New Yorker spreading peace one bumper sticker at a time

The business card itself is simple: The usual bright, crisp white with sharp corners. A businessman's bread and butter.

What's inside those common confines is unique. It's an idea so basic it has been passed from one to another for centuries. Smack dab in the middle of the card, it plainly reads in capitalized and bold letters, "WORLD PEACE."

Hank Stone isn't your typical suit-and-tie kind of guy. He dresses casual, wears a fedora and offers an intangible product that no one can buy but everyone seems to want.

Stone's something of a traveling salesman - for peace.

Chances are that if you've traveled down Route 96 toward Bushnell's Basin on a Saturday this summer, you've passed Stone. The 63-year-old activist spent his summer trying to change the world, one bumper sticker at a time.

src="http://www.youtube.com/v/dajeVKU8X0I" width="425" height="350" scale="ShowAll" loop="loop" menu="menu" wmode="Window" quality="1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed> "George Bush seems to be more of a peacemaker than his administration could possibly imagine," said Stone, of Ionia, Ontario County. "He awakened in people a great desire to get the country on the straight and narrow path and he's pulled people's attention to the problems you can get into if the government is ruled by greed. "He almost single-handedly has put us back in business again. The peace enterprise is back by popular demand." For Stone, business is good. On an unseasonably warm October weekend, Stone is sitting along the side of Route 96 like he has nine other times in spots around the area the last three months. On this Saturday, rain came down in sheets during short spurts in the afternoon, a muse for jokes on the effects of global warming and other environmental issues near and dear to Stone's heart. The bad weather didn't deter Stone's "customers," who came in rushes.Two or three cars at a time would line up on the side of the road, with visitors quickly emerging from vehicles to peruse Stone's inventory. Sifting through fliers and peace-themed brochures, Pittsford resident Adam Terho found a red bumper sticker that read "Support the Troops/End the War." With a cousin who served in Iraq, Terho said he's against the war because of horror stories he heard from his relative and other friends. "He supported the war when he joined and (now) he's against it," he said. "Everybody that I've ever spoke to that has ever been in the service and has come back from Iraq was against the war, and I think it's ridiculous and at this point we need to just get out of there." Kelly Ferrara decided to stop for reasons closer to home. The Walworth, Wayne County, resident has an adopted child, so she took a sticker that read "Many colors/one human family." "Anything that promotes peace is worth stopping for," she said. "You gotta start at home, you know?" That's exactly why Stone got involved. In the early 1980s, Stone was a member of Pittsford Citizens for Nuclear Disarmament. He and his friends would try to raise money for the anti-nuclear cause by selling bumper stickers, pens and T-shirts. When the group had too many stickers left over, Stone and a friend knew what they should do. "I said at one of our meetings that I had half a mind to go out by the side of the road and give these away," Stone recalled. So he did. More than 60,000 stickers later, he's making a difference in that "think globally, act locally" sort of way. "I do think that a lot of people are really disturbed about our invading Iraq and they think that they're all alone," said Brighton resident Marjorie Sexton, who spent Oct. 6 with Stone along Route 96. "If they have somebody standing out here in public, they say, 'Oh, there's somebody else and it's not just me.'" To pay for the printing of the bumper stickers, Stone set up a collection box so that people can donate to the effort if they want. Recently, Stone put $3,000 of his own money to buying a batch of 15,000 stickers, part of which he received as a settlement from a fender bender in the spring. There's still plenty of stickers left, but for now, Stone is done for the season. He's packed up until the next time he returns to the side of the road armed with a folding chair, a table full of reading material and stickers for the picking. Until then, he's left his customers wanting more and willing to share his message - the sign of any good businessman. "What's needed is thinking on a big scale and that's what we're advertising for," Stone said. "We're making connections with people and we're giving people permission to think thoughts that they're not provided by the media to think." Terho couldn't agree more. "People know that the war is bad, but we need more people out here like this spreading the message and letting people know," he said. "Say I put this on my car and somebody sees it, it might spark a thought in their head and (they'll) say, 'Hey, this is wrong,' and it'll get more people to do something about it." For more information or to request a bumper sticker, visit the Citizens for a United Earth Web site at c-u-e.org. <em>Bryan Roth can be reached at (585) 394-0770, Ext. 270, or at broth@mpnewspapers.com.