Staff writer
sbeveridge@observer-reporter.com
Kaisi Ritter was working behind the counter Friday afternoon at a modern-day hippie store, barefoot and twisting macramé, when a customer walked in asking for peace signs.
"You know it's the peace sign's 50th birthday," the customer said.
Ritter, 20, of West Alexander, smiled and said "Yes," thrilled that at least someone other than she remembered the birthday of what has come to be known as a global logo for peace.
"It symbolizes what I stand for," Ritter said before realizing the store, Simple Twist of Fate at Washington Crown Center, had run out of its stock of peace sign stickers.
The peace symbol with controversial roots was introduced on a Good Friday in England as part of an anti-nuclear weapon movement. Thousands gathered that April 4, 1958, in Trafalgar Square in London and marched to an Aldermaston atomic weapons research facility.
The symbol had been drawn then by textile designer Gerald Holtom to represent the railroad signaling flag positions for N and D, giving them a new meaning of nuclear disarmament.
The peace sign never fully caught on until the anti-Vietnam War movement escalated in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
"It was something you flashed at hard hats," said Colleen Nelson of Holbrook, Greene County, who attended Woodstock and later embraced the global warming movement during its infancy in the early 1970s.
She said there was "a fair amount of aggressive anger" at protest rallies, including those outside the White House when Richard Nixon was president.
The protesters flashed peace signs at police wielding batons almost as if they were flashing crucifixes to protect themselves from vampires, said the 59-year-old Nelson.
"People got hurt," she said.
At the time, the peace sign wasn't about sitting back and "lighting up," she said. It was the identifying mark an anti-war movement whose members were educated and read books by such authors as Nietzsche and Gandhi, she said. Even some soldiers returning home from Vietnam also wore them on their clothing.
Phil Coleman of West Brownsville also embraced the anti-war movement as a professor at California University of Pennsylvania.
"We were making peace symbols for students to wear on their caps for graduation," said Coleman, a former Cal U. dean in the English department. "Close to a quarter of the students wore them. Of course, they made some people uncomfortable."
"Everybody wants peace but to actually stand up for it, it's not easy," Nelson said.
Nixon was especially angered by the anti-war groups, prompting some of his supporters to use "spin doctoring" in attempts to discourage people from wearing peace signs, Nelson said.
Some Christian groups decried them as Satanic because of their resemblance to upside-down crosses. Others cursed it as the "footprint of the American chicken," the Associated Press reported.
Today, the sign is seen as "a rally cry for almost any group working for social change," according to the new book, "Peace: The Biography of a Symbol," by Ken Kolsbun and Michael Sweeney.
And for others like Ritter, it has a simpler meaning.
"It gives me reason to hope that there are some happy, peace-loving people in the world and not all sadness," Ritter said. "There's too much of that."