A leathery woman with a darkening black eye smokes
cigarettes through the spaces of her missing front teeth and tells the police how
her boyfriend slapped and bit her because he didn't like her grandchildren.
Another woman tells a counselor at a shelter that she's tried to leave her
husband 15 times in the two years that she's been married to him. Still another
can't speak at all, her moans incoherent as she's wheeled out of her house on a
stretcher covered in blood, her cheek slashed into two loose flaps from the
corner of her mouth.

Chris Hansen-Nelson's gray hair stands out in this crowd. Out of the six hundred or so Bill Bradley volunteers staying at the Nashua Boys and Girls club tonight, there are only a handful of veteran campaigners. Nelson came of age in 1972, the first year in which 18-year-olds were allowed to vote. "We were all pretty jazzed about that," he says. "We were old enough to die, and now we were also old enough to vote." In his salad days, he says, he participated in many political events, but they were mostly of the anti-establishment, down-with-the-government, burn-Nixon-in-effigy sort.