Earth Day staff member Judy Moody works the phones on April 9, 1970, in the Washington, D.C., office for what was then called the Environmental Teach-in. With just nine staff members, the office relied heavily on volunteers and organizers in other institutions.

Rozanne Weismann, now with the Alliance to Save Energy in Washington, D.C., was a young staffer at the National Education Association. "I got the nation's teachers and schools involved without authority because I naively had no idea that one young person on her own couldn't move an organization," she said via email.

As an NEA staffer, Weismann wrote articles for teacher-education journals around the country, providing ideas for Earth Day-related classroom activities. Her boss, she said, was not pleased. "But," she adds, he later backed off, because "he got all sorts of compliments from teacher members around the country about this activity."