The Peace Sign on the Mountain

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After returning from a stint in Vietnam, Jack Olsen enrolled at CU where he became, among other things, a journalism major and the night city editor at the Colorado Daily, which was still the campus newspaper back then.

Olsen has written a forthcoming book titled The Children, which draws on his time in Vietnam. The last chapter of the book recounts Olsen’s return to Boulder, specifically his time at the paper and how he and others came together in 1969 to protest the war by placing a lighted peace sign on Flagstaff Mountain near Boulder’s famed holiday star, which has been illuminating the mountain since 1947.

Many historical accounts state that in 1969, the lights of the star were reconfigured to form a peace sign, but that isn’t what happened. In the end, a lawsuit over the peace sign resulted in the court’s ruling that the Flagstaff Easter Cross and the peace sign were not allowed on public property but that the star could stay. The rest is history.

Jack Olsen served as Governor Dick Lamm’s press secretary during his first term. He was a working journalist for seven years at United Press International, The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News where he won awards for his investigative reporting. He traded his journalism for a law degree in the late 1970s.

Today, Olsen is still a lawyer and living in Niwot.

The following is the last chapter of his book.

On Nov. 2, 1969, we sat on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder and wondered if we would be branded a bunch of hippies and spied on by the FBI if we put a huge lighted peace sign on the side of Flagstaff Mountain, overlooking the city. As it turned out, we were being spied on by the FBI, even though I still looked like I had just gotten out of the Army, with a short haircut and 30 fewer pounds than when I went over to Vietnam. We all had come from conservative households. Nonetheless, we had become sensitive to being branded anything except college students who thought the Vietnam War was a poor idea. Or worse. Being followed around by the FBI was kind of neat.

We were also reporters for the student newspaper, the Colorado Daily, and we had watched the nation’s silent majority closing its eyes to what was happening in Vietnam. I was the night editor of the student newspaper, which meant I was there every night until two in the morning and loved it, because I was getting paid $120 a month and I needed the money badly to stay in school. I also had the GI Bill. At about 11 p.m. each night, the paper was laid out and then sent off to an equally enthusiastic student named Jim Colt to be printed (he would become well known in the printing industry) and, after deadline, the Daily office in the University Memorial Center, brightened up with impromptu debates that sometimes went on until dawn and drew students from all over the campus. Anyone who carried in a six-pack of beer was especially welcome. I sometimes nodded off while several debaters sat or even stood on my desk and made valid philosophic points ad nauseam. Dozens of others showed up, listened and chimed in; it became the center of the anti-war movement on the CU Boulder campus. That’s why we knew the FBI had already infiltrated our staff. Actually, I looked like I was the infiltrator because of my short hair and it took a while to prove I wasn’t. The infiltrator wasn’t Lorel Branigan or Lois Fingerhut either, both wellcoifed students from California and very astute reporters for the newspaper. Both were essentially brilliant and gorgeous, and, of course, that meant I wanted to sleep with them, one at a time. Eventually, Lois and I would live together for quite a while until she went off to live in Israel, and I took our two cats, an orange tiger named “Creamy” and a calico named “Action-Can-It!,” back to my mother on the chicken farm in Maryland over Christmas break.

We helped form what we called the University of Colorado Vietnam Moratorium Committee, with Lorel as one of its many leaders, although we didn’t know what title to give her. I became the light-bulb purchaser. Lois Fingerhut’s job was to scout up portable generators to rent in a three-county region.  Between them, Lorel and Lois chipped in $100, and I chipped in $10. The rest of the funding came from CU students who thought peace needed a chance. I drove to Denver and walked into an electrical supply store. The salesman told me exactly how to do it, and I purchased 300 feet of electrical cord and 150 25-watt light bulbs that you could screw neatly onto the wires. The salesman asked what I wanted to do with the entire gizmo. “Light up the side of a mountain,” I said.

A half-dozen volunteers helped put the light bulbs together in the form of a peace sign, 75 feet in diameter, on Farrand Field on the CU campus. Campus police stopped by to ask what we were doing. We said we were going to put a peace sign up on Flagstaff Mountain, and we pointed to the mountain. They said, “Neat,” and left us alone. We hooked up one of Lois’ generators and — voila — the trial run was a glowing success. It was a beautiful sight.

For decades, the city of Boulder had been lighting up the city-owned side of Flagstaff Mountain, overlooking the city, with a lighted cross at Easter and a lighted star at Christmas. When the city switched on the star, we moved into action on the night of Dec. 16, 1969. Lorel, Lois and I had scouted the mountainside twice earlier that week, finding a large open area (above the star, which we never touched, although vandals sometimes did damage the star over the years). We wanted to be careful not to tumble off the side of the mountain. At dusk, we carefully loaded the lights and generator into the back of Lois’ car, a tiny Opal Kadett. With the help of two other students, we pulled off the mountainside road and hoped that a sheriff ’s deputy wouldn’t drive by wondering what we were doing up there at that time of night with the trunk lid unable to close on a pile of wires and light bulbs.

Lorel was as strong as an ox. She and I grasped each side of the generator and climbed further up the mountain. Lois followed, taking care not to break the display of bulbs, which were layered in her arms. I slipped and fell and planted my left hand on a cactus. Way above the existing star, we spread out our lights in a beautiful circle on the tilted side of Flagstaff Mountain, and tried to see what we had wrought in the dark. Lois started to slip down the steep mountainside. Lorel and I caught her hands and then her arms and pulled her back up to safety. We decided to turn the lights on for 10 seconds just to see if it looked anything like a peace sign. After two such realignment procedures, we turned it on for the night.  It was 7:40 p.m. according to the Boulder Daily Camera, and for the first time since I got out of the Army I felt there was hope for mankind. You can tell I was given to cheap sentimentality.

We sat down next to the humming generator and basked in the warm glow shining out over Boulder. Within an hour we could hear police scouring the mountainside in the dark, searching for us. It should have been easy since you could see the huge peace sign for 10 miles. We could hear them chirping on their radios. “No,” one crackling voice said, “You are too low. Climb higher.” The first police officer to arrive waited for a sergeant, who instructed us that we were required to turn off the peace sign. We said no, we wouldn’t do that. So he turned off the generator himself and said goodbye. We sat in the dark and discussed our strategy. Within a halfhour the same police sergeant came huffing and puffing back up to us and said he was glad we were still there, as the Boulder City Attorney’s Office was unable to pinpoint any ordinance that we had violated. “There apparently is no law against turning on lights on public property.” He apologized and said we could turn the peace sign back on, and Lois cranked up the generator and the lights shone again. At 10:30 p.m., the same police sergeant reappeared and apologized profusely again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been instructed to confiscate the generator.” He asserted that it was a fire hazard on public land. He and three other officers carried it off.

But we still had the peace sign itself, all the bulbs and wires spread out, turned off though they were. Lois went off the next morning, Dec. 17, 1969 and came back with another generator. “Where did you get it?” I asked. She responded, “Don’t ask, and don’t tell my dad. I used his credit card.” Lois’ father owned a clothing manufacturing company in Los Angeles. Years later I learned how proud he was of his daughter.

Nonetheless, the police confiscated the next generator too. And the next and the next. Finally, we purchased a steel chain with links so large it could hold a ship in port, along with a huge, bolt cutter-immune padlock, and chained our last generator to a thick Ponderosa pine tree. Joining us that night was Jonathan “Skip” Chase, a CU Law School professor who was well versed in constitutional law. This guy mesmerized us with two qualities — brilliance and courage. It apparently rubbed off on his son, Adam, a precocious little kid, who stood nearby whenever we strategized in Skip’s living room. The kid was not shy around adults. Adam would later become one of Colorado’s more successful attorneys, always looking for a just cause. No wonder. But back then, his dad was a faculty member of the University of Colorado, and we figured Skip would get fired for sure. Skip said that was always a worry. But the fight was worth fighting, he said, as we sat there in the dark and waited for the next band of police officers. Professor Chase told the police officers that they couldn’t seize the generator, particularly because there were no bolt cutters in existence that were large enough, and there was no law forbidding us to put a peace sign on Flagstaff Mountain. His argument didn’t matter to the police, and they issued Lorel and me court summonses from the City of Boulder for trespassing on public lands. The charge made no sense to us. How can you trespass on public lands? The police took the spark plug out of the generator and departed while we laughed with artificial indignation and debated what it meant to trespass on public lands. Professor Chase said that was a new legal concept. The next morning the police came back with a blowtorch and cut the chain and seized the generator. It was the sixth.

Lois then went off and came back with another generator. Finally on Dec. 24, 1969, Judge Howard O. Ashton issued a restraining order forbidding “Lorel Branigan and John R. Olsen” from planting any more generators on the side of Flagstaff Mountain. But they forgot to name Lois Fingerhut in the litigation — and nothing was going to stop her now. She gathered more CU students and on Jan. 16, 1970, they lit up the peace sign again — and had yet another generator confiscated.

On Feb. 3, 1970 I got to speak before the Boulder City Council. I told them that the purpose of the peace sign was to stimulate discussion and to stop the killing of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese. I highlighted the killing of the children. The Daily Camera quoted me the next day, and it felt good, but then public reaction became a deluge and I was labeled in letters to the Camera and Colorado Daily a gook lover, a pinko and a drug-crazed hippie, although I had never taken an illicit drug in my life. I thought my short hair still looked pretty good in the mirror. I had a beer one night with a Boulder police officer I had come to know. He told me quietly that the department had been informed that I was the subject of some FBI undercover work. Which meant I was being tailed. I confronted one of my shadows on The Hill in Boulder, and he turned and walked away without saying a single word. On another occasion, I tried to photograph a different agent who was following me. Two other undercover guys jumped out of an unmarked car, ran up to me and ordered me to stop taking photos. They said taking such photos was illegal. Skip Chase commented later, with a laugh, “Another questionable legal principle!” 

Then the Boulder City Council voted to ban all lights on the side of Flagstaff Mountain, both Christmas and Easter. This was not unlike the way America had come up with disingenuous ways to sidestep any meaningful debate about Vietnam.

Eventually, a federal judge in Denver, in a lawsuit brought by Lorel and me, with Skip Chase as our truly intrepid attorney, suggested that the City of Boulder could continue to place a lighted star as a universal symbol that was not religious in connotation on the side of Flagstaff Mountain. But the cross at Easter (and peace sign at any time) must come down, because they were, in essence, symbols of a philosophy (or religion) on public property, which was a violation of the United States Constitution. During oral argument against our case in federal court, the Boulder City Attorney, Walt Wagenhals, was so strident, he broke the podium with his fist. Skip Chase explained with a chuckle that that’s how a lawyer argues when he doesn’t have the facts or the law on his side. In the meantime, I had received a full scholarship from the Daily Camera for my senior year and a promise of a fulltime job upon graduation. When I reported to the Camera offices for the job, an editor there asked me if I was the same Olsen who sued the City of Boulder over the peace sign on the mountain. They had put two and two together. I was told to go home and await a call with my start date. Of course that call never came.

The Vietnam War raged on. For five more years.

After the war, several independent studies concluded that one-third of the land in six central Vietnam provinces, including Quang Ngai Province — where my Army unit, Alpha Company, was relegated on foot and where the Vietnamese populous was nearly annihilated, including untold numbers of children — was still mined. In the nearly four decades following the war, 42,000 Vietnamese were killed when they accidentally triggered mines in their own countryside. This included a whole new generation of kids who didn’t know a mine from a mimosa tree.

President Johnson decided not to run again, and President Nixon decided that the war needed a little more elbow room, so in early 1969 he ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb the bejesus out of the edges of Cambodia that bordered Vietnam. This new incursion was called Operation Breakfast, and it was kept from the American people, designated a top secret. The Air Force flew more than 3,500 sorties and dropped more than a half million tons of bombs, wiping out virtually every village within 20 miles of the Cambodian border with Vietnam. Thousands of Cambodians were killed by the bombs, and it is estimated that a quarter of them were children. Then President Nixon ordered a ground invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970, triggering a Cambodia Revolution that ushered the Khmer Rouge into power. The Khmer Rouge shut out the outside world and ruthlessly murdered tens of thousands of its own people. If the parents were executed, so were the children. Estimates of deaths, one-half from starvation, the other half from executions (with bodies buried in several thousand mass graves around Cambodia), range from 1 million to 2 million.

Tens of thousands of Cambodian children were executed to ensure the perpetual expungement of the elite, the intellectuals, the recalcitrant and the religious, racial and political minorities. Other thousands of children died on long marches to remote refugee camps.

Skip Chase is gone now. So is Lorel Branigan. Both died young. The Alpha Company veterans I served with are starting to die off now too. They are in their late 60s. Very few have ever wanted to look back on history, although they were intimately involved in making it. As for my own children, James, Michael and Jane (and my beloved nephew Andrew), I would ask that you just hold onto what I have written and perhaps show it to your own kids and grandkids when they are older and if they ever mention the Vietnam War. Perhaps one of their teachers will bring it up in class and point out that the Vietnam War did not come before the War of 1812.

Or perhaps not. 

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com