The compulsion for writing this short monograph came the day a package arrived at the door of my house in West Linn, Oregon in the late fall of 2007.  It was from John Mumford of Juniata College, and I knew that it contained the materials I had “donated” to the college as part of the fortieth anniversary reunion of students, faculty, and friends who had participated in civil rights activities in the Deep South back in 1965 through 1967.

The materials had been stored in a simple cardboard box for almost forty years, along with lots of other memorabilia and paper ephemera from my college years.  There had originally been more, a lot more.  In fact, I had saved every paper, every homework assignment, every test, every notebook, every scrap of paper that had passed through my hands from the summer of 1964 before I started college to the end when I graduated in June 1968.  But due to the unhappy circumstances of a divorce and the incessant pleadings of my mother to do SOMETHING about the boxes and boxes of “stuff” in the attic of the family home in Sunbury, PA, I went on a cathartic binge while visiting home in March 1970.  In a matter of a few hours on a blustery day, I burned pile after pile of letters and papers in the burn barrel in the back yard and then filled the cargo area of my father’s Opal station wagon with boxes of bound class notes, piles of campus newspapers, handbills for theater productions, wall posters, anything and everything college.  For some reason now obscured by time, I continued my scorched earth run through the attic.  I added stacks of old copies of magazines:  Mad (including the first four years complete), Model Railroader, Model Trains, Galaxy and If, along with stacks of science fiction and horror paperbacks. I gathered up essentially everything that wouldn’t readily combust, and hauled it all off to the town dump, where for the princely sum of twenty-five cents, much of the record of the past 20-some years of my life was consigned to the myriad rats, moldering garbage, smashed cans and bottles, and perpetually-burning greasy piles of detritus dumped between the road ruts and Shamokin Creek.  At the time, I thought it a fitting and poetic end to “all of that.”

I was wrong, but it took thirty years and then some to prove the point.

Sometime during the winter of 2001-2002, Matthew Betting, a senior at Juniata College, called me at my office in the City of Portland’s Water Pollution Control Laboratory.  He was writing his senior thesis on the involvement of the Juniata community in the civil rights movement of the mid-1960’s, and my name had appeared in a number of period sources.  The college alumni office had provided the contact information.  We set up a convenient time, and in a few days he called me very early in the morning.  He tried to interview me, but as I responded to his first few questions, memories buried for decades came rushing back.  I started talking in a sort of stream-of-consciousness of bits of narrative, vignettes, anecdotes, tangential explanations, irrelevant asides, and mental snapshots.  I hoped he had his recorder turned on, because there was no stopping me as a Niagara of memories boiled up in my brain and poured out into the telephone.  Names came popping out that had been out of mind for over thirty years, and I kept saying that if I just had my “stuff” at hand, I’d be able to pin down every fact.  The poor kid’s ears probably rang for days.  After finally hanging up, I realized that I was physically and emotionally exhausted.  I thought to myself, ‘Where and the hell did all of THAT come from?’  I hadn’t thought about those days in many, many years, and I had never talked about any of it to the many friends and lovers I’d come to know since then.  But it intrigued me enough to rummage through the attic and bring down the box that contained all that was left from those years.

It surprised me how much had survived.  I had covered a lot of ground since graduating from Juniata, so I didn’t expect to find much left of whatever might have survived the great “Barrel Burn And Dump Toss” back in March 1970.  But what I found was enough to give a fair portrait of what I was like back then, what Juniata was like back then, and most importantly, what had really happened.  What do I mean by that?  I had been keeping sporadic diaries ever since the fourth grade (1955-56), so I was used to chronicling the events in my sometimes crazy life.  My freshman year at Juniata was no exception.  I had diary entries of the whole run-up to the first “action” (I can’t think of a better word) in March 1965 and the aftermath on campus after everyone had returned.  I even had a daily journal that I wrote “on site” every day.  It was full of names, times, and dates, plus a fairly complete narrative of what went on.  Much of it was written while sitting in the streets and on the curbs of Montgomery, Alabama while surrounded by municipal and state police decked out in full riot gear.  So I carefully went through the box and gathered together everything I could find. I then slowly went through the small stack and spent time remembering people and places and events that had long receded into the oblivion of lost memory.  Okay, that was cool.  And then I put the box away.

I got the second phone call only months later.  This time it was Juniata alumnus Sylvia Kurtz, who had embarked upon an MS thesis on the civil rights “movement” at Juniata College.  Again, a phone interview time was set up, and again I was asked about “what really happened.”  But this time, my memory had been refreshed both by Matt’s interview and my examination of all my memorabilia.  The interview was several hours long.  Sylvia had already interviewed a number of participants and had a very good sense of the events and big picture.  But I kept correcting her on details.  She finally became exasperated and challenged me:  “How do you KNOW all of this?”  My answer brought a stunned silence:  “Sylvia, the difference is that I wrote it all down WHILE I WAS THERE.”

When I mentioned to Sylvia in an email that I would be at Juniata later that summer as part of a marathon East Coast college interview trip for my son Peter, there was no dodging the absolute necessity of a face-to-face interview.  We arranged the meeting to be at my cousin Dick Lytle’s mountain retreat at Deep Creek, Maryland as our interview caravan swung north from Washington and Lee University on the way to Juniata College.  There then began a not-so-subtle campaign to loan her what I had.  I was extremely reluctant.  No aspersions against Sylvia, but I knew how things go.  There was much foreboding.  Besides containing a number of fairly rare items (you’ll read about and see them later), some of the personal notes contained lame ramblings and terribly sophomoric and maudlin attempts at poetry.  (Do all young males humiliate themselves by writing ghastly verse?)  These couldn’t be readily excised from the narratives.  And I was not exactly the intellectual giant of my class at Juniata.  Yes, I was “in the pudding” with the artsy-fartsy crowd.  But I usually felt more like a mascot than a leading light.  The last thing I needed was to be exposed to ridicule (overt or otherwise) over juvenile inarticulations.

Sylvia showed up at Deep Creek on the designated day at 9 AM sharp.  We sat at the kitchen table and I opened up the large envelope I had brought with me from Oregon.  We began by my explaining what everything was.  From there, Sylvia asked questions, and I tried my best to stay on point.  Again, I couldn’t keep from adding anecdotes and side stories that I thought helped to explain what was going on with the campus as a whole.  Sylvia tried to keep me on track.  The interview went for seven hours and burned through at least that many cassette tapes.  By late afternoon, both of us were exhausted, and Sylvia had a long drive back to Juniata.  At that point, I was still uncertain about loaning her my stuff.  After extracting multiple promises that she would take care of everything and then mail the whole thing back, I reluctantly handed her the thick package and watched her drive off back to Huntingdon.

About a month later, I received an email at work with a text file containing the entire, seven-hour transcript.  I spent quite some time filling in words and phrases that had become garbled on the tape.  After I sent back my comments and corrections, I figured that would finally be the end of it.  All I hoped was that Sylvia would send me a copy of her thesis.  My copy arrived at the end of May 2003 and my memorabilia showed up not long after.  In response to my congratulatory email, Sylvia said she was lobbying the president of Juniata, Tom Kepple, to push the Brethren press to publish her thesis as a book and to hold a reunion on the fortieth anniversary in March 2005.  The idea for a reunion got legs when Jim Tuten, Juniata Provost, lent his support.  Invitations eventually went out.

When Sylvia returned my materials, she suggested that they be donated to the Juniata Museum.  I had misgivings.  Most of the memorabilia would make no sense without fairly extensive explanations of who the people were, what they were doing, and the broad stage on which events had played out.  Plus, my materials covered two trips to the South:  the one to be the main (only?) focus of the reunion (the March 1965 demonstrations in Montgomery, Alabama) and a second that occurred the next spring when a group went to Selma and worked on the SCLC’s Mississippi/Alabama rural voter registration project.  I personally felt that the second trip was much more significant than the first in terms of actual accomplishments.  But the first trip had garnered international news, and the second was done more or less behind the scenes without any fanfare, publicity, or public notice…even at the local level in Alabama.  Then there was the work of Phil Jones in the summer of 1965.  It too was being ignored.

My wife Lynn was against it.  She foresaw things being damaged and/or lost.  Many of the items were unique.  The question of value was strictly personal, especially the nine pages of field journal I had kept in Montgomery.  And then there were the horribly juvenile writings that were interspersed with the journal entries.  How could I possibly let anyone see such stuff?  But then, it appeared that no one involved had saved much of anything.  I had been the only pack rat.  The debate went back and forth for over a year.  But ultimately, the “stuff” was mine, and I made the decision to let it go.

So in the fall of 2004, I gathered everything I could find and put all the materials into plastic sleeves and inserted the sleeves into a large, three-ring binder, with everything in more or less chronological order.  I then sat down and made a complete inventory, just in case things popped out or pages got taken out and put back out of order.  Finally, I wrote explanatory text for every single item, trying my best to provide enough information so that a person totally unfamiliar with the events would have a basic understanding of what went on, from small details, such as a tiny slip of paper containing  emergency phone numbers that was to be worn inside our shoes, to the Juniata “campus scene” as it was in 1964-1968.

It turned out to be a daunting task.  I wanted to be as honest as possible while still letting myself come through as a character in a small drama.  But what was that “character?”  I was painfully aware that I was not among the “inney” intellectual crowd at Juniata.  While at Juniata, I didn’t have deep thoughts about the classes I took.  Hell, most of it was science anyway.  I was having writer’s block over captions!     Finally, I loaded up the highball glass and just wrote down what I thought, and to hell with everybody else.  I made no grand philosophical pronouncements or socio-religious theses.  I guessed (correctly, it turns out) that there would be plenty of that by the student pundits among the reunion participants.  What I called “Some Notes On The Memorabilia” ended up being eight pages of 10 pt type.  I read it over once or twice and declared the project done.  To prevent the chance of second guessing my decision, I mailed the whole thing off the next day.  It was like watching your only child drive off to college and a new life a continent away.  Everything in that binder had been sequestered away in my various attics for just about forty years.  And, just like that, I’d given it all away.

Eventually, news came back from John Mumford, Juniata Librarian and Museum Curator, that some students had taken on the problem of presentation of the materials as a special project and that selected materials would be on display during the reunion.  I thought it was a great idea, but realized that the explanatory notes wouldn’t be appropriate for a static, visual presentation.  I started lobbying both John and Jim Tuten that there had to be some sort of venue in which I could at least verbally explain things.  After a number of email exchanges, it was agreed that some time would be set aside for this.  No details were forthcoming, but I was satisfied.

The story of the reunion is told in Chapter XV.  My presentation in the library was surprisingly emotional for me, and I don’t know why.  The whole two days went by in an exhausting blur of non-stop events.  And the filming done by Ken Love was incredibly intrusive and time consuming for me, mostly because of the awkward timing of my filmed interview and the lengthy and exhausting recording of me reading my journal, right during the second evening’s program in Oller Hall.  At the end of it all, I felt as if I had gone to a performance and had spent all my time backstage re-arranging folding chairs.  By the time I was finished, the performance was over, and everybody had gone home.

The letdown back in Oregon was enormous.  I hadn’t expected the event to be so emotionally draining.  I kept revisiting reunion events and things I had said, or worse, what I could’ve/should’ve said.  In this disgruntled state, in early summer of 2005 I received a CD from John Mumford that contained two PowerPoint presentations of the reunion, both done by a foreign exchange student.  Included in both were some of my donated materials.  As I had guessed, there wasn’t much in the way of explanation.  In my thank you email, I asked if the eight-page “notes” were still with the binder.  They weren’t, so I sent a copy.

I started brooding:  maybe my wife was right; maybe all the “stuff” was in a box with stenciled sides, just like the finale of “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark;” maybe it was all jumbled up.  Finally, I decided to take the tack of the Kennedy cabinet during the Cuban missile crisis:  I’d assume that the materials were just loaned to the college and act accordingly.  I started making polite inquiries about their return.  After some initial confusion and email exchanges, it was agreed to send everything back.

The box sat on the floor next to my desk for a number of weeks.  It rattled when I shook it and sounded as if it was filled with lots and lots of small items.  Finally, I tore off the heavy wrapping.  I had been sent the actual cataloged archive box, and it was filled with a jumble of items:  small, heavy stock cards used to explain the materials placed in view boxes in the library foyer for the reunion; loose plastic sleeves; the copy of the libretto for The Insurance Company that Janet Kaufmann had donated to the college.  My copy of the 1967 Kvasir was missing.  My copy of the complete, March 19, 1965 Time Magazine had been ripped apart, and only the cover and the cover story were left, stapled together.  My heart sank:  Lynn had been right all along.  The materials as they now existed would be totally useless for anyone interested in the source materials relating to the events of 1965 and 1966.

Sick at heart, things sat as they were until February 2008.  I finally decided to at least try my best to put everything back in its original format.  I bought another 3-ring binder, and on a Sunday got out the box and did a thorough inventory.  I laid everything out on the kitchen table.  It was an upsetting task.  I still had the original “Notes” and my Excel spreadsheet inventory on my computer, so I started with that and reconstructed the original binder, checking off each item as I found it in the jumbled pile.  Luckily, I had a couple extra copies of the 1967 Kvasir, and the Time Magazine was available on eBay.  At the end of the short, winter day, I had it all back together, with a placeholder sleeve for the to-be-purchased Time Magazine issue.  I felt better, but now what?

The necessity of back-to-back major surgeries took a hand.  The many weeks recuperating through the early months of 2008 gave me a chance to answer that question.  I made bound copies of Matt Betting’s and Sylvia Kurtz’s theses and The Insurance Company libretto and mailed them off to the few reunion participants who expressed an interest.  I mailed Janet Kaufmann’s original libretto and a bound copy back to John Mumford at Juniata.  I toyed with the idea of putting my memorabilia into the form of a hardbound book, complete with color pictures and scans, but it was too expensive.

So.  Finally, here I am on a typically cool Oregon evening in mid-August.  I’m going to scan everything, piece by piece, write up some new explanations, use some of my original explanations, and maybe even try my hand at being a “pundit.” 

                                                                                                            Charles Russell Lytle

                                                                                                            August 11, 2008