Reno's Pro-Life Andy Anderson --
as the first part of this
two-part series reported -- is a man so earnest for his
cause that nine years ago he legally changed his name,
and so ardent for that cause, he had tattooed on the back
of his hands the words "God is Pro Life." If you
want to begin to understand his earnestness and ardency
-- which have brought him warm hand-addressed cards and
letters from Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, and the Pope's
secretary, in behalf of the Pontiff -- it helps if you go
back in time, almost 70 years. Back to the early part of 1927, when
the father he would never know deserted his mother, his
older brother and himself -- before he was even born. Then to 1930-31, when his mother
died young, leaving him, a three-year-old, and his
six-year-old brother wards of his grandmother and
grandfather in Savannah, Georgia. And then to 1932, when the
grandfather also died, leaving the widowed, poor,
grandmother to rear the boys alone. You also need consider what else
fate had in store for the youngest Anderson boy, then
named "Charles F. Anderson. " One eye never developed. It not only
gave him blurry, deficient, vision, but its muscles were
wayward. It was an eye, he says, that "used to play
hide and seek behind my nose." The other kids, naturally, called
him "cross-eyes." And there were his ears -- large and
sticking prominently out from the sides of his head. So
he was also called "Dumbo the elephant." Finally, there was the general cast
of his other features, some of which would lead people to
suspect Indian blood, or something that -- in Savanna,
Georgia -- could have been seen as even worse. A cross-eyed, Dumbo-eared,
no-father, no-mother little boy who didn't look quite
'white,' growing up amid the attitudes of the deep South
in the 1930s and '40s. But what may be most interesting
about all these factoids, is simply that someone else
has to assemble them -- out of bits and pieces to be
found in Anderson's narratives regarding other topics,
and other, later, times in his life. Because Pro-Life Andy Anderson
doesn't see his early life in these terms. He sees it,
now, in the context of an immense and amazing good
fortune, given from the hand of a beneficent God. "I've got a lot to be grateful
for," is a sentence that recurs often in his speech.
Another is, "God amazes me." For example, led by his older
brother, and out of the sight of Anderson's aging
grandmother, as a boy he started getting in trouble
early. "I was a juvenile delinquent
growing up," says Anderson, adding that often he
would get caught, while his brother, who had put him up
to it, would not. Eventually he was being interned, he
says, in Savannah's equivalent of Reno's Wittenberg Hall.
But about the third time he was in what he calls
"juvenile jail," something fateful happened. "A friend of mine -- I don't
know who she knew or what the system was -- had me
transferred to a Catholic orphanage, 'cause she was
afraid the 'big boys' would teach me to be worse than I
already was. "And I was on the way. I was
learning things that I wouldn't want to even repeat
now." Anderson explains that his religious
background, up to then, had been motley: his mother had
been a Baptist, his grandmother was an Episcopalian, and
the two boys, for some reason, had attended services with
the Presbyterians. "So when I went to the Catholic
orphanage," he says, "I learned about the
Catholic religion, and I didn't give up anything good and
true that I had, I just added on to what I had. "I was very fortunate that
being a bad boy [had put] me into good company." If he hadn't been put the home --
St. Joseph's Orphanage, in Wassaw, Georgia, outside of
Savannah -- says Anderson, he probably would be in prison
by now. "Because the nuns taught me
love and kindness and told me that 'No matter of what the
world says about you, or thinks about you, God loves
you.' So, I might be the homeliest person in the world,
but it's what I am on the inside that counts." The nuns' words -- and actions --
fell like rain on a dry, parched plain. Because the homely young Anderson --
before being placed in St. Joseph's -- had been
developing attitudes toward his fellow man that Americans
in the 1990s have come to see all too often. Since "coloreds" were
required to sit in the back of Savannah buses, for
example, Anderson would get aboard a bus and seat himself
in the very last row still unoccupied, in front of any
blacks already seated on the bus. Because colored people weren't
allowed to sit in front of whites, any blacks who now got
on the bus had to stand, holding the strap. It was a malevolent, petty thing for
the homely boy to do. But it was the kind of
"satisfactions" he was exploring at the time.
Looking up at the standing blacks, he will tell you now,
he would silently gloat in the sense of power and control
that discomforting others was giving him. So for the boy who now found himself
in the orphanage, hearing that for even "the
homeliest person in the world" it's "what I am
on the inside that counts," was a saving message in
more ways than one. And the clincher was the caring way
the nuns treated him. So it was then that Anderson began
to take religion seriously. He was just 11 years old. The first event that really put him
on the anti-abortion path, he says, was a couple of years
later. Becoming a teenager, he was transferred to a
Catholic vocational school back in Savannah, his
hometown. 
"I got into some books there,
and I read about this woman called Margaret Sanger. The
word 'abortion' didn't even exist in my vocabulary back
then, but this woman wanted to have birth control to get
rid of the Jews, the Italian immigrants and the Negroes,
which she said were 'the weeds on the face of the
earth.'" Anderson, by that time, had received
instruction in Catholic birth control doctrine, of
course, but Sanger's eugenics ideology, he says, came as
a personal shock. It seemed something leveled directly
against his very own existence. Not only did he look like
an eugenicist's case argument, but fate had essentially
left him to grow up like a weed. "There was something about this
woman that just scared me -- she was so evil in her
plans," he says today, pointing out that Margaret
Sanger, who went on to found the Planned Parenthood
organization for similar reasons, also advocated various
Hitlerian doctrines, such as sterilizing
"genetically inferior races," segregating
"morons, misfits and [the] maladjusted," and
rehabilitative concentration camps for inferior Blacks,
Hispanics, poor whites and Catholics. So at about 13 or 14 years of age,
Anderson felt called upon to write out one of his first
rhymes, the name of which was Birth Control: There's a woman whose name is
Margaret Sanger. What she does is a shame; I think we
should hang her; ("I had to make it rhyme,
anyway," he says.) She's killing our nation with her
birth-control plan; To stop procreation every day that
she can; The way thing's are going, she's
doing her job well; If her plans keep going, things will
soon be pell-mell; It should be unlawful for her and
her gabies To set us off of having any babies. Where would our nation be if babies
were not born; Chop the family tree and we will be
forlorn. "I hadn't even had a date with
a girl yet," says Anderson, "and I'm writing
something like this." It was "because there was
something about her that impressed me that if she would
succeed, a children-less future would really
happen." The whole issue hit him almost like
a prophetic call, he says, and he wasn't even, at that
time, "aware of the monstrosity of the abortion
part." "I thought it was just a matter
of keeping babies from being conceived in the first place
-- what we call 'birth control.' Then later, they came
out with the abortion business, because, she said, it was
too early to talk about abortion 'cause that would scare
people away." When World War II broke out,
Anderson was in the Catholic orphanage; two years later
he was allowed to go back home to live. He got a part time job at a grocery
store, went to school, and helped take care of his
grandmother, who was living on a pension. When he was 17, wanting to follow
his older brother into the war, Anderson lied about his
age and tried to volunteer for the draft. However, he failed his eye test. Then, as soon as he really did turn
18, he registered for the draft a second time, and was
turned down once more. "So that was in '44," says
Anderson. "I was still going to high school -- a
commercial high school, to learn how to use a typewriter
and stuff like that." But he still wanted to join up, and
so soon Anderson was again talking to people on the draft
board . "I said, 'Look, the war's over,
[it was then 1945] and I can relieve somebody else, even
if I sit behind a desk and all. "So they made arrangements for
me to report for the third time to Fort McPherson,
Georgia, to take my physical. "I was so sure that this time I
was going to get in because, why would they send me when
I had been turned down two times before? "I quit school, I quit my
part-time job, I told my friends goodbye, and ... went to
Fort McPherson, in Atlanta, Georgia, and for the third
time I took the physical. "They turned me down for the
third time. I was devastated. "I said, 'Dear Lord, what am I
gonna do?' I mean, the Lord's got a sense of humor -- he
likes to kind of play with us for a while. "So they gave me my train
ticket to go back to Savannah, Ga., from Atlanta. But I
didn't use it. I stayed in the barracks overnight, and
slept in one of the empty bunks there. "I said, 'I've got to see
someone, I've got to do something. I can't go back.' Anderson went over to the chapel. "And I knelt down, in front of
our Lord, and his blessed mother, and I had tears
streaming on my face." He prayed to God, says Anderson,
that "if for some reason or another it's going to
bad for my soul, no matter how much I want to get in,
don't let me get in." Finally, in assent to whatever
God's will turned out to be, he ended the prayer. "So I went ahead and wiped my
eyes and got up and left the chapel," he says. "And I got out the door and I
was in a little hallway and I hear a voice say, 'What's
the matter, young man?' "And I turned to my right where
this door was open, and there [was] a chaplain sitting
behind his desk, and I guess he saw me being 
this upset. So I went ahead and told
him."
The chaplain wrote something on a
piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and said,
"Take this over to Personnel."
"I said 'Okay," and I kind
of trudge into the personnel section and hand it to the
guy behind the counter.
"He goes out of sight and comes
back with what they call a '201 file,' a great big brown
file that had on it the name: 'Anderson -- Rejected.'
"He took a crayon or something
and lined out the word 'Rejected' and stamped on there,
'Accepted.'
"I was in!"
Two days later, Anderson -when asked
if he wanted to -- volunteered for the Army Air Corps.
"So I was discharged from the
Army after two days and re-enlisted in the Army Air
Corps, [which later] became the Air Force."
By then it was March of 1946.
Anderson would serve the next 20 years in the Air Force,
working usually as either a chaplain's assistant or a
personnel clerk. He was twice given the commendation
medal twice for his work in personnel administration.
If gratitude to the nuns who taught
him love helped make Anderson a life-long Catholic,
gratitude to the Air Force helped make him a career man.
That problem eye and the Dumbo ears
were, again, what started it.
At the time, between 1947 and 1949,
Anderson was in Hawaii, in his first overseas assignment.
Because of headaches, he'd gone in to see an Air Force
doctor, a "Dr. King."
"I was just joking around about
my eye, and I kept looking down, and it kind of disturbed
him that I wouldn't look him straight in the eye.
"Well, I was self-conscious; I
didn't like people staring at my crossed-eye. So [Dr.
King] made arrangements to operate on my left eye.
"He said, 'I can't help your
vision, but you won't be so self-conscious about it.' So
he did pull the muscle over and straightened the eye out.
"So I was joking and said,
'Gee, how about my ears, ya know?'
"Sure enough," says
Anderson, "he made arrangements with a plastic
surgeon and had the ears pinned back.
"So out of gratitude, more than
anything else, I stayed in the military for 20 years --
just to pay them back, for being so good to me. Because
being an orphan and ... with a grandmother who was a
widow, I'd never have been able to afford it."
The final chapter in creating the
Pro-Life Andy Anderson people in Reno know today -- sort
of a rapid-fire-versifying, cowboy-hatted version of an
Old Testament prophet -- began in 1964.
That was when Anderson married a
Boston widow with a 9-year-old son. It was two years
before Anderson was to complete his 20-year Air Force
career.
"In the service I had joined a
Catholic correspondence club and met a Catholic girl by
mail," he says. "When I was stationed in North
Dakota and she lived in Massachusetts, we sent pictures
to each other and everything."
Anderson eventually took a furlough
to go meet her and her family, and, he says, ultimately
fell in love.
It was in 1969 that the new family
moved to Reno. However, just six years later, in 1975,
Anderson's wife had a stroke.
Suddenly she was unable to walk or
talk. For the next eight and a half years, until her
death in 1984, Anderson would take care of his helpless
wife.
But 1975 was a watershed year in two
other respects also. It was the year Anderson learned
about the new reality in America -- and Reno -- of
abortions. It was also the year the entire subject became
personal.
"I was reading the paper,"
says Pro-Life, "and it said something about some
people were having a protest in front of a local abortion
mill. And I said, 'Well, what do they mean by
that?'"
At the time, he says, the word
'abortion' meant the same to him as a miscarriage.
When he was told, "Oh, that's
where they kill babies," he didn't believe it.
"I couldn't comprehend
it," says Anderson. "So I went down to the
abortion mill on Mill Street -- when it was located there
-- and about 20-22 people were marching up and down in
front.
"So I figured, well, if they're
killing babies in that building, I'll join these people.
Well, I just got in this little formation and walking up
and down with one of these signs, and some guy came up
and handed me a brochure and it says 'Life or Death.' And
it showed pictures of babies who were actually killed by
an abortion -- by insulin, by curettage, by GNC. And I
said, 'My God, those are real babies. That's not a blob
of tissue. You could see heads and legs.'
"So when I saw these pictures,
it hit me like a sledgehammer and I knew what abortion
really was. I just rebelled against it naturally.
"Because that could have been
me, if they'd had it legal back when my father deserted
my mother. So, just as I objected to that birth control
woman, Margaret Sanger, just on the principle of
preventing my conception in the first place, it was even
more horrible to me to think of killing babies after
they'd already been conceived."
Relatively speaking, however,
Anderson says he was still "more or less
objective" on the issue.
"I wasn't too active. I was
taking care of my wife."
That was soon to change.
"And then my stepson had gotten
involved with a girl, and he came to me one day and
wanted to borrow the money to get an abortion for his
girl friend.
"It was like he hit me in the
face with a sledge hammer. I said, 'What do you mean,
give you money for an abortion? I'm not going to give you
any money to kill a baby. And I didn't order him out of
the house, I just said, 'I can't face you with something
like that.'
"What made me feel even more
guilty was, I had given him a truck and a chainsaw to
learn to be independent and cut firewood so he could
learn to take care of himself.
"And he used that as the
collateral to borrow the money to get the abortion for
his girl friend."
Pro-Life Andy Anderson is choking
up, eyes starting to glisten, in his distress.
"What happened was that he had
given ...
"What happened was ... one of
his girl friend's girl friends had driven her over to
Oakland, California to the abortion mill there...
"I got the phone number of the
abortion mill she was in [and] got hold of her on the
telephone -- I won't use her real name -- let's say..
"Betty, please.. I'll adopt the
baby, I'll give you and my son a free home... Anything.
Just get out of there, please.
"At the time, my wife was in
the bedroom with her stroke. I had an extension on my
phone, so I was in the kitchen. I got on my knees in the
kitchen, and said 'Dear God, please, don't let me be too
late.
"Anyway, she couldn't even talk
straight. They had her so doped up. She said "Iii
donnn't knowww. They gave me something and I can hardly
stand up...
"I said, 'I don't care, call a
cab, get out of there. I made arrangements for you at a
hospital over in San Francisco.. and just go over there
and tell the pastor I'm going to take care of you until
everything is accomplished.
"She said, 'Iii donnn't knowww.
I think it's too late' or something and she hung up.
"She went through with the
abortion, and I can't prove it was suicide, but not too
long afterwards, she killed herself in a single car
accident out on the highway. Only 20 years old, in 1979.
"Not only did I lose a future
grandchild, but I lost a future daughter-in-law.
"I said, 'Dear God, what can I
do." I felt like I was a failure in my own family. I
couldn't even protect my own unborn grandchild. What can
I do to help others?
"So I said, 'Dear God, use me
-- any way you see fit. I don't care, I'll crawl on my
knees through the middle of town.
"It was just a sort of
expression," says Anderson, laughing. But it soon
seemed that was exactly what God wanted.
"So I put a notice in the
paper, in January, on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade
decision, that Andy Anderson is going to crawl on his
knees from the Pioneer Theater down Mills Street, past
the local abortion mill, all the way to Washoe Med, as an
act of atonement asking God to have mercy on our country
and to beg people to stop killing their babies ...
"So.. I did .. and [laughing]
it was winter-time, and there's still ice and snow on the
sidewalk ... and I don't know what I'd got myself into,
and if I'd known ahead of time, I probably would have
chickened out, you might say. So I went ahead and I
crawled on my knees all the way.
"I was carrying an
anti-abortion sign which I could use as a sort of a
support, so I wouldn't fall down flat on my face...and as
soon as I got there I just collapsed.
"My knees were sore for a month
after that. I still have scars, because I did it again,
about three years later."
Rolling up his pant leg, he points
to his knee and shows where the skin broke open.
"But it made people stop. And I
said, 'If only one life is saved, it's worth it."
Personally, Anderson also felt it might help atone for
the loss of his own unborn grandchild.
So that was when Anderson began to
develop what he now calls his 'persona.' -- the panoply
of black and red costumery, crucified baby dolls, signs
covered with anti-abortion doggerel, old cars with nearly
every square inch covered with bumper stickers, garish
ads in the newspapers and Calvary-flavored media events,
that Reno has come to know over the last 20 years.
Today Pro-Life Anderson is 69 years
old, and -- knowing his life could come to an end at any
moment -- is trying to get his affairs in order.
Because his older brother died a
year ago January, from lung cancer, Pro-Life knows that
he could follow at any time. He is making arrangements so
that, when that happens, he will buried back in Georgia,
next to his brother and his mother.
That is the mother who died about 65
years ago, when Anderson was just three. Of her, he has
only one memory. It is archetypal.
"I was in a nursery, and
remember this old model T Ford, with my grandfather
behind the wheel...
"And I can just remember coming
out of the building...
... and going down the sidewalk, and
my mother's arms are open like that.." -- he
demonstrates --
"..and I'm just going to my
mother's arms,
...and they're open..."