“In life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.”

…Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge

We arrived back on campus to find everything in an uproar.  Juniata had just sunk heavy money on the design and construction of a new science complex along the west side of Moore Street, just up from the corner house I stayed in during the summer of 1965.  It housed the chemistry, biology, physics, and geology departments in three wings extending out from a large, circular center that had a large auditorium on the ground floor and a science library and smaller lecture halls on the second floor.  The building was first occupied at the beginning of the spring semester in January 1966, but the formal dedication was scheduled for April.  The college was immensely proud of the facility, which had taken literally years to come to reality.  David Hercules, a chemistry professor who had since moved on to MIT, was one of the main promoters and had had a huge role in the building’s final design.  He managed to coerce the editors of the American Chemical Society Journal Analytical Chemistry to feature the chemistry wing in their occasional feature Laboratory of the Month.  Figures X-1 and X-2 show the article, which because of publishing lead times, didn’t appear until the March 1968 issue.  As the spring semester got underway, upper class science majors were recruited to act as ushers and tour guides for the upcoming dedication.  Those of us involved in research projects had to set up something in one of the new labs and had to prepare five-minute talks about what we were trying to do.  Dignitaries were coming in from all over the country, and the festivities would last through an entire weekend.  I attended a number of pep-rally type meetings as a representative and summer researcher from the chemistry department.

All during the academic year, students in the humanities division had been making noise about how Juniata was focused too much on the sciences.  There had been sporadic grumbling the previous year when ground was broken and structural steel was going up.  During the 1965 fall semester, they started calling the school Juniata Tech and offered the new science complex as the final straw that proved that the administration didn’t give a hoot about the humanities or social sciences curricula.  The administration was duly irritated but did nothing until somebody wrote up and distributed a manifesto decrying the emphasis on science.  It was signed by a group calling itself the “Ad Hoc Student Committee On The Liberal Arts And Sciences” (Figure X-3).  If that wasn’t bad enough, word went out that students were prepared to picket the dedication ceremony to get the message across.  Coming just a year after the Life Magazine civil rights photo spread public relations disaster, the threat sent the administration over the edge.  It did no good that the broadside insisted, “…no student is or has been concerned with protesting the construction or dedication of the Science Complex.”  The administration chose to take the rumors at face value and stated that the Huntingdon police would be called if any protesters materialized and that any and all students taking part in any kind of demonstration or protest during any of the dedication events would be immediately expelled.  This was to include confronting or verbally engaging dedication participants or audiences, handing any kind of protest literature, and, of course, actual disruption of events by picketing or shouting.

The protest movement immediately went underground.  There were hushed meetings in dorm rooms and clandestine gatherings under the trees in Sherwood Forest.  I was in an awkward position as a chemistry major with a small but highly visible assigned role in the dedication activities.  I tried to keep a low profile and hide in my room in North Dorm.  But I was still stuck walking between classes and working in the dining halls and as a lab assistant.  It didn’t take long before I was approached by Wylie Greig, senior English major and fellow Kvasir staffer (see Figures II-4 and X-4).  He wanted to talk with Dr. Spink, the chemistry professor with whom I worked during the previous summer.  Charlie Spink was the youngest member of the chemistry faculty.  He was liberal, a jazz fan, and when the weather was nice drove an immaculate red and black Austin Healy 3000 convertible.

 

 

 

So with much trepidation, I approached Dr. Spink during one of my afternoons doing research and was surprised by his immediate willingness to talk with Wylie.  All three of us met the next afternoon in Charlie’s office in the chemistry wing of the new science building.  Charlie listened closely and was sympathetic but told Wylie that there was absolutely nothing he could do.  The administration was on the warpath, and he didn’t have tenure.  He couldn’t attend any meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee or even really be seen with students suspected of being behind the whole affair.  Wylie left the meeting with a lot of sympathy but nothing else.  I remember wondering what he expected Charlie to say or do, and I thought at the time that Charlie had to take the position he did, anything else would’ve been academic suicide.

The dedication came and went without a murmur of student protest.  I had half expected to be called into the dean’s office myself because I knew just about everybody who had been involved in the picketing threats and had arranged the meeting with Professor Spink.  I started my dedication day prepping for my short speech on my research project and then reported in at the second floor chemistry department office.  To my relief, there was no one there dressed in a suit ready to escort me away.  I spent the afternoon standing in front of a huge and complicated glass apparatus that I used to redistill acetonitrile, going through my speech a couple of times to very small knots of alumni who were wandering through the building.  When I left to go over to the Oneida dining hall to work dinner, Charlie Spink joined me in walking down the new outside flight of steps.  “Well, I guess Juniata’s still safe for science,” he said as he went down the sidewalk to his car.

The meeting with Wylie was forgotten until the following year when Charlie announced to his little research group that his contract had not been renewed for the 1967-68 academic year, an astonishing fact considering that he was the only member of the chemistry faculty with research grant money and the only member at that time who was publishing.  He would be gone for my senior year.  I never approached him about it, but I was always convinced that the short meeting with Wylie Grieg had somehow been observed and that it was the direct and sole reason he was fired.

 

SCORE continued with the admissions-scholarship idea and decided that the science complex protest non-event would make the administration more sympathetic to a SCORE rally on the front steps of Founders’ Hall.  In the last week of April, SCORE president Gary Rowe scheduled a meeting in the brand new lecture hall on the ground floor of the new science complex.  It was surprisingly well attended and included an amazingly emotional speech from fellow classmate Nat Mitchell.  Gary was trying his best to whip up the audience like a tent revival preacher, not an easy task considering the general makeup of the student body in those days.  When he ran out of rhetoric, he tried to lead the whole assembly down the street to the president’s office in Founders’ Hall.  This was too much for those in the audience who were good Brethren students.  For them, just attending the rally was almost beyond the bounds of common decency and decorum.  Presenting a petition to the president was over the top.  They faded away, and the crowd quickly dwindled down to the faithful.

When we got there, Gary stood at the top of the old wooden stairs that led up to the old wooden front porch and again explained the reason for the rally and again read the petition.  The redundancy of it all seemed to be trumping the confrontational aspect of the doorstep rally.  Because the doors were locked and the building vacant except for the janitors, the whole rally seemed in danger of decompressing on the spot.  Gary spotted me down on the sidewalk and called out, “Chuck Lytle will now lead us in singing freedom songs from the civil rights movement!”  First of all, I can’t sing worth crap.  Second, which freedom song?  “Ain’t gonna let Bull Connor turn me ‘round?”  What the hell does THAT have to do with scholarship petitions?  My mind froze and I stared blankly at Gary.  ‘Oh, shit, I’m dying, here.  Why didn’t he warn me?  Why can’t I think?’  There wasn’t a sound.  Finally, a squeaky voice somewhere behind me started in on “We Shall Overcome.”  The crowd picked it up, and the blood started flowing again in my veins.  Okay, overcoming is fine, just leave me out of the chorus.  I used the excuse of lighting up a cigarette to slide to the very rear of the small crowd.

Desperate for headlines after the anticipated head banging never materialized at the dedication ceremonies, The Juniatian of May 6^th put the rally on the front page (Figure X-6a & 6b).  There was even an editorial, which was surprisingly balanced (Figure X-7).  They also published an explanatory letter to the editor by Gary (Figure X-8).  The mood of the campus was obviously still “right” and “tight,” and any kind of demonstrations, whether in the form of meetings or rallies, were beyond the pale for the vast majority of students.  The Brethren Church seemed to have outlawed passion, strong feelings, perhaps even Technicolor from its colleges.  The only member of the administration to go on record was the director of admissions, and his statement was astonishing in its patronizing attitude.  In so many words, he explained that blacks just didn’t have the preparation in the pubic schools (or brains?) to be successful at Juniata, adding that the vast majority of white students weren’t concerned, which apparently in his mind was reason enough not to consider the issue further.  I have no idea what the blacks already attending the college thought of his insulting condescension.  The editorial board of the campus newspaper, after a gratuitous swipe at the rally’s “basic appeal to the emotions,” surprisingly came out in support of the idea.  Gary’s written defense added some much needed perspective to the admissions director’s flippancy and nailed down the moral imperative for the whole concept.

By this time, the campus was on the threshold of its semi-annual, end of the semester death throes and blood bath in which every professor in every class rushed to squeeze in one last hour exam and one last paper before final exams started on May 23^rd.  In the face of this huge and universal preoccupation by the student body, SCORE wound down the year with a few subdued meetings and vague plans for scholarships and for volunteer work down south in the summer.  And just like the year before, the registration materials for the main venue for volunteering, SCLC’s summer SCOPE project, arrived after everyone had left campus for the summer.  The materials were sent to me at Juniata and were forwarded to my home in Sunbury, arriving after I had returned to campus for my second summer doing research in the chemistry department.  I finally received the packet at the end of June after it was mailed back to me on campus by my parents (Figure X-9).

 

 

 

 

I lost track of SCORE activities and Elmer Maas during the summer of 1966. There were no newsletters to write, no urgent business to attend to, and, with the exception of the registration packet for SCOPE, nothing came in addressed to SCORE.  I was rooming in the bottom floor of Sherwood Hall with upperclassman and philosophy major wannabe and all around nice guy Paul Shaffer.  My days were taken up with research, and my off hours involved spelunking, rattle snake hunting, getting drunk, heading out to the various state parks up in the mountains, and – thanks to a mid-summer visit by Bill Brubaker, who was interning at the Circle In The Square theater in New York City – getting high.  Yes, drugs had finally made their way onto the Juniata campus, and not a moment too soon for those of us being ground up in the relentless litany of academics.  But like all first-timers, Paul and I toked up enough to lay out the entire 29^th Division and kept waiting for something, anything to happen.  I just remember time slowing WAY down.  Perhaps we should’ve tried laughing at something or running out to Topp’s on the highway for burgers.  Never having gotten high before, we had no idea what to expect, so that’s more or less what we got:  nothing.

When I finally got a jolt, it didn’t come from smoking dope.  I was walking from the new chemistry wing to lunch in the basement of Lesher Hall the last week in June when I ran into Bill Hofelt who had graduated as an English major the previous year.  I had known him, but not well.  He was on campus because he had been hired on short notice to replace Don Hope.  I was stunned speechless.  Bill offered no reasons and left it to me to assume the worst: that he had been fired because of the whole dust-up over the Montgomery demonstrations.  All Bill could offer was that Don had managed to scrounge up a job at an all-girls prep school somewhere in New York State.   In fact, he was already gone, and Charlie and Marty Spink had moved into his house out on Cold Springs Road.

The news wrecked the entire summer and soured me on the whole civil rights business on campus.  Although Don was not active like Elmer Maas, he was an enormous presence behind the scenes.  Both he and Elmer were living testaments for me that the whole world wasn’t crazy.  Remember that Viet Nam was already in the national news, and parents were predicting “another Korea.”  They both represented sanity and reason in a world gone mad.  And I had personal reasons for regret.  Late that spring, I had talked Don into letting me declare a dual major of English and chemistry, and I was planning on taking at least four more English classes my senior year.  Now what?  Bill Hofelt notwithstanding, the rest of the English Department had seen its day decades ago with professors from top schools who had simply been teaching way too long.  I was going to have to re-think this whole dual major thing.  I tried to cheer myself up that at least Elmer and Charlie Spink and Steve Barbash would still be around.

My junior year was a nightmare.  In order to clear out my schedule for taking all those English classes my senior year, I had signed up for three Division II classes to finish out my distribution requirements for graduation:  Introduction to Sociology, Principals of Political Science, and Marriage and the Family (I kid you not).  On top of all of that were Physical Chemistry I and II, Organic Reactions, Electronics, Applied Mathematics (differential equations), Instrumental Chemistry, and Atomic Physics.  And, of course, the usual working in the dining halls and being a laboratory assistant and typing papers for cash for cigarettes.

My academic schedule had me in classes all mornings and in labs all afternoons.  And, as in my first two years, I had to work like a demon in the labs to finish in time to make my evening shift of working “elevators up” in the Oneida dining hall.  All extra curricular activities took a nosedive, not that I had that many, anyway.  I was so buried that it was weeks into the fall semester before I learned that Elmer had moved out of his apartment and was living in a college owned building called Mifflin House, just a few blocks downhill from campus.

I finally came up for air when I received the annual notice that Kvasir, the campus literary magazine, was soliciting material (Figure X-10).  Somehow, I managed to rework and finish the poem I had first attempted while sitting in Dick Snyder’s VW down in Dallas County over seven months earlier and then put down on paper some of my cynicism from that trip.   The final result was a three-part poem in which I tried to distill down everything I felt about the whole affair.  It’s not a pretty piece, and I’m surprised the editor, Phil Jones, let it stand as is.  In retrospect, it was my “swan song” for civil rights, at least as I had come to know it back then.  It turned out that when the issue finally came out towards the end of the spring semester, it didn’t matter anyway.  But more on that in the next chapter.

I don’t know how it all happened, but somewhere, somehow during that fall semester, the idea for The Insurance Company was born.  Don Hope, from his hideout somewhere in the wilds of New York State, was doing the script, and Elmer was doing the music.  Music?  Yes, it was to be a musical of all things, with the futuristic theme that the entire globe was under the control of a single insurance company.  You survived by buying insurance; you perished when your insurance was cancelled.  Not exactly South Pacific, but if you could succeed by putting New York ethnic gang wars to music, you could sell anything.

By the beginning of the spring semester, I had gained some sort of equilibrium; call it shell shock if you choose.  I was more or less going through the motions of academics like an automaton. The sheer volume of content and the staggering time commitments had dulled everything down to a cerebral gray tone of survival, and I was conscious of subject matter just enough to maintain life support.  So at that point, I figured ‘what the hell, I’m going under anyway, why not go out smiling?’  So I volunteered.

The excitement of The Insurance Company was impossible to suppress.  Because of stage work I had done for spending money while in high school, Gary Rowe recruited me to help out with the lighting.  So instead of studying, I spent most of my evenings up in the control booth at the back of the balcony in Oller Hall, watching endless rehearsals.  It was all new for me.  In high school, I worked stage right with a pre-electronic-control Ward-Leonard panel of countless handles connected physically to giant rheostats.  At Juniata, I was working with this miniature board as far away from the stage as you could possibly get.

I suddenly went from doing nothing extracurricular to almost bunking down in Oller Hall.  Elmer Maas was everywhere.  He directed.  He worked with the student musicians.  He managed to coerce some members of the Altoona Symphony to show up for rehearsal once a week.  He played the star role of The Director of the insurance company.  He got involved in publicity.  In all of this, he managed to work on the music.  No one was sure if he ever slept.

 

It didn’t take long to find out that Don Hope himself was rehearsing the part of The Director and was driving down from New York for opening night, and it soon became the worst kept secret on campus.  For those of us still around who had been down south in 1965, the news was huge.  Don had become sort of a folk hero for the arty crowd on campus and was a symbol of everything evil about the college administration.

At the start, the orchestra was fairly large.  When Elmer started rehearsing the music with the acting, it became clear that a lot of the musicians didn’t have a clue up to that point what the musical was about.  When Elmer and Gary Rowe announced the opening date and that the production was under the auspices of SCORE and was to be a benefit for the SCORE scholarship fund, some of them walked out.  Because there would be no gate receipts (the whole event was to rely on donations at the door), there was no way to even pay people to play.  Besides, this was Huntingdon, PA not Philadelphia or New York.  SCORE members scoured the campus looking for volunteers and managed to find a few.  I particularly remember Ron Lennox, a chemistry major a year behind me.  It turns out that he played French horn, and played it very well and could literally fill a hall with his own sound.  I approached him, and he immediately agreed to join the troupe.  He wasn’t involved in SCORE or anything else particularly radical on campus.  But he certainly helped save The Insurance Company.

The performance was finally set for Sunday, May 14, 1967, a scant week before finals (Figures X-11 through X-14).  We went to full dress rehearsals that Friday and Saturday nights.  In an act of pure malice, a fair portion of the musicians walked out during the Saturday rehearsal, claiming that they had been duped into being part of something subversive and un-American.  I was standing out in the Oller Hall lobby when they left, snickering and bragging that they had just stopped opening night.  Well, they underestimated Elmer.  Somehow, he dug down deep and surfaced with more maniacal energy than anyone had ever witnessed.  He drove to Altoona, personally appealed to some musicians he knew, shuttled them back to campus, rehearsed them all day Sunday, and had the whole enchilada ready by curtain at 8:15 PM.  To top it all off and add “theater” to the theater, at about 7:30 student pickets showed up and walked back and forth in front of the hall.  The signs disavowed the event as being college sanctioned and proclaimed that the content was anathema to Juniata values, etc., etc., etc.

To everyone’s amazement, we had a good house.  The acting was great, the music sublime, and the production just fine, including the lights.  Even bit player Mick Allman was a standout as a policeman.  And there for all to see was Don Hope in the starring role of The Director (Figure X-15).  When the final curtain went down, there were literally tears all around.  There were no hecklers or catcalls.  The malcontents had obviously stayed away, not wanting their presence to give the impression that they approved.  Given the latent hostility of the administration, the debacle of the evil musicians, and the total lack of seasoned singer/actors, it all seemed like a miracle.  Backstage (which was really downstairs under the stage) was pandemonium and was certainly just cause for the fire marshal to clear the building.  It seemed as if everybody who was in the hall had squeezed into the long, narrow dressing room area.  Everybody wanted to talk to Don Hope.  Everybody wanted to talk to Elmer Maas.  And everybody ended up talking with everybody.

SCORE, Don, and Elmer had pulled off a triumph of sorts:  a vindication of the values of fighting the good fight against odds so great that they had cost Don his job.  At this remove, I have no idea how much money SCORE raised.  At the time, it didn’t matter.  What mattered is that The Insurance Company had happened and had been well received.  In that one brief moment, everyone involved could bask in the accomplishment of something good and say, ‘This we have; this we will never forget.’  It was a moment for me that triumphed over everything I did in my four years at Juniata and made my graduation in comparison almost an afterthought.

The afterglow of The Insurance Company somehow lifted me enough to finish the year better than I had ever hoped.  I pulled down a 3.00 gpa, offsetting the disappointing C in Atomic Physics with an A in Professor Kihl’s Introduction To Political Science.  I was exhausted but more or less content.  I could take my two-week break and be back on campus doing research for the summer.  Life seemed good.

 

 

 

 

 

The Insurance Company had one more performance.  Elmer had never stopped working with black organizations in Mt. Union and other areas.  At the 2005 reunion, someone gave me materials from a production by the Bridge Upward Bound program.  All I know is that it was held at the Arlington Street Church at Arlington and Boylston Streets in Boston.  The date is August 30 and Sunday September 1^st, which according to my perpetual calendar may have been 1968.  Elmer was already gone from Juniata by then.  The grainy photographs that were part of the materials showed an all-black cast.

But I was gone from Juniata after graduating in June 1968, and I lost track of just about everybody except Gary Rowe and Jeff Cawley.  Neither mentioned this production, so I must leave it to others to fill in the missing information.

One last Insurance Company memory.  As in every summer past, I received a letter that had made the torturous journey of Juniata-Sunbury-Juniata.  The return address on the envelope had no name but gave Elmer’s apartment address on Mifflin Street, and the letter was postmarked from New York City (Figure X-16).  Inside was a mimeograph sheet addressed to all participants in the Juniata production asking for expressions of interest.  This last vestige is shown in Figure X-17.

The summer of 1967 was my last at Juniata College doing research in the chemistry department.  The college was changing.  We were put up in Tussey Hall, a brand new, L-shaped dormitory west of North dorm.  It had a huge lobby cum-rec room with two pool tables.  Pool tables on campus!  Their very existence was a harbinger of doom for the already fading influence of the strict, Brethren doctrine of in loco parentis.  It couldn’t happen soon enough.  The coming year would see the first time courses could be taken pass/fail.  Freshman hazing and Saturday classes had already been banished.  Juniata seemed to be finally waking up to an America that had existed since the end of the Korean War.

 

 

Something else passed during the summer of 1967.  For three years, essentially all of the leadership in the foment on campus had been upperclassmen, and they were all gone.  The core group was really all on campus only during my freshman year.  My sophomore year saw a significant number of juniors off in Europe as exchange students.  The same thing happened the following year when fellow classmates such as Mike Marzio were gone.  More than that, I had become closer friends with upperclassman than I had with members of my own class, particularly Gary Rowe, Phil Jones, and Fred Bailey.

 

I came back to campus in mid-June 1967 in a melancholy funk that was softened only with the knowledge that the worst of my academic schedule was behind me and that I was certain I’d graduate.  The only bumps on the horizon were taking the Graduate Record Exams, applying to graduate school, both in the fall, and finally in April taking the oral and written exams to qualify for graduation.  I was well enough along in my research that I knew I could easily finish it up even with Charlie Spink gone for the upcoming, two semester research course required to graduate with a major in chemistry.  I had worked out a deal with the new Director of Food Services, Charles Bliven, to work with the kitchen crew in the Lesher Hall dining room that was used during summer school.  I worked almost every meal along with classmate Paul Lenharr.  Every morning, we would arrive and clock in just as the cooks would be setting out the food.  We’d spend a leisurely 45 minutes or so eating and kibitzing, often out on the patio, while the dirty dishes slowly piled up.  We’d then rush back in, run everything through the big Hobart, and return to the patio for another cup of tea.  Finally after another 30 minutes or so, we’d repeat the performance and clock out.  I figure that our clocked time was easily four-fold greater than the time we actually spent washing dishes.  Nobody ever minded, and the cash kept me in cigarettes, pop, and junk food the whole summer.

 

So the summer floated along.  I had no contact with Elmer Maas, and there were no ongoing SCORE activities as there had been in previous summers.  There were some rumors floating around campus that Elmer Maas’ job was on the line.  I didn’t find out until the spring of 1968 that they were going to fire him in the summer of 1966.  But he had successfully pled poverty, having spent every dime he had on various civil rights groups both locally and in New York City.  So the professorial blood bath would be complete, a permanent black stain of intolerance on the reputation of the college.

But along with the gentle Pennsylvania summer heat, the winds of change were picking up.  While some of us were still buying Folkways albums by Cisco Houston and Buffy St. Marie and Miriam Makaba, in July, one of the research gang returned to Tussey Hall in the evening with the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  About ten of us packed into a dorm room and listened without a word to the whole album.  What and the hell was all of this?  And if that wasn’t enough, only a few days later, somebody discovered that the local AM radio station was playing this weird music:  Sunshine of Your Love by a group calling itself Cream and this really bizarre piece called Purple Haze by a group by the name of The Jimmie Hendricks Experience.  It was too much.  Folk music became a mere historical novelty overnight, and civil rights was lost in the country’s belated discovery of hippies, Golden Gate Park, the Summer of Love, something called psychedelia, a weird-looking guy by the name of Peter Max, and a best seller titled The Electric Kool-Ade Acid Test, whatever the hell THAT was.  People were actually taking off and hitchhiking to San Francisco, just to find out what was going on out there.

And by then, the Viet Nam war had become front-page news, and grisly carnage could be seen almost every night on TV.  It was hard to believe, but LSD and nightly body counts in a war on the other side of the globe had combined to push civil rights so far out of students’ consciences, it was as if the past three years had never existed.  And I was included in the exodus.  The draft was on, and 2-S deferments were under attack.  The official status of Church of the Brethren members as conscientious objectors didn’t seem to be so quaint anymore, and students were suddenly getting religion all over the place.  Do you just kick back and get high, or do you start making plans to escape to Canada?

By the time I left for home at the end of August 1967, my summer idyll had turned into a panic over what was going to happen to me when I graduated in June 1968.  It didn’t help that my father, a WW II vet who had survived D-Day with the 29^th Division, was gung-ho for the war.  My mother was repeating the litany that she had always known that one of her sons would be killed in a war.  To make the perfect backdrop, this was the first time it was painfully obvious that my hometown was economically dying.  What few factories were left were either dying or on the ropes.  Stores were closing, including the uptown soda shop where kids had hung out since the day they invented teenagers.  No matter which way I turned, things were bleak, depressing, and hopeless.  I hadn’t felt this badly since the day before I started kindergarten in 1951.

The only glimmer of hope was somebody by the name of Doctor Norwood.  Way back during my junior year in high school, it was discovered that I had scoliosis of the spine, two malformed vertebrae, and had one leg about a half inch shorter than the other.  Norwood had been the orthopedic surgeon who had done my workup at the local hospital.  Other than keeping me out of physical education classes, it hadn’t really meant all that much.  But, he had offered to write me a letter in case I ever needed one for the draft or whatever.  I pinned all my hopes on that, and fretted away my two weeks home worrying that my whole life now depended on a doctor I hadn’t visited since 1962.