Monmouth College
Department of History

 

 

INTERVIEW WITH LEE MCGAAN

 

Conducted in the fall of 2000 by Jackie Johnson.

 

 

 

 

McGaan: I was born in Galesburg at Cottage Hospital but I grew up in Altona, Illinois, which is about fifteen miles north east of Galesburg, on a farm two and a half miles out of town. I was a farm boy; we had hogs, cattle, occasionally sheep, other critters like chickens and geese. We also grew corn, beans, and oats which is the usual Midwest farm story. I was the youngest in the family and there were three of us. I have a brother ten years older than me and a sister who is eight years older than me. My mother was a Monmouth College grad in 1930, which was the beginning of the Great Depression and she has some really good stories. She got a job, which was really exciting because the Depression wasn’t actually in full swing, but things were not good. People were terribly concerned that they weren’t going to find work when they graduated. She got hired to be an English and Latin teacher at Altona High School. She taught for six years and met my dad while she was there, who was a young farmer.

 

Eventually they got married and she had to give up her job because women who were married couldn’t teach school--that was only for men and single women with no other means of support. Then she was a farmer’s wife and raised three kids who all went to Monmouth College like mom did. She also had two brothers and a sister who went to Monmouth also, so there is this whole Monmouth College connection. The reason my mom and her family went to Monmouth College was that my grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. At that time, the College gave free tuition to sons and daughter of ministers, so that is why the whole family went to Monmouth.

 

I graduated from ROWVA high school and I went to Monmouth College in 1965. They still made freshman were beanies, but we were the last graduating class for which that happened. That was a casualty of the sixties and the protest movements of various sorts. The next year there was resistance and by 1967, no students had to wear beanies and do freshman things. I think my freshman year was the first year that chapel wasn’t required so my class was the first class to go through all four years without required chapel. There were people ahead of me who didn’t graduate on time because they lost credits because of too many chapel cuts. That was what it was like when I was here.

 

By my sophomore and junior years, Monmouth College had between twelve and thirteen hundred students. It was pretty crowded and this was prior to the existence of Hewes Library, the Haldeman Theissen Science Building, Cleland Dorm, or Liedman Hall. Gibson Dorm was here; it opened when I was a freshman. One of my roommates was one of the people who helped with the Holiday Inn sign caper.  When he got back, he woke me up early on Saturday morning to say the sign was there.

 

I really didn’t know how things worked. I look back at it and can’t figure out how the College was able to function with over twelve hundred people with no HT building. Poling Hall was then the library and I remember that it was really crowded and unpleasant because it was overloaded with books. Wallace Hall was pretty much like it is now, but there were a couple of more classrooms. The basement had the Psychology and maybe History and Math offices and classrooms down there. I can hardly imagine how they got all that stuff down there but they did. Of course there was no computer center like there is now. Other faculty members were in houses around the campus. The fraternity complex opened my sophomore year. Liedman, Cleland, HT, and the Library didn’t open until the 1970s so things were pretty crowded. All the sciences were over in McMike Academic. Geology and Physics were in the basement while Biology was on the second floor and Chemistry was on the third floor. And there was still 20% more students than there are now so I don’t know how that worked.

 

Johnson: Were the classes bigger?

 

McGaan: I don’t remember that the classes were bigger, but there were more faculty than there are now. I just can’t figure out how they squeezed everyone in various houses and places around here, but they somehow managed to do it. I think there was more office sharing; yes, it was very crowded but class sizes weren’t much bigger. I don’t remember being in gigantic classes, they are about the same size as they are now. I took Speech 101 in Wallace Hall 314 right where I teach 101 now. The first semester that I was back here teaching, I walked in here to teach 101 and it was very strange.

 

Johnson: What was academic life like?

 

McGaan: All students were better than then students are now. We studied sixteen to eighteen hours a day and we were a lot brighter!!  <Laughing> To be serious, I think the expectations about reading and writing were higher than they are now. It is clear to me and my mom has saved some notebooks that I had. The amount of reading that you were expected to do in a course was higher than it is now.

 

Johnson: You don’t have Stacy Cordery’s class!

 

McGaan: Stacy’s class would have been a typical class. She has probably held the line, everyone else has gotten soft. In general, I think there was more reading and there was a lot more writing. Jim DeYoung [Theatre professor] reminded me that major papers were usually twenty pages, but that would be extraordinary now. Students would just die if you told them to do a twenty-page paper for a course. A fifteen- to twenty-page paper would be typical, and not just at Monmouth.  I think that there has been a general sense of less reading and writing. I think that trend has been going on from the late fifties and sixties. It might have something to do with the media.  I don’t think that people are any smarter or dumber. There were the same proportion of goof-offs as there are now and seniors who didn’t get their research done in time, just as there are now. The kind of college Monmouth was then is not really different than now, but it was a time when people were more professionally oriented than they are now. More people were going to grad school than now, I believe. The proportion of people who were in the sciences was higher than it is now. More likely, people went to law school or grad school in one of the traditional liberal arts programs. Education was much smaller than it is now and the Communication Department is much bigger than it was then.

 

Johnson: Was there a social life?

 

McGaan: Yes there was a social life. When I arrived, things were pretty controlled. Women had hours; freshmen women had to be in by 8:00 or 9:00 at night. You had to sign in and if you weren’t there, they went looking for you, and you were in trouble because you were supposed to be there.  Men didn’t have hours because they believed if the women had hours, what were the men going to do anyway?! They wanted to lock up the women so the men would be alright, which is more or less true. Upper-class women had to be in by 11:00 p.m. on weeknights and midnight or 1:00 a.m. on weekends. You had to sign in and be there because they did bed checks. It was against the College policies to drink, regardless of your age or whether you were on or off campus. If someone got caught drinking off campus, they were punished by both the College and the police. If you were arrested for underage drinking, you were in trouble in the College and you had to also go to court and pay the appropriate fine. It was legal for people over 21 to drink off campus, but it wasn’t legal for anyone of any age to have alcohol on campus. Of course, people sneaked around and still did it.  You had to be careful because students got thrown out of school for that after being caught twice, but that rapidly disappeared.

 

By my sophomore year, the women’s rules had loosened up. By the time I was a junior, you could go out all night, but you had to sign out.  They didn’t try to control what you were doing like they used to. There would have to have been some major event from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. for men or women to come to their rooms, but the door had to be open in the rooms. The idea that people went to each other’s rooms was never accepted the whole time I was here. I don’t ever remember as a student going into women’s dorms and going in to people’s rooms. That changed the year I graduated, in 1969. Then I went to graduate school in Ohio. When I came back to the Monmouth campus, I was dating somebody here who was a senior at the time, and the dorms were open like they are now. By the early seventies, the campus was more open and relaxed. Drinking was ok by 1969 or 1970.

 

Johnson: Was going to graduate school the next step?

 

McGaan: I still haven’t gotten my plans in order. I still haven’t decided what I want to do when I grow up and that was my problem then as a student. I never really decided what to do. When I came, I thought I was going to be a Political Science major and I wanted to do government-related stuff. Then I hated a course in the government department and decided to not come back more for that. I didn’t really have any clear idea what I was going to do. Jim DeYoung was my freshman advisor and now he is my colleague. Things were hectic because of the rapid growth of the student body, and the advising was less controlled than it is now. People weren’t usually as close to their advisors and there was a strong sense of independence in that regard. Students now want someone to tell them what to do and if something is ok. I basically was my own advisor and I only checked in with my advisor when I needed a form signed. By the time I was a junior, my advisor was on leave so I didn’t have an advisor on campus. No one at the College noticed that I signed his name on forms, which is pretty interesting to see his name on forms knowing that he wasn’t there. I just took stuff that I liked, which turned out to be people, so I took a number of courses from the Speech department. I also took a lot of Economy from James Pate. I considered a degree in communication and getting involved with organizational communication, which was a new area of study at the graduate level. That was what I ended up doing. 

 

One of my favorite courses was Labor Law from Pate. I thought about getting a master’s degree in organizational communication and end up working for the National Labor Relations Board or something like that. As a way to get some additional background in the social science side in communication studies, I also took some Psychology courses from Doug Ross. I took Experimental Psych but skipped Introduction to Psych, which was a prerequisite. I also took Social Psychology from Bill Hastings and there is a story to go along with that.

 

There was a tendency for a number of people to do innovative things. The traditional methods were on there way out and there were a lot of experiments that faculty were interested in trying. One was contract learning because grading was an unfree and unliberal thing to do as we moved into the crazy seventies and the protest/free-speech movement. Hastings decided to run his Social Psych course with a contract grading system. You set up certain criteria and you got the grade if you met the terms of the contract. Every Monday, he gave a twenty-point quiz. If you got fifteen or more points, that entitled you to a C for the week. If you wanted to get better for the week, you could write a paper on a topic that he proposed if you got the fifteen. If you didn’t get the fifteen, you got a D or an F and you didn’t get the option to write the paper. But the quizzes weren’t that hard and if you read the material for the week, you could probably get a fifteen or better. If you wrote and turned in the paper, you either got an A or B, depending on how well he liked the paper. So I took the course and got a fifteen. I wrote the paper and turned it in so I got the A. Then I went to class and thought that this was pretty interesting, because I realized that you really didn’t have to go to class on Tuesday or Wednesday. Nothing was going on that has anything to do with your grade. All you had to do is take your quiz on Monday and turn in the paper on Thursday. Then I realized that you didn’t have to go on Thursday because someone else could turn in your paper. Then I realized that you didn’t have to spend the whole hour on Monday; you just needed to take the quiz. After the fourth or fifth week of the term, I showed up for the quiz and left after. I didn’t come back in for the class until Monday and had someone turned in my paper. I still got an A in the course. It was outrageous; I couldn’t believe that I was getting away with it, but I was a senior. I really did read the stuff and digest it. The stuff from that course was what I based my master’s thesis. Even though I really blew off the course, it really did pay off.

 

So I ended up with a lot of Psych, Econ, and Speech, but nothing turned into a major. By the time I was a senior, I couldn’t get a major in Speech and Theatre because I couldn’t get the Theatre courses in to graduate. I could have probably gotten a major in Economics done, but I would have to take two courses that I didn’t want to (Accounting and Money and Banking). Finally the Speech Department agreed that they would waive some courses for me to graduate. I ended up with a topical major made up of Psychology, Speech, and Economy. Then I went to graduate school thinking that I was going to get a Master’s degree. I got a national science fellowship to Ohio University and I liked them best. I went on fellowship straight through the Ph.D.

 

Meanwhile, they had the draft lottery and that was the only lottery that I ever won. My number was sixty-one. The guys I was hanging out with the night of the draft lottery, they all got high numbers but I got sixty-one. Richard Nixon was president at the time. He had eliminated student deferments; this was 1970 and he decided that they were unfair for graduate students. Nixon agreed that a graduate student got to finish out the year while he was in the program. So I had through August of 1970 before going to service or leaving the country; those were the choices. By busting my tail, I had enough time to get my master’s degree done. I was collecting data for my master’s thesis, which was a listening comprehension study and I was collecting the data in 100-level classes in Ohio. Then the U.S. invaded Cambodia and riots broke out everywhere, including in Monmouth I guess. With the Cambodia invasion, there was all kinds of protesting.

 

At Ohio University, it was initially pretty reasoned, and very intense and serious. There were various teach-ins and people going to the quad to have classes.  There were students picketing against ROTC; there were letter writing campaigns to stop the war; there were marches and vigils. It was completely emotionally captivating. Between graduate work and heavy drinking, you could get pretty caught up with what was going on. OU was probably more intense than any other place in Ohio. Kent was not that big of a protest place, which is very ironic that the shootings occurred there because the protests were usually not that intense at Kent State.

 

Once the shootings occurred at Kent State, all hell broke out at universities all over Ohio, as in other places. I think the intensity was greater in Ohio than most other places. Jackson State University also had shootings but I am not sure what was going on there. Things got pretty ugly all over. There were fire bombings like in the ROTC storage building at OU. One by one, the universities in Ohio closed and the only state university still open was Ohio University. Every time another university closed, the most radical protestors from Kent, Bowling Green, and Miami left there and came to OU. That was how things were out of control. Then the president of the university decided to close to avoid someone getting killed. This happened on a Thursday before I was scheduled to collect data on Monday. I thought, "there goes my master’s degree."  I ended up going back to Monmouth and collecting data from classes at Monmouth and Carl Sandburg. I actually finished my master’s on time, and it was a pretty amazing experience to see the University close. There was a tremendous sense of failure to see all the institutions close down and a tremendous sense of anger about the war.

 

The governor of Ohio wanted the universities to be closed and his friend was the commander of the Ohio National Guard. The two of them created hostility toward college students that led to the shooting. They believed the college students who were protesting were bad people, against the government. Had they not created such an ugly climate, I don’t think the National Guard would have shot--and they should never have had live ammunition. After I got into the real Army, I realized how truly outrageous that was. If it had been regular army, there never would have been shells in the chambers to be fired because they don’t let you do that. I was stationed at Fort Carson where they had guys guarding nuclear weapons. They didn’t want the guys guarding nuclear weapons to put live ammo in their M16s because that was dangerous. You shouldn’t let people do dangerous stuff with live ammunition but the Ohio National Guard wanted to put live ammo in the M14s while they were around college students. I am still pretty angry with those people. They should have been prosecuted because that was outrageous behavior. They had no business doing that.

 

One of my most vivid memories of that time was on a Thursday or Friday and students had only hours to get out of the dorms and off the campus. I had an apartment off campus so that didn’t affect me. I just had to clean out my grad student office. All the regular students had to be out of their dorms instantly. I remember walking uptown and there were national guardsmen with fixed bayonets at every other parking meter. They were everywhere. The governor wouldn’t let the national guard in Athens, Ohio, until the university closed--then he let them occupy the town. As we are walking down the street, a friend of mine Sally, stopped and asked one of the soldiers if he was Jack or John. But it was the guy who was her previous roommate’s boyfriend who had graduated a year before. There he was, standing at his university. I remember looking and realizing that he wasn’t going to speak to her. Tears were coming down out of his eyes but he was standing there and not moving. Sally was trying to talk to him, but he wasn’t acknowledging that he saw her.

 

But I came back and collected my data and went back to OU to write my master’s thesis. At that point, I got drafted and I had to decide what to do. One of my fraternity brother’s parents’ from Monmouth were Americans but he had been born and raised in Canada. He could ether be a U.S. or Canadian citizen but at age twenty-one, he had to decide. He graduated and got a job doing geology in Canada and all over the world. He wrote me when he heard that I had been drafted and invited me to Toronto because his bedroom was empty. His parents were opposed to the war and if I wanted to go to there, all I had to do was drive to Toronto. One of the things you have to figure out when you leave the country is where you go and how you survive. Canadians weren’t hostile but they weren’t exactly welcoming everyone. It wasn’t easy to get papers at that point to work legally in Canada but my friend’s father would have taken care of it for me. I gave some long and hard thought wondering if that was the thing to do. One part of me said that I didn’t want to leave the country forever. It wasn’t a really morally courageous thing to do. If you really believe that the war is wrong and you want to protest, you shouldn’t leave the country; you should go to jail. That would have been a moral thing, but I didn’t want to go to jail either. I finally decided that I was going to go and went to the Army from late 1970 to 1972.

 

I never left the United States. I was stationed at Fort Carson most of the time. I did my basic training in Fort Lewis, Washington. I occasionally tell people what I think about the state of Washington and Seattle area, I got there in late September and left before the first of the year. Everyday but one, it was forty-two degrees and we were outside most of the time. You could never get me back in the state of Washington again, except in handcuffs. I hated forty-two degrees and rain. One day the sun shone. We were right there at the foot of a mountain and once the clouds went away; we could appreciate the mountain. I hated basic training and I assumed that I was going to Nam. Everyone I was in touch with out of my basic training went to Nam. Everyone I went to basic training with, but me, went to Nam. I went to Fort Carson and that is a long story.

 

When I was in basic training, there was a guy who was the commander of the military prison at Fort Carson. We never knew the whole story about what exactly happened to this guy but he had a master’s degree in criminology and he was a major in the U.S. army. He commanded the stockade, but he had spent a year or so in the state penitentiary in Texas. That was why he was interested in corrections and why he got a master’s degree. You wouldn’t have spent more than a year in the state penitentiary if you had committed a felony and you can’t be an officer if you weren’t convicted of a felon. How that worked, I don’t know. Obviously, he had some sort of conviction, but it wasn’t anything that was talked about. However, he was interested in corrections and the prison program.

 

One of the things that he got permission from the commanding general of the infantry division to do was to change the counselors’ status at the stockade or prison. The army defines a counselor as a career sergeant. He noted that everyone in the stockade was seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen years old. Most of them were in for going crazy and there were mostly young soldiers. Sergeant MPs are guys in their late twenties or early thirties. You can picture the relationship with what a career military sergeant has with your typical mess up. The major decided that that had to be changed; he wanted young guys who were close to the same age and had counseling related backgrounds. He could hire different people for those jobs, but he had to get them. He had a friend at the Pentagon who agreed to sent him people. He asked for people who had master’s degrees in social psychology, guidance counseling, or clinical psychology. I happened to be in that set of people and I was interviewed by a guy that may have been a sixth grade drop out. He was finding out what my skills and background were. He had computer cards and punched holes in it while asking me questions. One of the questions in “What is your highest schooling?" I said that I had my master’s degree in organizational communication. He asked if that was radio communication. I knew that was the guy who carried the radio during combat and the enemy knows that the first thing you do when coming in contact with an American patrol is to kill the guy with the radio because he brings in the helicopters. I said that it wasn’t like radio at all. Then he listed all the areas. When he mentioned Social Psychology and I said that was close enough.

 

My card goes to the Pentagon and said that I had a master’s degree in Social Psychology. The communication stuff that I do is related to social. Then they found that there were five people who fit the criteria. So they sent all five of us to work in the stockade and one guy who was six hours short of his degree in guidance counseling. That was the six people who were appointed. I was a counselor for about a year. That is how I got to Fort Carson. Every month I waited for the orders that would send us to Nam because you knew that they were coming. Everybody at Fort Carson had been to Nam or had come back, or were sent for additional training before being sent to Vietnam. Every month we waited and our names were never posted. A month went by, eighteen months went by. Then we got too short to be going. It was mysterious; rumors were started and said that we had pull with the general to be kept out of Nam, but we didn’t know the general. It was weird and something was going on.

 

One time, I sat and chatted with the guy in personnel at some bar. I was telling him the story and he couldn’t believe that I had never been sent to Nam or Europe. He then figured out how it worked. Everyone in the army has a job classification, a MOS which is your military occupation specialty. My MOS was a 91G20. 91G means Psychology/Social work specialist. That is the MOS that they gave me because of my master’s degree. Then they stationed me to a military police operated prison. The guy explained that the way people get sent to Nam or anywhere else is that the commanders ask for placement troops. They ask for troops by rank or MOS. They need so many sergeants’ with a certain MOS and so many privates with this MOS. If they need infantry soldier, cooks, or clerks, they looked at the entire stateside army because cooks, clerks, and mechanics are everywhere in any unit. At that time, computer time was too expensive to be running all this data because computers were pretty primitive. Now, you could run the whole U.S. army in seconds , but this was a major operation with roomfuls of computers trying to sort out where all the staff was in 1970. It was too expensive to run the entire U.S. army to find people by rank and MOS in every single MOS because there were hundreds.

 

Then if they were looking for people who had a particular MOS, they looked in the kind of unit that person would be in. In most MOS, you would be only in one particular unit. If you were a medical MOS, you would be in a medical unit. The nineties were all medical numbers, and the ones with counseling/psychology MOS would usually be in mental hospitals or drug rehab centers. I wasn’t in a medical unit because I was attached to an MP unit. All the MP numbers were in the sixties.  Every time that they looked for a 91G20 to send to Nam, they ran medical units, but I wasn’t in one. Every time that they ran my unit looking for people to send to Nam, they were only looking for MPs. I wasn’t one and I could have stayed there forever. That is why I never went to Nam, so if you ever hear me say that bureaucracy is your friend, it is true  because bureaucracy saved my life. That is why I didn’t go to Nam.

 

Johnson: What affect did the war have on your life?

 

McGaan: On a psychological level, it is hard to say. Being in college and in the military at that time affected everyone dramatically. It is a major part of who I am as a person today.  It has a lot to do with my attitude toward authority and toward the government and society in general. I think I am more cynical and bitter in some ways because of that.  I never went to Nam; I can’t claim anything heroic or damaged in a personal sense. Everyone I know who went to Nam was hurt. No one came back undamaged. Many people were physically injured but everyone was injured. In direct ways, going to the Army took a few years out of my life and I lost my graduate fellowship. When I came back, the fellowship was gone and I was furious about that. Ironically, the only way I could continue graduate school then was to be a teaching assistant. When I became a teaching assistant, I realized that I really liked teaching college students. That ended my fantasies of working in corporate labor relations. I ended up heading myself toward being a college professor. In that sense, it affected how I am in that way. If I hadn’t been teaching to earn money to go to school as a graduate student, I doubt I would have ended up being a college teacher. It changed me in some ways for the better.

 

Johnson: Did you support the war at the time and have your views changed since then?

 

McGaan: I think in 1965 that the war was the right thing to do. I probably thought it was reasonable to stop the communists. By the time I was a junior in `68, I knew the war didn’t seem right. I didn’t also want to get killed and that has a way of getting your attention. It is more reasonable to think that whatever we were doing wasn’t worth me or my friends dying for. We all knew people who got killed and it wasn’t worth it. By the time that I was being drafted, I believed that we weren’t fighting to win the war and to accomplish a clear purpose. What were we doing there then? By `67 or 68, I knew that we shouldn’t be doing this and I didn’t want to be apart of it. The government doesn’t need to be ruining my life or killing me or my friends. Everything that I know since then has only reinforced that we had no business being there.

 

I got really angry when I read A Bright and Shining Lie, which is a wonderful book about Vietnam. It is based upon the memory and knowledge of a guy called John Paul Vann, who was a significant character very early in the Vietnam war. He knew that we were on the wrong side, thinking and doing the wrong things. Then I realized that people did know before `67 or `68. This guy knew and was telling people. They should have been figuring it out. There were people like Lyndon Johnson who knew that we were never winning the war. He said that he didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war. So let's send a whole bunch of guys to die so I don’t have to be the first president to lose a war. I don’t think that my dying and my friends were worth Lyndon Johnson’s reputation. I think that it would have been better to be the first president to stop the war so thirty or forty thousand people would have been saved. That is what I think about that and I still do.

 

I do want to add that I have tremendous respect for the guys who went. I feel guilty that lots of people went and I didn’t. I felt guilty at the time and I still do. It makes me very uncomfortable. As long as people are dying for no reason, why am I different? It was just dumb luck. I have a lot of respect for veterans and I think that the country should be respectful of them, but the war was wrong.

 

Johnson: In what ways did the war affect your community?

 

McGaan: As things got polarized, I wasn’t in the community of Altona and I don’t really know because I was in graduate school. Things were polarized in Monmouth and got more so because townspeople were furious with the college students who were opposed to the war. There was some real ugliness. One of my friends had a sister who was an undergraduate at Kent State. In a phone call, the sister was having a big argument over the phone. Everyone knew people at Kent State. It is sort of like people at Monmouth know people at Western. It was an emotional moment for everyone. Of course, the sister at Kent was really upset about the shooting because she had seen it. She was talking to her mother about the terrible things that the soldiers had done. Her mother said that those people shouldn’t have been out there protesting against the war. She didn’t understand how her mother was saying that because soldiers should have never done that. Finally, her mother said that anyone who was out in the quad deserved to be shot. The girl told her mother that she was out there, and the mother said that she deserved to be shot.

 

I often wondered what ever happened. After the school got out, the older sister was a senior at OU and her younger sister was a sophomore maybe at Kent. I have no idea what happened and I can’t even remember the sister’s name. Every once in a while, I think back to that story. I wonder what happened to that mother and daughter; will they ever get over that? That haunts me and I often wonder about the outcome. Many older people thought that the government was right; these are people who remember WWII. They always backed the troops. War is a terrible thing, but you back the troops and support their time in need. That is what is all about. People did that in WWII and Korea. Vietnam came and that era of people didn’t understand so they questioned the war and the government. There were tremendous splits. I don’t think there was that much in Altona because it was such a little town, but there were situations and families who were pretty unhappy. It happened in Monmouth because people got really unset with the students. There were real suspicions, but I missed that year at Monmouth because I was at Ohio.

 

Johnson: Did living in the Midwest play a role in the way you responded to the war?

 

McGaan: I think that people in the Midwest, this applies to me and my friends, were not caught up with big events and major activities that were going on in places like Berkeley, Stanford, Washington, D.C. or Columbia. Some people here actually went to Washington to march, but I didn’t. Although I was in Chicago during the `68 Democratic Party convention. That certainly had an impact seeing soldiers in every alley while there was a convention going on and people were getting beat up in the parks at night. I caught whiffs of tear gas at OU and Chicago. That is really unpleasant; I don’t like tear gas. So I think people are more introspective here. There was less action and less intensity. I think people thought about it themselves more and there was more quiet reflection, but I might be wrong about that. Most of my friends had the same general attitudes about the time. I don’t remember having friends who were war hawks, but I know there were such people around. Even the guys in ROTC were not that enthusiastic about what was happening. I think that I saw more of that away from the heartland; there were some people really gung ho about what was going on.