We all grow up in something of a bubble of our parents’ opinions and the ideas that surround us. I am grateful that I had Chet Huntley and David Brinkley instead of FOX News. I am also pleased that my mother would often take the opposite side or opposing candidate just so we could debate. Still race was something of mystery until I was well into my teenage years.
As an elementary school student I once rode the bus to Winston-Salem. When I got on the bus, I ran to the back of the bus to sit in the back seat only to be told I couldn’t sit there because I wasn’t black.
I can remember when I was fourteen flying back from my all-white male boarding school in Tennessee. It was the first time that I would be heading back to my dad’s big house in Mt. Airy instead of my mother’s small ranch in Lewisville. Alfred, the husband of dad’s maid, Mertha, had driven my mom to the airport. We stopped in Winston-Salem for lunch at the K&W Cafeteria.
As my mother and I were starting to enter K&W, Alfred, who was black, turned and started to leave. I asked him why he wasn’t joining us for lunch. He said he was not allowed to eat there. I was floored.
Over the next week, Alfred, his wife, Mertha, my mom and I had most of our meals together at the kitchen table. Obviously, I was still clueless about race with one set of rules at home and another out in the world of 1963.
Three years later I took my first trip around the country. The first trip taught me more than you could eat ketchup with eggs. It was a big country with lots of different people but it was unlikely that I was going to meet any of the different ones at McCallie, the all white military prep school my parents had shipped me off to in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
I would, however, meet some at Harvard.
There was probably not a more privileged place to be in 1967 than Harvard. We figured it out pretty quickly. Someone would ask where you went to school and you would say Cambridge. Most times it didn’t work and people still knew immediately where you went to college. Still Harvard was a very different world than McCallie, beyond the sprinkling of different races, we went to school with Radcliffe ladies. Boston and Cambridge were a different world than Chattanooga which was decades from its rejuvenation. McCallie was on Missionary Ridge just a few miles from downtown, but downtown was often hidden in smog and smoke from the factories.
At McCallie the only way to get from one stop to another was to hitchhike. At Harvard, I had my car for longer trips but the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) subway was a revolution. You could go downtown, to the airport, and all sorts of places for little money. Being on the Red Line even though it rattled our room in Wigglesworth freshman year was still eye-opening. Just walking through Harvard Square exposed you to more diversity than some see in a lifetime.
There were three things that really opened my eyes once I got settled in Cambridge. The first was having a car to go places in New England. My sophomore year, I came back with an original Ford Bronco that my uncle had helped me buy secondhand from a vet in Michigan. I had gone with him to Michigan to buy it and drive it back. Traveling with my uncle Henry was almost as eye-opening as a couple days in Harvard Square. He didn’t believe in motels and had private homes where he could rent a room when passing. We stayed in one on the way up. I came close to freezing that night. Still once the old Bronco got to Cambridge in the fall of 1968, it and some stop-leak for the radiator were to be the keys to exploring a lot of places including Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts even where there were not roads.
The second thing was going from being a barely politically interested student to one who felt like politics had the potential to save us or destroy us. The anti-war unrest kicked off at Harvard in the spring of 1969. As kids of the sixties we had already been through more heartache than some could take.
Still in the days before cell phones and social media, we were oblivious to what was happening locally when University Hall was seized by around fifty students. University Hall is in Harvard Yard. Only freshman live in the Yard. Upper class students live in Houses or dorm complexes sprinkled around the area between Harvard Yard and the Charles River. That evening the students took over University Hall, four of us were walking from Quincy House up Plympton Street towards Massachusetts Ave. with the plan that we would go to Barley’s Burger Cottage. As we turned right, our peripheral vision caught a line of charging Massachusetts State Police with riot shields and billy clubs. We were obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I was chased into the doorway of a nearby bookstore where I got a couple of whacks on the back before I escaped and started running back to Quincy House. We all got back to the dorm with the police not far behind us. They tear gassed our dorm’s courtyard. We were fortunate to have a fourth floor room. It was chilling to hear the sound that we all know, shotguns with shells being chambered. We’re lucky no one died that night. The campus was energized with anti-war/anti-administration sentiment. People could not forgive the college administrators for turning the police loose on students who had done nothing. It was a lesson in how it feels to be attacked when you have done nothing wrong. I haven’t looked at peaceful demonstrations the same way since then.
The third change happened my senior year when my roommates and I became part of Harvard’s coed experiment. Fifty male Harvard students were moved to Radcliffe. Our dorm was the brand new Currier House which housed 275 Radcliffe students. We were spread out throughout the dorm. One roommate and I had single rooms sharing a bathroom. Adjoining rooms housed Radcliffe students. Our floor had everything from first year students to juniors. It was a wonderful experience, I met more people who have become life-long friends there than in any other similar timeframe. I have more female friends from Currier House that I keep up with fifty-three years later than I do male Harvard friends.
The next year, my junior year, with the invasion of Cambodia, the campus exploded again and classes were canceled for the rest of the semester. We went home hoping to convince people the war had to end. People in North Carolina didn’t want to hear it from us. They had already seen enough on the nightly news. By mid-June, I was packing my Dodge PowerWagon for a trip to Alaska. The PowerWagon would also change me.
Comments