From 00:00:00 to 00:00:26
Did you live through a war? What was it like? What role did patriotism play in your upbringing? Huh. You know, I'm going to kind of overarch this and say our relationship with our parents, at least all of us, because I think yours too, it was very different than your relationship girls with us.

From 00:00:26 to 00:00:53
There wasn't a lot of dialogue and talking about things. You know, they were here and we were here in our box and, you know, we did what we needed together, but it wasn't sitting down and talking about life. And there was a very distinction between parents and children and not as open kind of communication that we have today.

From 00:00:53 to 00:01:04
Oh, yeah. It was very, very different. And I think I don't think of my parents' friends was any different than that either. That was the every way they were. You know, that was the culture.

From 00:01:04 to 00:01:25
Yeah, just, and it wasn't like kids were to be seen not heard. It wasn't that kind of thing. It was just. No, somewhat, but yeah, you always felt like you were a little sponge soaking stuff up and your opinion was not asked for a number one.

From 00:01:25 to 00:01:30
Exactly. And nor did you feel like you had the. But it wasn't in a bad way. It was just the way it was.

From 00:01:30 to 00:01:46
The power to say things. I didn't feel that that, you know, until I was in my 40s or 50s that I would speak up and say, "What's what I think?" Right?

From 00:01:46 to 00:02:02
So, but so yeah, so back up. Did we live through a war? Yes, Vietnam. For me, as a girl, it really didn't impact me. My brothers were in school, so they had deferments.

From 00:02:02 to 00:02:10
I don't even know where their draft numbers were. Well, they weren't in the lottery. They had deferments.

From 00:02:10 to 00:02:27
Yeah, so it didn't matter. You weren't either. So we knew it was, you know, it wasn't a good situation at all. But I don't recall how it just didn't seem. I didn't even know anybody who had gone to Vietnam.

From 00:02:27 to 00:02:46
So I didn't have any connection to that in my family or friends or even my parents' friends, none of their children had gone. So I was very removed from that. I was in college. So I guess you could say I had kind of my head in the clouds.

From 00:02:46 to 00:03:17
Patriotism in my family? Yes, definitely. You know, that was an important part of who we were, you know, understanding what the Constitution, the bill are all, you know, just respecting those who have fought for us. But I think because my dad had really hard time in the war, he couldn't talk about these things.

From 00:03:17 to 00:03:41
And my mom then, by default, didn't as well. So it wasn't dialogue about patriotism or let's go do XYZ that demonstrated a patriotic, I don't know, but it just wasn't that way. Because I think it hit him too hard to talk about and to do things like that.

From 00:03:41 to 00:04:06
Well, that generation largely never talked about their war experiences. My dad talked very little about it till he was dying. And when he was dying, we started to get some info about him and learning about, you know, all the little snippets I've given you. That's a lot of what I know about his war experience.

From 00:04:06 to 00:04:36
And Jim Carress, you know, Uncle Jim, to me and you guys know Jim, that's the same way he was. He was a physician and his destroyer was nearly sunk by the Japanese and with torpedoes. The decks were awash with blood and he got a he got a bronze star. He should have got a silver star or the Navy Cross because they were told to abandon ship.

From 00:04:36 to 00:04:50
And he stayed down in the whole yeah, the medical facility, the sick base, what they called it. And he was patching guys up. He wouldn't leave. So, you know, so tell them about your experience with Vietnam.

From 00:04:50 to 00:05:16
So Vietnam, you know, was raging. And my parents had a friend, Crick Streamer from Boulder. He was a firefighter. You fell off the back of the fire truck and got dragged to death. One of the kids I knew in Houghton, his Kurt Hackmeyer's brother Dan got shot up in Vietnam and got killed. So it was to me it was real.

From 00:05:16 to 00:05:40
Those days when you turned 18, you had to go down and register for the draft because it was a draft. And then you got a classification. And if you were better than just a warm body, didn't have any physical faults, smart enough to read, write and cipher, you were a 1A.

From 00:05:40 to 00:06:12
That meant your cannon fodder, baby. They'd call you at a moment's notice. And so I was 1A. But this was 71 and or 60, 70-ish. Anyway, I saw it was 70 on my birthday, 18th birthday. I went down to the draft board in Rockford, Illinois, got my draft card, got my draft physical, and I was set to be drafted.

From 00:06:12 to 00:06:33
You could get student deferments if you had political suck you could get by. You could join the reserves. There's a lot of draft dodging in those days. It was a real thing. But how if you had that? Brad would have had the same thing then. So he had a number. He just never got, he didn't get a number. He had a classification.

From 00:06:33 to 00:07:05
He probably was 1A as well because he's only a year older. Yeah, he was 1A. And Dave was probably a 1A. But somehow, then it was draft, it was just kind of a random selection. But then, I was 1A and then for 72, they decided that they would go to a lottery. So on early January, everybody, all the boys in Kittridge were in the lounges with the TVs because they were giving out the birthday and giving you your number.

From 00:07:05 to 00:07:28
So my friend Larry Johnson was 10. I was 111. I was 111. And so the war was over pretty quick after that. So I don't think, you know, Larry never got drafted. He did have to go. I think he had to go to Chicago for something. They paid for him to go to Chicago and get checked out or somewhere thing.

From 00:07:28 to 00:08:00
My other buddies, I didn't know, Gary McCarty was one of my best pals in biology. He was in ROTC. But the war was over by the time he got out. He went to officer candidate school, became a lieutenant, ended up as a major. He went through the first Gulf War. So I didn't really go through the war, but we had a lot of protests in Boulder. They closed the road coming in, the turnpike coming in right by Kittridge in the spring.

From 00:08:00 to 00:08:07
A lot of these kids were just demonstrating to not have finals, I think, but a lot of them were real left-wing. That's a bigger part of it.

From 00:08:07 to 00:08:27
I was a huge fan of the war in Vietnam, but if I'd been drafted, I'd have gone and I would have done my job. I'd have picked up whatever my military occupational specialty was, and I was going to buy God be good at it. So there we go.

From 00:08:27 to 00:09:02
Yep, didn't have to. So I have tremendous respect for military and especially guys like Ralph and Will, like next door neighbor Brett, who was in three deployments and got shot at. A lot of these people that never got shot at, that turned into lefty people I don't have so much respect for, they were in the military, this and that, but if you haven't been shot at, you sort of don't have street cred in my book.

From 00:09:02 to 00:09:18
Well, anyway. Okay. Mom and dad, you grew up during the Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam.

From 00:09:18 to 00:09:47
Can you please speak to how the Civil Rights Movement and later the war in Vietnam impacted your life firsthand? Well, I think we've talked about Vietnam. So it'll go back to civil rights and it impacted, you know, we're in Colorado, so it's a little different. We weren't in the south.

From 00:09:47 to 00:10:34
But how it impacted was in my high school, where we had a mix of black and whites. I had a really good friend who was a black girl. And, you know, things were good. It was my sophomore year. Dave was at Northwestern. Brad was a junior. And unfortunately, we had outside folks come into the school and cause significant threats to, I remember the vice principal had developed a disabled child and they threatened that child.

From 00:10:34 to 00:11:07
They were disruptive in the hallways. These were outside people coming in. And so they stirred trouble in our school. You've heard me tell it, but I'll put it down here of how I was in the lunch line with Brad one day. And this is not outside people. This was then inside because these folks from the outside were just stirring it up, stirring it up. There was even a report that they brought weapons into the school.

From 00:11:07 to 00:11:36
And they were older. They were not high school age. But so the story with Brad is we were in the lunch line together and the girl in front of him who happened to be black was stealing the food. And he said, he called her out on it and said, you know, you should pay for that. And she said some kind of lip stuff to him. And okay, we thought that was the end of it. Well, the next day I'm coming out of my classroom.

From 00:11:36 to 00:11:45
And that girl and several other of her friends surrounded me and had a belt with little spikes on it. These are all black kids. Don't.

From 00:11:45 to 00:11:49
And they started whipping my leg. Don't, don't leave out the fact.

From 00:11:49 to 00:12:08
Fortunately, then other people got involved. And that girl that I remember, and I wish I could remember her name now who was my friend, she had to stop associating with me because she was going to get hurt of some kind.

From 00:12:08 to 00:12:22
So the school finally had enough of all of this and we shut down for a whole month. And they reconfigured how the school days would go. They were only in the morning session was only in the mornings.

From 00:12:22 to 00:12:33
We didn't have lunch. We didn't have club meetings. We didn't have dances. Nothing. All the doors were locked. Parents manned doors. My dad was one of the door guards.

From 00:12:33 to 00:12:42
And to be in the hall, you had to have a pass. I was lucky. I was in the honorary cadets and so I could get a pass and walk in the hall.

From 00:12:42 to 00:12:55
But that was hard to get because they didn't want to have any more problems. It didn't, you know, there were, there were many more incidences, not like mine, but as bad as mine from other kids.

From 00:12:55 to 00:13:15
And so that was, that was kind of the reflection in Colorado where we were. It was also about segregation, desegregating the schools. All of that was hitting in Denver in our high schools at the same time that this was all happening.

From 00:13:15 to 00:13:40
And so that's how I, you know, the next year we were still under that same school system and a lot of our kids from George Washington, this is George Washington high school, just elected to transfer to East and manual. And then we had kids from East and manual come into George Washington so that we really tried to be more integrated school.

From 00:13:40 to 00:13:52
And so that's what I witnessed was, was that in my life. My parents, they didn't teach me anything about, okay, this is a black person and this is a white person.

From 00:13:52 to 00:14:10
That wasn't a conversation in our household ever. I remember when a black family moved across the street from us, they were as equally as welcome in our neighborhood as any white family. In fact, our neighborhood is mostly Jewish, which was that doesn't matter what, but, you know, we already had an interesting neighborhood.

From 00:14:10 to 00:14:24
In fact, half of George Washington was Jewish. So Jewish holidays, there was no one in school. And you think about, okay, we were off on Christian, but not on Jewish. But they did my parents didn't see that. And I appreciated that in them.

From 00:14:24 to 00:14:31
How about you? Yeah. You know, as this came on, we were living in Mount Vernon, Iowa.

From 00:14:31 to 00:14:50
And Granddad was a vice president development at Cornell College, which was a small liberal arts college like CC. And they had some small town Iowa, there were some racial events against black Cornell students.

From 00:14:50 to 00:15:13
And my dad was, you know, he was colorblind. And I think maybe some of that was the war that, you know, maybe there were some black GIs in his group. And but he grew up not having any bias. So we didn't have any bias. And so my first experience with black people was in Houghton.

From 00:15:13 to 00:15:31
And so it was like ninth grade. And there was an Air Force base that we played JV football against. And so the word was this K.I. Sawyer airbase. There was black kids and they're black kids and man, they're going to eat our lunch.

From 00:15:31 to 00:15:43
They're going to knock us apart. We're going to come back bruised and bloodied and we're going to lose. We were sort of afraid of them, frankly, didn't know what to expect kind of afraid of them.

From 00:15:43 to 00:16:02
Then it turns out first play, I thought, well, I'm just going to have to smack this kid hard, regardless. He may not be super human after all. To plays in, you realize these are just kids with a different skin. They're just like us. They play like us. They think pretty much like us.

From 00:16:02 to 00:16:26
So it was fine. And then moved to Rockford West High School. And it's about 30% black. And they'd had more racial strife the year before I got there. And so they were already through a lot of what your mom was going through in her junior year. It already happened at West High School.

From 00:16:26 to 00:16:44
So we had a resource officer. You could only come in one door. You had to show your West High ID because they'd had the outside agitators. And in Rockford West, I may have said this already, but there was a 21 year old senior who was the secretary of defense for the Black Panther Party.

From 00:16:44 to 00:17:04
But he was a known entity and they didn't let anybody else in. So the outside agitators really caused that day. Those days were over. Now was there something, not very much, white on black, black on white stuff. Most of what I saw was black on black.

From 00:17:04 to 00:17:31
And since I was an athlete and I was a respected football player that first fall, I had two black guys that I played with that were big figures in that community, if you want to call them that. And they said, you know, this was the quote from Charlie Black. Any of those niggers give you any shit? You tell them you're friends with Charlie Black.

From 00:17:31 to 00:17:54
I had an air of invincibility that my little brother did not have. And another guy, Michael Bell, same thing. So if you were known among the bigger, well known, athletic, tough black guys, you did have repellent of any kind of racial stuff.

From 00:17:54 to 00:18:13
The interesting thing was, though, if there was some sort of event in those days, we had the resource guy, but all the PE teachers, they would go to one of these altercations and they just grab guys and start to stick them in the lockers, slamming them on the lockers.

From 00:18:13 to 00:18:25
You know, this day, oh, you're a victim, blah, blah, blah. No, that was not the case. And there was a lot of policing, like Michael Bell, you know, there's one guy kept challenging him, giving him shit at lunch.

From 00:18:25 to 00:18:39
And he just took him over the top with about six pistols. And that was the end of that. You know, I don't remember it being in our community bigger. I don't know, remember riots or protests in town at all.

From 00:18:39 to 00:18:46
And there probably were, I was just shielded from it. Yeah, we never had him in Rockford.

From 00:18:46 to 00:19:02
It was really in the school that we would see that situation. And the outside agitators were the thing. And then busing came in Rockford. I think nationwide came out 70 fall of 71. They started busing.

From 00:19:02 to 00:19:14
CNRS was the next year. 72 or three. No, it was my junior year. It was before you. Yes, before we did. Rockford didn't bus. That's when we integrated with manual and East till we were gone.

From 00:19:14 to 00:19:29
And so then the white school, Guilford got a bunch of black kids because they were a little white. And that was a shock to the system for those kids.

From 00:19:29 to 00:19:54
So that was kind of it. And then we get to Boulder. It's, you know, no big thing. My girls had some of that at Boston, though.

From 00:19:54 to 00:20:06
Need some light. [BLANK_AUDIO]