Kenyon College - Reveille Yearbook (Gambier, OH)

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H,rb.ua Hosteller Steven Killpack I960 was a lime of great excitement, still fresh from childhood memories, when older brothers and sisters might have joined the Peace Corps, when “civil rights was something every decent human being could embrace without the ambivalence that busing would later bring, when neatly dressed col- lege students would march to Alabama in the name of brotherhood. (Ten years later students would march for sisterhood, and perhaps in the messianic future they would march for pcoplehood and then finally there will be no more need for marching any- more.) It was a time when everyone was called and many responded. This is not nostalgia, but the emo- tional responses remembered. But then things went awry. The center, perhaps based on false premises from the start, would not hold; things fell apart. The President, the secular Christ who bears our responsibilities like the Lamb of God, was crucified on the cross-hairs of an Italian rifle. Malcom X. Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy would follow. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones. Pig Pen. ad infinitum, until the whole decade seemed like a dance of death. Mark Rerek, a friend, would turn to me in the middle of Peirce Hall and mumble. Our heroes aren’t old. They’re just dead. It was a weird time in which to have grown up, groping for self-definition in a world that couldn’t decide itself what it wanted to be, and so instead of choosing it was everything at once. That was the horror and the terror. Kent State, Attica. Wounded Knee. Watergate. Woodstock. Altamont, Haight- Ashbury. These were some of the scenes that struck us in our childhood adolescence, and young adulthood. So we journeyed from public and prep school, sub- urb and inner city. Shaker Heights and downtown Detroit — to Kenyon. Some blown out by the previ- ous decades chaos, others hardly affected.

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I.iz Hutchins 9