Faith in Action: Tilling the cause for peace
Former farmer spent his golden years as activist

By Terry McGuire

No one knows how many jail cells Lawrence Norbert “Norb” Drouhard landed in for acts of civil disobedience.

Nor what compelled him to leave his Eastern Washington farm and spend his golden years traveling four continents as a colorful yet dedicated peace activist.

But plenty of people knew and loved this man of few possessions, as witnessed by the tributes that followed his death last month.

Drouhard, 80, who had planted himself in Las Vegas the past several years, was an activist to the end.

He was participating in a Good Friday walk outside the Nevada Nuclear Test Site where he regularly protested when he tripped and fell and struck his head on the ground. Twelve days later, he was dead, found lying in his bed at the Catholic Worker house where he was staying. The Clark County coroner listed the cause of death as a subdural hematoma,” a tumor-like collection of blood in the brain.

Though Vegas was his most recent home, the elder Drouhard was known in the Tacoma Catholic Worker community and by other local peace activists because of his visits here, which included protests outside the federal building in Seattle.

But in Las Vegas, Norb Drouhard was becoming an institution.

Norb Drouhard was an activist to the end.

Every morning, when the heat of the day was still bearable, he’d park his slogan-bedecked, 1988 red Mazda on the Strip. He’d don his homemade sandwich board carrying timely peace messages of his own creation. And he’d start walking.

“It took us about three hours to do the Strip,” said his son J.L. Drouhard, director of the Seattle Archdiocese Mission Office, who accompanied his father during a visit last year. The walk was made longer by his artificial knees – he sometimes used two canes. But mostly it took so long because “No-More-Nukes Norb” (as he signed his letters to the editor) was known by all, particularly those in the service industry, who would stop and chat; and by tourists, who wanted to take his picture.

“He joked he was the most photographed person in Las Vegas other than the Elvis impersonators,” his son said.

Tributes to a man of few possessions “Norb was one of only a few people whom I would follow into an action merely because he asked.” Fellow peace activist Ted Thomas of San Francisco on an online memorial page sponsored by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “We all miss him at the Catholic Worker house” in Las Vegas, “Even the birds notice he is gone.” Rick Kelley. “He is the archetypical grey activist,reminding us all that the older you get, the more radical you should become.” Marcus Page of Gallup, N.M., “There are many of us who called him teacher, inspiration and friend,” she said. And “his enthusiasm for hope for this planet was contagious.” Carrie Little, a staffer with the Emergency Food Network’s Mother Earth Farm near Orting, remembers how he would camp out at the farm and tend the crops destined for local food banks. “What I think made him interesting to some people is that he just had a different lifestyle that they kind of envied,” he said. “He didn’t have the sort of possessions that tied him down. At any moment, if he had an interest in going to Moscow or Ghana or Nicaragua…he knew people there and he could do that.” J.L. Drouhard, his son, the missions director of the Archdiocese of Seattle

Having grown up on a Kansas cattle ranch, having served in the Army Air Force during World War II, having been scouted as a shortstop prospect by the St. Louis Cardinals, and having worked a few years as a geologist following graduation from the University of Kansas, he could engage people on a wide range of topics. And he could talk for hours, if you let him, his son said.

His activist wanderlust began around 1986 after the last of their five children had graduated from high school, and after he and his wife, Pat, had divorced and sold their cattle and crop farm near Othello, his son said.

Elements of his Catholic faith that focused on peace also influenced him, his son said. He drew inspiration from the lives of Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi and Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day.

His first walk was the 1987 cross-country Great Peace March for nuclear disarmament. The next year he took part in an equivalent march in Russia. Other walks took him to Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa, where he was part of a group that retraced the slave route. “For him, racism and militarism were linked,” his son said.

Sometimes he’d interrupt his participation or drop out of the walk altogether when he’d land in a place where the people interested him.

He’d settle in for months or even a year, supplemented financially by his Social Security and veteran’s benefit payments. Among other locales, he lived in the hills of Jamaica, in Alabama, in a tent across from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and in apartments in the Far East Russia and Ghana.

“He always said it was the duty of every citizen to be arrested at least once for civil disobedience so they could experience…what the poor (experienced) in jail,” his son said.
At a memorial service April 8 at the Catholic Worker house in Las Vegas, some 50 mourners prayed in the garden, then surrounded Rosinante and prayed some more before going into the house for a final prayer.

It was the same day that funeral services were being held for another globe-trotting peace activist, Pope John Paul II.

One homeless man made note of the irony, reflecting on the variety of slogan-and-button-festooned baseball hats that Norb Drouhard wore.

“Now there are two guys in heaven exchanging funny hats,” he said.