War and Peace
Memories of Don Laughlin
I imagine Don and Lois were familiar to me as I grew up in Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative), but my first memories of them were from my days as a student at Scattergood Friends School (1966-70), when Lois was the librarian, and Don was the farm manager. I spent the summer of 1969 in Iowa City with…
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Don Laughlin, Draft Resister
I spent two years–May 1944 to August 1946–in California Quaker CPS camps under the Forest Service. During that time I made two trips to Europe, under the United Nations Relief Administration. One trip took cattle to Danzig and the other horses to Trieste. During this time I accepted a CO classification under the draft. I…
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Scattergood and the Vietnam War
by Jeff Kisling Don Laughlin and Roy Knight signed the Epistle to Friends Concerning Military Conscription. IMPORTANT NOTE: Below I include some quotations from the Journal I kept at the time. It was not correct when I wrote “I knew neither of my parents approved at all”. They both understood the issues very well. It was just…
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The Peace Testimony Remains
by Lynne Howard I am an Iowa native—actually a Des Moines native. I grew up attending Knox Presbyterian Church just two miles from the Des Moines Valley Friends (DMVF) Meeting House. Although Presbyterian Churches are not typically known as “peace churches”, Knox Presbyterian was an active peace church. While never having to officially declare himself…
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Judy Plank’s Testimony
by Judy Plank I have been touched by God’s grace. An incident many years ago healed my depression. I was in a rough patch in my life. I was depressed and despondent to the point of thinking of ending it all. This went on for a long time as I sank deeper into a hopeless…
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Diary of a Jailbird
by Sherry Hutchison Stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home The weekend of Nov. 15-16, 2002 started with a conference on Saturday at the Drake Olmsted Center, hosted by the Drake chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Those who planned to do civil disobedience the next day at the army National Guard headquarters in…
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Exchange Visit to Russia
by Beth Wilson As I stepped into the booth to have my passport checked in the Moscow airport, I was struck by the rather cold, no-nonsense stare of the young Russian guard. It was October of 1987 and newly appointed Soviet President Gorbachov was just beginning his new policy of “glasnost”, easing some of the…
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Quaker Stories 