STARKSBORO, Vt. (WCAX) – Jim Geier is a man in motion.
He’s the founder and owner of Vermont Folk Rocker, a maker of high-end rocking chairs in Starksboro.
They make 300 a year. Now 81, Geier no longer mans the machines but still runs the operation. In the early 1980′s, he was part of building a movement to stop the proliferation of nuclear arms. “I was a hundred hours a week for two or three years. It was ridiculous, it was crazy, but it was exciting, really exciting,” Geier said.
In New York City In the summer of ‘82, Geier joined hundreds of other Vermonters marching for nuclear disarmament. At the time, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at each other.
WCAX covered the historic march. “This is Bread and Puppet here,” said Geier, looking at video of the event. “The million people were all in the parade. “The world was ready to know this or something.”
A year earlier, when the Burlington Marketplace was being transformed from a regular street to what we see now, Geier’s life was transformed while attending a “die-in” against the weapons of mass destruction. “As I laid down, I felt like I was going into a cocoon. It changed my life right there, it was unbelievable,” Geier, recalled. “I had not been involved with anything like this in my life, anything political.”
It was a far cry from a decade earlier when Geier enlisted in the Army to avoid being drafted and sent off to Vietnam. “I was a training officer for Aberdeen training grounds for a few years.
After finishing his tour, Geier came to Vermont to fix and flip homes with his brothers. It wasn’t until he was in his late 30s that he got involved in the nuclear disarmament movement. “I went from reluctant to do that kind of stuff, to not being reluctant at all… that was a sea change,” he said. “The world was ready to know this.”
And so was Vermont. Back in his shop, a dusty sign says it all — at town meeting in 1982, 177 out of 195 Vermont towns voted for a nuclear freeze. Geier was the chief organizer, and the movement proved to be a success. President Ronald Reagan in 1987 negotiated a treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to substantially cut back both countries’ nuclear arsenals.
It’s a time Geier looks back at with fondness and an understanding that we all can make a difference. “You refine yourself, you try to,” he said.
A rock’n life indeed.