Another long, busy, successful day in Vermont. Thankfully it was a gorgeous day in the 50’s. We all got up at 6, showered, dressed, and were out the door at 7. We three (Dave Varney, Hardy Machia, & I), drove down to Rutland for the day. We had a 9 o’clock appointment with the Tim Philban Show on WSYB radio.

Hardy was out of milk, so I stopped at a Mobil station just before we got on 7 South. God bless my parents for the wonderful gift of a speedpass. I need to give them a call soon. Most of the length, 7 was a two lane road running past some pretty mountains. Trust me on this, Vermont looks much nicer during the day. And especially when its not raining buckets. We were just a smidge late, so I opened up THABOAT a bit passing cars on our humble 2 laner.

We still ended up getting there about 5-10 minutes late. It was alright though. Hardy informed me that the host, Tim, is pretty conservative, and so was the audience. We walked inside and were seated in the studio pretty quick. Or I was at least. We talked for a bit while Tim was covering the news. Hardy had my write out my name phonetically for Tim, but it didn’t help, he still came over (during a commercial break) to check the pronunciation with me. He then invited Hardy to come to another booth/mic and say a few things.

Tim knew Hardy (just like everyone else in the state) and turned to him first when the drinking age segment started. Small talk mostly, just inquiring as to what Hardy had been up to since his run for Governor. Hardy pushed NYRA, and mentioned how he got involved and how the chapter started. Then he turned to me and got into the meat of the show.

The host was supportive of lowering the drinking age, but the audience decidedly wasn’t. That’s a shame. Though I do suspect that the many people who agreed didn’t feel a need to call in, only the ones who really couldn’t stand me bothered to pick up the phone. I held my own, but the host really tried to push me. He asked what other issues NYRA works on, and I mentioned lowering the voting age to 16. He then immediately insisted then we must support lowering the drinking age to 16 as well. I tried to keep the focus on the current bill, which is to 18, or give some other nice answer, but he wouldn’t have it and insisted a straight yes or no. I said yes.

So now, unfortunately, the show often became about us promoting lowering the drinking age to 16 instead of 18 which is what this was all really about. *sigh* One caller, a very irrate woman, called up just to yell at me. She didn’t pull punches, I was a fool, our ideas were stupid, and I should go home and never come back. What amazes me about this woman is how much we actually agreed. She said she supports lowering it to 18, and said that she was raised in a family where drinking was allowed at home and she raised her kids that way. I tried to tell her that the current law doesn’t allow that, and we’d like to change it so she could keep doing what she does. But she just shouted me down. I’ve never seen a more hostile, more inflamatory, more insulting supporter.

The other callers disagreed, but they (mostly) listened to what I had to say. Go figure. I held my own, and the host said he was impressed with me. He mentioned at one point the ACLU, and how they were discussing filing a lawsuit to stop youth from paying taxes because it was taxation without representation. He asked if that’d be something we’d support. I told him we prefer, at this point, to go through the legislature and win the support of the people first. Nothing conservatives hate more than “activist judges” so I successfully navigated that trap. Overall it went well.

Next we were off to meet with Alexis and Rio. They left DC last night around 7-8 pm ish and drove through the night. We were trading phone calls off and on yesterday with directions and such. As soon as we woke up this morning, we called to let them know to meet us in Rutland. They were still on the road, and wouldn’t be able to make it to Grand Isle before we left. So we saved them some driving and they were able to get somewhere sooner and get some sleep. Rio definitely needed it.

We met them at a shopping center. It was great to see Alexis and Rio up here. Finally we have a Horde. We talked with Alexis a bit while Rio slept. Then we went off to try and find the Rutland newspaper and get them our press kit. But we couldn’t find them, so just gave up. We did find a copy of the Burlington Free Press though that ran the Associated Press story on our press conference yesterday. I picked up a copy.

We went back to Alexis & Rio and decided to split up the colleges for the day. Its so great to have enough people to do that. Dave and I went to St. Joseph College and Hardy, Alexis & Rio went to Castleton State College. We split up the literature and lobby cards. I followed Rio to St. Joseph College. Hardy called ahead to our contact there. We had reserved a table there ahead of time. I think Heavenly did it, she’s been great reserving tabling space at schools. When we got to SJC, Hardy/Rio/Alexis left, and Dave and I got to work.

Our contact greeted us in the parking lot, he was very friendly. He said we had the best place for tabling, very high traffic. Wonderful. He led us there, and found us some chairs and some tape. We were inside, I think it was a student center, but there wasn’t a whole lot there. A couple vending machines, and a “school store” with less merchandise than my high school store.

We set up the table, and soon we had a bunch of visitors all from the school’s corrections school. Most of them were supportive and filled out the cards. Good to get future jailers on our side I suppose. After that it was just a trickle for the next hour or two. Most of the people saw were the same folks walking back and forth. It was terribly slow. If this was a high traffic area, I’m thinking the low traffic areas are covered with dust and cobwebs.

After an hour or two I figured we were done. I called Hardy, and it seemed everything was going great for them over at Castleton, so he gave me directions over to Green Mountain State - another college in the area. Hardy wasn’t sure we’d get down there, but seeing how dead St. Joes was, we had plenty of time. Dave and I grabbed a bit of lunch at this great gas station deli on the way, and then arrived at Green Mountain.

While quiet at first, it definitely proved to be a much livelier school than St. Joseph College. We didn’t have a table reserved or anything, so Dave and I split up and just wandered around campus accosting random students too curious or not clever enough to avoid us. We did well. Much better than SJC (cause this place actually had students). Everyone was really supportive. Better yet, several folks who weren’t supportive, changed their mind.

It was great, I asked one guy, someone on staff, if he supported lowering the drinking age. He quickly said no, and kept on walking. About 15 minutes late the same guy walks back up to me with a bit of smirk on his face, and says “ya know, I thought about it, and guess what - I DO support lowering the drinking age. Where do I sign?” Another woman I approached said she doesn’t support lowering it, and after talking to me a bit said “Well congrats, I just changed my position. I’ll sign it.”

I hung out with some guys playing wiffle ball in front of one of the dorms. Sadly I wasn’t invited to join them, but nearly all of them joined. One of them was sneaking a beer out of a cooler hidden up on the steps when I approached him. A friend of his laughed, “hell yea he supports lowering the drinking age, look at him!” He signed. I pushed the membership option (still unpaid though) on folks and a lot checked off the box indicating they wanted to be NYRA-Vermont members. We stuck around till 3:30 pm.

All in all it was a success for us. Not as fast and furious as Norwich, but we each had time for some one-on-one conversations with people, which was nice. I had an opportunity to really present some ideas to folks, especially those who were on the fence initially. We signed up about 75 at Green Mountain and another 25 or so at St. Joseph.

We headed back, and I spotted a Wendy’s. Ah-ha! Civilization at last! No more wasting money on high priced food that was good for me, I could clog my arteries and fill my stomach for just a dollar a burger. Sweeet. In the drive thru window I asked the teller girl at the window if she supported lowering the drinking age. She enthusiastically did, and signed the card. Her manager wasn’t quite convinced, but I had a nice discussion on the issue with all the Wendy’s staff in the drive-thru. It was cool.

Then I went next door to Mobil to get a drink. They were much less supportive. They all wanted pretty much to raise all the ages to 25. Lovely. Stupid Mobil. I dropped some flyers off at the grocery store across the street, then we hit the road to get back to Grand Isle. We were going to meet Hardy/Rio/Alexis there. It was a two hour drive back. I was quite sleepy, but thankfully avoided nodding off.

I’m seriously not getting enough sleep, and I’m not one with much experience of late with going without. For example right now its 12:30 am, and I’ve got to be out of the house by 8:30. May seem easy for y’all, but that kills me. Of course I do have a great sense of accomplishment with how busy we are. At the moment I’ve been working for the last 17.5 hours straight without much break. Heck even getting food at Wendy’s ended up being work. I haven’t kept this pace in… well ever. Lets hope I can keep it up.

Back at the house I learned that Hardy/Alexis/Rio got 250 of the cards signed at Castleton State College. Totally put us to shame. Good thing I didn’t go for that idea I had of offering a prize to the team who ended up with the most sigs. They totally schooled us. Hardy rocks. But 350 for one day is a great take.

I relaxed for a bit with Alexis and Rio, and played X-Men on my Genesis I brought up for a bit. Though in truth I spent more time plugging the damn thing in than actually playing. Oh well. Hardy made us some spagetti, and then Alexis and Rio watched some TV and fell asleep real early. They needed it though, they had driven all night without sleep last night.

Dave and I got to work entering in the information we all collected at the schools today. I chatted with a bunch of folks, and checked out a pretty house for sale. Jay and Ken had some new developments in our schedule. A student group invited me to come speak to them tomorrow morning at 10:30 (thanks for commenting on the blog!), and a new NYRA-Vermont member is going to help out Ken and I tomorrow afternoon. All good news.

Dave and I amazingly made it through all 350 people tonight. It took us a few hours, but Dave just finished like 20 minutes ago. Consider yourself lucky Vermont, when Dave and I go recruiting in DC it usually takes us weeks (or months….) to enter in all the information. We had it all in tonight. Then I wrote my daily update, and have now, at last, finished it. Off to bed! Yay! Alexis, Rio, and Dave have already found their way to a mattress, so now its my turn. Joy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 30th, 2005 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Personal, Youth Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.