Writing > magazine article

I wrote this article about the spring of 1970 at the University of Oregon as a free-lancer for Oregon Quarterly magazine. Kent State could have easily happened in Eugene, Oregon.

A Spring of Outrage and Dismay

By Ed Dorsch for Oregon Quarterly Spring 1999

The UO was on the brink of catastrophe: Students serious about change clashed with an administration determined to keep the University open. Five students and a former president look back on a tumultuous time and assess how much they succeeded in changing.

It was the spring of 1970 and lines were being drawn. Nearly 800 people crowded 518 seats of 150 Science when the University of Oregon faculty voted down a proposal to kick ROTC off campus. After President Robert Clark announced the final vote, a mob of angry students marched to the ROTC building and destroyed doors, broke windows, and upended office furniture. Several hours later, a second wave of almost 400 demonstrators threw rocks, fruit, and torches at the building and doused it with kerosene. For the first time ever, police deployed tear gas on the UO cam­pus. The next day, "there were people with automatic weapons on the roof of the ROTC building," remembers Dennis Reynolds '82 MS '85. "Kent State could have happened here."

Steven John Ritchie '72 went to see the ROTC riot out of sheer curiosity. He had just arrived when police launched the tear gas. "We didn't know if they were going to start shooting or what," recalls Ritchie.

Though opposed to the Vietnam War, Ritchie didn't think of himself as a radical when he started at the UO. "But that spring," he remembers, "I changed quite a bit. It was being part of the crowd that was teargassed . . . both at the university level, as well as the national level. In spite of all the opposition to the war, it seemed to be escalating." The Sunday after the riots, he went to an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) meeting to help plan the next step in the anti-ROTC campaign.

When Allen Cox'79 came to the University from Roseburg, it was "almost like coming to another country" Cox didn't oppose the war in high school, but became captivated by the "atmosphere of thought" at the University. Books by radical leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Ruben were on class reading lists and his art professors conducted radical social experiments-during one class, students handed out money to people in the EMU. Cox designed posters for local bands and went to the SDS meeting to volunteer his skills. They "weren't too interested in having anybody do funky rock-and-roll posters announcing the takeover," recalls Cox. "What they really wanted were bodies." But he was willing to participate in the action: a sit-in at Johnson Hall.

"It sounded pretty exciting," Cox says. "The atmosphere was revolution every­where. Nobody wanted to be drafted and this was a way to actually make a state­ment about that. Instead of hiding behind your student deferment, get out there and put yourself on the line and say, `This is so bad, we're willing to get arrested."'

In addition to unprecedented upheaval, the 1969-70 school year had brought a new president to the University. On September 25, Robert D. Clark was welcomed to Oregon by 150 protesters carrying torches, marching on his front lawn, and demanding an end to the ROTC program. Clark stood outside and talked to students for nearly an hour.

The torchlight parade ended peace­fully, but it was a harbinger of more fer­vent protests to come. That year, protesters threw animal blood at ROTC officers during winter registration, soaking their uniforms to "symbolize the blood on the hands of the United States military," according to an anonymous source quoted in the Emerald. On February 16, a four-alarm fire destroyed an ROTC storage building.

Following six consecutive terms at the UO, Ann Margaret Tattersall '73 '89 L MS '91 was taking a break from school that spring, working as a baker at a coffee­ house. She didn't help plan the sit-in but joined the protest later. "The sit-in was just a way of getting in the face of the administration," she remembers, but she had no intention of getting arrested. "I had figured I'd go home, but I'd sit there long enough to make a point."

Dennis Reynolds first became involved in the antiwar movement when he joined the Radical Arts Theater (RAT) troupe at an SDS meeting. Reynolds strongly opposed the war, but also admits that "some of it was just pure ego." The RAT troupe performed guerrilla theater around campus, shocking onlookers with outrageous skits (one depicted George Weyerhauser raping a woman performing the dance of the virgin forest). Every day, Reynolds wore his activist uniform: a World War I surplus tan British field jacket with a red armband and a brass lapel pin shaped like a clenched fist.

During his activist days, Timothy Travis ’74 also wore military garb: his own U.S. marine jacket. Travis served in the Corps for three years in Casualty Reporting at Pacific Headquarters, but never made it to the front lines. When he entered the service, he tried to pull as many strings as he could to get to Vietnam. "After six months on the top-secret/crypto line, I didn’t want to go," he says. Fresh from the Corps, Travis moved to Eugene in June of 1969.

He remembers 1970, particularly the spring, as a time of tremendous change. "We had no idea that Kent State was in the offing, but we knew that we [at the UO] were in the vanguard of the student movement in the United States. We knew that the times were a-changin’ and that the whole world was watching."

On the morning of Wednesday, April 22, the firth Earth Day, about fifty students entered Johnson Hall and presented their demands to the administration: amnesty for the students arrested in the earlier riots, an end to ROTC, and the removal of police and navy recruiters from campus. Then they sat in the lobby. And waited.

"It was all pretty loose," recalls Allen Cox. "We did shifts, people would come and go." They talked, read the Emerald, and sent friends out for food. Reynolds remembers singing everything Joan Baez ever sang and "haranguing passersby." Secretaries did their best to work around students, despite loud voices and louder music. As word spread around campus, their numbers swelled to 200 or so.

By 5:00 P.M., it was clear that they weren’t going to leave. After negotiating with the faculty senate and ASUO representatives, President Clark agreed to let them spend the night, as long as they remained nonviolent. Clark (now retired) still lives in Eugene. "The students had a right to express their opinions," he says. "I felt that the war in Vietnam was a mis­take." Clark was one of the first college administrators to speak out against the war, and he supported students' rights to legally protest-but he refused to let them shut down the University.

Clark was also negotiating with Governor Tom McCall. Ed Westerdahl, McCall's chief of staff, insisted that the governor wanted to send in the National Guard. Clark felt that the Eugene police could handle the situation and that the armed forces would just make the students angrier. "If the governor wants to run this institution," he told Westerdahl, "tell him to come down to Eugene and take over." Two-hundred troops were put on standby alert.

The second day, after a night on the marble floor, "things were getting a lot more tense," Steven Ritchie remembers. "People were tired, and nerves were wear­ing thin on both sides." The University had not met their demands, and the students were getting impatient.

At 2:00 P.M., a staff member opened the door to the president's outer office. About fifteen demonstrators forced their way in, raising the stakes—and tempers. In hopes of occupying the State System of Higher Education office (then also in Johnson Hall), six to ten students headed upstairs. One stuck her leg inside the door as a staff member opened it. He began slamming her leg repeatedly, but she wouldn't budge. Dennis Reynolds got "chest-to-chest" with the man, who then punched him. Keeping his pledge to be nonviolent, Reynolds refused to fight back. Chancellor Roy Lieuallen later told reporters that this "fistfight" exemplified the sort of student violence that necessitated police action.

Ann Tattersall didn't join the sit-in until that afternoon. She remembers administrators and members of the faculty senate, including her father, economics professor James N. Tattersall, going into the president's office to help him decide what to do. At 5:05 P.m., Clark spoke to the students in the lobby. He could not allow them to stay another night. When a protester responded by telling him that students should have a say in University decisions, Clark replied, "I want you to have a say, but not in this way."

Outside, blue-helmeted police officers marched in pairs down Thirteenth Avenue, standing at attention in front of Johnson Hall. Two troop trucks carried in National Guardsmen and Lane County Sheriff's deputies. A helicopter thumped overhead. Inside, students were trying to negotiate a compromise with faculty members. Tattersall's dad finally came out of the presi­dent's office, told Ann she should go home, and left the building. Ann Tattersall chose to stay.

At 5:15, Clark announced that authorities had been called. The decision to arrest the students had been made more than an hour earlier. He gave the demonstrators a five-minute grace period. "I am very unhappy at having [had] to take this action," Clark says now, "but I don't believe that we can live in a situation where one group coerces decisions by intimidation or threats of violence." Clark left the building virtually unnoticed and joined law professor Orlando Hopis in his office across the street in Fenton Hall. According to Cox, once it was clear the police were on their way, the SDS leaders huddled to discuss their options. All of them decided they couldn't afford to be arrested and took off, except for the vet wearing a ranger hat: Timothy Travis.

The students gathered in circles, linking their arms and legs together. Thirty hours after the sit-in began, police started arresting the sixty-three remaining demonstrators. Cox went limp, making it difficult for police to carry him out. "They weren't too happy about the whole thing," he recalls. "Of course I was yelling some­thing like `Pigs off campus! U.S. out of Vietnam!,' that sort of thing." One of the officers stuck his thumb up behind Cox's ear and "jammed it in there until it hurt like hell." After seeing twenty or so of their comrades ripped from the circle and dragged outside, the rest opted to walk.

Outside, authorities held back the esti­mated 700 onlookers as protesters were loaded into police vans. Being arrested felt like victory, Ritchie says, because it brought attention to the issue and made the University look bad. But he was also afraid. "They weren't really gentle with us," he says. "We were long-haired, no-good hippies."

At 5:42, as the last prisoner was led down the corridor, the crowd surged closer, blocking the vans. Police used a mixture of tear gas and smoke to break up the crowd. Onlookers threw rocks, chunks of concrete torn off the curbs, and coffee cups. Movie star Jack Nicholson, who had been shooting scenes on campus for his film Drive, He Said, kept cameras rolling from behind police lines. The event took on a surreal, circus-like quality, remembers Cox. Police were "charging across the lawn with their big Plexi riot shields, gas masks, helmets, and clubs. All the students would be dashing away and the cops would lob at them with tear gas canisters."

Looking out over the clouds of tear gas and students scuffling with police, Clark realized that "the real anger was not with me personally, but with the state of affairs in the country." And he felt his own "outrage and dismay" as the National Guard marched in. According to Clark, the Eugene Police had the situation under control, but a communications snafu kept the National Guard from getting the message to stay away. Police and demon­strators clashed sporadically for hours throughout Eugene, and that night student leaders called for a general strike against the University.

Overwhelmed by their largest intake to date, guards at the Lane County jail herded the students into an exercise yard lined with con­certina wire. Cox took a pair of wire cutters out of his friend's pocket and clipped off every­one's plastic hand restraints. "It wasn't very scary, it was pretty fun," recalls Reynolds, "and we had this sense of righteousness. We were martyrs for the cause."

The students marched in the exercise yard, chanting a tune from The Wizard of Oz in mock formation. One tied a red bandana to the end of his crutch and flew a red flag for the crowd keeping vigil outside. They cheered wildly.

Travis doesn't share these memories: He was in solitary confinement. One of the guards had asked him where he got his Marine jacket. "I earned these stripes in the Marine Corps," he said. "Where did you get yours? In a Cracker Jack box?" Immediately singled out as a leader and a troublemaker, he was taken away. With his characteristic flair for drama, Reynolds shouted, "Let's all go to solitary. I've never been to solitary!"

"You’re next," the guard said.

But Reynolds wit got him more than solitary. Following Travis, he was the first one bailed out. "Just because I mouthed off, I got out early," he recalls.

Steven Ritchie, however, was one of the last to leave. After spending a night sleeping on marble, then another night in jail, he was beat. "By that time, reality was sinking in: I'd missed three days of classes." Eventually, all of the students made bail. A settlement was negotiated and they paid a small fine. The uproar on campus had diminished, and the student "strike" had little effect on Friday's atten­dance. Clark appeared on the University's closed-circuit television channel to address the student body of 15,000. He offered to meet with students on Saturday morning to discuss their concerns.

The governor was not so understanding. After the incident, McCall said that he was "totally convinced the only thing (the protesters) want to do-this 50 or 100 people, these activists-is to close the campus. It's ROTC today, but it would be some other issue tomorrow. This is just a straight power struggle and we want to protect the rights of people who want to go to college."

Two weeks later, the nation was dumb­founded by images of Ohio National Guardsmen firing into a crowd of Kent State students, killing four. President Clark canceled classes for the next two days and held a huge meeting in McArthur Court to let students vent their frustration. According to former University archivist Keith Richard MS '64 MLS'71, the open forum gave students a chance to "spew and spew and spew." Clark listened for hours. The strategy helped let some of the steam out of the protest movement, and the year finished with no other major incidents.

For Dennis Reynolds, Kent State made the revolution all too real. It could have happened in Eugene, and his friend Paul could have been the one pulling the trigger. While Reynolds was sitting in Johnson Hall, Paul was outside marching with the National Guard. The two had spent the previous summer surfing together on the Oregon Coast. "He slept on the top bunk and I slept on the bottom bunk," remem­bers Reynolds. As some activists were . calling for armed revolution, Reynolds's commitment to nonviolence was galva­nized. "My surfing buddy Paul and I were on the verge of going to civil war with each other.. . I realized, `that's Paul.' It's not about us and them. We're all us."

Remembering that spring, Reynolds comes back to the Buffalo Springfield song For What It's Worth. There were "`battle lines being drawn,"' he remembers, "`nobody's right [if] everybody's wrong.' And I really had to stop. I had to stop and `look what's going down.'... I ran away." Reynolds spent the summer on the Oregon Coast. In the fall, he worked in a cannery long enough to buy a one-way ticket to Hawaii.

That autumn, remembers Steven Ritchie, "things had changed, shifted somehow. The more radical people had gone sort of underground, and the other group was not nearly as active."

Travis continued opposing the war, but had adopted a pacifist ethic, "which, of course, caused me to become completely discredited in the eyes of `the movement' as it became increasingly violent. I remember when the Weathermen [a militant SDS faction] came to campus and . . . well, it was ugly."

On August 21, Emerald Hall (located where Willamette Hall now stands) suf­fered several thousand dollars' worth of water damage from sprinklers that extin­guished a firebomb before the blaze could spread. On October 2, another bomb­--presumably dynamite--exploded in a men's restroom on the ground floor of Prince Lucien Campbell Hall. Another smaller bomb exploded in Johnson Hall on December 1, shattering windows in the faculty club 150 feet away. "A few months later," recalls Travis, "those people [in the movement] with whom I had so strongly clashed were dead, underground, or in jail."

Did the movement make a difference? "I thought that it didn't," says Ann Tattersall, who completed her first undergraduate degree in 1973 and another bachelor's in 1989 before getting a master's in 1991. She's now a geology and environmental science instructor at Lane Community College. "But then I read that Nixon had been thinking about using the atomic bomb in Vietnam, and that he didn't because he was afraid there would be a revolution at home, and there's nothing that could have made him do that but us."

Clark agrees that nonviolent civil disobedience helped stop the war, just as it bolstered the civil rights struggle in the South. However, he says, "My position was not to condone civil disobedience, but to explain it as an almost inevitable consequence to the injustices of society." Leaders, Clark says, must limit civil disobedience to avoid vio­lence or destruction, including destruction of an institution. And they must work to remedy the problem causing the protest. Though he openly opposed the war, Clark felt that shutting down the University would prove nothing. "The students seemed to think that university presidents could stop the war," he says.

To Ritchie, Clark seemed "overwhelmed and ineffectual." Though Clark was calm, says Ritchie, he could have done more to avoid the confrontation. "Had he been

more forceful about initiating a dialogue with us, it may have brought about a different result, especially had he done this on the first day of the protest." Tattersall thinks Clark should have waited to call the police. At the very least, she feels, the students would have been willing to leave the president's office. "Clark didn't do anything to keep us nonviolent," she remembers. "We kept ourselves in line. We even picked up all our orange peels."

After working as an archaeologist for ten years, Allen Cox, who lives in Eugene, went back to graduate school at the age of thirty-eight to pursue his passion: abstract painting. His politics haven't changed much, and he's still active on campus-on the side of the administra­tion. He's a member of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts Board of Visitors and a former board member of the Friends of the UO Museum of Natural History. Cox recalls the irony of visiting the office where he was arrested years earlier and seeing his next-door neighbor: a secretary who worked in the president's office during the sit-in and continued to do so until her retirement last year. "I kind of enjoy that because it's just the way life rolls over," says Cox.

Disillusioned by the violence of the Weathermen, Steven Ritchie transferred to Mt. Angel Community College, then Western Oregon. He later joined progressive movements in the Catholic church. For Ritchie, now director of the Benedictine Foundation, activism is a part of the way he votes, what he teaches his children, and his spiritual practice­s--something he found lacking as a student. The protest­ers helped stop the war, but they weren't unified by a higher purpose that made the civil rights move­ment so powerful, Ritchie says. "They had more of a well of conviction to draw on, whereas we were just a bunch of young kids reacting."

Dennis Reynolds came back from Hawaii to appeal the denial of his consci­entious objector status and decided to go back to the University. Six months later, he started working in child care and never left. He's now the EMU Childcare Coordinator. "I'm still commit­ted to social change, but I'm a lot more patient," Reynolds says, pointing out that the bumper sticker on his car reads "Compost Happens." His activism now stems from his work with the Unitarian Universalist Church and a career that's consistent with his political goals.

Would he do it again? "Yes, but it had better be a real important issue," Reynolds says. "Now I have a whole lot more to lose." Having three kids, a job, and a mortgage makes it harder to risk being arrested. What if one of his kids participated in civil disobedience? Reynolds says he would support it, even if he disagreed with the cause. When Reynolds applied for consci­entious objector status, his father told him, "I disagree with what you're doing, but I understand you feel strongly and I support you." When Reynolds's son, now a UO student, briefly considered joining the armed forces, Reynolds shared his father's words-and offered the same support.

Tim Travis works for the chief justice of the Oregon Supreme Court in Portland, training judges about abuse and neglect law and lobbying for children's issues. The spirit of the movement has never left him. "Every step of the way, I have wondered how my `old fighter' comrades would view what I was doing. It was sort of like having Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder." The world would be a better place, Travis says, if everyone considered how friends from their idealistic youth would react before they made decisions.