7/21/20

I was thinking about my life as I got into bed. Actually I had just heard the Times OpEd John Lewis wrote which was read at his funeral service. But with my Kindle and thoughts of my life and inspired by thoughts of Lewis. And so I was led via the Kindle to look up Danial Berrigan. I pulled up a sample of a memoir of Berrigan. And in the introduction to the memoir, the author thanked, along with lots of others, Judy Peluso. And the name popped out. I'm 76 so I'm always excited about memory, the way it works.

And so I got my laptop and googled Judy and saw her obit from 2017. Searching my laptop I saw emails from her from the year of her death. Judy Peluso was the woman, a nun I used to sit with over 50 years ago, at night in Wilmington Deleware across from the Court House and Draft Board …. let me run upstairs and look at the framed picture in the Wilmington Press about the break-in. It was June 1970. Judy and I were casing the court house at night noting traffic. We were parked near a vacant lot looking like a couple with no place to go. Wilmington was very dark and quiet and downtown was deserted and we parked near some construction casing the courthouse. We were planning an escapade to break into the Selective Service Office and the draft board records.

It was Judy and Barry Wingard and several others from New York.. Young radicals who were going to break into a draft board and destroy the records. We were one of many cadres of the Catholic anti-war movement bent on interfering with the draft for the war in VietNam. But Judy and I would take notes and talk and sit in the dark car for hours as we cased the area. After several weeks of prepreation the group split into two groups and raided the two draft boards in Delaware. Judy was in the successful group which raided the Dover office. I was in the group which got caught at the Wilmington office. But now in our 70's, Judy had become a Unitarian priestess who touched many people's lives and we would email and reminisce.