Four of the Milwaukee 14 just before arrests. Doug Marvy is third from the left.
BY ED FELIEN
Doug Marvy died last month after a short and intense relationship with cancer as a result of a long-term blood disease.
I first heard about Doug when I learned about the Milwaukee 14 burning draft records and serving prison terms for their opposition to the draft and the war in Vietnam. I met Doug when he was married to a dear old friend, Andrea Schulberg.
He was the architect of two dramatic but little-known capers in which I was a willing participant.
He had this idea for doing a leaflet that we could put on the windshields of cars parked in the lot for the Honeywell anti-personnel bomb manufacturing plant. The leaflet encouraged the workers to commit sabotage and make the bombs ineffective. This was in 1972, before the fall of Saigon. It went pretty smoothly, but a security guard came out and recognized Marv Davidov and started talking to him. Marv, of course, couldn’t resist an audience so he went on and on about war and peace until Doug and I grabbed him by the arms and walked him to the car so we could make our getaway.
When I was on the Minneapolis City Council, half a century ago, Doug thought the most revolutionary thing we could do was start a bank. We thought about that for a while but, since it took half a million bucks to start a bank, we settled on starting the Southside Credit Union. This was before credit unions were as popular as they are today, and our experiment lasted about 10 years.
I lost track of Doug when he left Minneapolis to follow some guru. I loved his hope and his faith that we could make things better than they were. And he was right. His leadership and sacrifice helped end the draft and slow America’s imperialist ambitions.
