Chaos Pervades New Mobe Staff

WASHINGTON, D. C., Nov. 14-A stink bomb has just begun to spread its vomit-inducing juices through the tenth floor of the New Mobe offices here in Washington. It is the second in two days. Yesterday, believing that the yellow-gray gas pipes in the old office building had sprung a leak, marshals and workers began evacuating the are.

Today, a 25-year-old recent recruit his head out of an office to shout, "Can't anyone keep these subversives out of here"

Today, stink bombs are no more a problem than housing, feeding, and marching 250,000 people this weekend. With a casualness that closely resembles disorganization. New Mobe volunteer workers are treating that as no problem at all.

Six Kent State students walk into the office explaining that they have food for 10,000 people coming in this afternoon and that they need a place to put it. A skinny blonde, who assumed control of the "logistics" office early Thursday, looks on the map, reads off the street address of a reception center, then picks up a ringing phone.

Her volunteer helper, a law student from somewhere, thanks the students profusely and gives them a bag of apples and ten sandwiches to drop off when they get there.

The stink bomb is beginning to spread down to the two floors where other Mobe offices are located-the Student Mobilization Committee office, the March Against Death office, the legal office, the medical office, the poster office. Everyone gets an office.

And every office is the same-cracked jaundiced walls, covered with a schizo-phrenic mixture of fists and spread figures, schedules, stickers, and notes.

Three or four people lounge around a reception desk at the door of most offices, selling buttons and informing two out of three people who come in that they are in the wrong place.

Though they know little of the workings of their own operation, all of the button sellers have memorized and repeat in monotonously pious tones the fact that New Mobe is $70,000 in debt and needs its dollar per button to survive.

Most of these volunteers go to great lengths to keep themselves busy, tying security ribbons on anyone who has a recognizable face and typing letters to friends on New Mobe stationery.

Action is Elsewhere

But the headquarters has a self-contained business; for the real action, most volunteer workers discover, one has to move into the streets. The offices provide a place to start, but most of the out-of-towners who manned the phones Thursday have since moved on.

The new crop of helpers are only now, early in the afternoon, discovering that major decisions are being made over telephones on the plush 11th floor of the building. There, the six co-chairmen, old peace movement leaders like Stewart Mechem of the American Friends Service Committee, and their aides, have offices.

And of course nobody needs the New Mobe office to tell them to be in the Capitol Mall tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.