Interview with Jerome Alexander Zawada, August 9, 2006

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Jerome Zawada August 9, 2006 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Suzanne Becker © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Jerome Zawada August 9, 2006 Conducted by Suzanne Becker Table of Contents Introduction: birth ( East Chicago, IN, 1937), family background, early calling to Christ and attraction to the Franciscan Order, membership in Franciscan community and further education ( 1955- 1964) 1 Ordination as Catholic priest ( 1964), first assignment to Republic of the Philippines, return to the U. S. and work with Gospel Community ( Chicago, IL, 1971) 4 Suffers severe clinical depression, takes leave of absence from Franciscan Order and priesthood, rejoins community ( Green Bay, WI) and moves to San Antonio, TX ( 1982- 83), inspiration of Marta Alicia Rivera and Archbishop Oscar Romero in transition to a more political stance 5 Involvement with Central American Underground Railroad, work with Franciscans in Sonora, Mexico and refugee work in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas 7 Return to Chicago, continues refugee work with Pledge of Resistance and Sanctuary Coordinating Committee, becomes politically active in protest movement, involvement with Witness for Peace ( ca. 1984) 9 Transfer to parish work in Milwaukee, WI, continues involvement with refugees and the poor, work with Missouri Peace Planting ’ 88 on antinuclear protest ( 1988) 10 Growing awareness of contamination caused by nuclear testing, further antinuclear protest in Missouri, and conviction and imprisonment 13 Continues antiwar protest after release from prison ( early 1990s), including protest work at the NTS, and recounts first visit to the NTS ( 1987) 15 Backcountry protest actions at the NTS ( early 1990s) 20 Return to prison ( Chicago, IL) and release, refugee work with Su Casa Catholic Worker ( Chicago, IL) and in Guatemala 21 Experiences with Voices in the Wilderness and other peace groups 23 Feelings about Hiroshima and the end of World War II, and current understanding of those events 25 Conclusion: Importance of remaining faithful to the antinuclear movement, and the next step for peace movement in general 26 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Jerome Zawada August 9, 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Suzanne Becker [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Suzanne Becker: Go ahead. Jerry Zawada: My name is Jerry Zawada. I’m sixty- nine years old now. I was born April 28, 1937 and on that day another person was born, that exact day. His name happens to be Saddam Hussein. We were born the same day. Anyway, I was born in East Chicago, Indiana— that’s not far from Gary, Indiana— and it’s a neighborhood that was basically a Polish ghetto of sorts. At that time, many of the people there spoke only Polish. I didn’t learn Polish very well. But I lived in that neighborhood. My father was from Poland. All my grandparents were from Poland. Where? What part of Poland? They were from the southeast corner, near Slovakia and near the Ukraine; it’s about forty miles from both places, so it was in the southeast corner in the Carpathian Mountains. Anyway, that was my dad’s side, and my mom’s side is from a little different part of Poland, too. My family background is such that we were a very close family. We’ve done everything quite a bit together, with cousins and the extended family as well. Do you have siblings? I have siblings. There are seven of us. Five of my sisters and brothers, and I have two sisters that are adopted sisters who have become my sisters. They were my cousins originally, but their parents died and my parents took them in right away and they became, practically speaking, just like my other siblings. And they’re all living now and I’m the oldest boy. My sister was older than myself, a year- and- a- half older, and then I was next. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 I grew up in a very religious family, and from little on it seems like I had the desire to become a priest. I was taught at a parochial school by sisters, by nuns, and became attracted along the way to the person of St. Francis of Assisi who founded the Franciscan Order of which I later became. So you went to parochial school as a child. Parochial school. That’s right. And what was it about it that made you realize that you had this calling? Well, I became very attracted to the person of Jesus, as the person of Jesus. It was not necessarily all the— I’m not saying that I had a real good Biblical knowledge of Him but the thing that struck me from early on was His compassion and the values that He stood for. That stayed with me all my life up until this point. And so I just felt a certain closeness to Him that way. So that was the background for it. That’s interesting. So you have a religious background, and you mentioned that at some point you started to learn about St. Francis of Assisi. At what point was that? I read the Lives of the Saints, when I was in grade school. I guess I was sort of like a little bit of what seemed like a religious nut but at the same time I just found these things attractive. And I was given a lot of encouragement for that by the sisters and all that, and my family. My family was very pleased with that type of thing, and probably from the beginning it was kind of like wanting to please them. What did your folks do? My dad was a butcher, and we had a grocery store, and my mom helped him out there, and early on we, the older of us— I was one of the oldest— took care of the younger children. And my mom and dad had a set of twins when I was twelve years old and I took care of them pretty much UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 of the time. My mom worked and my dad both in the grocery store, and then my parents got a tavern where they were selling liquor, and for a while we had both the grocery store and the tavern. That sounds busy. [ 00: 05: 00] It was busy. They were very hardworking people, but we did manage to go on vacations together as a family and they brought some fun things together, too. And so from school, where did you go? So I imagine you were in Indiana up through high school. I went for just a half- year, one semester, to the local high school, another Catholic school in Hammond, Indiana. My parents moved to Hammond, the next town over, in the meantime, and that’s where I went for one semester. Then I transferred to— at that time they called it minor seminary, which was a high school boarding school, it was minor seminary and it was kind of just a boarding school, in Wisconsin, and that’s basically where I joined that community eventually. As of this year, next week, on the fourteenth of August, it’ll be fifty- one years since I joined that community. It was after high school in 1955 that I joined them. And next week also is fifty years since I made my first vows, so they’re celebrating that a little bit. Congratulations. Thank you. Well anyway, so I went to the seminary in Wisconsin, and most of my education after that was in Wisconsin. Where? Which community? Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, very fancy place. I know it. You do? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 Sure. I lived in Milwaukee for— Did you? I love Milwaukee. I’ve lived there, too. Yeah, for high school and college in Madison. You, too. How interesting. I love Milwaukee. In fact, I’ll be going there next week, too, to Milwaukee. Small world. Yeah. Well, we had one year, our first- year novitiate was in Lake Geneva, a real swanky place for Franciscans. Anyway, so from there, our college was in Burlington, Wisconsin. Burlington, you might be a little bit familiar, that’s south of Milwaukee. So I went to college there at Burlington, which no longer exists. It was like our in- house college, basically. And then I went to four years of major seminary after that, and this was in West Chicago, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and that’s where I was ordained a priest by a Franciscan missionary from China. I was ordained June 13, 1964. I was already in final vows and stuff. And then my first assignment was to the Philippine Islands, and I was there for about six years in the Philippine Islands. And very interesting, very many adventures. It was a remote area, very poor area; we were cut off by the sea so we traveled by boat and things like that. And typhoons and just a lot of adventures. Anyway, I came back. I was back in the United States by 1971 and then I lived with an intentional community. David Buer was connected with that community, the Gospel Family it was called. And we lived in Chicago in kind of a ghetto area, and lived among people who were poor and gangs and stuff like that. In the Uptown area, correct? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 We did at first in the Near North Side. This was before some of the community moved to Uptown. But I lived in the Near North Side, Armitage and so on, and got involved there. We had a storefront and were working. The storefront, which we called it sort of a store, was like playing [ 00: 10: 00] store. I tell people laughingly, I told David earlier, that it was a store where we had 150 employees and about ten customers, because everybody who came there became part of the community. We ate together, soup at lunchtime, and we had married couples and I did some babysitting again for my godchildren. And so it was down- to- earth kind of. And we did things among the poor people, our work. And that lasted for me, and then we moved to Uptown. Some of us moved later into Uptown. But after a while, things came crashing down for me. I don’t have any hesitation mentioning this because it’s a part of my life, too, but I succumbed to very severe clinical depression. It was sort of like I came to a point where I could not— I felt like everything we were doing was Band- Aiding the problems. We had so many street people coming, people with severe mental problems and emotional problems and so on, continuously, and I felt the weight of that. I felt like I just couldn’t stand it anymore and I gave up. And for a long time I was trying to get help, I was getting some help, professional help, but nothing seemed to work. And this lasted for a good six, seven years. I hated living, I hated God. I just struggled with all of this with all my mind. And I did take a leave of absence from the Franciscan Order and from the priesthood, for about a year- and- a- half. Eventually I did come back and I joined the community again in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was at our novitiate there. And from there, this was again in 1983 I went to San Antonio, Texas to study Spanish— I already had studied some Spanish— and to improve my skills in Spanish. I heard the story of a Salvadoran schoolteacher which utterly changed my life, that one UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 story. See, I’d never really gotten rid of this feeling of unease and I feared working with people who were in destitute need. But I heard her story, and she spoke of her torture by the military down in El Salvador. She was a schoolteacher who worked for the rights of the poor and the rights of teachers for their salaries. Do you remember her name? Yes. Her name is Marta Alicia Rivera. It’s strange that you ask me that because there are very few names that I remember, but she made such an impact on my life, and I never saw her after that. So you heard her sort of personally speak, right? She was there in person? Her story about the torture. She spoke. She was there in person. There was a small group there at a place called the Mexican- American Cultural Center, MACC they call it, in San Antonio. And it dawned on me almost like a light, I could not not do something. I didn’t have to take away anybody’s pain. I just needed to walk with them and learn from them and maybe somehow, I describe it in my religious terms as seeing the face of Christ, and working along those lines just learning from them, accompanying them in their plight and then hopefully to work with others for some type of resolution and relief. But that was my indication that I needed to become political. That was the same time. That it was not enough to be working for the day- to- day trying to— that’s important, that’s vital, some people are called to that to take [ 00: 15: 00] care of the basic needs of livelihood, that has to be done. Then there also needs to be people who would work, who would go to the roots of these problems, why is this happening, who or what group or what entity is creating this suffering for these people, and address that. And I felt that that would— in some shape or form, I had to get to that point. So that moment, that incident, inspired you to go to a different level? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 Yes. And I did go, during my break. It was a summer school in 1983 that I was studying Spanish. From there, I went down to the Rio Grande Valley, down in southern Texas, right on the border. And there was a place called Casa Oscar Romero, named after the archbishop of El Salvador. Are you familiar with that name? No. He was Archbishop Oscar Romero, and he was the archbishop of San Salvador, and in 1980 while he was having Mass— he was a remarkable man, he spoke out for the rights of the poor and so on, and [ was] threatened, of course— while he was having Mass, liturgy, in San Salvador— the people just loved him— he was shot down. He was killed while he was having Mass. Well, he became for me, too, another important figure, and many other people who were killed, who were victimized by these wars. So, well, this name on the house was after him, named after him. It was a refuge place, and people coming across the border from Central America, because of the war. The Contra wars there and so on, and you probably know the whole scene. Central America was a vital place for a lot of these happenings, and I got involved with the Underground Railroad, transporting people to places of safety from the border area, avoiding the checkpoints. I had to go through secret routes and so on. And I just did that at that time because that was one time that I had a whole carload and I was invited to do that. What was that like? I felt things were important again, things were meaningful again. I was thrilled and happy to be part of it, and I felt like this was the beginning of a learning process for me. I had to hear their stories and learn what was happening there from them, from the refugees themselves, and they gave me a good opportunity, even while I was transporting them. And I grieved with the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 possibility of them being picked up by the Immigration, shipped back to their countries, and also what they had to undergo even in coming here to our country. And I was dismayed at our government’s role in creating this terrible, terrible ordeal for these people by supporting these military regimes and so on. So it became a goal for me to get more fully engaged. I had to finish my studies. I went down to Mexico to continue with some study and some involvement down there. I spent about three months in Guaymas, Sonora and worked with Franciscans there. So then I came back and I worked in a parish there in the valley in a town called Mission. And on my days off, every Monday, I went to Casa Oscar Romero and became close friends with those who were running the place. They were laypeople, Jack Elder and Stacey Lynn Merkt and some others, and some sisters and others who were working in that regard. And we used code language sometimes because we knew that we were being watched and stuff. But then I continued transporting people, sometimes through the night. I had to get back to the parish, so I would leave the people off about a mile before the checkpoint, and then they had to scramble out of the car, through the dark, and get to a place of safety. Interesting. And so you would drive them? I would drive them up— see, the checkpoints were like seventy miles north of the border, and [ 00: 20: 00] that’s when cars would be stopped and examined to see if they were transporting refugees. So I’d stop about a mile or so before, shut off the lights before the checkpoint so we wouldn’t be seen, and refugees would leave the car then and go through the field around it. Now, it had been my hope that I could pick them up on the other side somehow, but I couldn’t do it and get back to the parish on time before the next morning. Right. And you did this overnight. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 I did that through the night and get back maybe around one, two o’clock in the morning or so, or later, because it was a long distance. And their stories used to stay with me, and I sometimes I would come back to the parish in tears, just recalling what they had to go through. Well anyway, after a while the diocese got wind of what I was doing and you know what they told me? They says that I had the unfor— the chancellor of the diocese, the Catholic diocese— are you familiar with the structure a little bit? I’m not too familiar, no. Well anyway, they told me, they says I had the unfortunate experience of being ordained a priest, because if I was a layperson, not a priest, they could’ve hired me to do that work; they were afraid that they would be implicated because I was kind of like officially part of their group and they didn’t want me to continue doing that, because of the risk that it would take for them. And I begged them, I pleaded with them, I tried to bargain with them, and they gave me an ultimatum and I had to leave. I felt like I had to leave. So that’s when I went up to Chicago, back up to the Midwest, and got involved with Pledge of Resistance, that was a group during the eighties, and also the Sanctuary Coordinating Committee. So involved with people, finding places for these people going up north then, you know, from Central America and other places. And I got involved politically, and 1984 was when the bombing of the harbors in Nicaragua took place under CIA auspices. The [ U. S.] Navy was involved there in the harbor right off of Nicaragua, putting people there in danger, so I protested in front of the Naval Recruiting Center in Chicago, downtown. And at random a paddy wagon came by and I was just passing them by at the time and I says, Well, this is something that I really feel a part of, so why not? I should be part of it. So I just went there and at random they picked five of us out and put us in the paddy wagon and I was one of the five. That was the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 beginning of my criminal career. And I’ve been arrested I know well over a hundred times maybe, maybe two hundred times. I don’t know how many times. I stopped counting a long time ago. So I was part of that, and I lived and worked for the Witness for Peace, another group in Chicago. And then I got transferred by my community to Milwaukee, and was in a parish there for three years but was able, while working in this parish, to continue being involved with the refugees and with people who were poor, getting them places, housing and clothing and whatever their needs would be, I got that. I was able to continue with that. And then there was a group then that organized themselves called the Missouri Peace Planting ’ 88. Very interesting group. And this took a whole year in planning. And I was working in the parish yet. And what this meant was that we were focused on the— see, I kept asking myself, where is the root of this oppression? Where does it go to? What is at the heart of it? And for me, along with other people, it was the nuclear threat, the bomb; the bomb that is sometimes celebrated here in the desert with the testing and all that. And so from that awareness, I joined this group. There were maybe about a hundred of us that gathered together, but out of [ 00: 25: 00] the hundred, fifteen of us decided to go to various nuclear missile silos in Missouri, and so we called ourselves the Missouri Peace Planting ’ 88. Which ones did you go to, do you remember? Oh, they had names, we gave them names, but there were 150 missile silos in Missouri itself at that time, with nuclear bombs, you know, placed in the ground, and they were scattered all in the region towards Kansas City. You could say, I don’t know, you could say the north, northwest corner or the western part of the state, close to Kansas City. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 And so I went there, two of us went there to one of the sites on August 15, OK, 1988, and that happened to be the anniversary of my vows. It just happened to be that day. And the feast day from the community that I belonged to. Well, I went there. It was 102 degrees. There were two of us at that silo and the other thirteen people were scattered at other missile silos. There were about ten missile silos. Some, just one person was there. And we were spread out. And it was a very interesting day but I won’t go into that because it’s a long story, but it was a very interesting day. The awareness became more acute for me than ever before, that this is where I belong, and this is meaningful, and together with all these other people that I felt a part of, this is my family now, who are involved with all this protest. And so we were arrested, given “ ban- and- bar letters,” the military gives us ban- and- bar letters forbidding us to come back to any military placement there. It was run by the Air Force then. And they came down while we were there. I was having Mass there on the missile silo, on the lid. And we had many symbols. And I wanted to keep our place sacred and to be there as long as we could, and so I put on three kryptonite locks on the fence to keep intruders out, like the military. So I put these bicycle locks on the gates. When they came around, there was a helicopter hovering right above us, there were three armored vehicles— three armored vehicles for the two of us, OK? There were about twenty guys in full riot gear with M- 16s pointed at us. But we indicated that we were not a threat to them. We had signs all over the gate, the fence, a huge fence area, and we put symbols right on the missile silo lid. I purposely pasted the pictures of my nieces and nephews and my family, my whole family, everybody, everybody that I knew, that was close to me. My indication was that this bomb below my feet here was meant to vaporize a schoolgirl in Russia— they were all pointed towards Russia and they still are— not the ones there because now all 150 missile silos in Missouri have been emptied, but the other UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 places— that that bomb was going to come back and vaporize my loved ones, too. I had to draw that connection. So anyway, when they came and took charge of us, they gave us the ban- and- bar. It took the rest of the day for all of us, for all fifteen of us from different— to be processed and given ban- and- bars. Well, several of us went the next day to another missile silo and did the same thing, because we were released. And we did the same thing. We sang. We prayed. We joined hands. When the military did come to take possession of us, we even invited them to join us if they so felt, to pray. And it was very meaningful, the whole thing; we did a lot of good things, symbolic things. And again given ban- and- bar letters and dismissed by the end of the day. And then the third day, again a number of us went to another missile silo and did that. And then on the fourth day, each one of us had these three ban- and- bar letters and we knew [ 00: 30: 00] that we were waiting for it to be going to court, eventually. And we had an interview with media on the federal building steps in Kansas City, Missouri, and over television then we burned our ban- and- bar letters, an indication that we could not recognize the injunction. And how was that received? Well, some of us did it again almost a week later to another missile silo, and the judge then was pretty irate. And he told us, he says, If you’re going to go to any more missile silos, we’re going to keep you in jail right now, so you have to sign a paper that you’re not going to go to any more. Well, we did that because we all had to go back and explain things to our families and communities and all that and we needed time to settle things before we would go to trial. Well, we did sign the paper but then, in the meantime, I had found out— the newspapers had it all over the country that by the production, by the storage of the nuclear missiles, the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 bombs that we were building— that we were killing our own people. Contamination. Waters. People were dying from cancer. Downwinders over here. So the newspaper came out with that story. They came out. It came out. And these were things that I didn’t know about personally. But Hanford, Washington was the worst, the Columbia River polluted. Fernald, Ohio and I think Rocky Flats and here and Savannah River, South Carolina were the places indicated, that these places were contaminated. I said, Wow, what is this? We’re killing our own people just in the manufacture and the storage of these bombs. So I said, I cannot celebrate the Feast Day of St. Francis without going to another missile silo. That was the only way I could recognize his Feast Day; he had a great love for all of creation, the environment. So I wrote a letter of explanation to the judge and I says, Judge, I’m sorry that it might look like I’m reneging on my promise to you, but I didn’t know this before, so I said, I’m not really reneging on it. I just changed my mind. And I had somebody deliver it at the same time that I went to this other missile silo on October 4, 1988, which was the feast day of St. Francis. So I went into another silo by myself, and that was my fifth time. And of course the judge was pretty irate when they brought me into court and he says, You’re a priest and you lied to me. And I said, No, I didn’t lie to you. I just changed my mind. And I really had reason to change it. Well, he kept me in jail then just to make sure that I wouldn’t get— How long was that for? That was only for about a month, the rest of that month, and then we had our trial by the end of the month. I actually was released after that but eventually I was given a sentence of twenty- five months in a federal prison for trespassing. It was not a felony. It was misdemeanor charges. Twenty- four months plus I got one month added for contempt because I wouldn’t say who drove UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 me to the missile silo, so they charged me with one month of contempt. And then a year probation, besides that. And I served quite a bit of that time. I was in county jails, then I was in Oxford, Wisconsin in a camp there for a while; but then I blew the whistle on some of the dehumanization that was going on there and I didn’t cooperate with some things that they wanted me to. And so they put me in the hole, in solitary confinement, and altogether about ninety days, I guess, and they transferred me. They raised my security level to a higher- level prison and they shipped me around the country in something they called, laughingly, “ diesel therapy,” to help to correct my behavior, which didn’t work too well. That’s something. For a misdemeanor. Yes, but several misdemeanor charges. So I got kind of a sampling of different prisons in the country. People have encouraged me to have like a travelogue of prisons or something. You should do a little guide. [ 00: 35: 00] Guide. Travel guide. Well anyway, so I ended up, after going through a series of prisons along the way in Oklahoma and then ending up in Danbury, Connecticut. I was in Danbury, Connecticut, and there I got into a little bit of trouble again, too, not too bad but I was held about two weeks in the hole, and then transferred after two months to Sandstone, Minnesota. So you’ve been all over. Quite a bit. And then I was released when [ Operation] Desert Storm was taking place. Desert Shield. Desert Shield was first, wasn’t it? Before the invasion. And yeah, I was released then. And I was sick with that, with the thought of going to war, and innocent people are still in war. So I was on probation then, for that year, and during that year I actually violated my probation and eight times I was arrested during that year. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 How did you violate it? I went to federal buildings and I protested the war, and I was not allowed to do that, but I had a very kind probation officer that I visited in Milwaukee. He was very gentle, and I told him to quit his job and join us in the peace movement. He was a very kind person. And on the paper there was a question: “ Have you been arrested since our last visit?” which was the month before, and I just didn’t write anything there. I just left it blank. I said, Well, if he really wants to know, then I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him the truth. But since they didn’t press for that, I just left it blank. But of that war, I just really felt the insanity of that, too, back in 1991 and afterwards. And in fact I asked him for permission to come here [ Las Vegas] for a retreat while I was on probation, and he gave me the OK. But then when I came here, I had to report to the probation officer here downtown in Las Vegas, and when I went there he asked me, Well, where are you staying? I said, I’m staying together with Louie Vitale here. [ He said,] You can’t stay with Louie Vitale! He’s a bad influence on you! And so I gave him the Catholic Worker address here in town, which is just as bad, but I stayed here with Louie. And had you known Louie prior to that? Yeah, I did, and I was very impressed by his— How did you guys meet? Well, we both belong to the Franciscan Order, and then during the 1980s, you know, when I first had this big change in my life, I knew he was the Provincial of the Franciscans for this community. He was over the West Coast. And his was the first and only province that declared sanctuary for the refugees coming from Central America. And I was very impressed by that and I UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 wanted to meet him, and I did, and he’s my closest friend. We belong to separate provinces but he’s my closest friend. Anyway, so that’s how I met him. [ 00: 38: 31] End Track 2, Disc 1. [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 3, Disc 1. Well, so— where was I now? OK, I was here. And four of my arrests during that probation time took place here at the test site. An