“What is the use of attempts at social, political, economic or other action if the mind is caught up in a confused movement in which it is generally differentiating what is not different and identifying what is not identical?  Such action will be at best ineffective and at worst really destructive.”

…David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order 

The campus was slogging through last days of a typical, miserable, wet-snow winter when the news of the results of the March 12, 1968 New Hampshire primary broke:  Eugene McCarthy, one-time college professor and Senator from Minnesota, had come within a hair of upsetting Lyndon Johnson and had captured 40 out of 44 delegates to the Democratic Convention.  The anti-war faction on campus was ecstatic. A core group of ringleaders immediately decided that everybody had to mobilize for the Pennsylvania primary on April 23^rd.  Spring break was coming up, March 30^th through April 7^th.  The campus would be open, and everybody could work on the campaign instead of going home for a week.

An organizational meeting was called in the Stone Church.  Up on the dais were the usual suspects:  Mike Marzio, Marta Daniels, Jeff Cawley, Chris Moore, maybe one or two more.  Faculty present included Elmer Maas, Steve Barbash, and Bob Faust.  The college had already agreed to let the group use the new student coffee house Salut at 1621 Mifflin Street, a roughly refurbished little neighborhood store that the college had picked up for a song in 1966.  The self-appointed leaders huddled almost nightly at Elmer’s apartment and established contact with the McCarthy campaign.

Packages of campaign materials appeared.  The plan quickly evolved that Juniata students would be used to canvas precincts in the towns and small cities in the region, calling on every registered Democrat and urging them to vote for McCarthy.  I don’t remember if he was on the ballot.  To make things easier for the canvassers, it was decided that every registered Democrat would get a unique 4×6” card and that these cards would be arranged by street and block, up one side and down the other.  It would involve a tremendous amount of work, and freshman John Sollenberger and I volunteered to impress typewriters and round up volunteers.  We would set up in the coffee house and divide up the work, starting with Huntingdon.  John and I managed to get everything ready by the end of the last week in March.  By then, McCarthy had won the Wisconsin primary, and the anti-war folks could feel upset in the air.

I went home on Friday, March 29^th, and was at my best friend Larry Bassett’s apartment in Williamsport, PA (he was a senior English major at Lycoming College) when we decided to watch a press conference by Lyndon Johnson on Sunday night, the 31^st.  When he announced that would not run for re-election, pandemonium erupted.  There were six or so of us in Larry’s tiny apartment.  Larry broke out an unopened bottle of Ouzo, and we proceeded to get as drunk as Zorba The Greek.  I crashed on the sofa, and had a horrible hangover the entire next day.

I was back on campus Tuesday evening.  The anti-war group on campus was in a tizzy with the news that McCarthy had just won the Wisconsin primary.  With Johnson gone, there was only that old has-been Hubert Humphrey, and nobody would take that perennial second banana seriously. The only dark cloud was Bobby Kennedy, who so far had played coy.  But McCarthy was on a roll, and the McCarthy faction dismissed Kennedy as a Johnny-come-lately who had been too scared to take on an incumbent president.  Winter was over, and it seemed as if there was a clear road all the way to the Chicago convention.

John and I set up camp in the coffee house and started directing the typing by a dozen or so volunteers.  We were generating small mountains of file cards, and others would prepare stacks, rubber band them up, and label them by street and block.  The tiny army of typists quickly devolved to just John and me, and we’d be at it from just after breakfast until late evening.  John was quite the musician and could play both guitar and piano.  We would entertain ourselves singing old doo-wop and Beach Boy songs.  In all of this revelry however, there was this one small matter to which I had to attend.

As a graduating senior, I was stuck having to take an entire day of written exams.  The morning was taken up by a three-hour exam prepared by the Chemistry Department.  In the afternoon, I had to take again the Chemistry achievement portion of the GREs.  But that wasn’t all.  You then had to take an oral exam in front of a three-person committee:  the head of the department, one chemistry professor chosen by the department chair, and another professor of your choosing.  I had asked Steve Barbash to be my chosen examiner.  However, it was tradition in the Chemistry Department for the entire faculty to attend the oral exam of every graduating senior.  I took the written exams on Wednesday and had my oral exam right after lunch on Thursday, April 4^th.  It was a total disaster.  I already had been accepted to graduate school.  There was no way I could fail any of my courses.  And here I was, dying worse than a stand-up comedian at a funeral.  I must’ve lost ten pounds by the time it was over.

As I was walking down the outside stairs of the new science complex, Steve Barbash caught up with me, “come on, I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.”  I was way too quiet.  I felt worse than I ever had in my entire life.

“I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you passed,” he said as we walked towards “Tote.”

“How could I’ve?” I stammered.  “I was hideous.  I knew nothing.  I choked.  I couldn’t even remember what the periodic table was.”  (I always tend to exaggerate when excited.)

Then Barbash delivered one of the highest complements anybody ever gave me at Juniata: “Only dummies get easy times.”

As Steve got the cones, I checked my mailbox and retrieved a letter from home.  I opened it up as we walked outside.  We were just at the top of the steps when I read that Stacy Brager, my old boss and owner of The Bon Ton in downtown Sunbury, had died of a heart attack just a few days earlier.  I had worked at The Bon Ton all during my eleventh and twelfth grade years in high school.  I couldn’t believe it:  I had just learned that I had passed my written and oral exams for graduation.  I had been so happy just a minute ago.  When I explained it to Barbash, he said, “You’re now getting old enough where the barriers between you and death start slowly coming down.”

We parted on the street in front of Founder’s Hall.  Steve was on his way to the basement of the old Carnegie library, where he had his studio.  I continued on over to Mifflin Street and walked down to the coffee house.  The door was wide open, and I could hear the sound of a solitary typewriter banging away.  When I walked in, John Sollenberger looked up and asked, “how did it go?”

I sat down at a table and pulled over my old, blue portable Smith Corona.  John had thoughtfully set out a stack of file cards and a voter registration list.  I wanted to tell him all about orals, writtens, Steve Barbash, and Stacy Brager, but I just fed in a blank card, looked up, and smiled, “I’m outta here.”

That evening, we learned on the six o’clock news that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been killed in Memphis, TN.  The McCarthy campaign workers on campus gathered back at the coffee house that evening and talked for hours.  To me, it seemed a fitting end to “all of that.”  I had become increasingly disillusioned with civil rights after the demise of SCORE and didn’t understand the militant blacks now associated with Black Power, such as Angela Davis, Hewey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver.  In my own way, I had decided that civil rights was no longer the provenance of white people, and it should be left well enough alone.  I felt tied to King because of the work we had done in Selma, AL back in 1966.  But those times seemed so far away, and everything now was rushing towards all-out war in Viet Nam.   I stayed silent the whole evening.

Almost immediately, blacks began rioting in cities all over the country.  While black ghettoes went up in flames, closer to home it became increasingly apparent that the Democratic Party machinery was going to throw the Democratic nomination to Humphrey regardless of any popular vote.  And the now lame-duck president was talking about a big build-up in the number of troops, just in time for graduation.  It was turning out to be a hellova time to be graduating from college.

Out of the blue, upper classman chemistry major and one-time summer research roommate Paul Shaffer showed up on campus the next day.  He had bought this incredibly beat up 1957 Ford station wagon that he had outfitted as a sort of low-ceiling camper, just like the character Morgan owned in the eponymous movie starring Vanessa Redgrave.  It was just the relief I was looking for, and I ended up forsaking my typing for going on a two-day mobile drinking binge.  The faithful labored through the rest of spring break, and a few others worked the next two weeks pounding the pavements from Huntingdon to Altoona to Lewistown.  It was all for nothing.  The Pennsylvania primary was not binding, and the Democratic machine had already decided the contest.  And so it was:  on Tuesday, April 23^rd, McCarthy got the votes, and Humphrey got the delegates.

And so four years of activism and excitement came to an end with a depressing thud.  We had been co-opted by party politics, and at least in the Democratic Party, power was definitely not with the people.  I concentrated on not screwing things up so I could graduate.  I already had a job lined up in the Analytical Research Division of Richardson-Merrell, the drug company, in Cincinnati, OH starting on June 10^th, only a week after graduation.  From there, it would be straight to grad school at Purdue in Indiana.  After that was anybody’s guess.

The run-up to graduation and the ceremony itself are now just a blur of vague memory.  I was home the late afternoon of Sunday, June 2^nd.  It only took until Thursday the sixth for events to get even more depressing.  I learned on the morning news that RFK had been assassinated late the previous night at his hotel after giving a victory speech in the California primary.  Life had suddenly accelerated, and I was again feeling that depressing loss of control that had appeared the summer before my high school years and the summer before I started college.  One day in early June, I boarded an old DC-3 at the Williamsport, PA airport and left it all behind.