The Catonsville Nine's invasion and burning of the Catonsville draft board files: an interview with Jean S. Walsh given on March 30, 1973.

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Collection: Friends of Catonsville Library Date: 1973-03-30 Date of Digitization: 2004-03-31 Source: Catonsville Library Original Dimensions: 28 x 22 cm Creator: Walsh, Jean S.

Description:
A transcript of a recorded interview with Jean S. Walsh, the editor of Catonsville's local newspaper, the Catonsville Times. She was present at the scene after the burning of draft records in Catonsville on May 17, 1968.

Transcription:

out, out!"  And I had to leave so I never was sure which of the two men I hadn't 
yet identified.  I wasn't sure which was which so I had to "fudge it" (as they 
say) in the cut line, not indicating which man was which in those two instances.
     Then after I was ushered from the room I saw them no more.  But before I 
was asked to leave, the leader of the nine, Fr. Philip Berrigan, handed me a 
sheet of paper which was a duplicate of an original which they evidently were 
handing out to everyone they could find to receive them.  On the paper was a list 
of the reasons why they thought they should do what they had just done and some 
of those reasons I published in the paper the following week when I wrote the 
story about the draft board file burning.

Interviewer:  As an editor of a newspaper, was everything recorded in other 
                newspapers correctly?

Interviewee:  As far as I noticed it was.  I didn't know that anything, maybe
                 some of the details weren't complete.  I thought it was very well 
covered.  After all, they had an "in" on it that I didn't even have.  They had 
been alerted, they had followed the nine to Catonsville, set up their cameras, 
set up their tripods, had everything in readyness for the act even before the 
draft board people knew they were going to have their office invaded.

Interviewer:  Do you have any general reaction to this whole affair which you 
                 would like to mention?

Interviewee:  Of course, the people in Catonsville started to rally around the
                 area - those who happened to hear of it, while the police, the FBI 
and the Army people were still there.  So we saw a number of the public standing 
outside wondering what was going on, what had actually happened and so forth.  It 
was nine days later, on Sunday, that would have been Sunday, May 26, that a group 
of people came from Baltimore to Catonsville to harass the members of the draft 
board at their homes.  This was most annoying to those members who felt it was a 
waste of the protestors' time to do this in front of the draft board members' 
homes.  They distributed flyers to a number of churches that morning.  A number 
of churches were the scene of distribution of these flyers and they were giving 
them out everyplace they could.  That afternoon they formed sort of a parade with 
banners in front of the homes of several of the draft board members.  Afterward,