Spring Semester 1970

Last week two Buffalo police officers were suspended without pay and ultimately charged with assault after they shoved a 75-year-old protester to the ground.  He hit his head on the sidewalk and started to bleed.  None of the dozens of officers in the vicinity tended to the victim, although one made a move to do so and was stopped by a colleague, who grabbed the back of his shirt and pushed him forward.  I didn’t see the video of this incident earlier this week on The Rachel Maddow Show, and the officers’ quick transition from aggression to indifference jolted me out of my TV-viewing lethargy. 

            

Fifty years ago, an anonymous Buffalo cop made the front page of The Spectrum, the UB (SUNY Buffalo) student newspaper, an edition published four days after the Kent State shootings.   Even though his back is to the photographer, the raised middle finger of his left hand makes it clear that he is fully aware of his being in the frame.  As a fellow UB grad and Wisconsin library colleague commented when I posted the photo on Facebook the other day,  “I don’t think that’s a Jesus/One Way sign”.  Or as Ken Tuchman, my best friend during my college years, lamented, “(Sigh).  The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

It’s been an eventful two weeks since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  During the first wave of protests, I felt as though everyone in the U.S. had jumped on a greased slide to dystopia, as dubious participants seemed intent on creating mayhem.  And just two months ago, we thought empty shelves where packages of toilet paper used to be stacked high and deep (think Costco) was unnerving.

It was just as eventful a time in 1970, with rallies and protests and riots but maybe not so much looting.  (Property destruction, yes.)   At Buffalo, the turmoil started in late February, with a group of 40 or so students protesting a police presence at a basketball game the previous evening.  They marched to Hayes Hall, the UB administration building, and demanded an explanation from Acting President PeterRegan.  In response to the rocks and ice thrown at his office windows, Regan called the police, who arrived on campus in riot gear, which, of course, only served to further incense the group.  What followed was a clash between the police and a larger group of students at Norton Union (shown below).  Windows were broken or cracked and furniture was used to create barricades against the police.   The building, less than 10 years old at the time, remained in a shabby condition on the main floor for the remainder of the time I spent at UB, through December 1972.  Furniture taken from Haas Lounge and damaged during the melee was not replaced, giving this large and once-inviting space a spartan, ragtag look.

The events of May 4^th, aided by a simmering opposition to the Vietnam War, served as a giant spark, reigniting smoldering embers of protest.  Students at campuses across the nation – public and private, nondenominational and denominational – erupted as if their own schools had been violated, their friends lying on the ground dead.  Eleven days after Kent State, police units from City of Jackson and the Mississippi Highway Patrol descended on the Jackson State campus, killing 2 and injuring 12 in a volley of gunfire – 460 shots in 30 seconds.  It was as though these officers had purposely thrown gasoline on an already raging fire.   Most college administrators who hadn’t already shut down their campuses early took swift action after this subsequent student slaughter, leaving students and faculty with much unfinished business

            

As I wrote the next day to Mardi, a high school friend living in Minneapolis.

It’s been so long I really don’t know where to begin.  Classes were disrupted again due to Cambodia and Kent State.  We had three nights of battles with the police.  They used a phenomenal amount of tear gas.  Buffalo State closed down entirely but UB remained open for those who wanted to stay.  Considering how disruptive and disorganized the semester was, I did alright:  2 A’s and 2 B’s (a 3.5) and one incomplete.  The incomplete is my Chaucer class.  He’s mailing the final to us this week and we have the entire summer to do the term paper.

Clearly, despite my insinuation, I was not in the thick of things during these ‘nights of battle’, but I did catch of whiff of tear gas one evening as I rode a shuttle bus from campus to the university-owned apartment complex where I lived during my first two years at UB.

            

Being apolitical at this point in my life, I had adventure and new horizons on my personal agenda

As of now, it looks as though Mike, Keith and I are definitely going to California.  Great!  In order to get out there, I’ve been working  and guess where?!  Ah yes, Gleason’s.  I started right after Easter vacation, and a week from today is my last day.  So I will have been there a total of 7 weeks.  I’ll have about $240-$250 in the bank and that will give me plenty to fall back on.

Working 25 hours a week -- and that's the floor -- and keeping pace with five courses on my academic schedule means that I had no time to attend demonstrations to protest the killing of students in Ohio and Mississippi.

As it turned out, the trip to California fell through, probably because Mike’s planning never moved beyond the gossamer stage.  (And who the hell is Keith?  Probably a college friend of Mike’s, I’d guess.)  We joined Mardi and her boyfriend Bill in Minneapolis.   I received a job offer within an hour of my first day canvassing downtown businesses – a part-time maintenance positions at the Dayton’s department store.  I went in to work just before the store closed, which meant I had my days free, just the opposite of Bill and Mardi’s schedules.  It worked out well that way as I ended up crashing with them the entire summer.  Mike, on the other hand, grumbled that he wasn’t able to get a foot in the door anywhere, even though he, too, had applied at Dayton’s.  Or so he said.  I think he set himself up for failure, increasingly frantic with how his summer was not living up to his expectations.  He returned to Baldwin-Wallace, the stuck-in-the-1950s college where Greek societies continued to thrive in the Age of Aquarius, and landed a job with the Department of Buildings and Grounds.  Our paths greatly diverged after high school, but we remained close friends until the mid-1970s.  Our last contact was an out-of-the-blue phone call in the spring of 1975, when I lived in Deer Lodge, Montana, it was lights out after he moved to California.