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1968
by theresa m. ripley

I was 23 in the summer of 1968 and had just finished finals at Indiana University. All the requirements were met for my masters degree in education. The summer was to be filled working at Indiana University for faculty at the business school as I had done the summer before. I came home after classes and final exams to spend a couple of weeks before going back to Bloomington, Indiana, for the summer's work. I had negotiated to live with a young women off campus who had a 7-year-old child. The woman, Pat, was getting a master's degree in comparative literature. Her daughter, Melissa, was an unknown to me. The family also included a Persian cat.

I was filled with pleasant anticipation on the day I was to go back to Bloomington for the summer's work and then the news came. Robert F. Kennedy had been killed the night before in Los Angeles. I couldn't believe it. When would this stop?

Just a few months earlier I had been in Chicago at a professional convention when Martin Luther King had been killed. I looked out the window of my hotel room and I could see the fires in the city. The next day I traveled to Detroit to attend another professional convention, an important ritual for near graduates searching for placement contacts. Detroit was like an armed camp. The riots of the summer of 1967 had placed the city on alert and the King killing had brought forth yet another explosion in racial tensions. People could not get out of the city as planned. Its effect on me was that the room I had reserved for the convention was not available. By a turn of fate, the only solution was to stay in my advisor's suite for the duration of the convention. This turned out to be pure luck since my academic advisor was president of our professional association that year and she was hosting all the big whigs in our field in her presidential suite. There I was, a near graduate, getting to meet the people whose articles I had been reading in professional magazines the past two years. To say the least I was disappointed. They mainly drank and were obnoxious in any number of ways. They were also almost exclusively white and male. Didn't they realize that our nation was being turned black against white? Wasn't this the time to act and be passionate about this cause? Where was their idealism?

I thought about King and Robert Kennedy as I took the 3 plus hour drive back to Bloomington that weekend. I was sad, horribly sad, and disgusted at the turn of events in our country. On Monday I started work. This was also graduation day. I did not participate. I didn't see the need for ceremony.

My new roommate was quite an activist and within a week or so she had me circulating petitions for gun control, a result of the second Kennedy assassination. I felt it was the right thing to do. The summer passed and I enjoyed my faculty "bosses" a great deal and thoroughly enjoyed my roommate and her seven-year-old daughter. We took quite a shine to one another and became close friends by summer's end.

The two years at Indiana University had been much different than my experience at Illinois State University (they got rid of the "Normal" title in my sophomore year). Not only was Indiana University a much more cosmopolitan institution, but the times were radically different in the country. Times were tame when I was graduated from undergraduate school in 1966. I had a friend whose boyfriend was in the marines. He was stationed someplace called Vietnam in 1964. I didn't know where that was. By the time I started at Indiana there was no doubt I knew where it was. The days of "gentile" student body presidents was gone. The student body president during my last year of Indiana University was a died in the wool activist. He had students marching against Dow Chemical, the war, and against other injustices as perceived by students.

I was in an in between position. Clearly, I was a student, a graduate student, but I was also employed by the Student Affairs Service as an Assistant Director of a student dorm. We called them residence halls. Students called them dorms. Our job was to keep an eye on students, not only their morals, but on any and all actions that might be "subversive." By the two year's end it was clear we as graduate students were more inclined to agree with the students than the administration. Our hearts were with Eugene McCarthy as he campaigned in that tumultuous year of 1968 against the Vietnam War. I was not stridently for or against anything, but it was clear where my leanings were. They were with Clean Gene.

At the end of the summer of 1968, I was ready to leave the Midwest. The summer had been momentous personally and for the country as we all sat through the Democratic Convention in Chicago. My personal agenda was to go West. I had interviewed at those conventions in Chicago and Detroit earlier in the year and got an opportunity to interview at the University of Portland. Ah, Oregon, I thought, how much I liked it when we visited there on a family vacation when I was 15. I took my first plane ride in the spring of 1968 to interview in person at this Catholic institution on the bluff of the Willamette River overlooking Mt. Hood. The site was incredible. Most of my student colleagues were getting starting positions running residence halls. I thought I would likely end up with that as well, but I wanted more.

The interview at Portland turned out to be more than I hoped. The Dean of Students was an activist himself in a Catholic sort of way. We clicked and by the end of my four days there we had agreed to create a new position at the university, coordinator of student activities. I was sure he and I agreed on the type of activities that should be coordinated! He even encouraged me to be a part of the Upward Bound program that was coming to campus the following year. Yes, of course, I would.

I anticipated all this as the summer ended and I finished what I was sure was my last nonprofessional job. I went home and packed my new, to me, white Chevy 1965 Super Sport with red interior that Dad and Ray had picked out for me at Wolf Jacobson in Pontiac for $1500, and was ready to leave for Oregon. A friend from Indiana was going to drive out with me for the journey across the country. I was filled with anticipation. This was it. I was leaving Illinois and the Midwest.

I shall never forget the despondent look on my mother's face as I drove out the driveway and entered Route 66 one last time. She and Dad were standing together on the gravel driveway representing the stability of my past farm life. As I looked back in the rear view mirror, I knew she knew this was it. I was gone.