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I was a mere freshman 35 years ago this May when the fecal material hit the air
circulation unit during the famous student strikes. One minute we were fighting
over wearing beanies at Freshman Camp, and the next moment students were getting
shot in Ohio while schools were shutting down across the nation. It was the closest
I’ve been to American history in the making, and all I recall is a blur.
It’s been three decades since Abbie Hoffman waggled a lit joint in front of thousands
of cheering University of New Hampshire students. On that day, May 5, 1970, Hoffman
was officially a felon, recently convicted of conspiring crowds to riot at the
1968 Democratic National Convention. Hoffman had gotten in trouble for, among
other things, trying to measure the Pentagon. Then a group of Viet Nam war protesters
encircled the world’s largest building and attempted to levitate it with their
combined brain waves. As I recall, it didn’t work.
Hoffman’s appearance onstage at the rural Durham campus that evening with Chicago
7 co-conspirators Jerry Rubin and David Dillinger also ran afoul of the law. Under
pressure from the Manchester Union Leader, UNH trustees had originally banned
the talk. Then, fearing violent student protests, the trustees, aided by a student
court injunction, agreed to let the three Yippies have their say – providing they
spoke between 3:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.. The activists made sure to arrive late,
throwing the already tense campus into a state of nervous hysteria.
Are you going? Are you going? Kids were bouncing off the walls, unsure whether
to join the swelling crowds outside the Field House, while another 4,500 waited
inside. Are they coming? Are there a lot of cops? Will they let them speak? The
morning Union Leader front page predicted trouble.
"They’re here!!" Someone screamed. "C’mon, it’s all coming down!"
Suddenly I was alone in the dorm a few hundred yards from ground zero, abandoned
by my friends, lying on the tiny bed. There was violence in the air and in my
stomach. WUNH, the student radio station, covered the event like it was the only
news on Earth and the Earth was about to explode. Underground newspapers pictured
T-Hall the administration building in flames. Mandatory military draft to the
left, Canada to the right. Was this why I went to college? I felt like I was going
to puke.
It is my theory that history looks less clear as one approaches the actual event
horizon. My father says that about World War II; the soldiers were the last to
know. Freshman psychology professors prove it every year by staging mock crimes
of violence right in front of the class. Stats show that most eyewitnesses have
no clue what really happened. Memories contradict. Perceptions vary.
Lucky for history, there was one cool head among us. Seacoast cinematographer
Gary Anderson made an amazing little movie of the whole mess called "Mayflowers." The documentary has been kicking around
in one format or another since its release in 1971. Last week, with the anniversary
of the event looming, I popped my copy in the VCR.
It's all there in glorious black and white like ancient footage from another
era -- the scraggy hair, the bell-bottoms and ripped jeans, the teach-ins, the
power salutes. What I remembered was the raging voice of Jerry Rubin telling us
that education was nothing more than advanced toilet training. What I remembered
was the placid oval face of Union Leader publisher William Loeb, my high school
boss in my early journalism days, comparing the convicted speakers to Nazi stormtroopers.
What I had forgotten was the way the pieces came together.
Things were generally tense all over in those days, what with riots and moon
walks and assassinations. Loeb, famous for his provocative right-wing antics,
wanted the state legislators to cut off funds to a University that allowed co-ed
dorms and seditious gatherings. Rubin and Hoffman hoped our whole imperfect society
would come crashing down. The war dragged on. The Beatles were kaput. Watergate
was still two years away.
Gary's film captures both the drama and the foolishness, set to a psychedelic
musical score by his own New Hampshire band, the Spectras. What’s amazing is how
clearly the documentary evolves, peeling the pages of the story and the layers
of the emotional onion at the same time. A 1969 UNH graduate, Gary should have
been as confused as the rest of us. But his clarity makes this a compelling film
even today.
What I had forgotten was Kent State. Just one day before the Chicago 3 arrived
in NH, four Ohio student protesters had been shot and killed by the National Guard.
No wonder we were agitated, fearful, angry, confused, empowered, and in my case,
nauseous. No wonder the UNH trustees, state legislators, our parents and maybe
even William Loeb, behind his fearful exterior, felt the same. It is a sickening
fact that the death of a few innocent students on American soil galvanized us
as much as the slaughter of so many brave soldiers overseas. The more they fought
and died, the less we understood what was going on, and so our brains were set
to pop, like overloaded fuses.
Now Hoffman was onstage, pacing like a caged cat. What I pictured lying on my
dorm bed years ago, I finally saw in Gary’s film. Adding a third infraction to
his growing list, taunting the police and mugging for the news cameras, the king
of the Yippies took a very public and illegal toke on what appeared to be a marijuana
cigarette.
"Tonight, the Granite State is going to crack!" he shouted. "Tonight the Old
Man in the Mountain is going to blow his [expletive deleted] brains out!"
No one died at UNH that night, despite the violent call to arms, the dry powder
keg of passion and the spark at Kent State. The speakers left quietly. The crowds
disbursed. Charges were filed against student body president Mark Wefers who authorized
the speech – and then were dropped. Charges against the Chicago "convicts" were
dropped too. The strike closed campuses all over the nation. Most final exams
never happened. I quit school to join a rock band in New York, but the following
fall I was back. Nixon was re-elected. The war dragged on. Abbie Hoffman was later
busted for possessing cocaine, served a little jail time and eventually killed
himself.
Gary Anderson, who still makes movies and performs in his nostalgia band The
Spectras, says the film "Mayflowers" just sort of created itself.
"There was so much footage," Gary says, "and people didn’t really want it around.
They were afraid it might get subpoenaed. I knew where things got tossed. …We
knew something should be done with the footage, and sooner rather than later."
The film was released just one year after the incendiary event, then chopped
from an hour to half an hour and re-released a year later. It went into limited
distribution, won a few film festival awards, even a mention in Saturday Review.
Many of the people from my freshman dorm still live around here; UNH grads tend
to stick pretty close. So I called a few the other day, just to test my theory
about the danger of trusting history to eyewitnesses.
"I think I was there," a local artist recalls. "Yes, I’m sure I was there, either
inside or outside. I think outside. Didn’t they pump the sound outside?"
"I remember a lot of protesting," says a Massachusetts senior computer salesman.
"People were carrying signs and candles. I know I went and saw the Chicago Three
speak. I think I remember a teacher coming into a Physics class with a shotgun
and telling us to go out and join a peace rally or something. Maybe it wasn’t
a shotgun."
A prominent Portsmouth businessman, once a semi-stoned long hair, recalls sitting
in his room and watching crowds gathering. The protest group, he says, ended up
on the lawn outside UNH president McConnell’s home. The student body president
and others used a bullhorn to call the university leader out for a confrontation.
"They were trying to really provoke an aggressive approach, to get us to go into
the president’s house and take over. They couldn’t get the crowd to do it. I had
just been down to a protest in Washington, DC and expected there might be some
violence here too. Hey, you’re not going to use my name on this are you?"
And so it went from one fuzzy interview to the next -- my peers, my pals, my
colleagues – everyone went to the famous rally except me, at least 7,500 students
in all. But none of my fellow freshmen remembers much. The history bomb landed
too close.
"We were just babies," a female friend, now a teacher in Maine told me. "Sure
I was there. Abbie Hoffman was so close he was spitting on me. Later we tried
to levitate T-Hall. What do I remember? Not much, but hey, I was at Woodstock
too, and all I remember was heading out and coming back. The rest is a blur.
Thank you Gary Anderson. On this auspicious day, 35 years after the revolution,
we honor thee. You single-handedly saved our generation from being lost, forever,
in the swirling dust clouds of our collective haze.
Copyright © 2005 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.
For more information: "Mayflowers" (1972) is a black and 29-minute documentary
available for $19.95 plus p/h from New Hampshire Movies (1-800-666-6843) or go
to Nhmovies.com
