Vermont Vox Populi: An Interview with Marion Leonard

Editor's Note: I have been corresponding with Rochester, Vermont's Marion Leonard for several years. The 98-year-old citizen activist and educator, who founded an environmental nonprofit called “Save Our World,” is the oldest supporter of Vermont independence anywhere (to our knowledge). When we learned that she was celebrating her 98th birthday this past May, we felt she'd be the perfect candidate for this issue's “Vermont Vox Populi” column. Happy birthday, Marion, and thanks for sharing your experience and wisdom with us.

Rob Williams
Editor

Rob: When did you first live in Vermont?
Marion: My husband Warren and I worked at the Putney School for 10 years (1936-1956), with a brief stint away during World War II. My husband taught there, and then, after the war, came back and acted as a sort of assistant head. I was sorting books in the library, and not getting paid, incidentally. This was my first time living in Vermont – and I fell in love this state. But, working at the Putney School, you, know, we were living in Vermont, but we weren't really living in Vermont. And so, after we left Putney in 1957, we vowed we'd come back to Vermont some day.

Rob: And you did!
Marion: Yes, we returned here when we reached our late eighties. Ever since our Putney time, I had always envisioned coming back to a small Vermont town, maybe near Burlington, where we could really be involved in the politics and daily life of a small village. You'll never believe this now, but I always imagined living in Williston, because during the 1940s, Williston was a relatively small town near the city of Burlington. But, of course, when we came up to Williston, driving up Route 7, in 1997, we couldn't believe how much Williston had changed.

Rob: What do you make of Williston today, with all the box stores?
Marion: I always told my out-of-state friends, Vermonters will never tolerate Wal-Mart. For a long while, Vermonters didn't. And when we visited Williston in 1997, I stopped in a small store and asked the store owner, “How did this happen?” And he said, “No one wanted it.”

Rob: But somebody must have wanted Wal-Mart.
Marion: Yes, some of them said they thought it would be good for development and progress. That sort of thing. But anyway, we left Williston and drove down Route 100 into the town of Granville, and my husband said, “This is what Vermont was like in the 1940s.” And we kept on driving south, through Hancock, and into Rochester, and that really did us in. We saw the town green, and then we drove slowly through the center of town, and we saw the sign that said “Park House – Shared Housing For The Elderly.” And Warren said, “That's exactly what we are looking for!” And we walked into the dining room, and two elderly women were playing Scrabble, and pointed us in the direction of the office, and I said, “This is exactly what we envisioned.”

Rob: But…
Marion: But there were no rooms available at Park House, and a bit of a waiting list, so we went home to New York. That was July 1997. And we kept coming back to Rochester that summer to visit from our home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, to see what was going on. And on one visit, we went into the post office at Rochester – I've always loved post offices – and talked about getting a box, and then we went over to the café, and sat down and talked, and I said to Warren, why don't we rent an apartment for a while? So we called around, and we found a place for $400 a month, which, coming from Long Island, seemed like a steal to us. And by the fall of 1997, we moved up to Vermont, and, as we made plans to come up, we discovered that three rooms had opened up at Park House – first time ever in its history, I think, that three rooms had opened up so quickly. So, by October, we ended up in Rochester at the Park House!

Rob: And what did you do when you got here?
Marion: I re-started “Save Our World” right out of my room, the same organization I had run while living in Long Island. And I started distributing our Earth flags here, with the support of my husband Warren, who has always supported everything I did, and really got into it when he moved to Rochester – he got a big kick out of helping me with “Save Our World” – and we started taking trips we'd never taken before.

Rob: Where did you go?
Marion: We went into Montpelier, to the state capital, which felt like a place you could actually go into and run around in and not get lost, unlike like Albany felt when we were in New York, and we discovered the Capitol Plaza on State Street, and we stayed there so much they finally gave us a special rate. And I wandered around Montpelier, feeling like I owned the place, and I visited a lot of libraries, something I always liked to do, and continued to work to hand out books about our “human-earth” connection, including a collection of books that is still housed here in the Rochester town library 10 years later. And now I'm re-structuring “Save Our World” as a Vermont-based nonprofit with a new mission and bylaws, and an advisory board, and I'll soon write the last newsletter I'll ever write, making it all official, hopefully by this summer.

Rob: This spring (May 24), you celebrate your 98th birthday. You are the oldest person in the world we know of who supports the notion of Vermont independence. Can you talk about your interest in this?
Marion: To begin with, Vermonters always have had that – I don't know what to call it – that interest in these things. But it's more complicated than what we sometimes think of as the Vermont we see in the postcards and the paintings. I have a friend who once said to me, “Marion, you have the most idealized vision of Vermonters; you have no idea what goes on in those farms and those fields,” and she's right about that. Vermont is, in some ways, no different than anywhere else, but I also think that, as a friend of mine in Mississippi once told me, “Vermont is like another country.”

Rob: What do you think he meant when he said “Vermont is like another country”?
Marion: I think he meant that Vermont is the country you'd want to be living in. The country where everything seems to be working for most everyone, where the earth is well-taken-care of, and people have an understanding that “what you do to the earth, you do to yourself.” And you can find so many groups here in Vermont who are working on projects that take care of the Earth: Rural Vermont, Middlebury College, Save Our Earth, and the list goes on and on. So it is the sort of vision that people have here, I think, that helps explain his comment.

Rob: Is he right, do you think?
Marion: In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no. Many Vermonters don't always like to be told what they can and cannot do. Especially when it comes to their land. I remember when I was working on the GMO campaign at our Rochester town meeting many years ago, and there was a small but vocal group, including some farmers, that opposed a ban on GMOs. But by the end of the day the GMO ban passed overwhelmingly.

Rob: Are you hopeful about our future?
Marion: I like to say what an old friend of mine used to say. Sometimes I get very discouraged, but I never lose hope. Because you can't exist, really, if you don't have hope. It hasn't been an easy life in the 20th century. I was brought up with a vision of the United States as a wonderful place to live, the best place on the planet, and we had this wonderful opportunity to show that this diverse group of people in America could live together with democracy and freedom, and I don't think we have ever quite realized this vision that we've projected for ourselves. My father was a doctor in the U.S. Army during the Great War – “the war to end all wars” – and was a realist, especially after we harnessed the atom. Humans, he said, couldn't handle the atom, though I would add that education can often help people solve the problems we help to create.

Rob: You've lived a whole century. What advice might you give to Americans today?
Marion: I've been thinking about that a lot. The most important thing, I'd say, is to keep your eye on the ball, and be a part of the experiment this country has been. This country has never been a country “of the people, by the people, for the people.” That's not what our Founding Fathers even envisioned. People don't like to get involved in politics, I know, but the only way to change things is to get involved in the decisions that are made on your behalf.

Rob: This seems hard to do at the federal level.
Marion: What we're living under right now is a fascist dictatorship. I'm sorry, but that's what it is. And no one is willing to admit or deal with that. And this Memorial Day and July 4, I will grieve for the young men and women who've lost their lives for what seems to be to be no good reason. This is a hard time for us. If we don't get involved, and make hard choices – the right choices, but hard choices – then we're going to be worse off for it.

Rob: Do you think Vermont will ever secede from the United States and become its own independent republic?
Marion: I think the answer to that question depends on what happens in the next few years. We have to, right now, get the people who are running the federal government out of there, and get people elected who will do what is right, with regard to global warming and the other problems we're facing. We have a lot of people with so many enlightened ideas out there; we need to figure out ways to get them into positions of leadership.

Rob: Thanks for taking the time to talk with our readers. And happy 98th birthday!