor calling women to meet in protest of testing the atomic bomb in the atmosphere.

“Women were to meet in front of the courthouse,” she remembered. “We were supposed to dress like ‘respectable women’—we wore hats and white gloves; and we distributed and hung up leaflets in protest of nuclear testing.”

That was Curtis’ first demonstration and she describes it as a “freeing moment.”

“We went on for quite a while; opposing nuclear testing, becoming aware of other groups of women around the nation who had a common cause,” she said.

As the movement grew, the Ann Arbor Women for Peace also grew and the group eventually was invited to host a national conference of Women for Peace. Female activists Dagmar Wilson and Betty Friedan, along with many others, attended that first conference in Ann Arbor.

As the 60s went on and the war in Vietnam escalated, the peace movement in Ann Arbor grew steadily.

“We continued our opposition to what was going on,” Curtis recalls. “I can’t say it was us women who wakened the faculty at the University of Michigan; but many of us were faculty wives.

“Some of the younger women, whose husbands weren’t tenured, also were sympathetic but wouldn’t dare take the risk of speaking out, for the sake of their husbands’ livelihoods. They might slip us some money, but they couldn’t participate.”

In the early days of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Ann Arbor Women for Peace did “woman sort of things”—serving coffee and doughnuts at meetings.

“Not all of the members of the group were students,” Curtis added. “We had gotten beyond the hat-and- white-glove stage; we did a lot of leafleting and writing of letters. We were glad to simply be a part of what was going on.”

Curtis also had the tacit support of her husband.

“Although he didn’t always agree, he agreed that I had a right to do this,” she said. “He was a tenured professor so he didn’t have the concerns that some of the younger faculty members might have had about threatening his job by my involvement.”

Another movement, the Voters’ Pledge, was headquartered in the Unitarian Church on Washtenaw Ave., right across the way from Curtis’ home, which remained a place where those involved in the peace movement could congregate throughout the turbulent 1960s. Voters could sign the pledge saying they would not vote for any candidate who supported the war in Vietnam. Curtis and other members of the Ann Arbor Women for Peace were responsible for interviewing local and national candidates for office to ascertain their views on the war.

Curtis also became active in the movement to repeal the draft. Although her oldest son, John Bailey, had joined the ROTC when he went to college in 1960, and served for 20 years in the Air Force, her second son, James Bailey, was a conscientious objector to the war and moved to northern Wisconsin for a time in his refusal to be drafted.

Toward the end of the 1960s, peace activist Anatole Rappaport had a duplex house and made the unused apartment available to the Michigan Council to Repeal the Draft, part of the American Friends Service Committee, for the group’s headquarters.

“These were exciting times,” she recalls. “It was amazing; we got statewide coverage on our efforts to repeal the draft. We had a mailing list; we had speakers come from Washington, D.C.; and I had the FBI calling at my home a few times.

“I would go every day to the Rappaport’s and answer phones, update the mailing list and mimeograph memos to send out.”

Meanwhile, Jim Bailey was living in Chicago and working in a soup kitchen with a Catholic priest. When he was finally indicted and tried in Federal Court in Detroit, his sentence was to continue his work there for an additional two years.

“For years after that, he signed his letters with pride as James Bailey, Felon,” Curtis said.

“Jim is still involved in doing ‘good works’ and lives in Madison,Wisconsin.”

In the early 1970s the Kellum family moved to the Manchester Township farm where Curtis still lives, and she “kind of retired,” although she still maintains frequent contact with friends from the Ann Arbor Women for Peace and several members of the group hold periodic reunions all across the country.

But Curtis, who remarried after Lew Kellum died, didn’t forget her roots in the peace movement when she moved to Manchester.

“I first met Eileen Parker during the Desert Storm upheaval,” she said. “My neighbor Lois Jewell and Mae Hardenbergh and I had fallen in together and we decided we ought to say something (about the war). We joined vigils in the park and heard speakers at Emanuel church. A number of other people joined us, including Eileen. I was reminded of her again when she recently wrote a letter to the editor and held a meeting in her home for people interested in discussing peaceful alternatives to war in Iraq.”

And so now, at 87, Curtis has come full circle as a member of the Manchester Area People for Peace. Despite her recollection of the celebration when the “war to end all wars” concluded, she knows now that keeping the peace is a delicate matter and one that needs constant effort.

She will continue her vigil for peace, as she has for the past 42 years.

“Anything I’m doing today is mostly trying to stay informed,” she said. “I listen to the radio—WUOM is a great source for me—and I get e-mails via my daughter. It all keeps me aware of what’s going on. I’m still interested.”