Capitola Woman Talks About Walking, Spreading Peace and Her New Book

Give yourself just a few minutes to talk to Capitola resident, Donna Rankin Love, and she’ll have you convinced that you can write a memoir.

After all, she’s done it, and as she says, “Who would have thought I’d be doing something new at age 84?”

Actually, she’s done a lot her whole life—from raising four sons to walking 5,000 miles in peace marches across the United States and Russia. And now? She’s written three memoirs, all in the four years since she turned 80.

Love will speak this week about her new book, Walking for Our Lives. The event is at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Capitola Book Café, 1475 41st Ave.

Love’s 282-page book, self-published by Park Place Publications, tells the story of how she decided to join the 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament at age 58. She’d never been an activist. She was divorced, living comfortably in San Mateo and running a tutoring business. But she liked to walk, and when she heard about the peace march, she was so intrigued that within a few months, she’d rented out her house, closed her business and told her family she’d be gone for nine months.

And so she was. Love joined 1,200 people in Los Angeles in February 1986 to walk to Washington, D.C., arriving on Nov. 15, 1986. The group dwindled to 400 who trekked the entire 3,700 miles, clocking an average of 15 miles per day. But by the end, the number swelled to 15,000 supporters.

Traveling with 100 support vehicles, they stopped in small towns and big cities, camping along the way. They gave workshops and spoke about peace in schools and community centers.

Today, sitting in her living room in the Jewel Box neighborhood of Capitola, Love talks about how the walk transformed her.

“I realized I was asking fourth-graders to save the world while I was just taking a stroll across America," she says. "I had entered the classroom a walker and left it a committed peace walker."

Love went on two more marches after that—the Soviet-American Peace Walk in 1987 in Russia and the 1988 American-Soviet Peace Walk in the United States. She chronicled the marches with articles she wrote for the San Mateo Times.

In 2007, she published her first book, Tell Me A Story, a title that came from her granddaughter, Sarah, who always wanted to hear the stories about her father when he was young. That was followed by To Make the House Complete, a chronicle of her experiences as she moved into two houses in Mexico, a farm in her native Oregon, the beach cottage in Capitola and a marriage, all of which, she says, needed work.  

And now? She’s teaching others to write their memoirs.

“By living well and writing our stories," Love says, "we’ll inform the coming generations. It’s important that they know where we came from, one story at a time.”

Donna Rankin Love will talk about writing and autograph books Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at Capitola Book Café.

Her next memoir-writing workshop is Jan. 14, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., at her home. Lunch is included with the $40 fee. To register, email lovedonna@sbcglobal.net.

Her blog, "You Don't Have to Start at the Beginning," is here.