UCSB New Chancellor's Welcoming Ceremony
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MESA SCHOOL PRESS RELEASE
July 9, 1987
Regarding July 15, 1987 Wednesday:
U.C.S.B. Gathering at Noon
To commemorate the 42nd "birthday" of the atomic bomb
(July 15, 1945 near Alamogordo, N.M.), and to welcome
Dr. Barbara Uehling, the new U.C.S.B. Chancellor whose
term of office begins July 15, 1987, people will gather for
one half hour at noon around U.C.S.B's eternal flame
memorial peace monument (at the southeast lawn of
Ellison Hall), in a "Peace and Liberation Ceremony"
conducted by American Peace Movement organizer
David Crockett Williams, C.L.U., of the Mesa School,
to venerate the theme "May the Light of Knowledge
Illuminate the Correct Path to End this Age of the
Threat of Nuclear Annihilation".
The ceremony will be opened with the prayers of Rev.
Gyoten Yoshida-shoni, a Japanese Buddhist Monk from
Nagasaki, whose efforts to build a Peace Pagoda memorial
peace monument in Santa Barbara as part of the Santa
Barbara and Yalta, U.S.S.R. sister city program are being
coordinated locally by the Mesa School, Williams' d.b.a.
since 1985. Yoshida-shoni came to the U.S.A. walking in
the 1976 Continental Walk for Social Justice and Disarmament,
and thereafter he opened a small temple for Nipponzan Myohoji
in Los Angeles. He led the five routes of the World Peace March
of 1982 which concluded with one million people walking to
Central Park in New York on June 12, 1982, in support of the
then United Nations Second Special Session on Disarmament
(SSDII). Thereafter he walked from Moscow, U.S.S.R., to Vienna,
Austria, whereupon he built a beautiful Peace Pagoda there on
the bank of the Danube River. Afterward, he was invited to
London by the Greater London City Council to build the peace
pagoda there on the Thames River in Battersea Park. Here in
Santa Barbara, Yoshida-shioni has so far met with Mayor Lodge,
City Councilman Lyle Reynolds, and City Parks Director Jerry
Ambrose, all of whom heartily supported the idea of the Peace
Pagoda, and so several possible sites are under present consideration.
After Yoshida-shioni's celestial drums prepare and open the ceremony
from 11:45AM-Noon, opening remarks and welcome will be made by
Williams, who will then introduce the Santa Barbara Peace Resource
Center's executive director Michael Lindemann for his brief message,
which will be followed by an offering from Bob Phares, recently
returned veteran of the June 14 to July 4, 1987, Leningrad to Moscow
International Peace Walk, and who was the oldest Santa Barbaran
to walk from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., with the 1986 Great
Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament.
The gathering will conclude with a ceremonial empowerment of
the new chancellor by spiritual leaders of the local American
Indian descendants, with the assistance of Wonono Rubio,
U.C.S.B. Student, American Indian Student Association activist,
and Chumash [spiritual practitioner].
Handouts will be distributed after the ceremony announcing
information, ideas, and events to help the cause of true peace,
harmony among all life and free natural abundance as paradise
on earth, by recognizing natural law.
The above proceedings will be videotaped, for possible worldwide
distribution via the Canadian Seneca Satellite Television Network
courtesy of Mark Ward, a freelance videographer and former
U.C.S.B. student.
---------end of retyped press release
Note that the original had "medicine person" which was
replaced October 5, 1987, with [descendant] where
above now replaced by [spiritual practitioner]. Wonono
participated in the Spiritual Run to Diablo Canyon which
departed August 6, 1993, from the UCSB Eternal Peace
Flame after it was re-lit November 9, 1987 by the mayors
of Santa Barbara and its new sister city Yalta USSR, and
after installation of the Hiroshima Peace Flame on the
monument on January 11, 1990. Wonono was also one
of the main co-coordinators and strong walkers
who participated in the Global Peace Walk of 1995,
also organizing and doing benefits and promotional
events in Santa Barbara in late 1994, traveling with the
walk on Yamato's bus to the Unity Gathering for the mutual
prophecy fulfillment ceremony August 28, 1994, four
days after the birth of the first White Buffalo Calf, Miracle
Wonono went as the GPW'95 advance arrangements person
to New York City in December making liaison arrangements
and he walked with the group from NYC starting on Martin Luther
King's birthday from the UN January 15, as far as Oklahoma
in April of 1995 before coming back to Santa Barbara and then
participating at the walk's ending ceremony in San Francisco
on June 20. In recent years he has become the Chairman
of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation. He participated
in the small ceremony with Victor Skyeagle Lopez in his very
late lifetime where this beloved Chumash elder offered his
prayers at the UCSB eternal flame monument for it to be
relit as an eternal peace flame, which it later was.
After this press release, the invitation to David Krieger
as president of the then newly created Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
was referred to its Vice President Frank Kelly who did
take part and spoke at the ceremony where he explained
to the gathering including several Japanese Buddhist
Monks that he had been the speechwriter for President
Harry Truman, which was a somewhat electrifying
coincidence, ie, to have been announced on this occasion.