Scrawled Peace Symbol Now a Venerable Icon

MISSOULA, Mont. —  It started when six members of the mythical North Side Liberation Front sneaked up Waterworks Hill above this city one night 18 years ago and painted their message on a big microwave reflector.

To some, the crude, 30-foot high peace symbol--the universally recognized trident inside a circle--was just vandalism, an eyesore, an insult. To others, it was a homely work of art, an inspiration.

For years the phone company repeatedly painted it out, but somebody kept painting it back, usually within a few nights.

Whatever residents thought of it, everyone came to recognize it simply as “the peace sign.”

But now, the 900-square-foot steel surface that served as a canvas for nocturnal artists over the years is obsolete, and the phone company wants to tear it down.

And the fate of the peace sign has become a major topic of conversation in this eclectic university community of 58,000, with its abundance of activists of every persuasion. Residents are trying to decide not only what the sign on the hill has come to symbolize, but more important, what shall become of it.

“At first the community was quite divided over it,” said Dan Kemmis, mayor from 1989 to 1996. “And then gradually you could see it coming around to even people who originally would have just hated the sign, kind of took pride that Missoula had this particular kind of quirkiness.”

The City Council wants no part of the debate, so an ad hoc citizens’ group has been collecting ideas and opinions--almost 700 written comments so far. About 60% say the community should figure out a way to keep the sign, said the coordinator, Jim Parker of the Missoula Community Peace Project.

Some have suggested that the community buy the reflector panel and the land where it sits, turn the site into a “peace park” and designate Missoula a “City of Peace.” Some think the phone company ought to donate the panel and land to the city. And some want the panel torn down.

“Only in this backward town would people condone graffiti and vandalism,” Doug Cummins wrote in a letter to the Missoulian newspaper. “It stretches the mind to think that some people would like to keep this eyesore. This isn’t art, people.”

Resident Teri Wing thought otherwise: “To me the sign is a reminder that we can’t ever go there [war] again,” she wrote. “Keep it. Put a fence around it. Put up a plaque that says we won’t repeat the past.”

Some of the sharpest division is among veterans.

“The poorly drawn symbol is a constant reminder to many vets of the Vietnam conflict and the minority who abandoned them,” one said in a written response to the citizens’ committee. But another Vietnam vet, who identified himself only as Bruce in his letter, likes the symbol and what it represents. “I still have the brass peace sign medal that I wore throughout my time in ‘Nam,” he wrote.

The antiwar, anti-military, implications of the peace sign are secondary in the view of investment counselor Bob Whaley, a board member of the Five Valleys Land Trust, which promotes open space. The reflector--regardless of what’s on it--is just another billboard sitting like a blister amid precious open space, he believes.

“It’s somewhat hypocritical of those who profess to be environmentalists--and they are the ones who embrace the peace sign--for them to ignore the environmental aspect of what the sign does to the view shed,” he said.

The reflector panel, built in 1968, sits atop the bald Waterworks Hill on the north side of town, facing the entire city.

It is not pretty.

Steel girders sunk in concrete hold the giant steel panel 10 feet above ground. Since last summer, the panel’s face appears to be awash in blood, the result of being splashed with reddish fire retardant at the height of the wildfire season.

Even the peace symbol is ugly. The circle is green, the vertical bar is blue, one short branch is purple, the other one red.

The site--less than a quarter-acre of Qwest Communications property surrounded by city-owned open space--is enclosed in a six-foot-high, chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Half the gate is gone, and the other half stands ajar.

U.S. West, now Qwest, put the fence up years ago, thinking a six-foot barrier would discourage people who had hiked up the hill and were prepared to carry paint buckets up the reflector’s vertical face. It never worked, and the company eventually gave up.

“We came to consider that a nonproductive activity,” said Qwest spokeswoman Linda Reed.

Each time workers painted over the peace sign, it reappeared, often signed with the initials “NSLF.”

The North Side Liberation Front.

The group doesn’t exist, of course, except as an ideal for successive bands that repainted the sign over the years. The leader of the first expedition said the name was merely a North Side “in-joke.”

The sign on the hill has inspired at least six peace posters and a T-shirt that still sell well, at prices ranging from $10 to $30, said Patty Corbett at Rockin’ Rudy’s House of Elvis, an alternative music and gift store.

One poster is a photograph of about 30 people holding hands and dancing in a giant circle under the peace sign. In the background, two sheriff’s cars are cresting the hill.

The City Council accepted the peace sign last summer as a neighborhood landmark at the urging of the Northside/Westside Neighborhood Council. The city, however, declined to give it legal standing as a “cultural resource.”

The sign appears regularly in children’s art at schools. Tourists inquire about it at the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center, named for the most famous pacifist of a city with a history of antiwar sentiment. Rankin voted against America’s entry into both world wars and was the only member of Congress who voted against war after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

“It’s been a wonderful, wonderful symbol for this community,” said Anita Doyle, a board member of the Peace Center. “We’ve heard from people who were driving through and saw it and stopped because it was such a welcoming sign. We heard from others that said they moved here because of that sign--not out of devotion to the sign, obviously, but because it seemed to say something about the community that felt welcoming.”

Kemmis, the former mayor, recalled that the sign once came up at a round-table discussion.

“I remember one very conservative business leader surprising us all by saying he liked living in a town that had these crazy peaceniks that were so committed to their cause that they would keep painting that until finally the community just adopts it,” Kemmis said. “This was a matter of pride for him.”

But the four men and two women who first created the sign weren’t exactly crazy peaceniks. The peace symbol was less a political statement than their solution to an artistic need.

“I looked up the hillside and could see this big, silvery-gray, blank billboard,” said the organizer. He asked that his name be withheld, not for fear of being charged with vandalism, but fear of appearing to claim too much credit.

“I always thought it would be nice to decorate it with something,” he said. “We actually decided that we’d like to put something up there before we were totally committed to what.”

Phillip Pyle, an aspiring writer, was a University of Montana student when he led two other painting groups in the late ‘80s, each time to wipe out offensive graffiti. Just last summer, someone painted a swastika over the peace sign. Within days the peace sign returned.

Qwest has agreed not to tear down the reflector panel while it studies the community responses and decides what to do with it.

Meanwhile, the opinions keep coming in to Jim Parker’s office.