The Missoula Peace Sign 20 Years Later
The Missoula Peace Sign is on the path to reunification. It will become permanently installed at the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center, at last giving substance to the legend and the long-held community vision that all nine pieces will be reassembled. Once unified, the Missoula Peace Sign will become a monument to resilience and a gathering place for people seeking a reflective moment.
The Missoula Peace Sign has never been one thing; at its creation it was two things in opposition. Structurally it was a telephone tower designed to reflect microwave signals from the Bitterroot Valley to a receiver in downtown Missoula. However, its looming white surface became the canvas for the loose and persistent ambitions of an anonymous group of activists who sometimes called themselves the Northside Liberation Front. What ensued was a decade-long contest of transformation.
The peace sign activists, armed with buckets of paint, rollers and climbing equipment, would hike the North Hills under the cover of darkness, scale the fence and the tower and paint the iconic symbol of peace on the huge white screen.
This act of guerrilla art would soon be followed by the dispatch of maintenance trucks up the mountain to repaint the screen white. As night follows day, the NSLF would again scale the tower and paint a huge rough circle with the center bisected by a “Sparrow Track”. Undetected in the act, this appeared to be a giant bit of conjuring in the light of the next morning.
Though it isn’t clear what ideology played a part in the minds of the guerrilla artists; the Peace Sign is a modern symbol for nuclear disarmament, to advocate for the end of war, and to raise consciousness for global ecology as part of the Environmental Movements Flag.
In the Missoula community, the symbol was adopted with pride by some, glared at with ire by others. The Peace sign was well situated, substantial and visible from everywhere in the East end of the valley. Countless stories relate the experience of noticing the repainted white screen only to happily note the reappearance of the Peace Sign on the screen at a later time. At some point in the 1990s the telephone company simply stopped sending trucks up the mountain to paint the screen white. The Peace Sign received its final decoration when a 2000 brush fire required a slurry bomber to drop a coat of pink fire retardant.
The final chapters of The Missoula Peace Sign would have been written in the Spring of 2001 when the telephone company moved to take the tower apart and junk it. In response, a community group sprung up, negotiated with the company, and took possession of the 9 panels that make-up the 27x27 foot screen. Dubbing themselves The Keepers of the Peace, they trucked the individual pieces to various private locations in Missoula, and swore to retain the panels in the community until the time that they could be reassembled into one unit.
That time has now come. From a variety of sheds and backyard shrines and one prominent location at Rockin Rudy’s World Headquarters, The Missoula Peace Sign will take form as the pieces are reassembled at Jeannette Rankin Peace Center. As a badge of peace to visitors, a symbol of pride in our community, and as a testament to the patient and strong heart of Missoula, the Missoula Peace Sign will stand tall and united after 20 years.
There are other celebrations planned throughout the year, as the sign is built, and as Covid-19 restrictions begin to lift in the warmer weather. Jeannette Rankin Peace Center would like to thank The Historical Museum at Fort Missoula for a generous grant for the restoration. Many other individual donors are making this dream a reality. Donations are still welcome on the JRPC website, and the Center is proud to be part of the Missoula Community Foundation’s Missoula Gives Fundraiser May 6-7, 2021.
Authors: Joyce Gibbs & Jim Parker | Peace Sign Committee