{ title: 'The Spectrum (Buffalo, N.Y.) 1955-current, May 11, 1979, Page 18, Image 18', download_links: [ { link: 'http://www.loc.gov/rss/ndnp/ndnp.xml', label: 'application/rss+xml', meta: 'News about NYS Historic Newspapers - RSS Feed', }, { link: '/lccn/np00130006/1979-05-11/ed-1/seq-18/png/', label: 'image/png', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/np00130006/1979-05-11/ed-1/seq-18.pdf', label: 'application/pdf', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/np00130006/1979-05-11/ed-1/seq-18/ocr.xml', label: 'application/xml', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/np00130006/1979-05-11/ed-1/seq-18/ocr.txt', label: 'text/plain', meta: '', }, ] }
Image provided by: University at Buffalo
—continued from page 15— there. The workers are protesting low wages and dangerous working conditions. from the negotiations and vows to fight the agreement. No actual construction begins. February 18 — The trial of nine students accused of disrupting an ROTC drill begins in closely-watched proceedings of the Student Judiciary. It is the first significant display of the University Advocate’s office efforts to maintain order on campus. all convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot. Contempt sentences totalling over 19 years are handed to these and other members of the Chicago-8. Angry student demonstrations flare up in Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, among other places. students. “It was not so much a matter of over discriminatory practices as it was a lack of sensitivity and awareness,” the associate dean explains. February 20 — Demonstrations downtown against the Chicago-8 verdict end in a confrontation with police where several demonstrators are maced and nine arrested, including five UB students. The demonstrators* returned to campus and marched to Hayes Hall for a confrontation with University Advocate Robert faculty. The details and final approval have yet to come. February 6 - Students announce plans to form a food cooperative to combat high prices in school cafeterias. February 8 - Three students, five faculty and one alumni are named as the search committee for the new UB President. February 8 — A few dozen students travel to West Valley, N.Y. to support striking workers of the nuclear reprocessing plant February 13 Rockefeller lifts the moratorium on construction at the Amherst campus,- announcing a breakthrough with local construction unions on the issue of minority hiring and training. But the minority coalition formed to oppose the construction and recognized by the State as the minority committees’ bargaining agent charges that it was excluded Governor February 18 — The UB Med School announces that it is now working closely with campus and community minority groups and is actively seeking disadvantaged February 18 — Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden are / remember my father holding me up on that brilliant summer day when JFK spoke from the steps of Buffalo’s City Hall. I still couldn't see. I remember a man in jj> a white space suit, his head ® helmeted in a clear plastic sphere, £ weaving through the rapt crush, * distributing coupons for free \ hamburgers while the president’s tinny amplified voice rattled i between tall buildings I’d never seen Dejore. / wondered how he could bear the heat in that outfit. I remember the November assassination. We ate frank and beans from paper as we watched the portable TV planted uncharacteristically on the kitchen table. A single jet idled on the runway while the commentator commented on and on. I remember asking why the president got killed and if the jet plane would take him to heaven. My mother and father became visibly distraught. I realized then, there in our small over-lit kitchen, that a man we had never met and events faraway could still matter. I was six. That wider world outside home, cloakrooms, and playgrounds comes to us in little jars, minor jolts. Via tubes 'and texts, information reaches out for us but it is in steps of little moments that we begin to see ourselves connected to and bebttled by a broader expanse. And eventually, for most of us, those territories and their transactions beyond our neighborhood become present and provocative enough to demand our position, to demand that we position ourselves. Sometimes this occurs slowly. Sometimes it occurs not at all But for me, the initial formulations of moral and political beliefs came in one finally as hypocrites. I would sit and watch the war on the evening news and have bad dreams about it and they, instead, complained only of the demonstrators and “their ratty hair.” In school, my teachers weren’t dealing with or even mentioning the war and I began to question the relevance of what they were teaching me. I felt alienated from my peers with was UB. I lived nearby (on University Avenue, then on Niagara Falls Boulevard) and, during the fall and spring when it wasn’t too cold, 1 often frequented the campus (in those days there was only one). I liked my visits. The campus was exciting - or at least exciting from the point of view of 1 a skinny, spectacled boy on a bike pedalling amongst the “big kids” in a place my mother forbade me to go. Of course, now that I think of it, it wasn’t all that different from now. It was more crowded 1 think (the Amherst Campus being only a contractor’s wet dream), but most people seemed intent on getting to classes and the like. But unlike now, there were “special events” and frequent mass vociferation. hairs handing out leaflets. 1 recall one tall fellow with stringy blonde hair reaching to the base of his scapulae and wearing only a pair of cutoffs with a peace sign patch on the seat. He handed me a pink sheet bearing the chubby, shiny face of Mao Zedong. I kept it for a long time. window of the Marine Midland bank (at least that’s what 1 heard standing among the spectators). Somebody got hit in the head with a misaimed beer bottle. This 1 know, because she stood only a yard from me. 1 decided 1 didn’t like this. The mood was ugly and the violence made me feel a bit sick. As I was leaving, I heard screaming. I turned and saw hundreds running back the way they had come - Though I understood why all this activity was going on, the environment struck me as rather jovial and festive. 1 enjoyed the bombast, the chants, the boarded windows, the heady anger. I enjoyed it almost the way anothe; child my age would enjoy a parade or circus. And so I went up the hill to the campus now and again, to sight-see, hand out, and to revel in my vicarious “radicalism.” But it was UB that changed this attitude. During the Spring of 1970, there was a big march down Main Street beginning at the campus. Someone told me about it in history class and I rushed there as soon as I got out of school. Things were well under way when I arrived, panting. A line of students strung out across the street bore a banner and chanted, “Fight your own fucking war!” People were throwing rocks A vicarious rebel away from canisters spewing white clouds. I began to run too. I stopped going to UB after that except for rare visits and contented myself with monitoring the war from home. My views on the war, on the U.S., on the North Vietnamese, and on the issues of capitalism versus communism developed independent of the inflammatory and often misrepresentative rhetoric that continued on campus. I never grew up to be the radical I once thought I owuld be. On the other hand, I didn’t become a conservative or a Republican even though my tendencies are sedate. And for this I owe, in part, UB, for it was UB that presented me with an unforgettable experience which was, and still is, a personal epiphany fo;the cruelties committed by a system committed to “keeping order:” my first and hopefully last whiff ‘oft«argasf ; • ..... — . Watching - from the sidelines An Impressionable youth Many buildings were scrawled with slogans and obscenities. The presses against the turmoil Commentary by Boss Chapman and garbage at police who had gathered down past Herzog’s •
