Spitball Army

Here are more found things from one corner of one room of my little house.  This little batch, like the last two posted, are buttons, proclaiming support for certain “causes.”

After the partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant (near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) in March of 1979, several advocacy groups against the use of nuclear power sprouted in America and, by the following year, became a strong political and environmental movement (does this movement still exist?).  A group of musicians banded together, gave themselves the name Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), and held a series of concerts in New York and California.  I’m sure these two buttons come from that time period, which straddled my sophomore and junior years in college.  I once owned the No Nukes record album (a lot of my favorite artists of the time were involved), as well as a book entitled No Nukes: Everyone’s Guide to Nuclear Power.

The Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers today is nearly 5,000 Harvard employees strong. It was voted in on May 17th, 1988, a year after I had moved from Cambridge.  I would date this button’s addition to my collection at somewhere between 1984 and 1986, so the Workers Union was apparently a good long time in the making.

I was a regular blood donor for several years in a row, including the years I lived in Massachusetts.  There was nothing unpleasant about donating blood at the Harvard Drives, where you would lay on your back on a table in Memorial Hall, gazing up at the wooden rafters and stained glass windows, listening to the non-specific buzz of activity echoing through the cavernous building.

I had thought that this button was a politically-oriented one, perhaps for a workers’ union or labor movement.  Using an online Spanish-to-English translator, it was revealed that “Nos esforzamos mas” is “We try harder,” the Avis Rent a Car slogan.  Oh well.

Unfortunately, this was a lost cause, but I was behind it.