The "old times," in this case, were the early '60s in New York City's Greenwich Village - ground zero for the artistic and political energy that contrasted starkly with the conformity and complacency of the white-bread '50s. It was the time of civil rights protests and ban-the-bomb movements, of the Beat poets, of Bob Dylan and Merce Cunningham. Along with thousands of other restless, creative souls, activists like Dellinger and free-spirited artists like Paley, the Schumanns and Rabins were drawn to the Village.

But these eight individuals have shared more than a lifelong commitment to peace, social justice and human rights; they all ended up in Vermont. Paley first bought the group together socially after she joined Nichols in Thetford in the mid '80s. Over the next several years, the activist octet assembled for dinner at least annually, catching up and getting to know each other's families. But the gathering this May was their first encounter in more than five years. There was a lot of ground to cover.

Jules Rabin recounted tales of his 8000-mile 1962 disarmament march across North America and Europe. Paley spoke of meeting her husband the previous year at the first meeting of the Greenwich Village Peace Center. She also remembered inviting Dellinger to speak before that group. He was then the editor of Liberation magazine, which chronicled the activities of the peace movement. Activists read it to keep up with meetings and demonstrations past and future.

Peter Schumann recalled performing his "Dance of Death" at the Living Theater as part of a General Strike for Peace in the winter of '61-'62. It was his earliest foray into American politics. He met Paley and Nichols soon thereafter, and noted it was anti-Vietnam War activities that forged close bonds among the eight.

The Rabins helped Schumann transport puppets to the 1967 March on the Pentagon, which Dellinger organized, and which all four couples attended. Later, in 1969, Dellinger recruited Paley as an emissary of the peace movement to travel to North Vietnam and bring back three prisoners of war.

Though Dellinger was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease almost a year ago, Schumann insisted, "Dave has a very good memory, better than almost everybody, so he was correcting everybody." Dellinger and Jules Rabin were both teaching at Goddard College when the latter helped recruit Schumann and company as artists-in-residence. At the time, Schumann and his growing family were eager to trade in their urban lifestyle for a simpler one in Vermont.

Like the other three couples, the Schumanns were deeply moved by the teachings of Scott and Helen Nearing, who wrote the bible for the back-to-the-land movement of the '60s and '70s. Living the Good Life, originally published in 1954, is a how-to manual documenting the Nearings' two decades of subsistence homesteading in Jamaica, Vermont. Scott Nearing was 70 at the time; he lived to be 100.

"We were seeking an affirmation, a way of conducting ourselves, of looking at the world and taking part in its activities that would provide at least a minimum of those values we considered essential to the good life," wrote the Nearings. "As we saw it, such values must include: simplicity, freedom from anxiety or tension, an opportunity to be useful and live harmoniously." They termed this way of living "bread labor." The Schumanns had a blood connection to the Nearings, too. Scott was a well-known socialist writer and orator before he met his second wife, Helen, at the outbreak of the Great Depression. John, his son by his first marriage, initially followed in his father's leftist footsteps. But after experiencing Stalinism first-hand while working as an engineer in a Soviet steel mill in the 1930s, he became a Republican. He officially replaced his last name with his middle name, Scott, to disassociate himself from his famous father.

While still in the Soviet Union, John Scott and his Russian-born wife gave birth to a daughter, Elka - the same Elka Scott who later married Peter Schumann. The young couple shared more beliefs and values with Elka's grandfather than her father.

"When I was a teenager, I was very much influenced by Scott's ideas, political and vegetarianism - I became a vegetarian - and I loved visiting them, asking Scott questions about the world and about political systems and all that," remembered Elka. Visiting her grandparents' Vermont homestead while a student at Bryn Mawr College provided a refreshing contrast to the stultifying academic atmosphere of the 1950s.

"There'd be these dynamic old folks in their sixties and seventies, people who'd walk across the United States for peace demonstrating against nuclear weapons, and old-time radicals talking about demonstrations and things in the '30s, and there was just such a liveliness," Elka explained. She and Peter have in turn become role models for generations who never. heard of her grandfather.

Peter Schumann still shares Scott Nearing's anti-capitalist world view. He has forsaken potential commercial exploitation of his art, refusing corporate, government, media and even most foundation funding as tainted money. Bread and Puppet relies instead on a live-off-the-land ethic, small donations, fees for performing and sales of prints, pamphlets and calendars.

Schumann was raised in Nazi Germany and fled with his family in 1944 just before the invading Russian army burned their village. After attending art school, he met Elka while performing street theater in Munich in 1958. Three years later they emigrated, with two children in tow, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There, the couple gave birth to Bread and Puppet and three more kids. They moved to Plainfield in 1970 and, four years later, to Elka's parents' farmhouse in Glover. They never left.

Bread and Puppet's world-famous puppetry features oversized, often grotesque masks depicting the full range of humanity, from washer women to generals and mythic figures, as well as sometimes comical, sometimes beautiful specimens from the bird and animal kingdoms. Its pageants are steeped in timeless moral and religious themes of good versus evil, man versus nature, and the triumph of life-affirming human instincts in the face of plague, flood, pestilence and death. Contemporary socio-political motifs also permeate Schumann's performances. Case in point: this summer's revival of "Fire," a '60s pageant referring to napalm and the Vietnamese monks who torched themselves with gasoline in protest.

Schumann's belief in the symbolic importance of baking bread explains the company's name - bread being substantial and nourishing, as art ought to be. That philosophy also influenced the Rabins to become bakers, though with some variations.

"Jules wants to make fancy French breads, and I make very old-fashioned, mountain-people bread - the kind I learned from my mother, and my mother learned from Salisian peasants, typical bread of Russia, Poland, eastern parts of Germany, and the Alps," Schumann explained.

Jules and Helen Rabin met in 1962 at a New York meeting to organize a General Strike for Peace against the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Jules was a Beat poet and landscape architect; Helen was a Barnard College student. Peter Schumann knew them individually before they met each other - both performed with Bread and Puppet at its Delancy Street headquarters.

With time, though, Jules' interest in the theater troupe waned. "As a father of a family, I found it demeaning to subordinate myself to Peter, as one does in working with him. He is the absolute master of his theater," explained Jules. "This is harsh talk about somebody who I admire a lot and care about. But anyway, that's why I stopped collaborating." Their respective children picked up where their parents left off. The Rabin kids participated in Bread and Puppet circuses and parades growing up, and still do. Over the past year, Schumann daughters Tamar and Maria have performed an experimental theater piece with Nessa Rabin throughout Vermont.

The annual circus also brought the Schumanns back together with Dellinger and Peterson, who began to make the annual pilgrimage to Glover each August after moving to Vermont in the mid-'70s. "We got to know Elka and Peter by going and introducing ourselves there and work ing in the bread shop," explained Dellinger. Soon he and Peterson were joining the Schumanns for dinner when the Nearings came to visit.

The couples also saw each other at protests in Vermont, just like the old days in New York. "Naturally, Dave got involved with Vermont political activities, and so when we’d go to do something in front of the Statehouse, he would also be there," Peter remembered. "So you had to run into him all over the place. He's in everything."

David Dellinger and Elizabeth Peterson met at a Christian student peace conference in 1941 as America entered World War II. Peterson was pregnant with their first child when her husband was jailed as a draft resister. He went on a hunger strike protesting prison segregation and censorship. Much later, he achieved notoriety during the Chicago 7 trial, resulting from violent protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As chair of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War, Dellinger is credited by historians with uniting disparate factions into the mass movement that forced President Richard Nixon to scale down, and eventually end, American presence in Vietnam.

Ironically, perhaps, the couple's private life mirrored the double standard held by so many activists in the '60s. Dellinger would go off to fight the good fight often for months at a stretch - leaving Peterson at home to take care of the kids and household, even as she worked and attended school.

"I had a deep sense of being deserted, and I had terrible nightmares for years about David happily waving me goodbye and leaving me at home,” Peterson recalled. “But it wasn’t until much, much later that I got in touch with my anger. So I mostly just cried and felt lonely... Feminism was a word we had learned, but we had no idea what it meant." She and Dellinger were separated in 1973, in the wake of the Chicago 7 trial. They reconciled just as he got his first teaching job at Goddard College - the same magnet that had attracted the Rabins and Schumanns to Vermont.

Elka Schumann remembered Paley coming to a women's consciousness group she and other young mothers attended in the '60s. "Grace would come, and it was always wonderful; she had so much more perspective than us young mothers," Shumann said. "She had gone through the child-rearing years and was such an active and prominent person in the bigger world." Paley opposed war because it was bad for women and children. "And she wasn't like some super-human being who managed all these things," added Schumann. "She just did what she could where she was at each step of her life." Paley grew up in the Bronx - where her young socialist parents ended up after fleeing pre-revolutionary Russia. She and Nichols found each other at a peace center meeting in 1961. Now the couple lives in his childhood home, a farmhouse on a Thetford mountaintop.

Paley appears to be the glue that keeps this gang of eight together. Her friends say she was also an unusually loving force for unity in the peace community in New York. "When Grace was there, she had a very good influence," remembered Peter Schumann. "She would be able to talk leisurely with the same [police] who were ordering their guys to break our flag-sticks, our puppet-sticks, and Grace would be able to make it so they wouldn't beat us up... I remember one of those instances - Grace was just there talking to the cops, like they were her neighbors: `Well, we had pretty bad weather today,' that sort of thing. And she had a wonderful way of taking them, not as these sub-humans that we thought they were, but really just treating them like normal." Paley might have worked similar magic in Quebec City, if she had been there with 85-year-old Dellinger in April. The eldest of the eight activists rejects his doctor's diagnosis of Alzheimer's, and refuses to significantly, slow his endless rounds of protest and travel. He went to Canada to protest corporate globalization and the -proposed expansion of Free Trade Area of the America. So did his 25-year-old grandson Seth, though in the large crowds and confusion, the two never found each other.

"We all need each other, people in different generations," said Dellinger. "I learn more from young people than they learn from me." . Schumann is also encouraged by the recent resurgence of youthful political protest, as manifested in Quebec City and Seattle. This summer he's hosting a workshop - called "Radical Cheese About the Asphaltization of a Small Planet" - for young radicals opposed to corporate globalization. As always, he will teach the use of large puppets and masks in demonstrations and marches, encouraging protesters to steal his ideas. "You can't live with this society in the direct it's going," Schumann said. "You must try to live against it, in whatever possible way."

These eight remarkable elders certainly have.

For more info about Bread and Puppet . Theater, call 525-3031.