My Odyssey Through the Underground Press
256
My Odyssey Through the Underground Press
256eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609172305 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2011 |
| Series: | Voices from the Underground |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Ken Wachsberger is a long-time writer, editor, and author, as well as an early member, a book contract adviser, and a former national officer in the National Writers Union.
Read an Excerpt
My Odyssey through the Underground Press
By MICHAEL "MICA" KINDMAN
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2011 Anthony Hebert and Ken WachsbergerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-000-9
Chapter One
Going to College — But Not for Long
September 1963. I'm off to East Lansing, Michigan—far from my hometown on Long Island—to start college at Michigan State University, bright-eyed and enthusiastic, excited about the possibilities that await me. I'm an honors freshman in the journalism department, and one of hundreds of honors students from all over the country recruited into the freshman class. Nearly two hundred of us have been awarded National Merit Scholarships underwritten by the university and usable only there; together we represent by far the largest group of Merit Scholars in any school's freshman class. At Michigan State?
Our purpose in being there—from the point of view of the university officials who created the program, and the alumni who funded it—is to help upgrade the reputation and academic atmosphere of the giant school, which is still struggling to transcend its origins as an agricultural and technical school, "the pioneer land-grant college." The Land-Grant Act of the 1850s offered federal land to the states for the establishment of state-sponsored schools to encourage and promote agriculture and technology. Many state universities grew from these origins. The Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, founded in 1855, happened to be the first of them. It graduated to "university" status on its hundredth birthday.
Only a few years before, MSU had begun building a national reputation by becoming a major football power in the Midwestern Big Ten, replacing the University of Chicago in that athletic conference. Now it was striving to increase its academic reputation, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, as well as to justify its exponential growth in terms of services it could provide to the state. Competition with the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor was in full swing, and "State" was more than a little defensive about its standing.
Attracting huge numbers of top-ranked freshmen was just one tactic in the university administration's overall strategy of challenging UM's preeminence—a strategy that also included an enormously ambitious building program that had already doubled the size of the developed campus in recent years and would double it again in the next few years, as well as an aggressive lobbying campaign aimed at persuading the state to open a new medical school at State rather than expand the existing ones at UM and Wayne State in Detroit. The tactic of attracting high-ranking high school graduates into the freshman class included, in addition to the scholarship program, grouping us together on certain floors of the gigantic new dormitories, brick monoliths along the outer edge of the campus, far from town, and offering us accelerated participation in the "Honors College," a special program that sounded real good in the promotional material: special library privileges, the chance to do original research work under close faculty supervision, extra recognition for our academic success, et cetera—if we kept to a certain grade-point average.
The promotional literature did not talk about the generally sterile, almost rural atmosphere of both MSU and East Lansing—a dry (no alcohol sales), conservative place that looked like a picture-postcard college town but offered little in terms of cultural opportunities or intellectual community and the stimulation these could bring. And, of course, the state capital was just a few miles away in Lansing; certainly the university fathers would not want to do anything or allow anything to occur that might raise the eyebrows of the legislature. All in all, it was sort of a company-town situation, but the enthusiastic series of promotional mailings we received from Gordon Sabine, vice president for special projects, and Stanley Idzerda, director of the Honors College, did not emphasize this aspect. As a result, we showed up in droves, not only from the Midwest but from all over the country.
We honors freshmen may have suspected something was amiss, as we settled into our dormitory rooms in the farthest corners of the built-up campus, checked out the bland surroundings, and anticipated our courses, including the required freshman survey courses, American Thought and Language (ATL) and Natural Science—but if we did, it was only a dim awareness at first. We were concentrating on seeking each other out for intellectual companionship and emotional support among the much larger number of more typical midwestern types surrounding us.
Most of us lacked the sophistication to really evaluate the quality of the academic programs and were simply hoping for the best. I didn't really know what to expect from college, having had very little counseling and little else in my background to prepare me for it, other than the assumption that I would do something intellectually based with my life. I didn't understand the extent to which my growing up in the New York suburbs had already colored my expectations and experience, but I had known I didn't want to stay at home for college, and had passed up opportunities to go to Berkeley and other far-flung schools. I felt quite innocent, excited about what was being offered to us at MSU, and ready to develop a loyal connection to my future alma mater.
In addition to the academic opportunities, I was also looking forward to the option those of us in journalism had to work on the Michigan State News, the 30,000-circulation daily paper that was the official organ of the university, published by students under the close advisorship of a professional publisher employed by the university. I got a paying job right away on the copy desk of the State News, final-editing the articles and writing the headlines, and found it easy to keep up with my heavy course load despite the five afternoons a week I spent there.
One Saturday that fall, the university had all the freshman Merit Scholars pose for a picture for the alumni magazine, standing together to spell out "MS"—for Michigan State and for Merit Scholars; get it? The suspicion was starting to grow that we were being hoodwinked somehow. But I was making friends and gaining confidence.
The Beginning of the Beginning
One Friday in November, my ATL instructor came into class late, to announce he had just heard that President Kennedy had been shot and possibly killed. Class was dismissed; with it went much of our innocence and optimism. The ride was just beginning.
When first quarter ended just before Christmas, I took off for a visit to my sister's family in California. While I was there, my father had an accident at his job in New Jersey and died a few days later of his injuries. I flew home for his funeral and the obligatory mourning period. By the time I returned to East Lansing to move in with my new roommate, Larry Tate—one of my honors-program peers, who was also a budding writer—my world had been badly shaken, and I wanted deeply to be anchored in school and in my progress toward the future I was planning. I took heavy course loads through winter and spring and even summer quarters, and worked diligently on the State News as copy editor and reporter and occasional editorial writer.
The journalism courses were unexciting, taught by traditionalist faculty with a heavy commitment to what we have since come to know as "the myth of objectivity"; but it didn't matter much, because there was a real newspaper to play with. We got to work with wireservice news about world events, and to develop local angles when we could. I got to write reviews of local appearances by the folk musicians I admired. Little professional guidance was offered, but we were allowed a fair amount of room to maneuver. We had the chance to initiate coverage of issues we wanted to work on, within limits. I remember doing a series in the State News during the summer, when there was more freedom to experiment than during the rest of the year, on what I perceived to be the university's complicity in the pollution and degrading of the Red Cedar River that ran through campus—my first attempt at muckraking (so to speak).
By fall, I had achieved junior status and was named coeditor of the editorial page. My coeditor on the page, Sue Jacoby, was also double-timing through college (she did in fact graduate after two years and went on to a career with the Washington Post and the New York Times). Sue had grown up locally and had worked on the State News since high school; she had faith in the university and, by extension, the larger government and establishment it represented. I had the viewpoint of an outsider; I was rebellious and instinctively trusted what was new and spontaneous. She was conservative; I was liberal. We got to write our differing opinions about news events as they unfolded, and have thousands of people read and debate our ideas daily.
I was sure I was on a track leading eventually to the job of editor in chief, and then on to greater glory and success in the newspaper field. I took seriously the notions of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and their correlate in the university context: "academic freedom," the hallowed right of instructors and students to examine any and all ideas freely and fearlessly, and to do so with the full encouragement and protection of the institution. I joined the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
It Can Happen Here
In October 1964, my friends and I all became transfixed by the drama that was unfolding in Berkeley, as students at the University of California began fighting for their right to freedom of political expression, over the opposition of their university's administration. The fight escalated for two months, and in December, hundreds were arrested for sitting in at the university administration building.
The Sproul Hall sit-in had almost immediate repercussions for those of us in East Lansing who had been nurturing our growing frustrations with the situation we were in. We all felt shortchanged to one degree or another for having been tricked into doing college at Michigan State University—"Moo U," as it was sometimes known (referring to the university's origins as an agricultural college)—in the conservative, teetotaling town of East Lansing, for God's sake, when we were all so brilliant and could have gone anywhere. The Honors College program that had been offered to us whiz-kid recruits had turned out to be more hype than opportunity, more the extension of Stanley Idzerda's personality and intellectual enthusiasm than a real chance to do outstanding work ahead of the ordinary academic schedule. In the sciences and technical fields, MSU generally had a legitimate claim to excellence and even leadership, but those of us in the humanities and social sciences were becoming increasingly aware that MSU was something of a cultural backwater, not the center of intellectual debate we had been led to believe it was. Many of us were growing increasingly stir-crazy. Our education was working, but not in the way the university might have hoped; the more educated we became, the more frustrated we felt.
The local Socialist Club had been discussing the Berkeley situation and its parallels in East Lansing, and the time seemed right to expand the discussion beyond the club itself. A first, secret planning meeting was called for a Committee for Student Rights (CSR). I believe it was at the suggestion of Mike Price, home-grown socialist and rebel, whose parents owned one of the local department stores, that I was invited to the meeting, despite my status as a bigwig at the State News, and despite the need for secrecy in organizing to challenge the university's authority. Nothing like that had been done before in East Lansing. After some negotiation, I showed up at a mysterious house off-campus for the meeting. I was aware of stepping into an alternate reality of some kind. Someone played the new album by folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie, the one with the politically inspiring songs "Universal Soldier" and "Now That the Buffalo's Gone." We talked frustrations and strategies and made plans; by the end of the evening, my life had been changed forever.
CSR decided to start out by protesting the university's in loco parentis policies for governing students' behavior "in the place of the parents." Dormitory curfews for women and the requirement that all underclassmen live in dormitories for two years were the first targets—safe issues in terms of winning student support, and very explosive ones in the eyes of the university. I slipped a guest column into the State News in the name of the one member willing to go public, and we began publishing a single-sheet mimeographed newsletter for distribution in the dorms and campus buildings, along with a petition supporting our position. These publications stirred further controversy as the university stumbled over itself trying to prevent distribution. It became clear that the "rules" governing student behavior and activities were not a clearly defined set of principles and procedures, but rather were made up arbitrarily as the need arose, by administrators whose primary interest seemed to be to stifle the debate we were inciting, and to control the way students thought.
CSR sought opportunities to debate and negotiate with administrators on a wide range of university policies, and when these channels were insufficient, as was usually the case, challenged the university in our newsletters to open more channels for student participation in the governing process. When this failed, we demonstrated and sat in at various places around campus, gradually gaining support for our causes and for our right to engage in such activities. Many faculty members were happy to defend our right to express even unpopular opinions. Our protests were not just about political issues. On one occasion, we sat in at the main university library, calling attention to the low student-to-volumes ratio at MSU compared with other major universities.
That winter and spring, we demonstrated and leafleted under many banners, for many causes; a political community, an indigenous piece of the counterculture, was coming to be in East Lansing. We had a headquarters of sorts: Spiro's, a cafeteria and coffee shop across the street from campus on Grand River Avenue (everyone called the place "Kewpee's," for the "Kewpee-burgers" served there), where at any time of the day we could find some of our friends to hang out with. At last, an alternative to dorm life and bland, university-authorized activities.
Our activism jumped across the street, too, as a large number of students tried to pressure the East Lansing city government into adopting an "open housing" (anti-discrimination) ordinance. Fifty-nine were arrested at a sit-in at East Lansing City Hall in May 1965.
As each of these political actions occurred, I explained and defended them in columns in the State News, while in news articles, the university administrators and local politicians were making statements about "outside agitators" and "Communist sympathizers" infiltrating the otherwise calm environment of East Lansing. I found myself leading a double life, risking everything. All my own political, intellectual, and social assumptions were being challenged and reexamined. Whereas I formerly thought of myself as simply a liberal Democrat, now I was becoming a confirmed radical.
With a few of my political friends, I participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march inspired by Martin Luther King in Alabama. The big march on the state capitol gave me my first experience of what I have ever since felt to be the religious uplift and inspiration of masses of people calling out in unison for what they believed and needed. My more informed friends were starting to encourage the rest of us to learn about the little-known war then in progress in Vietnam. As more of us figured out what was happening there, we sought ways to organize marches and teaching efforts to let more people know about this outrage. As much as I could, I documented my changing views in the State News, to increasing criticism from the rest of the staff and the advisor. My grades and academic ambitions were suffering from the loss of my interest, but it was worth it for the experience. And, I was deeply enmeshed in a community of like-minded friends—an interesting, diverse, and tolerant gang; that was definitely worth it. I quickly became known among my activist friends as the "conscience" of our movement; I seemed to have an instinct for the ethics of the struggle, and for keeping our actions proportional to our demands.
During the summer, a graduate student on temporary leave from school, Paul Schiff—president of the Socialist Club and editor of Logos, the CSR newsletter—was refused readmission to the university in what was widely seen as retribution for his political activism. One of the accusations held against him was that he had sought to "discredit" the university by speaking out against the mayor of East Lansing, Gordon Thomas, in the campaign for the open-housing ordinance; Thomas happened to be a professor of communications. Schiff decided to challenge the university in a lawsuit supported by the ACLU.
As for me, I took the summer of 1965 off from the process of school and politics and went home to Long Island to remodel my mother's house and deepen my relationship with my long-distance girlfriend, Carol Schneider. Carol and I had become friends working on our high school newspaper at a time when we were both quite inhibited and unhappy, but very successful in school affairs. We had both been offered journalism scholarships to Syracuse University in New York. A year younger than me, Carol had just finished her first year there, but she couldn't afford to return. By the end of the summer, we finally yielded our respective virginities to each other. In the fall, her college career having been stalled for the moment, Carol returned to East Lansing with me. She had come a long way from her repressive Catholic background. I wasn't sure what it meant to be living together, but I couldn't think of any reason not to.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from My Odyssey through the Underground Press by MICHAEL "MICA" KINDMAN Copyright © 2011 by Anthony Hebert and Ken Wachsberger. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword Paul Kraasner ix
Foreword Tommi Avicolli macca xiii
Editor's Introduction Kan Wachsberger xv
Chapter 1 Going to College—But Not for Long 3
Chapter 2 Ambassador from Somewhere Else 17
Chapter 3 And Now, Something Completely Different 27
Chapter 4 Moving to the Future 37
Chapter 5 Settling In 45
Chapter 6 Two Different worlds 51
Chapter 7 Time to Get a Life 61
Chapter 8 A Purpose Finds Me 67
Chapter 9 A Simple Man 77
Chapter 10 Christ, You Know It Ain't Easy 83
Chapter 11 Superstars 91
Chapter 12 Another Visit from the Karma Squad 101
Chapter 13 The Colonial Era Begins in Earnest 111
Chapter 14 Send Out a Lifeline 117
Chapter 15 Hit the Road Again, Jack 127
Chapter 16 What Next? 135
Chapter 17 There's a Place in the Sun 143
Chapter 18 A New Movement, A New Paper 153
Chapter 19 Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are 173
Chapter 20 Looking Back, Looking Forward 187
Afterword. Michael "Mica" Kindman's Last Years Rosemary for Remembrance/ Steven S. Muchnick 189
Index 199