MALOY, Iowa -- Brian TERRELL says he wasn't looking for a fight when he and his family came to this rural hamlet eight years ago to start a Catholic Worker community.

"I don't see myself as confrontational," he says, although he has been arrested about 30 times for demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience.

"But neither does he back down when someone disagrees with him," Betsy KEENAN, his wife, adds.

It was TERRELL's quest for access to public records that led to a rift between the City Council and "Strangers and Guests," official name of the community, which includes TERRELL and KEENAN and their two children. Clara and Elisha; Don and Veronica RAY and their son, Wendell; and Humility Sr. Bernadine PIEPER, a pastoral associate at Immaculate Conception Church in Maloy. The small community constitutes nearly 25 percent of Maloy's total population.

Although most Catholic Workers houses are in urban areas, TERRELL says rural communities are in keeping with the philosophy of its founder: "Peter MAURIN's vision was to reintegrate people with the land. A soup kitchen is what most Catholic Workers end up doing, but that's not how we're going to build the new society out of the shell of the old."

For several decades, many Maloy families have been so squeezed economically that they had to move away, forced to sell out to agribusiness. But when Maloy was incorporated as a city in 1909, it was a thriving place, with banks, a hotel, a stockyard, barbers, farmers, dentists and several churches, including Immaculate Conception. A priest comes at least once a week to offer Mass, and PIEPER manages the non-sacramental affairs of the parish. TERRELL chairs the parish council.

TERRELL's problems with the City Council began when he and KEENAN were keeping bees and a sheriff's deputy visited their farmhouse, apparently in response to a complaint. "He was friendly and suggested we check the ordinances," TERRELL recalls. But seeing the ordinances wasn't that simple.

When he asked City Clerk Betty CONLEY, wife of then-Major Ron CONLEY, she replied that they were not available for public viewing. "She said she would tell us if we'd broken one. I asked if we'd broken one, and she said no, so we dropped that one for a couple of years."

At least one former council member says troubles began six years ago during the city' centennial celebration. TERRELL and KEENAN, both peace activists, had decorated their house with a banner reading "Farms -- Not Arms."

To TERRELL, the message was pro-farm and antiwar, but City Council member Leland DUGAN saw the banner as a protest against farmers. He told a local newspaper that some townspeople had to be talked out of tearing the banner down.

As time passed, there was more friction between the council and the Catholic Worker community, this time involving a piece of church-owned property where PIEPER had reestablished a stand of grasses and flowers native to the mostly vanished Iowa prairie. The council tried to get a weed ordinance passed to get rid of the project, but gave it up as too difficult to enforce in a city made up largely of vacant land.

During regular city mowing operations along public rights-or-way, workers cut a 14-foot swath that included part of the restoration project. TERRELL objected, claiming the road bordering the restoration planting was not city property.

"The rumor went all over that we wanted to close the roads."

At one point, TERRELL says, he was refused permission to examine the minutes of previous council meetings in regard to the dispute. When he insisted on his right to examine public records, the council members finally allowed him to do so, but stood by and made hostile comments as he did so.

Members of the Catholic Worker community weren't the only people in Maloy who experienced difficulties with the council. Councilman Larry OVERHOLSER, a farmer, quit the council when he couldn't find any support there for his plan to hold a tractor pull on city property. The night he quit, he walked up the till to TERRELL's home and suggested Brian might want to run for the seat he had just vacated.

TERRELL was the only person to declare candidacy for the seat, but the incumbents supported a write-in campaign for Carol DAVISON, wife of one of the council members. In a special election in August 1992, TERRELL was elected to the five-member council by a vote of 11-10.

Soon after his election, TERRELL sought information from the other council members about unexplained legal fees totaling $416 paid to David CHRISTENSEN, an attorney who handled the town's legal affairs. TERRELL was told that part of the bill was for the "investigation of an individual."

CHRISTENSEN declined to provide details on the grounds that disclosure would violate the privacy of his client, in this case the council as constituted prior to TERRELL's election.

At the January council meeting, Mayor CONLEY claimed the investigation was related to some "threatening" letters city officials had received. The contents of the letters have never been made public, but The Mount Ayr Record-News, published in the county seat, quoted CONLEY as saying they had been turned over to the FBI. The newspaper also reported that the county sheriff's office had confirmed that complaints of threatening letters had been received, but that it had happened in 1991.

At the March meeting, as TERRELL continued to press for disclosure, the council voted 4-1 to disincorporate the town and to seek information on what steps the town needed to take to do so.

TERRELL, in a letter to the editor of the Record-News, wrote, "I do not believe that those who voted to disincorporate our city are acting responsibly or in the interest of the town. It does not appear that they represent anyone but themselves. Their efforts will fail and our town will go on into the future. I pray that all involved will give up the fears and prejudices that keep us from being the people and the community we ought to be."

The other council members and officials responded with a letter of their own, defending their actions and claiming that disincorporation had been discussed at length by them previously, although not with TERRELL.

Their letter, published at the time of the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas, claimed that townspeople were asking, "What kind of cult is getting established in Maloy?"

Alan SMITH, a columnist for the Record-News, advised against labeling the Catholic Worker movement, with its loose organization structure, a cult. "It's true that Brian TERRELL has been arrested in the United States, Central America and Israel in demonstration," he wrote. "The demonstrations have always been to stand between weapons and their victims or to disrupt the manufacture and distribution of weapons," TERRELL notes.

In April 1993, all the council members except TERRELL resigned, along with the CONLEYS, and someone put a padlock on the door to City Hall, making the town records inaccessible. The complicated disincorporation process was left hanging.

When TERRELL, the only remaining council member, asked the former city clerk for the key to the building, she told him she had given it to attorney CHRISTENSEN. TERRELL responded by placing a second padlock on the door, and the government of Maloy ground to a halt.

An entirely new council was voted in and TERRELL was elected major with a 14-0 vote. The resigned council members and their families didn't vote. The outcome of the election was no surprise, TERRELL says: "A secret ballot gets to be a kind of fiction here. You literally can count the votes you have on your fingers."

Last August, CHRISTENSEN confirmed what TERRELL had suspected all along -- that he had been paid by the council to investigate TERRELL when TERRELL was seeking election. CHRISTENSEN said City Clerk Betty CONLEY and a council member had expressed concern over whether TERRELL was a convicted felon. The investigation indicated he was not. TERRELL's record of arrests in demonstrations is no secret. He has never been convicted of a felony.

He and the new council will try to make Maloy government more participatory, he says: "Before, the council pretty much ran things. Sometimes people would get frustrated. They might get mad or stop talking to one another or get drunk, but they didn't try to fight City Hall."

SOURCE: National Catholic Reporter, Feb 25, 1994

Submission by anonymous, 2005

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