As he shuffled to his seat on a military bus, the 66-year-old retired sales executive glanced down the road from which he had come. Pressed shirts, expensive ties and suits were a long way behind him. On this day he wore a cheap T-shirt emblazoned with the message: "Close the School of the Assassins."

It was a Sunday afternoon in November, and it was cold. A stream of protesters - some carrying signs, others holding mock coffins over their heads - stretched a quarter of a mile to the brick pillars that mark the entrance to the base. Somewhere past that gate, Lawton's girlfriend Mary Berglund, three years younger than him, stood in a crowd holding his wallet and car keys.

Pat Walters / Poynter Summer Fellowship MIRROR LAKE PARK, ST. PETERSBURG, FLA: Dwight Lawton, 77, reflects on his years in civil rights activism after speaking to the media on June 21 about homelessness. "I'm trying to be the counterbalance," he said.

It was 1997, and they had come to Fort Benning, a U.S. Army base in southern Georgia, to protest the School of the Americas, a facility built to train Latin American military leaders, and made infamous by the human rights violations allegedly committed by several high-profile alumni.

Lawton had been arrested for trespassing. He spent three hours sitting on the floor of a military police office. Four months later he was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison, which he served.

"To me, it seemed like the right thing to do," Lawton said. "It was motivated by anger, and the feeling that we were powerless to get our elected officials to take action and stop funding this organization."

Lawton was practicing civil disobedience, uncommon for a man his age. The 75-year-old retiree lives in an inconspicuous yellow cinder-block house on the outskirts of the Westminster Shores retirement community in St. Petersburg, Fla. He has a pool and his back yard edges the water. According to a survey conducted by the American Association of Retired Persons in 2004, Lawton's generation is the least likely to participate in political activities outside of voting. The most commonly cited reason for their lack of involvement? Difficulty getting around.

DWIGHT LAWTON

Age: 77 Born: Germantown, PA; Dec. 23, 1930 Occupation: Civil rights activist Children: Catherine, 40; Ned, 38; Lee, 36

That's not a problem for Lawton, who not only drives a car, but twice a week paddles a kayak out into Tampa Bay. His white hair is side-swept, as though by bay wind. He wears wire rim glasses, he is thin and fit, and his pale skin is textured by the shallow wrinkles of a man 20 years his junior.

Since his retirement in 1990, he has lobbied in Tallahassee, Washington, D.C., and St. Petersburg. Two years ago, he and several friends founded the Tampa Bay chapter of Veterans for Peace. The Korean War veteran's activism consumes upwards of 25 hours a week.

Lawton has not always acted this way. His parents, politically conservative Presbyterians, attended church every Sunday. His father, a carpet salesman, taught Bible classes.

Lawton grew up to be a businessman.

But he says he has never liked authority. As a boy in Philadelphia, he often skipped out of class at Glenside Elementary School. When he turned 11, his parents threw him in private school. Eventually he graduated from high school, and even from college.

By 1970 Lawton, then 40, was living in Chicago and working 15-hour days. He had worked in six different cities since he first put on a suit seventeen years earlier. Along the way he married, and had three kids in close succession.

Their aging Dutch Colonial needed work and he was having a little trouble at Ryder, the truck leasing company where he was a district manager. His office was doing well, but not well enough for the new regional manager. Checkup visits became so frequent that Lawton started to feel like a child whose father wouldn't stop looking over his shoulder. He complained to upper management.

"Everything was important (to the new boss). Just do it all," Lawton said. His speech is all business, slow, deliberate and clear, with the unvarying rhythm of a machine. "I pointed out to him that our results were improving, and we were profitable. ... This tension developed between us."

The boss had a simple solution. Lawton was transferred, and he was glad to get away. Besides, moving was second nature to him by then.

In the years that followed, Lawton moved through several jobs, eventually planting himself on Long Island, where he and the mother of his children divorced. He met another woman and married her. They moved in together, and, for three years, lived in happiness.

Then she started drinking, he says. And Lawton lost his job. It was a low point, the lowest in his life, in fact.

Soon, Lawton was making twice-a-day visits to Al-Anon - a group that, while teaching him to look out for himself, showed him how good he might be at looking out for others.

For Lawton, Al-Anon was a bridge. The confidential meetings became his therapy. In a church multipurpose room, sitting in a metal chair, surrounded by strangers, Lawton shared his pain, fear and confusion. Gradually, he began to see himself in those strangers, particularly in the adult children of alcoholics. He discovered that his father, who had been dead for 20 years, was an alcoholic.

When he divorced for the second time and moved to Florida, Lawton did not leave Al-Anon behind. Talking about a higher power twice a week eventually led him to join a church: the small but close-knit Lakeview Presbyterian in St. Petersburg.

"They were friendly," he said. "So being with those people, they opened my eyes and my curiosity to areas that I had not been interested in before."

When Lawton retired into activism, his kids weren't quite sure what to think.

"This wasn't like what I had when I was growing up. He wasn't always so politically active," said Catharine, 40, Lawton's oldest daughter, who works on Wall Street. "Sometimes it's like, 'Oh, guess what I was arrested for!' ... And I'm like, 'Okay ...' "

Ned, 38, Lawton's only son, is a salesman for a San Francisco high tech firm. He says he respects his dad for his activism, but was a little surprised when Lawton told him he was going to a protest that he knew would get him thrown into jail.

"It was hard to see my dad in prison," he said. "Nobody wants to see a parent or someone they love go to jail, especially if you don't feel like they deserve it."

Catharine and Ned aren't sure exactly how their dad got turned on to civil rights activism. In fact, Lawton isn't so sure himself. He says his interest may stem from his compassion for the powerless. But where did that come from? He isn't quite sure.

"I think it was a deep-seated, I guess it could be, resentment to people using their power inappropriately and taking advantage of that with people who were powerless. ... I don't know if I can trace it to anything particularly."

He is, however, absolutely clear that his mission is to help the people who, in his words, "got the short end of the stick." And seven years after he awoke to it, he was sitting in a military police office, handcuffed, in western Georgia.

The mantra of the protesters had faded as the bus rolled away. Back at the gate, a man stood at a podium and addressed the crowd. Slowly, he read the names of people executed by alleged death-squad leaders, known School of the Americas alumni. After each name, the man struck a thickset drum, and the crowd spoke a single Spanish word - "presente" - in unison, a military roll call for the forgotten dead.

Lawton spent six months in jail for walking in that procession. Nearly a decade later, he has barely slowed down.

He and his girlfriend spend their days rushing between meetings and events. Berglund is active in the League of Women voters. Lawton heads up the Tampa Bay chapter of Veterans for Peace. Recently, he has been lobbying the Pinellas County School Board to allow the organization to enter the public schools and conduct a leafleting campaign he calls "counter-military recruiting."

Two months ago, Lawton called the principal at Lakewood High School and told him he and several other veterans were coming into the school, whether or not the administration wanted them to. The principal called the police. When Lawton and five other veterans arrived, six police officers stood in their way.

"The police officers were more nervous than we were, I think," Lawton said. "Some of them were looking pretty belligerent ... their arms akimbo."

Lawton could have walked past the officers, or tried. He could have been arrested, just as he was in Georgia. But he chose not to. Lawton is no ordinary retiree, but, still, he is retired.

He would like to spend a little more time with Mary. He would like to see Alaska before it melts. And if he can find time between school board meetings and leafleting campaigns, he might even start sailing again.

He is, after all, almost 80.