Who remembers this picture? October 1983. The cold war was churning with Ronald Reagan at the helm, but Mikhail Gorbachev was not yet on the scene.

I had returned from the Peace Corps a decade before, but the international spirit was still alive in me. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States were high, threatening mutual nuclear annihilation. I was a new mother with a two-year-old and pregnant with a second child. I didn’t want to see my babies grow up in a world saturated with fear and tension of war. I was not alone.

In the spring of 1983, a group of west coast Returned Peace...