His Journey To Norwich and Beyond

Clint Gardner says his first role in Norwich was as an angel in the Christmas pageant. He was 18 at the time. "I came out from a choir stall and threw open my arms to announce the news," he recalls. He has since spent much of his life trying to spread important news.

Gardner grew up in Larchmont, NY, and came to the Upper Valley as a Dartmouth freshman in the fall of 1940. College is often a trans¬formative experience, and Gardner was changed by the teachings of a notable philosophy professor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and by exten¬sive involvement in the European theatre of WWII. Gardner has woven himself closely into both this small community and life in the larger world. Gardner has recently published his third book, Beyond Belief: Discovering Christianity's New Paradigm. According to Gardner, the book is "one more attempt to answer that difficult question: How can we speak of God after the Holocaust, after Buchenwald and Auschwitz?"

By the end of Gardner's freshman year, American involvement in WWII was looming. His awareness that in Europe young men his age were fighting to protect the freedoms he cherished would not let him rest. Debating between fighting and conscientious objection, he arranged to leave college and join a new experimental community, Camp William James, in Sharon, VT. The group was composed equally of CCC workers and college students, with the aim of sharing work projects and mutually educational discussions. Gardner was already aflame with ideas garnered from Rosenstock-Huessy, who had fought at Verdun in WWI and left Germany when it came under Hitler's thumb in 1933. "Probably three-quarters of my classmates had religious upbringings," Gardner recalls, "but many drifted away. If I had not met Rosenstock-Huessy, I suspect I would have drifted away too."

Meanwhile, seeking a congenial spot to retire and encouraged by Gardner's accounts of the local intellectual stimulation, his parents had moved to Norwich. His father met the man with the patent on split ball bearings, discussed the likely needs of the Air Force, and eventually became the president of Split Ball Bearing.

After a season with Camp William James, Gardner volunteered for the army. He had reread Hitler's Mein Kampf, which implied Germany had a destiny to dominate Europe and destroy the Jews. Training took time; he first saw combat in the Normandy invasion in 1944. Preparation for battle encouraged his personal thinking and reading about religion in life. A head wound in the first hours of his arrival on the beach added focus to his studies.

Gardner was a scout in his artillery outfit, which landed at 9 a.m. on D-Day. Since they were in the thirteenth wave to land, they "thought it would be very safe by then, but something had gone very wrong, and the bombers had missed taking out the beach defenses."

Raising his head, Gardner was almost killed by a fragment from a German mortar, which tore through his helmet. "I couldn't talk," he explains, "so I didn't think I was OK. The pain was diminished by being very deep in shock. I thought I was feeling my brains when I put my hand through the hole in my helmet, but it turns out there's about half an inch of flesh that your hair grows on." After a while he could speak very slowly, one...word...at...a...time. It was almost 24 hours before he got much medical help.

Evacuated to England, Gardner "thought the war was over for me. I soon learned if you can walk, you're back in action." In his case, he went back in six weeks.
Gardner was in Paris on the first day of its libera¬tion, in part because he spoke French. His battalion was attached to the French troops entering the city because their big anti-aircraft artillery could also be used against tanks. Then it was on to the Battle of the Bulge, in Belgium, where Gardner was "squashed" when the building he was in collapsed when bombed by friendly fire. He was not seriously wounded. Treatment was a tranquilizer that made him sleep for 24 hours. He continued with his outfit.

By March 1945 Gardner was working as second in command in a military government team. He was put in charge of Buchenwald, which held about 20,000 prisoners. He was 22 years old.
"We had to get enough food to them, but not too rich food," says Gardner. "And the filth. There were dead bodies all over. I got the Germans from nearby to work on the clean up-the mayor of Weimar sent 500 people a day to work on burying bodies. After that the main task was to get the prisoners back to their homes, in Germany and other countries." It took a couple of weeks to clean and stabilize the camp, and another couple to arrange transport. The last inmates remaining were Poles and Russians. The threat of imprisonment awaited them at home, and many did not want to return.

Gardner returned to Dartmouth after the war and finished his three remaining years in two, working through the summer. He was "in the shadow of Buchenwald," he says. "There was all sorts of discus¬sion about God giving us free will, but those argu¬ments seem to collapse in the face of people being herded into gas chambers. And the Russians lost 15 million people."
Rosenstock-Huessy, himself in the shadow of Verdun, helped his students, including Gardner, to a new understanding of Christianity. "It was no longer based on the supernatural, on things contrary to the laws of nature," Gardner explains. "One thing Rosenstock-Huessy said was ‘Christianity did not come into the world to compete with electricity.' " Rosenstock-Huessy discussed Christianity not so much through theology as through history, he adds. While Gardner was back at Dartmouth, his sister asked him if he'd like to go on a blind date with a young woman who had a pottery studio upstairs on Main Street in Hanover. Thus he met-and shortly thereafter married-Libby Cone, whose ancestors had moved to Vermont in the 1790s. Within nine months of their marriage, Gardner had finished his Dartmouth degree and begun a Masters at the Sorbonne. He studied Russian history and culture, aiming to become an expert on religion in Russia, with an eye to joining the State Department. But a friend from Camp William James persuaded Gardner to come work on the US Military Government newspaper in Berlin. The Gardners "flew into the city on the first day it was cut off from the West. We had parachutes on our backs. MiGs were buzzing the plane."

"It was a fascinating time. We got along well with the Germans, whom we had just defeated," contin¬ues Gardner. "Berlin was a very international city, and they were delighted that we were there to keep the Russians at bay. There were two or three plays a week, Shakespeare, the Symphony." After a year with the Berlin paper, Gardner worked in magazine publishing in the New York area for a couple of years before launching his major business adventure, a mail-order housewares and gift importer.

"The idea of starting Shopping International came to me while I was walking on Cemetery Hill in Norwich, out of our experience living in Europe and my experience in mail order. It would bring things that looked like the country they came from, the lit¬tle gems of handicraft in which each nation crystal¬lizes its culture." In the mid 1950s, such items were strange to much of the country, in more ways than one. "We got hate mail because we were disloyal, because we had items from communist countries," recalls Gardner. He could not publicize his client list, which would have shown that J. Edgar Hoover shopped there, and even bought Czechoslovakian Easter eggs. The Gardners sold the company to Harry and David in 1974.

Soon other projects were taking up most of Gardner's time. In 1978 he founded the Norwich Center to explicate and promote the ideas of Rosenstock-Huessy. The Center's most ambitious project was US-USSR Bridges for Peace, which sponsored exchange visits to the Soviet Union from 1983 to 1994 to encourage international under¬standing. Originally the group worked with Russian Christians and found participants through churches, but the mission broadened to include anyone. As the world has changed, so has the mission: After 1994, travel to and from Russia became easy, but since 9/11 Gardner and other local citizens have organized Building Bridges: Middle East-US, to work with Middle Eastern countries, especially Iran. "It's very difficult-impossible-to get groups going back and forth," says Gardner. "Individuals are possible."

As in so much of Gardner's life, Norwich was central. "People would come and travel in New England and would almost always come through Norwich. We'd take them to Dan and Whit's," he says with a smile.