Maggie Fleming, who attended a Camp Obama last summer, said: "Marshall is able to bring this bigger picture of his work with civil rights and with the farmworkers and [connect] people to this idea that this is bigger than just one candidate."
Fleming, 28, the assistant director of a nonprofit environmental education group, later helped form the core of Obama's grass-roots committee in Oakland.
Ganz encourages volunteers to share their own life stories with voters, in the belief that by speaking from the heart, they turn the tedious -- phone-banking, door-knocking -- into a communal mission. It's not policy but passion that he teaches.
"It's counterintuitive," Ganz said. "At Camp Obama the tendency is, 'I need to know all of the arguments.' No. You need to learn to talk from your own experiences. It's a very empowering thing."
For Ganz too. He sees the campaign as a chance to turn back the hands of time.
Freedom Summer
Ganz was born in Bay City, Mich., and grew up in Fresno and then Bakersfield.
He entered Harvard in 1960 but after two years took some time off. When he returned to Cambridge, he found that one of his roommates had joined Students for a Democratic Society and another had joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
He volunteered for the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Mississippi and was in training when volunteers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner disappeared. They were found dead several weeks later.
Ganz decided to forge ahead -- and found his life's work.
"I had friends involved in SDS, and they would have these big ideological discussions, which never had any appeal to me," Ganz said. "What worked for me was to work with the people, going around and meeting people."
As a way to connect with the black community, the rabbi's son taught adult Sunday school in Mississippi -- Old Testament only. Ganz returned to the Central Valley in 1965 and soon joined Chavez's fledgling farmworkers union, where he helped organize workers, lead boycotts and negotiate contracts until internal divisions led him to quit in 1981.
He then moved into political organizing full time, targeting infrequent voters.
The strategy turned out 180,000 new voters, primarily in low-income Latino and black neighborhoods, who helped Sen. Alan Cranston win a tight reelection battle in 1986.
