Old and in the way Macy Morse is one long-time activist who seems to get stronger by the year BY ADRIAN ZUPP

July 14, 1983. Wilmington, Massachusetts. The offices of AVCO Systems Division, manufacturers of MX and Pershing nuclear weapons components. As part of a group of seven people, calling themselves AVCO Ploughshares, who had entered the premises with fake passes to protest the company’s deadly products, a woman pours blood on contracts for MX missile parts. But it’s no khaki-clad, female Che Guevara. Not a left-wing Patty Hearst. Rather, it’s a five-foot-nothing, 106-pound, 62-year-old grandmother. Fast forward two decades to April, 2003. Now a great-grandmother, the same little lady from New Hampshire is serving 18 days in county jail for yet again sticking her two cents into the cogs of the political machine.

This is the story of one Macy Morse — Seacoast resident and jovial agitator for the betterment of society. Macy is well known in radical circles and that’s not surprising, given her distinguished record of conscientious rabble-rousing. During the Vietnam War, she pestered every official she could to try to get a military visa. She wanted to visit the air base where her son, Pat, was stationed and take a " good look " at the fighting that was going on in the surrounding hills.

In 1980, she did 30 days jail time in Richmond, Virginia, for spraying anti-nuke slogans on the pillars of the Pentagon. In 1981, she smuggled some blood and ashes into then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s office in Washington, DC, in a symbolic protest against American involvement in El Salvador. And then there were the 10 arrests for protesting the building of the Seabrook, New Hampshire, nuclear power plant. The list goes on.

" I started in regular politics in the ’60s, during the Kennedy administration, " explains the now-82-year-old, sitting in her water-side, downtown Portsmouth apartment. " I did some work for the Kennedy nomination and election. I was the secretary of the Democratic State Committee when I moved from support of Lyndon Johnson to Eugene McCarthy. And in that period of time I got involved with the antiwar movement. That was 1967. "

That was before the true radicalizing of Macy Morse. These days, you can find Macy every Friday from 5 p.m. on, in Market Square, Portsmouth, protesting the US occupation of Iraq, with the Seacoast Peace Response (SPR). But Morse is no mere placard waver. She might be 82, but comets never slow down.

On October 8 of last year, Morse was arrested again. In a " pre-emptive act of civil disobedience " prior to the invasion of Iraq, she and 34 other members of SPR went to Senator Judd Gregg’s (R-NH) Newington office to get some answers as to his position on the looming intervention. Fifteen answers in fact, to 15 carefully considered, neatly printed-out questions. Of course, at that very time, Gregg was on the floor of the Senate in Washington speaking out for President Bush’s war policy.

" Senator Gregg had been approached by telephone, email, and letter, and he wasn’t responding satisfactorily, " says Morse. " We wanted to meet with him and urge him to justify why we’d go to war, and of course he came back with a position paper that just mouthed jingoistic phrases. "

The senator’s chief of staff, Joel Maiola, came over from Concord to meet with the group. " He tried to make himself very cozy with me, telling me he knew my sons, " says Morse, who believes that claim lacks credence. " And he kept trying to persuade me not to stay and get arrested. He’d say ‘You’re not going to stay are you? You’re going to leave, aren’t you?’ He’d just kind of sidle over to me and say it very sotto voce. But other people heard him. "

Of course, she did stay. And of course the police came. Five stubborn protestors — who became known around the Seacoast as the Newington Five — refused to leave and were arrested. But the saga was just beginning.

Arraignment was November 6, 2002, the trial April 9 of this year. Found guilty of criminal trespass, the protesters were fined $1200 each ($900 was suspended) and $60 court costs. Two paid the fine, two others paid in part. One refused to pay a cent and chose instead to go to jail for 18 days: Macy Morse.

" It brought to mind an old family saying, " says David Diamond, one of the two who paid in part. " It was like we were holding the lantern for Grandma while she chopped the wood. "

So began the latest prison experience of Macy Morse, that tireless wood chopper for peace, the under-privileged, and, yes, prisoners. The chronological breakdown goes like this: Two nights in Rockingham County Jail in Brentwood for processing beginning April 14, then 15 nights in Hillsboro County Jail in Manchester (a predominantly male prison with 60 beds for women), then back to Rockingham for one night for release processing. She was released May 1. But there’s a lot more to this chapter of the story than mere numbers.

There were the cells: sparse, small (Morse estimated them at about six feet by 10 feet), and lacking in privacy.

" There was a long narrow window in the door and the guards checked on you about every half hour or so, " says Morse. " If I couldn’t see the guard at his station I didn’t go to the bathroom because I got caught two or three times. And they go around with their flashlights in the night — that’s probably the most scary time. "

And that’s where, in a four-day period prior to " classification, " she spent 23 hours per day. For the rest of her stay she was permitted to join " the population " for five hours per day, provided there wasn’t a " lock down " for any one of various possible reasons. In that five hours, prisoners have to clean their cell, take a shower, and make any phone calls. To hear Morse recount the details in prison parlance, she sounds like an elfin version of James Cagney in White Heat.

Chronically unselfish, Morse was, and remains, more concerned with the plight of the other inmates.

" Maybe it’s because of my age, but I’m able to live with myself in a cell and not feel like I have to break out, " she says with an irrepressible laugh that seems to punctuate her stories whenever she has to talk about herself. " I was treated pretty much the way the other prisoners were, but there were some concessions to my age. I never got called an f’n you-know-what. That’s very common in there. Very common. The ‘f’ words were nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives, used in every conceivable way. And things can escalate where the prisoners in the cells are shouting at the guards and the guards are shouting back at them. "

Morse admits she never saw any acts of physical abuse. But she found plenty else to be disgusted about.

" The food was awful. The meat products were what you might term something like hot dogs in different shapes. There was some meat product but it was filled with cereals and probably dried milk and chemicals. It was terrible. Stuck to the roof of your mouth. The vegetables were old. They were canned, probably, and then re-cooked. No fresh vegetables — there was nothing fresh. "

Morse quickly became a curiosity, sounding board, and respected elder to the other prisoners. (She was also the only prisoner with a vigil being held in her honor across the street from her cell!) The workout equipment — a couple of exercise bikes and some weight machines — went untouched until the great-grandmother started using it. Women would sit with her during population time and tell her their stories.

" Every woman that told me her story started out with ‘This is the first time I’ve ever been in jail.’ Those women didn’t want me to know that they’d ever been in jail before. They knew I represented something else, something different than what they did. "

Most of the other inmates were in for drug- and alcohol-related offenses or shoplifting. In Morse’s opinion, most are caught up in a poverty/offense/incarceration cycle.

" There’s a lot of recidivism among these women. Their boyfriends, husbands, sons, nephews either were in jail downstairs or had been in jail someplace else. So I see this whole culture of prison; this whole family of people. It was very unnerving for me to see a woman who’s been a drug addict since she was 13 years old and has been brutalized by her boyfriend, her head damaged so that she has seizures. How does she go back out, into our world, and live in a little cottage with a white picket fence? There’s absolutely no way that she could know how to live in it. You know the sad part about it is: How do we get these women together to tell us what they need and what to do about it? "

Morse has a cause-and-effect theory; one not new to radical thinking.

" It’s poverty, low wages. People can’t make a living. If you’re unskilled or working in a service job, you have to have two jobs if you want to ‘live inside,’ as the author Barbara Ehrenreich puts it. People can’t work two jobs — low-paying, hard working jobs. These are hard-working people when they work. Raise a family, too. They can’t do that. There’s no daycare; they need better-paying jobs. They need a revamping of their lives!

" I had a call from a woman who called the governor yesterday to tell about the conditions in Hillsboro, " she continues. " There’s a lot of support for connecting the conditions in our local jails with the war effort because the women and men that are imprisoned there are victims of a very bad societal policy. And so we need to work on that and a lot of people are interested in doing that. "