After 460 Weeks of Protests, the Grannies Call It a Day

Sometimes the news is what didn't happen. It is worth noting, then, that Joan Wile and her cadre of graying activists did not stand curbside on Fifth Avenue late Wednesday afternoon in protest against America's wars.

In mid-November, after an almost-unbroken run of Wednesday vigils going back nearly nine years, this group, known as Grandmothers Against the War, decided to call it a day.

What had gotten them started, the war in Iraq, was over. While the other war, in Afghanistan, does go on, it draws ever scanter attention. That was the case even in the presidential campaign. (Headline in The Onion two weeks ago: “Nation Horrified to Learn About War in Afghanistan While Reading Up on Petraeus Sex Scandal.”) By now, Ms. Wile said, President Obama “doesn't need us to urge him” to speed up the withdrawal of American forces.

Besides, interests changed within her ranks. Some of her fellow grannies, as these women in their 70s, 80s and even 90s call themselves, turned to the Occupy movement. Others have focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And then there is that relentless tyrant called time.

If old age, as they say, is not for sissies, it is also not optimal for standing on the street for an hour - week after week, rain or shine, in numbing cold or pitiless heat, come hell or high water.

Actually, high water was one thing that stopped the grannies. On Oct. 31, the Wednesday after Hurricane Sandy hit, there was no way for many of them to make it to their usual protest site, the Fifth Avenue entrance to Rockefeller Center.

The only other time they could not take up their positions was in early December 2009. It wasn't for want of trying. But the police turned them away because the annual Christmas tree lighting in Rockefeller Center was that evening.

Those interruptions aside, theirs was quite a display of nonstop determination - 460 Wednesdays, starting on Jan. 14, 2004, 10 months after the Bush administration went to war in Iraq, supposedly to prevent Saddam Hussein from ever using the arsenal of unconventional weapons he didn't have.

Still, nothing lasts forever (even if war seems to). Frankly, “it's a relief not to have to stand there for an hour any longer,” said Ms. Wile, a singer and songwriter who is 81. “Old bones do not take too well to such activity.”

“Do you know why I started it?” she said, meaning the weekly vigil. “I saw a picture in Time magazine of a young Baghdad boy, a 12-year-old boy named Ali who had lost his arms, was horribly burned all over his body and whose entire nuclear family was killed by our bombs. That's what motivated me. I just said, ‘I've got to do something.' I was tossing and turning right after that, and the idea hit me: Grandmothers Against the War.”

At times, dozens stood with her. Not all were grannies. Men took part, too, including vete rans of the Vietnam War. But “by the end,” Ms. Wile said, “we were down to seven to nine people - pretty small.”

The reaction to them could be icy, to put it mildly. At an early protest, in February 2004, a man walking by pointed a finger at the women and made a motion as if he were firing a gun. The demonstrators shrugged it off. “His aim was bad,” one of them, Judith Cartisano, said to me back then.

Ms. Wile recalled “a lot of heckling in the beginning.”

“The thing that they threw at us most often was, ‘You're a traitor,'” she said. “Another was ‘Remember 9/11.' They linked 9/11 with Iraq. It hurt to be called traitors, but what can you do?” Some of the taunting was truly in-your-face. The Army veterans in her group, she said, “almost came to blows with particularly nasty hecklers several times.”

But over the years, not coincidentally as the wars grew ever more unpopular, noxious comments faded. “Maybe one or tw o people would argue, but not with that nasty implication,” Ms. Wile said. “And people from other countries” - especially Europeans - “were always very supportive.”

With songs and speeches, the grannies held their final vigil on Nov. 14. Some of them gathered in Midtown one more time on Wednesday evening for a farewell dinner.

Mission accomplished, to use a discredited phrase? Not really, not with “all those people still fighting and dying in Afghanistan,” Ms. Wile said.

“But I think we helped jump start the anti-Iraq war movement here in the city,” she said. “We threw some seeds in the air, and maybe they landed somewhere and sprouted.”

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com