By LARRY RULISON, Business writer
First published: Tuesday, July 18, 2006

ALBANY -- A collection of business, labor and environmental groups has come together to promote clean-energy technology and construction projects in the state.

The New York State Apollo Alliance was launched Monday at a news conference at the Legislative Office Building in Albany. Its members include the Environmental Business Association of New York State, the Sierra Club, United Steelworkers and New York State United Teachers, among others.

Officials from the groups pointed to countries like Japan and Germany as leaders in the use and development of renewable-energy technologies such as solar power. They said New York can aspire to be more like those nations by investing heavily in the sector.

"It generates lots of opportunities," said Ira Rubenstein, executive director of the Environmental Business Association of New York State, a trade group based in Albany. "They've been focused on their policy for 20 years, and it pays."

The new group is affiliated with the Apollo Alliance, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. The New York group is the 11th state chapter to be created.

Alternative energy has been a huge focus of political and business leaders in the Capital Region. Gov. George Pataki and the Legislature have supported alternative-energy projects and business development in the state, and local universities -- including the University at Albany and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute -- already have major alternative-energy research and development programs in place.

The region also is home to emerging alternative-energy companies like DayStar Technologies Inc. of Halfmoon, which makes solar cells; Plug Power Inc. and MTI MicroFuel Cells Inc., two Colonie companies that make fuel cells; and SuperPower Inc., a Schenectady company that is developing superconducting wire for the utility and defense industries. GE Wind, General Electric Co.'s wind power operation, also is headquartered in Schenectady.

But Jeff Jones, project director for New York Apollo, who also is a consultant to the Workforce Development Institute in Albany, said the group's creation was important because it brought together labor and environmental interests. Jones called it a "blue-green" alliance.

"It's a unique coalition," he said.

The group has developed a 10-point plan that it also unveiled Monday. It asked political candidates to embrace its causes, but said it would not endorse any candidates.

The plan calls for the construction and retrofitting of buildings and schools that use less energy and have healthier environments.

It also calls for the creation of thousands of "green collar" jobs through the promotion of research and development and manufacturing in the alternative-energy sector. New incentives could be created by investments from state and local pension funds, and the business community would be encouraged to invest in these new technologies. The group estimates that at least 20,000 new manufacturing jobs could be created this way.

The plan also calls for the expansion of urban spaces and promotion of bike- and pedestrian-friendly communities. And it encourages development of mass-transit networks such as light rail with a reduction in waste and an increase in recycling.

William Pienta, district director of United Steelworkers District 4 in Cheektowaga, near Buffalo, said New York could benefit from additional wind turbine manufacturing. He pointed to Pennsylvania, which attracted Spanish wind-turbine manufacturer Gamesa Corp. to build a manufacturing and regional headquarters.

"This is a major industry that can go anywhere," Pienta said. "I want some of that in New York state."

Rulison can be reached at 454-5504 or by e-mail at lrulison@timesunion.com.

Positive outlook

A study completed by The Perryman Group, an economic consultant in Waco, Texas, found that the Apollo Alliance's New York efforts could create: $15.1 billion in economic activity $9.6 billion in increased income 228,100 new jobs, including:

31,320 new manufacturing jobs

25,635 new construction jobs

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Mr. Tambourine Man, Remembering the Legendary Yippie, Stew Albert (1939-2006).

By Jeff Jones

Stew Albert had one of his smart, funny ideas when he was thinking about a name for his memoir. My Sixties, he said was going to call it. He was in his late fifties when we kicked this one around and I thought the irony was sublime: He knew the book wouldn’t be out until he had turned the numerical corner.

Stew didn't call his book My Sixties—the title is still out there, if someone with a lifetime of movement cred wants to grab it. Instead, he called it Who The Hell is Stew Albert?

Who indeed?

The title is a quote from Howard Stern, who once responded with that question when one of his on-air gang started talking about Stew as if everyone in the world knew who he was. Stern didn’t, but that was his loss: It always seemed to me that Stew knew everyone and everyone knew Stew.

Nobody was more devoted to the idea of the Sixties. If you want to see what I mean, visit his website (http://members.aol.com/stewa/stew.html). Stew worked hard to translate Sixties values to a new generation of political activists. He kept in touch with a wide array of movement veterans, loyal and engaged, blogging his thoughts and poems every day—right up until his penultimate day.

Younger activists adored him.

He died January 30th.

Stew was big and barrel-chested, with curly blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Losing Stew—he was 66 when he fell to liver cancer—creates a huge personal, political and emotional hole for me, as I know it does for so many others, especially his wife, Judy “Gumbo” Clavir Albert, and his daughter, Jessica Pearl. The Albert’s post-1960s peregrinations—Bay Area, Hudson Valley, back to the West Coast—finally landed them in Portland, Ore. Years of fighting various ailments kept Stew close to home, and close to his computer where he became the most successful sixties radical I know at moving to online activism. Whenever we met, we spent hours catching up on the latest gossip about the doings of various old Panthers, Yippies and Weathermen. And then we would plot and scheme, mostly about how to support those emerging young activists devoted to resistance to racism, environmental catastrophe and Bush’s oil wars.

How I met Stew says something about who he was. That is, I don’t remember how I met him. I remember the first time I met the other Yippie founders: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner. But Stew just appeared in my life one day, and he never left.

To one degree or another, the founding Yippies were all nuts. It was their strength, their weakness, their charisma and their charm (for Abbie, in particular, it was also his doom).

Stew was different. He always had a strategy and a plan. He managed the campaign of Pigasus the Pig for president in 1968 and ran for sheriff of Alameda County in 1970 (He lost, but carried the city of Berkeley). More than anyone, he helped Abbie and Jerry give definition to the Yippie movement. Without his ability to broker their competitive egos and channel their ideas into strategy, what is passing into history as the Yippie story would have been different, definitely diminished and possibly disregarded.

The Sixties were filled with political tendencies: anarchism, communism, socialism, the working class, armed revolution, Panthers, Weathermen, Maoism. It wasn’t easy to find one’s way and keep one’s head. (The lineup may be different today, but it’s not any easier.) In this political stew, Stew Albert was a cultural radical with a political ideology. We bonded because I was a political radical struggling to blend New Left ideology with the cultural power of young people. We found ourselves speaking the same language, and stayed friends to the end.

Along the way we had some adventures. When the Weathermen helped Timothy Leary escape from a California prison and make his way to an uncertain reception at Eldridge Cleaver’s expatriot compound in Algeria, Stew went over to help with the introduction.

Long before today’s wiretaps, Stew and Judy were being watched and tailed by the FBI. After the Weather Underground bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1971 to protest the Vietnam War, they famously declared: “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.” 

We last spoke on New Year’s day. That was just after his email arrived letting his many friends know that doctors had just found the cancer and that it was bad. His daily blog told the unfolding story of his fading hopes for a cure, his joyful, if tiring, visits with friends. Daughter Jessica came home from law school to be with him, and his happiness grew having her near. Two days before the end, he blogged to the world that “my politics have not changed.” No death- bed conversions or regrets for a life lived radically and well, in constant resistance to a government and political system he abhorred. As Stew slipped away, he posted his final words: “It’s still me. It’s still me.” n

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4 Shades of Green - Adirondack Explorer

Park's defenders differ in approach

By Phil Brown

The Adirondack Club and Resort could be the biggest development in the history of the Adirondack Park: It calls for more than 700 condominiums, single-family homes and “Great Camps” to be built on 6,400 acres on the outskirts of the village of Tupper Lake.

Supporters say the project—which also calls for reopening the Big Tupper Ski Area—would turn around the economy of a village that has been down on its luck for years. But opponents say the development would set a bad example for the rest of the Park.
So where do the Park’s environmental watchdogs stand?

• The Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks has taken a stand against the project. David Gibson, the executive director, calls such a huge development “fundamentally wrong for the Adirondack Park.”

• The Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks wants the state to buy 3,000 acres of the land eyed by the developers—as well as adjacent lands—and create a 20,000-acre Wilderness Area.

• The Adirondack Council is suggesting that the Olympic Regional Development Authority take over the Big Tupper Ski Area and that the state preserve as much of the surrounding land as possible.

• The Adirondack Mountain Club has several worries, such as that the influx of seasonal residents may lead to the overuse of nearby Forest Preserve tracts, but the club is waiting for the developer to submit a final application before adopting an official position.

The four groups by and large share the same concerns over the project (including forest fragmentation and scenic blight).
Nevertheless, their divergent positions reflect both the strength and weakness of the environmental movement in the Adirondacks. On the one hand, the multiplicity of perspectives fosters a lively public debate and makes it less likely that a good idea gets overlooked. On the other hand, the groups probably wield more clout when they speak with one voice.

The question is whether the environmental groups strike the proper balance between independence and cooperation. And the answer will depend on the issue—and on where the person answering stands on that issue.

In general, though, most green-minded observers argue that the advantages of having several organizations fighting for the Park outweigh the disadvantages caused by their failure to agree or work together on every matter.

Jeff Jones, a political consultant in Albany who used to work for Environmental Advocates, a statewide organization, said politicians at the state Capitol may never set foot in the Adirondacks, but they get the message that it’s a special place by virtue of the fact that so many people lobby on its behalf.

Jones is one who sees the groups’ differences as more of a plus than a minus. “You could take all the resources and put them into one great, big organization, but then you’d lack the diversity,” he said. “It’s good to have the tension and disagreements fought out in public rather than kept inside a boardroom.”

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Pataki Moves to Create Empire State Greenway by Developing 524-Mile WaterfrontGov.

By Al Baker

George E. Pataki offered a plan on Friday to transform the Erie Canal and the land along its shores into a waterfront greenway and link it with similar eco-friendly tracts to its east and west. The plan came months after the state Canal Corporation's deal to sell development rights along the canal was plagued by scandal.

At a news conference at a canal port in Little Falls, just west of Albany, Mr. Pataki said his plan to recast the 524-mile waterfront as a linear park dotted by tourist destinations, natural vistas and trails would unite the Hudson and Niagara greenways to form the Empire State Greenway, ''one of the largest greenways in the nation.''

Environmentalists quickly embraced the idea of ''water-dependent development'' along the canal. They said it would improve the struggling upstate economy through which the all-but-forsaken canal flows, and lure visitors with the promise of biking, hiking, boating and fishing amid the panoramic corridors of New York's interior.

''It would really link New York City to Buffalo,'' said John Stouffer, legislative director for the Atlantic chapter of the Sierra Club. ''Potentially, you could bike to Buffalo, or, if you were willing to brave the Hudson River, you could paddle to Buffalo.''

But hurdles remain before Mr. Pataki's vision can take root, Mr. Stouffer said, adding that he would watch closely to make sure that improving water quality, recreational activities and public access to the waterfront remained priorities over time.

In outlining his plan, the governor called for a grass-roots approach to greenway development. He nominated Carmella R. Mantello, the executive director of the Hudson River Valley Greenway Communities Council, to serve as director of the Canal Corporation, a subsidiary of the New York State Thruway Authority, which oversees the canal system.

If her appointment is approved by the corporation's board, Ms. Mantello will lead a task force of representatives from several state agencies and localities along the canal who would solicit suggestions from federal, state and local planners before sending recommendations to the governor within six months.

Those recommendations would ''form the basis'' of legislation that Mr. Pataki would submit to lawmakers in Albany next year to create the canal greenway, said Kevin C. Quinn, a spokesman for the governor.

Depending on what the task force recommends, parts of the development plan itself could also require state lawmakers' approval, state officials said.

An investigation by the state attorney general's office and the state inspector general's office found that the Canal Corporation's previous deal to sell development rights along the canal for $30,000 was fraught with favoritism and ethics violations.

While the Canal Corporation ''lost credibility'' in that affair, it is ''getting back on track,'' with the new plan, said Jeff Jones, a spokesman for Environmental Advocates of New York, a nonprofit group that monitors state government.

The gathering of grass-roots input from communities along the canal in advance of developers' proposals is a reversal of state policy, said Michael R. Fleischer, the executive director of the Thruway Authority.

Next, Mr. Jones said, the state should expand on the governor's plan by linking all of its canals and the St. Lawrence Seaway with its largest rivers. ''That would create a world class destination for eco-tourism that would rival the great waterways of Europe,'' he said.

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Son's book chronicles a radical family tree By MARC HUMBERT As the heavily armed FBI agents stormed into the apartment to arrest his parents, the 4-year-old walked to his bedroom and took his little scissors out of a drawer. "The ends were rounded, and the blades were covered by blue plastic guards," Thai Jones recalled. "I considered putting on the cowboy hat and charging into the hallway with scissors blazing to defeat these men who had come to hurt our family. Even then, I knew it was a battle against long odds. But I didn't realize it was a question that many in my family had already faced. They had chosen to fight. "For me the decision was easy to make. I returned the scissors and closed the drawer. I went out to the hallway where my father was manacled, slid my small fingers around the cold cuffs into his palm, and stood with him in the corridor holding hands. "This is my earliest memory," Jones writes of the scene on Oct. 23, 1981 that provides the poignant opening for "A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience." What follows over the next 285 pages is the colorful history of his Weather Underground parents and activist grandparents. Sitting next to a huge stone fireplace in the restored mill he is renting for the winter on the outskirts of Woodstock, the village immortalized by the '60s counterculture, Jones recently talked about mom and dad, then and now. "For me, the hardest mental jump was imagining him doing the things that he's famous for. He was a wild man - climbing up on stages and grabbing microphones and pushing people off," the son said. "He's so mild-mannered." An early leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, Jeff Jones helped give birth to the revolutionary Weather Underground movement. He led the charge onto the streets of Chicago in the infamous "Days of Rage" demonstration in October 1969. It was at the beginning of the next year that Jeff Jones went underground, not to surface again publicly until the bust in the Bronx apartment. During that time, Thai Jones' mother, Eleanor Stein, would leave his father after other Weather Underground leaders purged him for pushing a less violent agenda than they wanted. He favored blowing up objects, not people. She was pregnant with Thai at the time. The couple were apart for a year. Thai did not learn of the separation until he started the book. "I was never going to tell you that," his mother told him. But she did. The book, after all, was her idea. Thai, pursuing a master's degree at the Columbia School of Journalism, was taking a book-writing course and had a book proposal due. "I called my mom in a panic and said do you have any book ideas and she said, to her utter dismay ever since, why don't you do the story of the grandparents because that's what makes it different than other '60s stories," he said. "The next thing I knew, we had a book deal," the author said. For his parents, there was pride, but also practical concern. There would be ground rules. "We said we would answer all questions truthfully, not necessarily completely," the elder Jones said. "He would have to respect that there were areas we didn't want to talk about and mainly that would have to do with anything that could get anybody else in trouble." The author readily agreed. "My goal with the book is not to get my parents put in jail," he said. The son also set some limits. "I said, 'There's not going to be any sex in this book about the '60s. I'm going to put in as much rock 'n' roll, drugs and car chases as I can,"' he recalled. While there are few details about the Weather Underground bombings and other illegal activity, the book contains plenty of tidbits that bring the parents and grandparents to life. There is Jeff living on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay with Weather Underground icon Bernardine Dohrn - she sunbathed on the rooftop patio - and helping arrange for the 1970 prison escape of LSD-guru Timothy Leary. Eleanor's parents were Communists. Arthur Stein was called twice before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Annie Stein became a major figure in the civil rights movement and was active throughout the anti-Vietnam War movement. Jeff's parents were Quakers and pacifists. Albert Jones spent World War II in a camp for conscientious objectors. Millie Jones ran off in 1967 with one of her adult violin students. Jeff was a blond-haired California kid when he went east to Antioch College and two years later to New York City. Disillusioned by Lyndon Johnson's expansion of the Vietnam War and spurred on by the writings of Karl Marx and other revolutionaries, he was soon an SDS leader, a rebel with a cause - decked out in jeans, leather jacket and cowboy boots. Eleanor Stein was the classic New York City kid - big hoop earrings, tall boots and short skirts. She embraced the anti-war movement during the Mark Rudd-led takeover at Columbia University in 1968 while a law student there. By the end of 1969, she had withdrawn from law school and left her first husband, Jonah Raskin, who later became a leader of the Yippies and an Abbie Hoffman biographer. Eleanor had also laid eyes on Jeff for the first time. By 1971, the two had gotten to know each other while driving across America, were hiding out in the Catskills north of New York City and falling in love. A decade later, the two would be arrested in their Bronx apartment. Both faced felony explosives possession charges and Jeff also had a misdemeanor riot count against him from the Days of Rage protests. They worried what might happen to Thai while they were behind bars. "I was expecting to go to jail for a couple of years," said the fugitive father. A judge, however, sentenced Jeff to 18 months probation and six months of community service. All charges were dropped against Eleanor. "The judge, I believe, saw us as a family that was coming out the other side of this political experience," Jeff recalled recently. Thai, whose birth certificate had identified him as Ty Emerson, returned to his day-care center where he had been known as Timmy - life underground meant aliases, even for the kids. The teacher told the other children that Timmy was now Thai. "None of the other four-year-olds found this odd," Thai wrote, "but several of them thought it would be fun to change their names." Jeff drove the school bus for his son's day-care center for the six months community service, later got a job as a printer and then became a newspaper reporter. Eleanor went back to law school. In 1986, the family of four - a second son, Arthur "Bluejay" Jones, was born in 1982 - moved to Albany. Mom had gotten a job as a clerk at the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest tribunal, and would later go on to a distinguished career with the state's Public Service Commission. She is now a professor at Albany Law School. Dad was a reporter covering state government for an alternative weekly newspaper and has since become the director of communications for Environmental Advocates, a lobbying group. In late August, Thai joined thousands of others on the streets of New York City to protest the war in Iraq as the Republican National Convention began. Despite that, his father says he expects his son to follow a different road than the one traveled by the rest of the family. "Thai very clearly wants to be a reporter, a historian and an observer, more than a participant," Jeff said recently as he sat in the ornate lobby of New York's state Senate in Albany. "And, as a parent, knowing perfectly well what I put my parents through, I would be delighted if that's the path Thai chooses." It appears Thai has already made that choice. "For one thing, it's impossible to be rebellious with parents who are literally icons of rebellion and revolution," he explained. Looking back, Thai acknowledges his parents gave up a lot for a cause. "For them, those were the most exciting years of their lives," he said. "So, personally, I don't think they were wasted (years). Politically, it's hard to point to any real significant achievements of the Weather Underground." "I feel great joy in the book," the father said, "because even though he makes fun of us and he ultimately maybe doesn't agree that it was worth it, he respects it." BACK TO TOP

Family memoir details radical life on the run By Paul Grondahl Jeff Jones is only half-joking when he says he's living a parent's worst nightmare. His son grew up to be a writer and has published a book about the family's checkered past. In what amounts to the first detailed public "outing" of his parents' involvement with the Weather Underground and 1960s militant activism, Thai Jones, 27, of Albany, has written his first book, "A Radical Line." The nonfiction volume blends social history with family memoir. It chronicles three generations of leftist politics that grow strongly from both branches of his family tree. The story moves from his grandparents' work with the Communist Party in the 1950s, to his father's dozen arrests for inciting riots as a leader of Students for a Democratic Society and other radical acts, to his own childhood lived under an assumed name amid the turbulent undertow of his parents' maneuvers to avoid an FBI manhunt. "My goal was never to get my parents thrown in jail," Thai says. He worked as an editorial assistant at the Times Union and Newsday before completing a master's degree at Columbia University's School of Journalism. He recently quit his job at Barnes & Noble bookstore in Colonie to travel around the country to promote his book. His 57-year-old father, Jeff Jones, is a lobbyist and spokesman for Environmental Advocates of New York, based in Albany, and will accompany his son to some of the bookstore appearances on the West Coast. Thai's mother, Eleanor Stein, 58, a professor at Albany Law School who specializes in telecommunications law, recently retired as administrative law judge with the state Public Service Commission. Stein's radical adventures figure prominently in her son's book, but she avoids interviews and prefers to remain in the background during the book's promotion. Paradoxically, the book was mom's idea. She answered a frantic, late-night call from Thai. He had procrastinated on an assignment to write a book proposal for a class at Columbia. Mom bailed him out by suggesting he write about their family's colorful political activism. "And she's regretted it ever since," Thai said. He's sitting at the antique table in his family's dining room in their book-crammed, comfortably unkempt Pine Hills bungalow. A '60s tapestry covers falling plaster from a roof leak. His mom's evocative landscape paintings brighten the walls. Outside, the shrubs and grass bear the shaggy, au naturel condition of an unrepentant environmentalist. The Jeep Cherokee in the driveway is the only jarring sight in the picture. "Ohhhh, you're busted, dad," Thai said. "Guilty. I can't justify it," his dad said. "I'm not a perfect environmentalist." He argues that the 4-year-old Jeep is his fourth Cherokee and he's loyal to the brand. He points out that he and his wife share one vehicle as they have for the 18 years they've lived in Albany -- the longest stop in an itinerant life. Listening to the father and son discuss and debate their perspectives on the Vietnam War, civil rights and political activism -- the father's from firsthand experience, with the scars to prove it, and the son's from interviews and books -- is like "Crossfire" meets "The Real World." "The more I researched the Weather Underground, the more I saw you guys as cultish. I do poke fun at it sometimes," Thai said with a smirk. "I found it kind of laughable when you tried to transform yourselves from student activists in SDS to stone communist revolutionaries fighting for oppressed people the world over." His dad countered: "We believed the world was in a time of revolution and we saw ourselves as true revolutionaries. Looking back on it now, we are who we are. We were middle-class, white suburban kids." Early on in researching the book, Thai agreed to ground rules with his parents. They could decline to talk about certain incidents or people in the interviews, but anything they told him would be accurate. He also allowed his parents to read a draft of the manuscript and they consulted with a lawyer, who said the statute of limitations had run out on any criminal activities in which they might have been involved. The publisher, Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, also reviewed the manuscript in their legal department. "Their main concern was that my parents would sue me for libel," Thai said. So far, that hasn't happened. "I had some concerns at the outset, but I had no choice because Thai got an agent and a book contract on his own," his dad said. "Now that he's finished, I feel very proud as his father and think the book he's written is accurate and it doesn't de-legitimize what we did." "A Radical Line" is marked by a straightforward, detached journalistic tone throughout. The son refers to his parents in the third-person and he has a crime reporter's style of sticking to the facts even when they involve his kin. Such as his dad's bust in Hoboken, N.J., in 1979 for growing marijuana on the roof of their apartment building. "I can't justify that, except to say I was very much a part of the hippie pot culture of that time and I found it liberating," his dad said. "I regret that we put Thai in harm's way when he was young. But I think we were good parents. We were transitioning from living underground to an above-ground existence when he was born." The book project was an intense education for Thai, who wrote "A Radical Line" in his bedroom at his parent's house after moving back from Brooklyn. "I knew none of this history when I started," he said. "I'll never view my parents the same way again." Thai's younger brother, Arthur, 22, whom the family calls "Bluejay," also recently moved back into his parent's home. He displaced his mom from her art studio. He works as a cook at Ground Round and plans to study history at the University at Albany. "Talk about a parent's worst nightmare," the father said. "Both our sons are living back at home." BACK TO TOP

Quieter Lives for 60's Militants, but Intensity of Beliefs Hasn't Faded By Daniel Wakin When explosives accidentally demolished a Greenwich Village town house 33 years ago, three young militants inside were killed, leaving two of their comrades to stagger out and into clandestine life. All were members of the Weathermen, a violent offshoot of 1960's radicalism. One of the survivors, Kathy Boudin, was granted parole last week for her role in a 1981 armored car robbery that left a Brink's guard and two police officers dead. The Boudin case was a compelling reminder of a turbulent era. But the other woman who escaped serves as another reminder, of how a once revolutionary band has dispersed into the rhythms of quieter lives and more peaceful, but not always more remorseful, idealism. The woman, Cathy Wilkerson, lives in Brooklyn. The mother of a grown daughter, she has spent the past two decades teaching mathematics in high schools and adult education programs. Many former Weathermen have taken up careers that they see as an extension of their political commitment: teaching, social work and advocating causes like environmental protection, care for AIDS patients and prisoners' rights. Today they proclaim the same ideals they held four decades ago, and sharply condemn American policies at home and abroad. "They sustain certain kinds of ideological and ethical commitments into their lives beyond the armed struggle," said Jeremy Varon, an assistant professor of history at Drew University in Madison, N.J. Members of the Weathermen began resurfacing in the late 1970's after the group dissolved in 1976. Ms. Wilkerson emerged from hiding and surrendered to the authorities in 1980. She spent 11 months in jail on explosives charges in the explosion of the town house, on West 11th Street, which was owned by her father. Now, she said, she is working on her memoirs, part of a new round of exploration of the Weather Underground, as it was later called by its leaders who found the original name sexist. Professor Varon is writing his own book about the group, which was the subject of "The Weather Underground," a well-received documentary film that opened in June. In a telephone interview on Friday, Ms. Wilkerson said it was the first time she had spoken to a reporter in about 20 years. "I'm re-entering the conversation," she said. "There are enormous problems that we predicted in the 60's, around the environment, about the wartime economy and permanent states of war, and there's a real crisis of leadership about those issues. Talking about patriotism is a way of distracting people as the world lumbers toward catastrophe." Speaking in guarded tones, Ms. Wilkerson would not discuss the explosion, saying she wanted to save it for her book. But she did say that the Weather Underground's legacy of violence must be seen in the context of the times. "We were way not the first," she said. "It was a mass phenomenon. In 1969, national liberation was sweeping the world and looked like it was going to be the main vehicle for ushering in popular governments. Now the wave of violence sweeping the world is reactionary." Like other former members, she said the movement made "mistakes," adding, "We were all young, under 25 for the most part." Conservative critics, including Prof. Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory University in Atlanta, have little patience for that view. "It would behoove people like that who did illegal, morally reprehensible things to have some sense of remorse," he said. Professor Klehr also took a dim view of the often stated account that after the town house explosion, the Weathermen resolved to take no lives, and that in the string of bombings that followed, no one was seriously injured. He points out that members have said the explosives at the town house were intended for an officers' dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey and for Butler Library at Columbia University. "The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence," he said. "I don't know what sort of defense that is." The Weathermen -- who took their name from the Bob Dylan lyric "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" -- originated as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society. The leaders came from reasonably well-off families, though several interviewed said a common portrait of them as privileged children of the rich was a caricature. Charismatic and articulate, they employed revolutionary jargon, advocated armed struggle and black liberation and began bombing buildings, taking responsibility for at least 20 attacks. Estimates of their number ranged at times from several dozen to several hundred. Their revolutionary language pursues them to this day, including the phrase attributed to Bill Ayers, a Weathermen founder, to "kill all the rich people." Then there were the words of Bernardine Dohrn, another founder, who seemed to delight in the Manson family murders before a Students for a Democratic Society crowd in 1969. (She has since said it was a joke.) Mr. Ayers is distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ms. Dohrn, his wife, teaches law at Northwestern University and is director of its Children and Family Justice Center. Together they raised Ms. Boudin's only child, her son, Chesa Boudin, who graduated from Yale in June and is a Rhodes scholar. Mr. Ayers returned to the public eye two years ago with the publication of a book, "Fugitive Days," about his life as a Weatherman. And while they have been among the most outspoken members of the group, the couple would not be interviewed because, they said, they did not want to jeopardize Ms. Boudin's pending release. For the same reason, other former members also said they did not want to talk publicly, or limited their comments. Four defendants in the Brink's case, two of them the former Weather Underground members Judith Clark and David J. Gilbert, are serving life prison terms with parole not scheduled for another half-century. Another significant figure in the Weathermen was Jeff Jones, one of a group of Ms. Boudin's friends and supporters who lobbied for her parole. A former reporter for an alternative newspaper, he is now communications director for an environmental lobbying group in Albany. He said he felt "absolute horror at the idiocy" of the Bush administration. In Iraq, he said, the president "has gone down the path of Vietnam." "We are now in a guerrilla war on foreign soil," Mr. Jones said. Linda S. Evans, who was granted clemency by President Bill Clinton for convictions related to bombings and released from prison in 2001 after serving nearly 16 years, lives in Santa Rosa, Calif. She received a Soros criminal justice fellowship from the Open Society Institute and works to restore civil rights to felons. "I'm trying to make things better in our society," she said in a telephone interview. "I just feel really strongly that the policies of our government are just anti-human at every level." Mark Rudd, the Students for a Democratic Society leader from Columbia, teaches mathematics at the Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute, a community college. He, too, has called the group's violence a "terrible mistake." An early organizer, Jonathan Lerner, wrote an article for The Washington Post Magazine last year about his Weathermen days in which he denounced the group as a "cult of leftist cynicism and violence" whose members amounted to "political terrorists." For most Weathermen, he wrote in the article, "the legal consequences were negligible." "We came to in a daze," he wrote. "We crawled off to lick our wounds, learn to be responsible grown-ups -- hard work, for the inexperienced -- and come to terms with what we had done." Brian Flanagan, who was acquitted of assault and attempted murder charges stemming from the 1969 "Days of Rage" violence that surrounded the Chicago Eight trial, owns a bar, the Night Cafe on the Upper West Side, which was the setting for several interviews filmed for the recent documentary "The Weather Underground," which was directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel. The film revived contacts among former members, Mr. Flanagan said, and prompted him and others to open up about the past in interviews and public forums. He said he recently met up with Ms. Wilkerson in the bar, which has become what he called "definitely a lefty bar." "There were a lot of things I had trouble coming to terms with over the years, and this has resurrected them," Mr. Flanagan said of the documentary which, he said, portrayed him as more rueful than he felt. "I was regretful over about 5 percent of what we did," he said. "I think 95 percent of what we did was great, and we'd do it again." And what was the 5 percent? The town house, Mr. Flanagan said. When pressed, he said he regretted both the deaths of the three Weathermen -- Ted Gold, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins -- and the plan to bomb the dance at Fort Dix and the library at Columbia, which could have taken lives. And life outside politics? "I run my business," he said. "I shoot pool, I drink wine. I'm old and fat." He also mentioned winning $23,000 as a contestant on "Jeopardy!" "God bless America," Mr. Flanagan said. BACK TO TOP   Another century finds more waterways passable to the public By Michael Virtanen The Schroon River winds for miles through private land on its way down into the lake, but the divide between Adirondack property owners and paddlers stands in high relief at the put-in. The state canoe access site off Route 74 - a parking area with narrow wooden steps to the river - is surrounded by signs that say Private. The adjacent land is posted against trespassing. "You actually have the right of way when you're on the water," said Bruce Robinson, who rents canoes at Maypine Marine. But, he added, you may not be able to get out and walk around on somebody's property. It's a thumbnail description of the current state of riparian rights, an old issue in the Adirondacks, with as many twists as the Schroon. Ten years ago, five paddlers set out to clarify those rights. The result was nine years of litigation, a decision from New York's highest court affirming rights of recreational canoeists and a settlement with a major landowner. Today, more of the state's rivers are open to the public. "The practical value of the case is really what everybody is crowing about," says Tom Kligerman, organizer of the June 15, 1991, canoe trip. He and four companions paddled 21 miles that day, 12 through land owned and posted by the Adirondack League Club. "Of course they claim they won. Both sides claim they won," says Mart Allen, a former state forest ranger who was general manager of the private fishing and hunting club at the time. Paddlers still have no right to cross private land to reach a river, to fish where the river passes through private land, or to camp alongside it, Allen said. In a settlement with the 50,000-acre club, paddlers can traverse the South Branch of the Moose River only from May 1 to Oct. 15, and when the water is 2.65 feet or higher. The Adirondack League Club was started in 1878, and its roughly 380 members pay taxes and dues, Allen said. "It's not cheap. ... It (the court decision) diminished their rights of being an exclusive club. It was a taking, as far as I'm concerned, without compensation." Allen, who was made a life member of the club on retirement in 1992, said the canoeists came specifically to provoke a confrontation, which mainly amounted to Allen asking if they knew they were on private land, asking them to leave and asking their names. Shortly after that, the two canoes flipped in Grindstone Rapids, within view of a small crowd of hunt club staff and members. Kligerman, a state Transportation Department engineer in Albany, headed the Adirondack Committee of the state chapter of the Sierra Club. With him went Carl Anderson and Lorraine Van Hatten, canoeists from the Utica area, journalist Jeff Jones, and Bob Wolff, a river guide. The four canoeists quickly righted their boats. Wolff, in a kayak, retrieved paddles, and they continued through Adirondack League Club property, later portaging around the 12-foot drop at Limekiln Falls, reaching state land again in late afternoon. "We expected them to do something. We had no idea we would be sued for $5 million," Van Hatten says. "That sort of threw us for a loop." Nancy Jones, a Troy attorney and paddler, defended them pro bono. The Adirondack Mountain Club and the state attorney general's office intervened on their side. Also in the boats was the influence of Paul Jamieson, author of the 1975 book "Adirondack Canoe Waters - North Flow." Years earlier, Kligerman had gone on outings with Jamieson. In Jamieson's view, all Adirondack waterways were publicly accessible a century earlier. But in the late 1800s, the wealthy bought large estates and posted boundaries against trespassing, blocking river access. The government was enlisted to enforce claims to privacy. Allen said canoeists indeed had been arrested and successfully prosecuted for trespassing at the Adirondack League Club. But in 1990 and 1991, the state Department of Environmental Conservation sent a memo to rangers and police agencies, advising them to stop making such arrests. That memo followed a 1988 law review article by John Humbach, Pace University associate dean of property law. The research on New York cases was done at the request of Charles Morrison, DEC director of land resources. It concluded that streams deemed navigable in fact are open as public highways, regardless of who owns the riverbed or banks. Even then, Kligerman said, 20 rivers in the Adirondack Park remained effectively closed by landowner postings. Meetings were held at the DEC with interested groups on how to clarify the right of navigation, he says, but attempts to get a bill through the state Legislature were fruitless. He decided to test the waters, expecting some sort of criminal court case. By the end of the civil case that actually followed, the damages claim against the five paddlers and the Sierra Club had been dismissed. A 1998 ruling from the state's top court, the Court of Appeals, noted "the right to portage on riparian lands." Jamieson, in his 90s, wrote to Kligerman that the state's purchase of Champion land and easements meanwhile liberated "the most-hoped-for rivers" of his cherished north flow, including the South Branch of the Grass River and the Middle Branch of the St. Regis, leaving access to only a few waterways blocked by private owners. Soon after the final settlement with the Adirondack League Club, the "Moose River five" went back in July 2000. On a weekday after a heavy rain, it took 10 hours instead of 12, they didn't see anyone else, and they knew what to expect from the rapids. "It was," Van Hatten said, "definitely easier." BACK TO TOP