The year was 1985 and the Cold War was at its coldest. But Peter Hagerty, a farmer from the western Maine town of Porter, had just the thing to warm things up: wool. He and his wife, Marty Tracy, headed to the Soviet Union with a bunch of other farmers and a plan: They could take Maine wool and Soviet wool and spin it all together until they couldn’t tell where one left off and the other began. The resulting yarn would be a symbol of the good things that could happen if the two nations could put aside their differences for a common goal. They called it Peace Fleece.

“I thought if I could just communicate with these people, we could use business as an excuse just to talk to one another,” Hagerty said during a recent interview at the farm. “Even though it wouldn’t, practically speaking, make a difference in terms of the threat, it would make me feel better.”

The situation was beginning to remind him of Vietnam, and that scared him. Years before, in the late 1960s, Hagerty was honorably discharged from the Navy after refusing to serve. He joined the anti-war effort and headed to Vietnam after the friends he had trained with had been killed.

During a visit to a monastery, he encountered a group of 14-year-old Vietnamese soldiers who had gone there for spiritual guidance.

“Here I was talking to the person I was told was the enemy,” he said. “We talked about baseball and girls most of the night. They love baseball and wanted to know all about America.”

This was one of the few fond memories he has of the time he spent in Vietnam, where he witnessed the horrors of war. Images of death haunted him, and in

the early ’70s, he and his wife moved to Maine, where he hoped his bruised soul could recover. And it worked, for a while.

Then came the kids, Cora and Silas, and shortly after, rumblings of the threat of nuclear war.

“I believed if I lived in a place where I could raise my own food and burn my own wood and shear my own wool, somehow everything would be all right,” Hagerty said. “I think having children made me once again vulnerable to the fragility of life … and then I started worrying about whether we were on the verge of nuclear war.”

He was depressed. The farm wasn’t doing well. And he was beginning to worry if his children would ever have the chance to grow up.

“Having been in Vietnam, I saw what human beings were capable of doing to one another,” Hagerty said.

He didn’t want history to repeat itself, so he intervened in the only way he knew how. He wrote to trade ministers in the U.S.S.R. No one replied. He called Washington. D.C. No one there knew anything about Soviet sheep farming practices. A New York broker told him it couldn’t be done. But he persevered.

When he went to Russia, the businessman with whom he met, Nickolai Emelianov, called Hagerty’s idea crazy. No wool had ever been exported from the republic, because the Soviet Union needed all the wool it had and then some. What made him think that would change?

“This Russian businessman had never considered doing business with the United States,” Hagerty recalled. “He was very skeptical … until we started talking about our children and our wives, and the fact that our children may never have the chance to grow up and fall in love.”

So began Peace Fleece, and with it, a friendship with Emelianov and the famers with whom Hagerty has worked over the years.

“We made these really great friendships with our Russian partners,” Hagerty said. “It’s not a friendship based on business. It was so emotional what we were dealing with.”

These friendships have long outlasted the Cold War – and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And Peace Fleece has gained nationwide acclaim for its strong, lustrous yarns and gorgeous colors with such names as Perestroika Pink and Kamchatka Sea Moss. The yarns became so popular, in fact, that there has been pressure for Hagerty and Tracy to expand the business, but they don’t want to.

“There was a real push to increase our size, but we felt it would compromise our ability to do the work in Russia that we want to do,” Hagerty said. “We never grew to a size where we couldn’t make the decisions, Marty and me.”

The couple still does most of the work, with help from six employees. Tracy takes care of marketing and product development, along with cooking up beautiful dyes for the wool.

“It’s sort of like a recipe to me, making a yarn color,” Tracy said. “The more colors you can blend together, the richer the color looks.”

Their specialty is kits, from beginning “learn how to knit” bags to expert sweater patterns.

“From the outset, we decided to market kits as opposed to finished products,” Hagerty said. “Both Marty and I really liked the idea of people buying things they had to make themselves.”

It’s much like their approach to business. Today, though, the company has more than 8,000 online customers and 400 retail outlets in the United States and Canada. They could grow the business and make more profit, but doing things themselves gives them the freedom to pursue what matters to them.

They work one-on-one with three farms in Russia, but, Hagerty says, trade restrictions have made it nearly impossible to get wool out of the country. So he recently started importing merino wool from a sheep farm in Romania. In 1991, in response to the Gulf War, Peace Fleece went to the West Bank to bring Palestinians and Israelis together for a wool festival. The company also began spinning wool from the region into a rugged yarn for weaving.

The work there continued until 1997, but it started to take away from Peace Fleece’s involvement in Russia. While Hagerty and Tracy remain in touch with their friends on the West Bank and they still sell the weaving yarn, they no longer import wool from the region.

“We’re still in touch with the village, but it was sort of a chapter,” Tracy said.

This is part of the reason the couple hasn’t headed to Afghanistan in response to the war on terrorism. It’s an unstable area where sheep graze on land covered with land mines, but that’s not their only concern. They have other priorities.

“We as Americans are willing to jump around from this hot spot to that hot spot,” Hagerty said. “When we do that, the focus is lost. … I feel we would be doing a disservice to our friends in Russia who are in some ways as much in need.”

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the couple’s friends from Russia called to lend their support and to see if they were OK. These farmers were no strangers to terror.

“When 9-11 happened, what it did was it equalized us – it showed we were vulnerable just like Russia was to all kinds of horrific things,” Hagerty said. “I don’t think any Russian I know welcomed that, but they thought now there was the potential for a deeper understanding, from the American point of view anyway, of their problems. I think that there was more of a sense of solidarity coming out of 9-11.”

Peace Fleece is available locally at Spin Me a Yarn on Forest Avenue in Orono. To order yarn or a catalog, visit www.peacefleece.com or call 625-4906.