1968: So much hope, so much tragedy

By Jack Sheehan

Monday, March 31, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Just as one break in the snow can cause an avalanche, so one twisted mind can alter the course of a generation.

This Friday is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and that tragic occurrence extended a continuum of events that came to define the entire decade of the ’60s and forever transform the social and political atmosphere of the country.

I was in the spring semester of my first year of college when it all went down, at a school that had been labeled the Berkeley of the North for its many liberal uprisings and student riots. Nothing in my previous 18 years and carefully controlled Jesuit prep school education prepared me for what I would witness in the next year.

•••

I took my first steps on the University of Oregon campus in late summer of 1967, and it was as though I had been plunked down in a garden. Flowers and bushes and plants and trees sprang out of the ground from every plot of dirt not trampled on by feet or paved over by commerce.

It didn’t take a baccalaureate to realize that humanity eventually would lose out if it came to an all-or-nothing battle with nature in Eugene. Weeds sprouted through cracks in sidewalks, tree branches scratched on windowpanes and draped themselves over power lines, and mold formed in any cupboard or closet not regularly cleaned. The pervasive vegetation offered convincing testimony that if we laid still too long, moss would grow over our eyes and toadstools would sprout from under our arms.

The penalty for a parking ticket was more severe than for possessing an ounce of marijuana. Perhaps because it came from the ground and had a distinct fragrance and caused people to make love and not war, ‘weed’ was considered part of the natural order of things in Oregon.

•••

Football was big at the U of O, but not nearly as significant as the track and field stars who had migrated from throughout the world to train under the critical eye of running guru Bill Bowerman.

At any given moment, if you didn’t watch your back as you strolled to class, you were likely to be stampeded by a pack of green and gold four-minute milers, their ribs as prominent as greyhounds’. Many of them, like Roscoe Divine and Steve Prefontaine, were becoming household names to the tens of thousands Americans being drawn to the national jogging revolution which Bowerman and his protege Phil Knight, who founded the Nike athletic apparel company, had ignited on that very campus.

In late August and early September the parks in Eugene were full of children on swings, and dogs arching high to snatch Frisbees out of the air. How well I remember my first evenings in that summer of ’67 — the Summer of Love as it was called a day’s drive south in San Francisco — sitting on the sidewalk in front of my rooming house on the Oregon campus and watching the scattered parade of youthful strangers pass by.

By that next spring, with one rifle shot from a flophouse window toward a motel balcony in Memphis, all the peace and tranquillity that had welcomed me to the campus was shattered.

Two black fraternity brothers in the house I had pledged were especially torn up by the news of King’s murder and the early reports that the assassin was a white man, James Earl Ray. They both moved out of the fraternity the next semester and became affiliated with a black power coalition on campus. They remained friendly, but it was obvious that racial tension and pressure from their black peers on campus had made it difficult for them to stay affiliated with a predominantly white association.

•••

Just two months after the King tragedy, and smack in the middle of final exam week, I stumbled out of the sleeping porch at the frat house suffering mild nausea induced by too little sleep, too much caffeine, and brain cells short-circuiting from an overload of computer-programming data. I had a computer final in three hours, and it would take another major jump-start to create a fresh flow of blood to the noggin.

Suddenly, I heard a commotion down the hallway. Several of my fraternity brothers were gathered, watching a news report on television. As the tube was not typically on at such an hour, I ducked my head in. It was then I learned that Robert Kennedy had been shot, just moments after giving a victory speech after the California presidential primary.

College boys can be remarkably insensitive at times, and one of them told me the man who’d shot Kennedy must be a relative of mine. “His name is Shee-han, or something just like it,” he said.

I learned later that day that the gunman was Sirhan Sirhan, but that didn’t prevent me from getting tagged with the unfortunate nickname “Sirhan” for the last three years of my matriculation at Oregon.

I watched the sad developments for a while, trying to get my mind around this second killing of a great American leader in just two months, and the third in a decade. I then called my computer professor’s office and told his secretary I couldn’t take the exam that day. I said I’d like to reschedule, or if that was not possible I would accept a grade of “incomplete” and finish in the fall. She said I was the fifth student to call and beg off the exam. The test had been postponed, she said. She was crying.

I had little idea back in 1968, when all those inconceivable things were happening around us — two great leaders struck down in two months, the violence in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention (with one of my professors, John Froines, being arrested as a member of the Chicago Seven), the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the gloved black fists raised in defiance on the medal stand at the Olympic Games in Mexico City — that this wasn’t the kind of stuff that went on year after year out in the real world, once a kid left home and started practicing to be an adult.

In the late fall, two more significant events occurred: Richard Nixon’s election to the presidency, which would lead six years later to a crisis in public trust of government officials; and the release of the Beatles’ White Album, which allowed us to sit back and reflect on where we’d been and where we were headed.

Nineteen sixty-eight: It was the most amazing, confusing, stimulating, depressing, enlightening time of my life.

It’s been 40 years since it came crashing down us, but it all remains so vivid in my memory it could have been yesterday.

Jack Sheehan’s column appears every other week.