Ryan Chartrand
Click here to view an audio slideshow with “Peace Guy” Mike Leisure.
If you live in San Luis Obispo, you probably know who he is and likely don’t know anything about him.
If you see him at Farmers’ Market or on the corner of Santa Rosa and Higuera streets (his favorite place to be), you may wave or honk your horn as you drive by, but that’s the extent of your interaction.
He’s mysterious but not threatening, perhaps because of the sign he’s always holding with the peace symbol emblazoned on the front. A symbol with a history so intertwined with his life that it’s not surprising he’s displayed it every day since October 2002.
Sitting on the living room floor of his one-bedroom apartment near downtown San Luis Obispo, Mike Leisure details the events of his 45 years while brushing the brown, shoulder-length, twisted-up strands of hair off of his forehead and out of his salt-and-pepper-stubble beard.
His bed sits in the middle of the room, facing the television with a small collection of bobblehead dolls standing on top. A wood carving of the word “Peace” sits on a nightstand in the brightest corner of the room, and in another corner on another nightstand sits a black-and-white autographed photo of the Grateful Dead.
Facing the bed to the left of the television is a life-size cutout of Nicole Richie from “The Simple Life.” Leisure’s a big fan; in fact, he has the same image tattooed on his right forearm, and on the other side is a portrait of Tori Spelling.
Often switching from sitting cross-legged to leaning on his left arm, Leisure makes sure to mark the major political happenings, military conflicts, and natural or unnatural disasters associated with each event he recounts of his own history. In this way, he gives his life a context that is rich in the observance of a world in need of peace.
“It seemed as though the world I grew up in was a much better place than it is now,” Leisure said slowly in his highly inflected baritone voice.
He spent the first years of his life in New York and he can remember when “mom used to take (me and my younger sister) bike-riding in Central Park on a Saturday morning. During that time we were in the Vietnam War.”
He can also sharply recall his first introduction to the peace symbol.
It was 1969 or 1970, and he and his mother were eating pizza at Frank’s Pizza on 96th Street and Madison Avenue. “Amazingly enough, some lady came in with a peace symbol on the back of her denim jean pocket and my mom said, ‘Michael, peace sign.’ ”
Leisure, his younger sister and his mother moved out of New York because his mother said it was becoming a dangerous place, and in 1979, Leisure was living in Paoli, Pa. That’s when the Three Mile Island accident, a nuclear power plant meltdown, occurred.
“I remember thinking to myself how dangerous this is and I wondered why this happened,” he said.
In 1980, inspired by the Three Mile Island accident and a star-studded concert for the benefit of solar energy, Leisure became an anti-nuclear activist. And that being what is now understood as the peace symbol was originally adopted by anti-nuclear weapon campaigners in Britain, it seems fitting that this is the path that his life took. However, Leisure didn’t fly the peace symbol himself quite yet.
Instead, while living in Dover, Del. in 1982, Leisure made an orange T-shirt with the words “No Nukes” printed on it. It was the first time he had publicly displayed a message of protest.
The peace sign would resurface later, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when Leisure was living in Arlington, Va. He begins his description of this part of his life by first saying that George Bush, Sr., was president and that the United States was involved in “what started out to be Operation Desert Shield. Then it turned into Operation Desert Storm.”
Leisure said he spent much of his time in Lafayette Park, which people called “peace park.”
Out of work and not in school, he would stay in the park during the day “holding the fort down” at its vigil, which is famous for being a gathering place for anti-war and anti-nuke proponents and their protest signs – many displaying the peace symbol.
He was unaware that about a decade later, the symbol would become his message to the world.
Living in San Luis Obispo in 2002, Leisure said he saw people starting to speak out against the possible invasion of Iraq. “Right away inside my brain a bell went off, big bell, humongous bell. I started thinking, ‘Déj… vu, I have been here before.’ ”
It was then that he decided to carry with him the peace symbol every day, everywhere he went except church.
Leisure feels it necessary to make clear that he began protesting only the invasion of Iraq. “I did not believe in protesting against the Afghanistan thing because I believed we had to get bin Laden. He’s a son of a bum.”
He also said the reaction to his peace-symbol-touting has been mostly positive, especially from military personnel.
“You should see the amount of young Marines that really love me . They honk at me and they go, ‘Right on!’ ”
Asked if he has encountered any negative responses, Leisure responded, “sometimes people like to flip me the bird or cuss at me and call me every dirty name in the book.”
He then described one incident where “one idiot” pulled down his pants and stuck his “rear end” against the window of a passing van.
“I just stood there like, hey buddy, you’re making an ass of yourself because you are an ass.”
Leisure said that at first, these occurrences bothered him, but then friends told him, “Try not to let their ugliness and rudeness destroy you, because that ugliness and rudeness is inside of them and you don’t have to let them formulate the beautiful person who you have become.”
He then added, “It takes a lot of courage to be there letting someone flick you the bird and call you all these wicked names and you just have to stand there like, ‘Hey buddy, peace on you.’ ”
And retaliation is out of the question for Leisure. He said that if one strikes back, not only are they stooping to the offender’s level, “but you’re destroying the purpose of what you are really trying to pass on.”
What exactly is he trying to pass on?
“I hope really to try to see if I can make a difference by showing people that we need to have peace on all levels,” he said.
With that in mind and peace symbol in hand, everyday he’ll be there on Santa Rosa and Higuera streets, or walking up and down Farmers’ Market, with a smile on his face, listening to the calls and honks of supporters and brushing off the curses and gestures of others.
“I love what I do so much,” he said. “This is my life; this is my passion.”