Big Chill Redux part II

I did make a number of great friends, some of whom I have shared friendship with for forty years. I have lots of tales to tell of that Delta Kappa Tau experience, but decorum dictates that they are best left for another vehicle when all the participants have made is safely into the great beyond.

Somehow, most of us survived academically and even became interested in our studies in our junior and senior years. Political Science was my field of interest. It held an emotional and ethnic appeal to me. I had been raised in the tradition of several generations of Irish-American politicians and the area of study seemed to come easily to me like it had to generations of my family before me. I was to later use many of the disciplines I learned at Geneseo in the formulation of political campaigns and carry them over into decision-making techniques in many local government departments. Sound academic theory really does precede rational decision making in many environments in the real world.

My real interest lay in the field of International Relations. I hoped to someday join the United States Foreign Service. I studied Russian assiduously for three years, hoping to prepare myself for the field. I found the rest of the real world to be a fascinating place in which the United States was a sometimes troubled and envied partner. The Ugly American was a well-written chronicle of how not to relate to our co-inhabitants on the planet. I thought I might be able to help change things for the better.
However, a principal faculty advisor gave me his best advice, “Forget it. The Foreign Service only selects people from wealthy backgrounds,” he said. “You wouldn’t stand a chance.”

‘Thanks,’ I thought to myself, ‘you miserable prick, for stomping over all of my academic aspirations.’

Maybe he was right. It did seem like a stretch for a kid from a working class background and a state college to mingle with the Ivy League crowd in the State Department. In any case, that was the last of my attempt to join the consular ranks of the U.S Foreign Service. Like most of my colleagues in this “teacher’s college,” I turned my attentions into getting certified for a degree in secondary education. The study of history was a life long interest. I thought I might be able to present the wonderful narrative of our past to those malleable minds of younger students. Several substitute-teaching opportunities in surrounding schools convinced me that I didn’t have the proper temperament to deal with the many behavioral vagaries of the “little monsters.”

There was a rather fresh and inspirational idealism that raged among all of us young scholars at the time. We wanted to save the planet, end poverty and sow peace and love through out the world. Boy, were we all in for a wake up call.

Some things did go according to plan though. The very first Earth Day occurred on campus in the spring of 1970. Publicity from Rachel Carson’s graphic novel Silent Spring had propelled many in academia to take up the torch in leading a conservationist movement. Students and faculty passed out handbills, held educational meetings and provided information that began to turn the tide in the public perception of our accidental despoiling of the planet that we lived on.

Meanwhile, the Viet Nam War raged around us and was featured daily on the nightly news. The casualty lists ran up from one hundred soldiers killed in action per week in the mid-sixties, to two hundred and fifty KIA a week in the early seventies. By then, the enemy’s Tet Offensive of 1968 and continued battle losses had taken the heart out of America’s will to fight in its decade-long national nightmare. There was little support for the war left, though thousands of Americans continued to die for our involvement in this far away jungle land. This was a different attitude from just four short years before when most of America supported the war. “Victory in Viet Nam” posters were seen everywhere, even on college campuses.

The early seventies was the era of massive student protests across the nation. In the spring of 1970, a nationwide student strike shut down many college campuses across the country to protest the war in Viet Nam. The various faculty members were pretty good about attributing grades to the missing students, particularly the graduating seniors.

The Students for a Democratic Society and other then radical groups urged dissident students to action. I remember well the time “Chicago Seven” member Abbie Hoffman spoke at a student rally on the Geneseo campus. The rhetoric was classic 1960’s agitprop and the student crowd was enthralled. As Hoffman started to leave the campus, various police agencies moved in, threatening arrest. A cordon of Geneseo students surrounded Hoffman and escorted him off campus until he could effectuate his safe departure. Things have changed little since the storming of the Bastille in 18th century Paris by radicalized students. It didn’t take much to set off a riot when emotions ran this high. The police were wise in their discreet actions that day. The whole student protest movement reached its emotional denouement with the death of four students at Kent State University in Ohio, shot down by armed National Guardsmen.

The first draft lottery was held in America in 1970. Tags were picked in a nationally televised lottery. Each number drawn represented one of 365 possible birthdays. If your number (birth date) was selected for those needed that year, you were drafted into the armed services. In my year, the numbers being called ran up to 245 out of a possible 365 days. My number was 273 and thus I was exempted for that year.

My roommate’s number was three. He and others immediately abandoned all plans for graduate school and starting their careers. They were headed off to be members of the big green machine. Fear of the draft filled the ranks of the various State National Guard units to the bursting level. At that time National Guards were never called up for actual combat service but used for any number of worthy local projects.
My own brother Paddy got called up that year and sent to Viet Nam as a combat medic in the Central Highlands. It was not a good experience for him. His unit was over run and slaughtered in one firefight. Paddy and a few guys escaped into the bush and evaded capture until they could make their way back to American lines. He was never the same again and spent the rest of his life wandering the world like a gypsy cast upon the wind. The casualties of the Viet Nam war, like most conflicts where men and women fight and die, would continue to develop for decades afterwards.

I had met my dear wife Mary during my senior year in college. We were both active on the Student Government Council. Five of us got elected campus-wide to represent student interests to the faculty and the administration. It was my first venture into elective politics. We managed to conduct the first faculty/course evaluation ever held. It was to serve as a guide for students in selecting courses. Some of the faculty members were not well pleased with the exercise nor were they appreciative of “their ratings.” I guess they now were reminded of what we felt like on the other end of the marking pen.

It was an eye opener for us into all sorts of “adult behavior.” We sat on the Faculty Senate as student representatives. The banter back and forth there was sometimes just as silly as that heard daily in the college dorms. I laugh now thinking of one exasperated faculty member “flipping the bird” to a colleague that he disagreed with on some forgotten issue du jour.
“Children, children, now behave,” I then wanted to say.

By the end of that year, I had graduated and married this wispy and wonderful young woman from suburban Rochester, NY. It was the beginning of a 40-year love story that still unites us today.

I stayed on for graduate work in education until my wife Mary received her undergraduate degree the following year, in January 1973. Then she went to work as an English teacher for the West Seneca Central Schools and I started work for the Erie County Department of Social Services. Our combined salary for the next year was $13,500.

It was the era of the failed policy of Vietnamization in Southeast Asia. Turning the war over to Vietnamese nationals to fight “their war” sounded good enough to war weary Americans. It just didn’t work for shit. We were pulling our troops out as fast as we could manage. The specter of those last days of the war was not a good one for the American image. The last Huey helicopters transferred remaining American consular personnel from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon to waiting American aircraft carriers off shore was an image embarrassing to the entire nation. To complement the image of a hasty departure, film clips depicted bulldozers pushing perfectly good helicopters from the carrier decks and into the sea to make room for other arriving Hueys filled with departing consular personnel. Tens of thousand of our Vietnamese allies were left behind to fend for themselves as the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces surged around and through the city. It may not have been as ignominious as the French defeat and departure after Dien Bien Phu in the 1950’s, but it was an inglorious end to a decade-long American national nightmare.
During the closing days of the Viet Nam War, the whole charade of the Watergate experience erupted upon the American psyche. Days and days on end the media coverage of the Nixon administration’s suicidal swan dive played out in the press. The Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidency were locked in a Wagnerian “gotterdamerung death struggle” that threatened to undo the republic. Finally, Nixon surrendered and resigned from office. The trauma was almost over. The new president, Gerald Ford, immediately pardoned the former president. A howl arose across the nation, claiming that a deal had been reached between Ford and Nixon. Maybe it had, maybe it hadn’t. Some say it cost Ford his election two years later to Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. “Jimmy” and his band of anti-establishment youngsters didn’t fare too well in Washington D.C. and exited after one term, losing to an improbable former actor by the name of Ronald Wilson Reagan.

The national turmoil of the late seventies even inspired local insurrections in our area. A little known New York State Senator by the name of James D. Griffin challenged the existing Democratic machine for the office of Mayor of Buffalo. After a tumultuous campaign, in which Griffin ran on the Conservative line alone, he won the general election by a narrow margin, defeating both the Democratic and Republican candidates. The times they certainly were a changin’.

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Joseph Xavier Martin