Talk:Another Mother for Peace

Keychain medallion

I feel I ought to tell somebody that I have in my hot little hand a key chain medallion exactly like to picture for the "Another Mother for Peace" Facebook. There, I discovered the claim that the organization was founded in 1967. BUT: on the back of my medallion in raised letters there sits: "Another Mother for Peace Beverly Hills Calif. 1958 (c)" Clearly, the organization is at least nine years older than this Wiki article states. Somebody should take another look. This also means the event that triggered the founding cannot be as stated. Jimkay317 (talk) 12:44, 6 May 2012 (UTC)Jim Kay jimkay317[reply]

Those keychains were everywhere in the 1970s, so they must have mass produced them. I think it's conclusive that the group was formed in 1967.[1] I think your keychain was supposed to say 1968, not 1958. Not sure what happened. However, I once had one of those keychains (it originally belonged to my mother), and I seem to recall that the six looked like a five due to the printing process (in fact it looked like an error to me, and I distinctly remember thinking "that's not a six"), so that could explain it. Viriditas (talk) 00:53, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

First use of poster

My family friend, Francis Bloom (occasionally an extra in Hollywood films and a political activist and mother of three girls) was one of the founding members of Another Mother for Peace. I picked her up at the curb at the San Francisco airport on March 14, 1967, and she told me she had to go back to get some signs from the baggage claim. She and I believe one of my sisters brought back about 15 "War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things" placards on stakes and put them in the back of my family station wagon. She said they had just been printed and they had been trying to get them dry in time. The appeared to be screen printed. The design had been given to Another Mother and she said several times as she put them in the car, "This poster is going to be famous. This poster is going to be really famous." She spent the night in my family home and I took her to San Francisco the next day for the anti-war march from downtown to Kezar Stadium. She handed the protest signs to several people she was meeting up with and I carried one for part of the march. They were rather heavy and I handed it to another marcher when Bubbles (Francis's nick name as she sometimes mimed being an exotic dancer) asked me if I was tired. 50.79.40.28 (talk) 00:26, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

When I first saw the print (many years later, as I'm not a boomer), I immediately saw how different and distinctive it was. It stood out from almost every other design in its originality. BTW, your comment is somewhat serendipitous, as I was just writing about the march to Kezar in two different articles today. One of the things I noticed was how incredibly peaceful the march was, and the majority of the mainstream media covered this. The only thing the conservative papers could do is accuse them of being communists. Meanwhile, at least two counter-demonstrations by right wing activists, the first being a neo-Nazi contingent, and the second, a group of military men, were stopped by San Francisco's police department from causing violence. The history books fail to mention that 90% of the violence from the 1960s to BLM today was caused by right-wing agitators, not the peace movement. This was particularly evident with Reagan as governor in California, who had repeatedly and intentionally tried to cause violence in otherwise peaceful marches. And there are several books that discuss that. I forgot to mention: at some point, someone made blacklight posters of the print. It's probably one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Oh, and to address your comment about the sign being heavy, people today don't realize how heavy regular items were back then since we really didn't have have as many lightweight materials at the time. By the time we were marching in demonstrations in the 1990s, materials were so incredibly light (but not environmentally-friendly for the most part), that you could carry massive signs stretching 20 feet across and maybe four feet high with just a few people. When you carried a sign, it was probably held together by solid wood; that's heavy. Viriditas (talk) 01:32, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]