From The Cornell Daily Sun, April 7, 1989
This is the first in a two-part series. The next part will appear Monday.
And so I read in these pages, that the Straight Board has decided to commemorate the 1969 Parent's Weekend Straight Takeover by shutting down the Straight! Far out.
I can already see it now, in my mind's eye, all the usual geeks and grunts, so buried in their computerware that they had not gotten the word about the closing, trudging over to the Straight for lunch, say, and suddenly discovering, to their dismay: no boburgers! No Ivyburgers! And wondering, what is this campus coming to? What is going on?
I like it. Because, you know, that's the way it all began that crazy Friday morning, eons ago, with dozens of visibly hungry - and befuddled - students gathered around the Straight, along with a few visibly agitated parents who had been unceremoniously evicted from their Straight guest rooms at five in the morning by the advance elements of the Afro-American Society, asking each other, or muttering aloud to no one in particular, what is happening to this campus? What the hell is going on?
Cornell University, founded in 1865, was in the process of self-destructing. That's what
was going on.
Actually, it memory serves, there had been numerous, fairly hard-to-ignore signs that all was not well with the body academic - not to mention the nation-state and the cosmos - for some weeks prior to the colorful, unscheduled Parents' Weekend festivities.
James Perkins, university former president, distiguished educator, successful fund-raiser and a hail fellow well met when he was around long enough to hail him, had been roughed up, right up on the stage, while giving a speech at Statler.
A few of the black demonstrators had done an impromptu Mau Mau in the Ivy Room, dancing on the tables and causing two hapless snackers to upchuck.
The dean of the arts college had been held hostage in his room. That sort of thing. Campus unrest.
And yet, if one was entirely oblivious to the world outside one's work-study-get-ahead continuum, as I'd say about 50 percent of the study body (and 70 percent of the freshmen) were and still are, it was still entirely possible not to suspect that all was not well with Big Red.
Until that weekend.
It was pretty freaky, let me tell you, standing outside the Straight that day I only got up there around 11 a. m., I think - and seeing everyone milling around in the rain (of course it was raining) - and one of the brothers leaning out of one of the windows of the Gameroom with a bandage around his head.
He was shaking his fist and shouting, and I found out that there had just been a pitched fight, with pool cues and ash trays, between the Takeover force, which numbered around 60 at that point, if I recall, and a group of a dozen or so gung-ho Aggies from a nearby fraternity who, dementedly, took it upon themselves to somehow take the Straight back.
Instead, they had gotten their asses kicked; as captured by Life magazine the following week in a breathtaking photo - Life goes to a campus takeover complete with airborne Aggie and airborne ashtray.
And I remember - how can I forget watching SDS members march around the Straight in a
"protective cordon" and SDS leader and Big Man on Campus Dave Burak '67 get on top of the Stump with his bullhorn, squawking encouragement to his sniffling, chanting cadres, while some of those poor, starving engineers (the assumption that anyone with a crew cut was an engineer) and their poor parents looked on from afar.
And then some of them started heckling.
It was pretty freaky, let me tell you.
And then, of course, came the guns. In retrospect, it should not have been that surprising, given all the paranoia that was going around (and not just at Cornell, baby), and the blood that had already been spilled during the Battle of the Straight.
But believe me, my friends and I were a tad taken aback when we were driving back to campus the next day and what a gorgeous far-above-Caguya sort of day that day was on the way back from a picnic in Treman Park, and we heard on the radio that the AAS had ended its two day long occupation after reaching a tentative accord with Day Hall.
And that the students, their numbers doubled by now, had emerged from the already nationally famous student union brandishing shotguns, rifles and other novel, paramilitary campus gear.
And that they had been given an escort back to Wari House by the obliging, if somewhat traumatized constables of the Cornell safety patrol.
Man, we thought as we bumped and hissed back up the Hill, what the hell is going on here?
I mean, it was freaky, let me tell you.
Of course, it was over then.
Or was it?