One of the many posters in the Spring Mobilization peace march headquarters read, "The Original Great Springout--A Megalopolitan Peacepipe Pow-Wow--Saturday, April 15, 1967--Many Smokes and Spring Seasonings--Lites, Kites, Pipes, Rites, Sights, Beads, Reeds, Bells, Shells, Smells, Cells, Kids. Aimals. Flowers, Feathers, Corn, Bananas, Peppers, Seeds, Nuts, Forbidden Fruits, Instruments.

"Blessed by: Brotherhood of the Love of Christ, Community of Poets, Easter Coast Spring Ball, East Village Other, Innerspace, Jade Companions, League for Spiritual Discovery, Liberty House, New American Church, Peace Eye, Psychedelic Fellowship."

That's how Greenwich Village announced the march to its own. The Mobilization was headquartered in the Village, and the Village welcomed it with open arms. The artsies, craftsies, and hippies who turned out en masse last Saturday gave the demonstration the air of a carnival--a black carnival.

First Arrivals

They were the first to start arriving in Central Park, where everyone was to congregate by 11 a.m. for the parade to the United Nations building. By 9:30 there were already several hundred hippies gathered on one grassy knoll.

It was sort of a be-in. Pungent incense, sweet music, bright balloons wafted on the thick morning-foggy air. One girl sat on a small boulder playing a recorder to the accompaniment of a Heinz-kosher-pickle-can drum. Another stood around in a waist length alumninum foil mini-skirt and flexed her thighs, making the word "Peace" which was painted on both her legs in fluorescent psychedelic lettering undulate weirdly.

Out in the middle of the meadow was a young man attired like a king in a flowing red velvet robe. He had walked to New York in the Boston to Washington peace march which left here March 25 and is scheduled to arrive at the Pentagon May 8. "We are going to launch the yellow submarine," he explained. Many young people wore buttons with the yellow submarine sprouting daffodils out its periscope. It is becoming a symbol of the youth peace movement. "Peace with Beatles power" was a popular slogan. And everyone in the meadow clutched a yellow daffodil.

Flower Power

On a large boulder in the southeast part of the meadow, a student held up a sign, "Draft Card Burnings Here," No need for a barker. The press and about 1000 others crushed in on the 75 as they lit up to chants of "Flower power" and renditions of "Aint Gonna Study War No More."

In another sideshow, "The Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam"--a group of Greenwich Village intellectuals staged six different "carnivals of death" on floats around the Park. One show consisted of poetry readings delivered from a stage decorated with sculptures of mutilated babies and severed hands. The whole thing was entitled, "Vietnam Monument, Designed by Johnson, McNamara & Co."

On another hill members of the "Ad Hoc Committee for a Revolutionary Contingent," a radical group, built a tower of black poles and flew Viet Congo flags along with one American Revolutionary War flag. Some of the revolutionary contingent changed into black pajamas and coolie hats to emphasize their solidarity with the fighters of the National Liberation Front.

Under the flags stood Boston's most faithful counterdemonstrators, the Polish Freedom Fighters, brandishing a "Bomb Hanoi" placard. One of them, who gave his name as Cliff Arneson and said he had just gotten out of the service, mounted an overturned trash can and began haranguing people about the necessity to fight in Vietnam "to preserve our freedom and theirs."

Afterwards, a twelve-year-old girl, clutching a daffodil, approached him. "Excuse me, Sir. You just said women and children get killed in Vietnam. What freedom do they get?" she asked.

"Mam," he explained, "everyone gets killed in war. It wouldn't be war not to kill people."

Then, concluding, he declared, "We will either stop Communist aggression, or..."