“…[the] potency of college memories lies in the fact that in those years we made the most memorable discoveries in our lives.”

Quoted by Earl Kaylor in Truth Sets Free, A centennial History of Juniata College, 1876-1976

As I had every year, I arrived early on campus to work the dining halls for freshman orientation, which in 1967 began Saturday, September 16^th.  Classes didn’t start until Tuesday, so it was the perfect time to buy books, check on my research lab in the new chemistry wing of the science complex, and get ready for the academic year at a leisurely pace.

I was looking forward to a leisurely pace in my studies, too.  For the first time ever, I was taking only one hard-core science class, Advanced Inorganic Chemistry.  The only “lab” I had was Introduction to Chemical Research, which in reality was just an extension of the research project on which I had been working the last three summers on campus.  To finally finish my Division II requirements, I took Paul Heberling’s Criminology.

And, along with every other senior on campus, I had to take the most fascinating course I ever had during my entire career at Juniata, Integration of Art, Knowledge, and Conduct.  It was run by assistant professor Robert Wagoner in the Philosophy Department, and, just like Steve Barbash’s freshman course Great Epochs In World Cultures, it met three mornings a week en masse with smaller breakout classes meeting once a week in the early afternoon.  Guest lecturers appeared throughout the year, mostly from other departments at the college.  The reading list was a tour de force designed to jolt the senior class into at least approaching the question, ‘what does it all mean?’  It included Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty, Alfred Jules Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic, Martin Buber’s I-Thou, on and on such that I can’t remember the rest forty three years later.  All of this was peppered with excerpts from underground newspapers, magazines such as The New Yorker and Playboy (the Playboy Philosophy was huge in 1967-68), newspapers, columns, broadsides:  a ceaseless barrage of media.  At my first breakout class, new assistant professor of religion Jose Nieto, just out of Princeton Theological Seminary, assigned the paper “In What Do I Believe And Why,” with no credit if you just stated something without a thorough defense.  And no church dogma allowed.  I’m sure that the difficulties in grading the papers matched the Herculean struggles to write them.  Oh, it was due in one week.  To get ahead of myself, we read a mountain of literature, argued over everything, wrote more papers, took exams, got frustrated, and ended the year still not knowing what it all meant.  Years later in my belated hippie period, I read an underground comic by R. Crumb in which the character Mr. Natural answers the very same question with, “It don’t mean shee-it.”  I immediately thought of Integration… and felt both gratified and vindicated.

Fellow chemistry major Jeff Cawley had been installed as chairman of SCORE following my refusal that spring.  He called a meeting, which was surprisingly well attended.  There were a number of freshman, curious more than anything.  We were in one of the ancient lecture rooms on the third floor of Students’ Hall sometime during the last week in September.  It was sunny and hot, and all the windows were wide open.  Jeff called the meeting to order and asked if there was any old business.  There was none.  He then asked if there was any new business.  There was none.  The freshmen present seemed confused.  Jeff then explained that SCORE had always been an ad hoc committee and that it had been formed to fulfill a need that apparently no longer existed on campus.  (This was most certainly NOT the case.)  No one cared enough to comment.  I was the only one present who had participated in both the major actions down south; everybody else had either graduated or had left school or had been fired.

As the “sole surviving member of the old guard,” I had nothing to say.  Jeff asked for a motion from the floor to disband the committee.  I made the motion.  There was no discussion.  Without even taking a vote, Jeff declared SCORE disbanded.  There were no faculty present.

So in less than ten minutes, the whole three-year movement that had directly or indirectly led to the dismissal of three faculty, had caused one local pastor to lose his position, had garnered unwanted national attention on the “right little, tight little” college, and had placed so many students in harm’s way, committed hara-kiri in plain view, with the bell tower of Founder’s Hall peering down through the maple leaves into the room.  It seemed to me at the time that it symbolized the triumph of the narrow conservatism of both the Brethren Church and the college.  The “intelligent bumpkins” had won at last.

In retrospect, that sentiment gave the student body more credit than it deserved.  If there was any “war” with the civil rights activists on campus, it had faded away with the last chorus of The Insurance Company.  The demographics had certainly changed during the four years I was at Juniata, with more and more students coming from bigger and bigger cities.  (You have to remember that Altoona was “big” compared to Huntingdon.)  The newer, more cosmopolitan students simply had no interest in civil rights.  They weren’t antagonistic, just preoccupied with other things.  By the fall of 1967, the majority of students didn’t care whether SCORE existed or not.

Jeff, Mike Marzio, myself, and my roommate Andy Grange, sat around the room and talked about how it all got started and about all the adventures with antagonistic students and a hostile administration.  Jeff seemed to want support for presiding over the death of SCORE, which we assured him was inevitable and was the right thing to do.  Nobody wanted to be part of yet another committee without a purpose.  Jeff noted wryly that I had stopped wearing my Black Panther button.  Andy reminded everyone that word was out that there was going to be a huge rally in Washington DC in October to protest the Viet Nam war.  We all agreed we’d go if we could get enough students interested to charter a bus.  With that, the small group broke up and walked down the creaky stairs and outside.  Jeff, Andy, and I walked back to the Cloisters dorm in animated discussion about protesting the War.  Civil rights on campus was officially dead.

The apparent holly-stake-through-the-heart was Elmer Maas’ activities during the past summer.  He had either formed or at least was a driving force of something called the Viet Nam Summer Steering Committee.  I had no idea what he had been doing or where he had been doing it, but he arrived back on campus billing the upcoming national war protest gathering as the next big thing.  So even Elmer had abandoned civil rights.  Well, at least on campus.  Martin Luther King, Jr. and his organization SCLC had just finished up something he had called Viet Nam Summer, an educational barrage conducted throughout the south that blasted the Viet Nam war because it involved drafting blacks and poor whites all out of proportion to their national population demographics.  Elmer defended his apparent switch by claiming that protesting the Viet Nam war was just another facet of civil rights, and he had MLK, Jr. himself to back up his claim.

The very next week, Elmer and a few students, notably Mike Marzio, Jeff Cawley, and freshman Marta Daniels, called an organizational meeting for those interested in traveling to Washington DC for the big national war protest, which now had a firm date of Saturday, October 21^st, less than three weeks away.  The meeting was very well attended and attracted students from across the spectrum.  The “usual suspects” made up only a modest portion of the audience.  Most of the students figured that protesting the war would be a natural for a college affiliated with a pacifist protestant denomination.  Although this may have been theologically correct, the college administration still came out against the whole affair as being ill conceived, dangerous, unbecoming of Juniata students, and full of unwarranted and unseemly hubris.  But other than that, there wasn’t much they could do.  In response, Brethren students shot back church dogma.

The final organizational meeting took place on Wednesday, October 18^th in a small room in the Stone Church at the southern edge of campus on Moore Street.  The purpose was to finalize the head count and the money due per person to pay for the bus.  Things had just gotten started when a small group of students came in, led by a freshman with the unlikely name of Soterios Nickolopoulos.  Nick, as he was called, had done at least one tour in Viet Nam and was furious at the whole idea of a war protest.  He had brought along an odd assortment of underclass football players, wannabes, and female camp followers.  Nick was built like a fireplug and still wore his military buzz cut.  He interrupted the meeting and demanded that somebody, anybody explain why they were participating in the protest.  After a stunned silence, Mike Marzio spoke up.  That unleashed an emotional and heated back and forth, that was long on accusations but short on substance and ended up a sort of pedantic exchange of “Yeah?”  “Oh, yeah?”  The anti-protest protestors finally left the meeting, with the original group somewhat shaken and nonplussed.  There had been a few veiled threats to go along with the taunts.  The good Brethren students present just couldn’t believe that anyone would resort to violence over a war protest.  Those who had been down south countered with, “Welcome to the real world, kids.”

We still had one more meeting to go, scheduled for Friday evening, again in the Stone Church.  This one was to go over all the final details and collect the rest of the money for the charter.  The meeting had been well publicized, so the anti-protest group was well aware of it.  We decided to pack the meeting with sympathetic faculty to act as both witness and human shield in case things got out of hand.  I recruited chemistry professor and Brethren minister Dale Wampler.  We quickly got commitments from minister to students Bob Faust, academic dean Paul Heberling, history professor Ken Crosby, and a number of others.

That Friday morning, The Juniatian came out and was full of news about the disrupted meeting (Figure XI-1) and the upcoming demonstration (Figure XI-2).  Also included were anti-war opinion pieces by myself (Figure XI-3) and classmate Bob Frysinger (Figure XI-4).  Unfortunately, I only managed to save the front page of the newspaper, so the second parts of the opinion pieces are missing.

The campus was once again in an uproar, with most students gleefully watching and waiting to see if Nick and his gang had the guts to bust heads the day before the planned departure for Washington.  I was convinced that nothing was going to happen.  First, this wasn’t Alabama or Mississippi.  Second, the college was so strict that even a mild pushy-shovey would most certainly lead to immediate expulsion of the perpetrator(s).  Of course, some of the anti-protest people weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, and maybe they’d figure it was worth the chance.  Or, there might be one or two who didn’t like Juniata and would figure that pounding on a couple of anti-war protestors would be a great way to make an exit from higher education.  I had just enough belief in the irrational and the insane that I was actually worried after the sun went down (no daylight savings time).

After my stint working elevators up in the Oneida dining hall, I hustled back to my room in the Cloisters and got ready for the meeting.  Neither my roommate Andy Grange nor I had heard of any trouble so far.  We had just enough time to head out to the Stone Church for the final, pre-trip meeting.

It was quite a gathering.  All the concerned professors showed up, along with Nick and his small group.  Chemistry Professor Dale Wampler, who had the demeanor of Caspar Milquetoast, looked as if he was about to get a root canal without anesthetics.  Elmer stayed firm and ran the meeting without hesitation, either in action or in voice.  The anti-protestors seemed to be cowed by the presence of so many staff, including the Dean of the College, Paul Heberling.  The highlight of the evening came when Elmer Maas asked if anybody was missing from the roster.  The bus still had a few empty seats.  Right in front of the “Nick contingent,” senior Mick Allman said loudly, “I don’t think my name’s on the list.”  He rose out of his chair, walked right in front of Nick, and signed his name.  Nick went apoplectic because he knew that Mick was an ex-Marine.  This was the ultimate case of treason: a veteran and a Marine daring to protest the Viet Nam war.  I think Mick’s performance was the main reason Nick decided that he couldn’t handle college or college students and led to his leaving Juniata at the end of the fall semester (see Figure XI-6).

Because the news media were predicting huge crowds for the demonstration, we had arranged to drive the charter bus straight to Mick Allman’s church in suburban Arlington, VA and then take a metro bus to the National Mall.  Mick had the schedules, route numbers, and fare charges all at hand.  There was a bus stop right at the church parking lot, and the buses ran every 30 minutes on Saturday.  To get there in good order, we were to assemble in front of the Stone Church for a 6 AM departure time.  No matter what happened during the protest, we were to be back at the church parking lot by 7 PM.  The meeting broke up with no outbursts from the anti-protest group, and no one was followed on their various walks back through campus.

Jeff Cawley, his roommate Chris Moore, my roommate Andy Grange, and I went back to our rooms in the third floor of The Arch section of Cloisters dorm.  We were expecting to be set upon at any moment, but nothing happened.

Andy and I were up by 5 AM the next morning, far too early for the Lesher dining hall to be open.  We joined up with Jeff and Chris and hurried down Moore Street to the Stone Church.  The charter bus was already parked in front of the church, the motor running and the door open.  And there was Nick, leading a small group of anti-protestors.  All six were holding signs and had arranged themselves on the sidewalk on either side of the bus door.  Elmer and several faculty members were already there.  Elmer had a clipboard and was checking off names as people arrived.  To get on the bus, you had to walk the gauntlet, with three anti-protestors on each side.  Chris Moore started arguing with one of them, the rest of us just walked through the sad protest line and on into the bus.

The bus quickly filled up, and finally only Elmer and the bus driver were left on the sidewalk.  Nick started in on the bus driver, trying to convince him he would be committing treason if he drove the bus to Washington.  I remember John Solis-Cohen laughing and commenting that Nick should give it up, the bus driver was earning his beer money for an entire month by driving this charter.  We left in good order and drove nonstop to Breezewood, the huge truck and potty stop set out in the middle of nowhere and famous throughout the East Coast since the earliest days of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  For a whole bunch of us, it was finally a chance to get something to eat.  And right there in front of the diner was this little man selling buttons.  He must’ve had at least a hundred commemorating the March On Washington.  I had to

buy one, and I’ve always wondered as the decades went by how many have survived (Figure XI-7).  It would’ve been natural to see somebody selling these at the protest site.  Finding the little man in such an odd location made me think of Jack Kerouac’s Ghost of the Susquehanna in On The Road.  Maybe it was the same person.

We landed in the church parking lot without a single wrong turn, and the metro bus was empty when it pulled up just a short while later.  By the time we got to the National Mall, the sun was up, the sky was blue, and about two zillion people were crowded around the Lincoln Memorial, all up and down the reflection pool, and anywhere else there was grass.  We spread out in one of the few areas of open lawn and went to work making signs.  Figures XI-8 though XI-12 are shots I took during the day’s work.  There were unintelligible speeches from the Lincoln Memorial (Figure XI-9), various draft card burnings for the benefit of the TV crews, and a WHOLE lot of milling around.  The gigantic mass of people finally got underway and walked across the Potomac to the Pentagon (Figure XI-10).  Well, sort of.  The Pentagon grounds had been completely fenced off, and we were again stuck with just milling aimlessly around (Figures XI-11 & -12).

All the pictures from the trip were taken with an inexpensive camera using low speed (ASA 64) Kodak Kodachrome II slide film.  If you don’t have access to scanners costing several thousand dollars (or more), Kodak slide films are extremely hard to scan without major loss of detail and contrast in shadow or dark areas.  The scans also suffer from producing multiple halos around objects, making them appear out of focus.  Such scanned images thus easily degrade upon enlarging, even to 3×5” size.  Because several of the pictures were taken in crowds or while moving, they are blurred in the originals.  But, for the historical record, I present a small selection of the original twelve or so slides.

Unlike the civil war protests in Montgomery back in 1965, Juniatians managed to stay out of the limelight.  We weren’t in the right area to take part in the human-chain attempt to levitate the Pentagon.  We couldn’t even here the mighty “Ooooohhhhmmmmm.”  In turns out, the founders of the feast had installed these huge outdoor horn speakers all along the outside perimeter of the fence.  There was this endless and mindless babble blaring out over everyone’s head.  We tried to move to a spot between speakers.  It helped a little, but you still had to shout to be heard.

My roommate Andy Grange also missed his chance at fame by being cropped out of one of the two most famous press photos of the event.  The picture shows a blond haired college student in a turtleneck sweater facing a young soldier holding an M-1 rifle.  The student is dropping a long-stem mum down the barrel of the gun.  Andy and I had managed to get up close to the action, mostly out of boredom.  We were tired of sitting around listening to announcements blasting in our ears from those confounded speakers.  We both watched this guy in front of us drop this mum down the barrel of a rifle held by one of the national guardsmen blocking a break in the fencing.  We both remarked at the time that we thought it was a really stupid thing to do.  We both later saw a picture of the moment and would always comment that we were there when it happened.  Finally, years later, I saw in a magazine an uncropped version of the photograph (Figure XI-13), and standing in the extreme lower right corner is Andy.  In all other reproductions of the picture, Andy is cropped out.  (The other famous photo is of Robert McNamara standing at one of the Pentagon’s slit windows, staring down at the protestors.)

We finally returned to where we had left the others.  A few more Juniatians had wandered into the group.  Rather than hang around, we walked all the way back to the National Mall, waited for our metro bus, and took the ride back to the church in Arlington.  We got there after the sun had gone down.  The charter bus was there, motor running and the inside nice and warm.  It turns out, everybody else was already there.  Elmer got out his clipboard, did a final head count, declared all present and accounted-for, and told the driver to head for home.

The rest of the fall semester was taken up with applying to graduate schools, taking the Graduate Record Exams (at Bucknell University), and visiting Charlie Spink up at SUNY Cortland.  Watching Walter Cronkite and getting the latest body count became a nightly ritual after finishing work in the Oneida dining hall.  In early December, I registered for my last semester at Juniata.  I had only one science course, Advanced Physical Chemistry, which was really an introduction to quantum mechanics.  I was required to take the second half of “Integration.”  I filled out my schedule with Steve Barbash’s Art History II, and two English courses:  Modern American Literature and Contemporary British Literature.  There was nothing left but sliding out to graduation while avoiding any major screw-ups.