Biography
Anne Symens-Bucher was born in Oakland on September 17, 1957. She lived and worked with Dorothy Day at the New York Catholic Worker as a young adult, then returned to California and founded the Oakland Catholic Worker in 1980. In 1982 she helped organize the first Lenten Desert Experience at the Nevada Test Site and later co-founded Nevada Desert Experience. Symens-Bucher also organized with the Bay Area Pledge of Resistance during the Central America wars and was arrested repeatedly in nonviolent protests. She later co-founded Canticle Farm in East Oakland and continued working in restorative justice, nonviolent communication, and faith-based peace organizing.
Separate Nevada Test Site custody episodes
Her own UNLV oral history places the first Lenten Desert Experience in Holy Week 1982 and describes the nineteen protesters being ordered out of the courthouse rather than kept overnight. Ken Butigan's account names Bucher among the group briefly jailed in Beatty and released by Judge William Sullivan. UNLV's contemporary photographic-negative catalog dates that Good Friday protest and arrests to April 9, 1982. This was same-day detention, not an overnight prison term.
The oral history separately describes repeated arrests and short jail terms at the third Lenten Desert Experience, which she dates to 1984. Those episodes are recorded separately with year-only admission and arrest, leaving individual release dates and a combined duration unknown. The previously recorded claim that her oral history establishes no jail terms was incomplete; the thirty-day Livermore term elsewhere in the interview belongs to Terry Symens, not Anne.
Sources: UNLV oral history, August 6, 2005, transcript pp. 5-7 and 18-19; Ken Butigan's account of the first Lenten Desert Experience; Wayne C. Kodey Photographs finding aid.
