“This job is long, hot, and hellish…”
…Phil Jones, letter to the author written while in the civil rights trenches, summer 1965

The Juniata Chemistry Department maintained a research program during the summer that was sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation.  In addition, the department conducted a summer school for high school chemistry teachers.  Both programs utilized students, who were chosen more or less by their success in the preceding year’s chemistry classes and by their perceived ability to conduct modest research projects.  Somehow during all the chaos of the spring semester, I was offered a slot for the summer of 1965.  There was a formal interview process in May in which new participants spoke with all the professors and then asked one of them to take them on.  I chose Charles Spink, a young and fairly new professor out of Penn State whom I already knew and who was sympathetic to the civil rights actions both in Alabama back in March and on campus through the rest of the spring semester.

Eight of us were put in the upstairs of an up/down duplex on the NW corner of Moore and 18^th Street.  Downstairs lived an emeritus professor of Physics, Paul Yoder, and his wife.  We paired ourselves up and picked rooms based on seniority.  I paired up with Andy Grange, who would be my roommate for the next three years, and we ended up being stuck in a back bedroom with a window looking out over the home of Morley J. Mays, Vice President of the college.  There was a small balcony on the SE side of the house that was accessible from two of the upstairs rooms and had views of the north end of the old science hall right across 18^th Street, students’ hall on the SE corner, the old women’s’ gym down 18^th Street, and the south end of the new Beeghly library along Moore Street.

We moved in on a Sunday in mid-June and gathered at 8 AM Monday in the lecture hall at the south end of the main floor of science hall to get our marching orders for the summer.  As I recall, we got free room but had to pay our board.  Everybody ate in the Lesher dining hall just down the hill from the women’s’ gym on 18^th Street.  We were expected to be in the labs 8 ‘till 5, Monday through Friday, although it was understood that good researchers put in lots of extra time.  Andy and I were assigned a small, damp, ancient lab in the basement that looked as if Robert Bunsen himself had worked there and the college had preserved it as a memorial to him and his famous burner.  Out in the hallway was an equally ancient safe on spoked wheels in which the department’s hoard of platinum crucibles and gold objets d’scientifique were stored.  The building had no central air conditioning, and the windows were innocent of screens, so the second floor casements were either stuffed with add-on air conditioners to keep the department’s hoard of instruments going or served as convenient perches for student researchers trying to escape the heat.  Senior Shirley Hoover’s lab was right above the front entrance, and most warm days would find her sitting precariously at the open window reading journal articles or writing in her lab notebook.

The Juniata summer semester was a modest affair in those days, but the college hosted a whole series of events and camps that ran on and off all summer long.  Trustee William Swigart always hosted a two-day concours d’elegance; there was a high school basketball clinic run by Press Maravich out of LSU (who also happened to be late of Aliquippa, PA and who was the father of “Pistol” Pete Maravich, at the time a high school All-American and later would be an NBA basketball star, who back then roomed right along with the scrubs in Sherwood dorm); and a religious group who called their Juniata sojourn Camp Fartherest Out.  (They were only on campus that summer, and we never did find out what particular god they worshiped.)

I felt as if I’d died and gone to heaven.  No classes, no homework, no exams, no papers, and NO working in the dining halls.  Yes, we were all supposed to work very hard on our research projects, and we really did try, but not to the extent that it would interfere with everything else going on.  However, I never let the rattle snake hunting, spelunking, hitch-hiking home, underage drinking, or other diversions interfere too much with just lying around soaking up the sun or taking day excursions with business professor Ron Cherry as he indulged in what he called “industrial archeology,” which translated to bombing around the sticks of Central Pennsylvania in a beat-up 1951 Chevy pickup trying to find long-abandoned towns and railroad spurs as revealed on a set of 1880 USGS topological maps carefully glued to the walls of his upstairs model-making room in his house at the very upper end of Mifflin Street.  Through all of it, the pilot light of civil rights was somehow supposed to be kept burning so as to ignite the fire for the upcoming fall semester.

I had never palled around with professors during my first year, so it was quite a trip to be contacted by Elmer Maas that first week and be invited to his apartment in a disintegrating stucco building on the edge of campus at the corner of Cold Springs Road and College Avenue.   I don’t know if Elmer was teaching that summer, but I do know that he was all involved in HOPE in Mt. Union.  One problem was that SCORE had barely time to organize and get settled before the spring semester ended and everybody scattered.  All sorts of people and organizations had been contacted, but we were just now getting materials, too late to distribute to students.  Examples are provided in Figures VII-1 through VII-3.  The first two are applications for volunteering for summer work.  The third is a petition. Elmer and I signed a copy of the petition, and took it around campus trying to collect signatures.  I got Charlie Spink and a couple of students to sign, everybody else refused.  Elmer mailed off the sad petition with the paltry number of signatures.  It was simply too late to do anything about the volunteer opportunities.

We did take action and send money from the SCORE treasury to Ed Jones of “Freedom House” in Montgomery where we had all congregated during the March demonstrations.  This had been voted on at the last SCORE meeting at the end of the spring semester.  We also decided to send a small amount of money to Phil Jones, who did not participate in the March action but who subsequently decided to volunteer for SCLC out of the Atlanta Georgia headquarters.

Phil’s collect calls and letters to Elmer provided stark contrast to the bucolic Juniata summer.  He had driven to Atlanta in his 1955 Chevy only to volunteer immediately to participate in James Meredith’s famous “March Against Fear.”  Phil had driven out to Memphis and was with Meredith when he was shot just a day or two into the march.  He was there for Stokely Carmichael’s famous “Black Power” speech in Greenwood, MS and had gotten tear-gassed in Canton, MS.  After that baptism into the world of civil rights, Phil settled down to the gritty work of canvassing in Alabama for the SCLC SCOPE project.

Elmer and I decided that the best thing to do was to put out a newsletter.  Elmer had the SCORE mailing list and volunteered to provide the postage.  We wanted to tell Phil’s story and keep up everybody’s spirits in preparation for the fall semester.  He gave me a couple of mimeograph masters, and I repaired to the upstairs balcony in what we chem. majors were now calling “Yoder Hall.”  Armed with my portable Smith-Corona, a pint of grain alcohol from the chem. lab, and a quart of Seven-Up, over the course of the next several evenings and after a couple of spoiled mimeo masters, I had issue number one in hand.  Elmer ran the mimeo copies (I have no idea where), and we got back together the next day and folded up and stamped a couple dozen copies.  We drove down to the Huntingdon post office in Elmer’s gray VW bug and dropped them in the bin (Figure VII-4).  Note that Reverend Witt is mentioned in the piece on HOPE and apparently already had a new position working on programs funded through the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity.

In the meantime, I was serving as the de facto drop box for everything SCORE coming into campus, which was surprising given that Elmer was there the whole summer.  I didn’t interact all that much with Elmer, who had a non-Juniata circle of friends and who spent what seemed to be a lot of time at Penn State.  He was also heavily involved with HOPE in Mt. Union, something in which, for whatever reason, I had little interest.  A number of mailings got forwarded to my home address in Sunbury.  These were kept until I returned home two weeks before the beginning of the fall semester or were simply lost.

In late July, we decided to put out another newsletter.  Elmer gave me his notes on recent HOPE activities, and I added a report on a visit to campus by three civil rights workers.  I requisitioned supplies from the science building stockroom and repeated my balcony scene.  Issue number two was mailed off the first week of August (Figure VII-5).

When I finally made it back home in early September, there was a letter waiting for me from Phil Jones.  It had been mailed from Temple, TX to me at Juniata and then forwarded to me in Sunbury.  First, some comments on the letter’s content. The whole “blowing up the new science building” flap is covered in Chapter VIII.  Basically, the humanities and social science majors were upset that the college was spending so much money on the hard sciences (yet again in their opinion), and there had been dark  rumors flying around campus that students were going to picket the dedication whenever it was finally scheduled sometime during the 1965-66 academic year.

Second, John (“Captain”) Blood was Director of Food Services and ran the scullery and wait-crew like a general on a battlefield.  Because Phil and I worked at the same particular job removing food from three huge dumbwaiters and putting them on trays held by student wait-staff (called “Elevators Up”), substituting for Phil really meant I’d have to do two people’s work simultaneously.

Third, I had no idea what Phil was talking about when he wrote, “Rowe quit and I’m pissed of at that…”  On February 6, 2011, I emailed Gary Rowe and asked him for help.  Here is his reply:

I did go to Atlanta in June 1965.  I don’t remember how I won the battle with my parents. I turned down my automatic summer job at the Harrisburg Hospital even though I needed to earn money for college.  We were promised that there were “scholarships” to be had by doing voter registration with SCLC.  I remember the all-night drive in Phil’s 1955 green Chevy and that major parts of Interstate 81 were uncompleted through Virginia.We crashed the first night at the S.C.O.P.E. Freedom House on Johnson Avenue in Atlanta.  It was said to be a former residence of Dr. MLK, Jr.  There’s a picture I’ve seen of the King family seated in front of the wallpaper in that living room, some sort of huge flower pattern as I recall.  From the front porch of the home you could look straight into downtown and the city’s gleaming skyscrapers.  An expressway exit stopped abruptly at a barricade at the end of Johnson Avenue.    The street was about a block long exiting off Randolph Street at the location of Freedom Parkway in the upper right of the map.  Johnson Avenue disappeared about ten years ago when the parkway was finally constructed.  At that time the neighborhood was filled with modest single-family homes.  We worked in pairs, one black student with one white student, and knocked on doors to encourage people to register to vote.  Mostly, people stared at us in disbelief, especially  the elderly. 

One evening we sat on the front porch of that house listening to Andrew Young and Hosea Williams.  It was spellbinding.  (In 1980 I did a live interview with Hosea and Dr. Ralph Lowery on WIND radio in Chicago.  Improbably, they made news by endorsing Ronald Reagan for president against fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter). 

It is charitable to call SCLC organizing “improvisational.”  We were housed at Morris Brown College in an empty dorm.  Meals were haphazard.  After a few days it was clear that there was no hope of earning money and, if there were, I’d be taking a job away from a black student whose needs were greater than mine.  Phil faced the same disappointment but decided to stay.  After a week, I went to Hartsfield and bought a standby ticket on Eastern Airlines.  I ended up spending the night in the terminal, got on a flight to Philadelphia in the morning — my first air trip — taxi to 30th Street and home on the good old PRR.  I think my parents were secretly smug about my adventure.  I pounded the payment in the hot sun for three weeks before my old boss would give me my job back.  I think she took a dim view of civil rights workers.