Jim Woolsey and the Peace of the Tibetans

    Jim Woolsey led two peaceful lives in a chaotic time.

    In his first life, he lived on the outskirts of New Hope in a little green house that he bought for just under ten thousand dollars in the 1970s.

    In his second peaceful life, he traveled to Dharamsala, India to work with the Tibetan government-in-exile at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives. He taught the Tibetans about using computers and helped organize their library.

    Jim passed away in 2014 of lung cancer.

    If you didn't know Jim but were in New Hope prior to his passing you most likely remember him, just for his prototypical hippie appearance. Tall at six-foot-three, he was a scraggy one-hundred-thirty-five pounds at most. He had long thin brown hair and a beard to match. He dressed in colorful clothes and wore a distinctive red felt hat that he might have stolen from an elf or gnome. He smoked a pipe that was stuffed with pleasantly fragrant tobacco in public and filled with other things in private. 

    All that smoking gave him a gruff voice that he used to express his ironic and humorous view of the world. It might also have given him his ending. He was so often in town he was nicknamed "The Mayor."

    "Harrumph," was a favorite expression of his to express how he felt about views he considered suspect.

    His might seem an odd combination of lives, the spiritual and the technical, but he managed to merge his first life with his second when he traveled to India, where he applied both. Jim had gotten into tech after he came home from a four-year stint in the United States Navy as a gunnery mate, which was anything but peaceful. At home again, armed only with a tape deck, he recorded rock music and tended bar at Markey's. Taping music eventually grew into a home recording studio he named Stems and Seeds. From that interest in music tech and stems and seeds, he evolved into computer tech, studied hard and became expert at it. 

    Brought up a pacifist Quaker, he found his mother disapproved of his military service and all this technical mumbo-jumbo, but that changed.

    "Then when she found out I met the Dali Lama, she thought I was okay," he said. 

    Prior to Dharamsala, he took to reading Tibetan literature and compiled an extensive list of Tibetan books, which he organized into a bibliography on his computer. In one of the harshest imperialistic moves of the Twentieth Century, the China invaded unarmed Tibet and claimed the country as its own, causing the government to flee to India with its trove of books and papers. 

    It was a chaotic retreat by wagon and horse over the Himalayas and resulted in the library looking more like a freshman dorm room.

    A love of peace and interest in the exotic culture of Tibet led Jim to their books and then him to visit their library in Dharamsala.

    "The Dali Lama learned I had this list of Tibetan literature on my computer and he assumed it was going to be published as a book, so he wrote a forward to it," he told me.

    Jim would travel to India every other year or so to drag the Tibetans into the present century by teaching them how to use computers and organize their library.

    The Tibetans would reciprocate at times by traveling to visit his home in New Hope.

    Once when I called to see how he was doing, he told me he had a visitor from Russia, a Mongolian Buddhist monk he met while in Dharamsala. I was writing stories for the Lambertville Beacon then, so I asked if it was okay if I did a story on the monk's visit.

    "Come on over," he replied.

    If I recall correctly, the monk was named Tenzing. In those freer days in Russia, which was struggling toward democracy after communism, Tenzing was an elected member of the Duma, the Russian parliament. He wore the traditional orange robes of the Buddhist monk, had a shaved head and happily struggled with English. He exuded kindness. I had difficulty understanding his answers to my questions, but got just enough to write a little story and get a photo of him for the Beacon.

    It wasn't much of a story, since I had to write in English and Tenzing was speaking an approximation of the language. I thought I'd do the best I could.

    After the interview was over, Jim asked if I could drive him and Tenzing into New Hope.

    "Sure," I said. "But I have a little hatchback Honda CRX with only two seats. It will be hard to fit all three of us in it."

    "We'll put Tenzing in the trunk," Jim said. "He won't mind."

    So we explained as best we could to our visiting monk what we were doing and went outside and pointed to my tiny red Honda. I opened the hatchback, which had a big sloping window, and we once again pointed to the trunk and motioned for Tenzing to climb in. Tenzing smiled and nodded warmly, happy to do as we wished. He gathered together his orange robes and tumbled into my trunk. Thank goodness he had never seen any American gangster movies, or else he might never have gotten in.

    It was busy in town that day, but we managed to find a parking space on South Main Street and got out to unload our cargo. We walked around to the back of the car and I opened the hatchback. To the surprise of dozens of passing tourists, out stepped our Mongolian Buddhist monk resplendent in his flowing orange robes and shaved head. There was more than a little gawking and staring as he exited the red sports car.

    Jim and Tenzing headed off to John and Peter's, and I went home to pound out my story.

    I got a second chance at writing about the Jim and the Tibetans years later in 1993 when I was working as a feature writer covering Bucks County for the Allentown Morning Call. 

    It's still on the internet. Here's the link: https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1993-10-08-2954574-story.html.

    We'll end here as Woolsey ended all his phone calls and emails.

Peace, Jim.