UCLA, home to grown-up child actors and proto-Tri Delts, is a very noisy campus. There are street sweepers and leaf blowers, car alarms and lawn mowers, and a mercilessly loud game room in the student center. “That’s why I actually left,” says Ted Rueter.

Rueter was a political science professor at UCLA until he was driven away by the noise. Since those dark days he has relocated–to the “quiet, residential neighborhood of Davis”–and undertaken a crusade. Ted Rueter wanted a quiet country, so he logged on to The Right to Quiet Society, a list-serve in Vancouver, and announced that he was going to fight the noise. Thus, Noise Free America was born.