Hold fast old noble Dietz

WE have heard your cries and rush to your zid

1000 strong to fight

The Establishment

He needed a quorum of 1691 Coop members to challenge the Establishment's slate. Only 135 showed up.

That was the pattern for Dietz's entire effort: the more spectacular his methods, the less spectacular his results. He collected hundreds of signatures for a petition to save an old carpenter shop on the annex site. The Coop bulldozed it. He pleaded with Cambridge City councilors to outlaw a bridge the Coop wanted to build across Palmer Street. The Coop has built it.

But, at the same time, the Coop was admitting quietly that Dietz was partly right. It changed its plans to show the annex set back from the street, as Dietz had suggested. An off-street truck loading dock that Dietz had also wound up in the Coop plans.

Quietly Paid Off?

And, beginning last November, the Coop quietly negotiated with Dietz a peace part of which he, to put it middle, will be the benefactor. The Coop pledged, by the end of this summer, be install terns along Palmer Street and repave it with take cobblestones and redbrick of a $40,000 job. And it will hand over to Dietz $5,000, almost half of his court costs. Dietz's prices is a promise that he will never again challenge the Coop before any administrative or judicial body.

The pact came just in time. With the Coop fight. Dietz had reached an apogee of protest. Simultaneously he joined the fight to save the Memorial Drive sycamores from the MDC and the fight to save North Harvard Street from the BRA. He even, for the purpose of writing a letter to the Herald Tribune, formed the Society for the Preservation of the United States for Human Beings.

But the protesting had began to sour. Earlier this year, Dietz said that the Coop should be kicked out of its nearly completed annex because it didn't have a temporary off-street loading dock for trucks. Then the Coop countered with photos of trucks unloading on a wooden platform next to the building. Then Dietz charged that the photos were staged and that the platform was normally blocked by construction machinery. Then the Coop displayed affidavits from truck drivers who said that they had used the dock. Then Dietz produced an affidavit from someone in his office who said that he had never seen trucks at the dock. Finally, on another related matter, both sides deadlocked. Then the negotiating began.

A Deceptive Peace?

By signing on the dotted line, Diets and Coop officials have ended their monotonous war of affidavits. And, with the Coop controversy over, Dietz is, in a sense, back to scratch again. What will he do now?

He is very much aware of the role he has been filling. In an old Time article he Clipped out, he has underlined this: "For the most part it is probably a healthy thing to be well behaved,' added Psychologist Barron. But there are times when it is mark of greater health to be unruly.' "Next to it he has written "Dietz."

"I'd like to see fountains in Brattle Square," he says. "I'm waiting for an entrepreneur." He may very well be kidding in fact, there are only two things certain about Dietz's future. One is that when he reads this article he will say it is bush. The other is that he will be secretly pleased.