00:00:00PETER: --particularly, uh, yeah, they haven't been that succinct anyway. It's
pretty informal anyway. For the record, let me get this down.
This is a, uh, interview with David Holwerk, uh, on the,
uh, uh, campus of people's, specifically the burning of the ROTC building
at the University of Kentucky, uh, May of 1970. Uh, this
interview is taking place on December 4, 1978 at, uh, Mr. Holwerk's
home on Hampton Court. Uh, what were you doing at U.K.
in, in, say, spring of '70?
HOLWERK: Not very much.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, I was just about through being(??) a student at U.K.
Uh, I believe in the spring of 1970 I was taking,
00:01:00I may have been taking two courses. I think I was
taking only one. Um, this(??) was my fifth year as a
student.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: Um, and I probably would've, wouldn't have been taking that one
if I hadn't thought it was necessary to keep from getting drafted.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um.
PETER: Did you go to U.K. all that time?
HOLWERK: Yeah. Yeah. ----------(??) then some, at(??) the time, the
relations with U.K. were tenuous at best. We're(??) ----------(??) the, the
fall of 1969 was with the National Student Association in Washington, and
I was technically still a student at U.K. and got fifteen hours
of ----------(??) for doing it, which ----------(??)--
PETER: --hm--
HOLWERK: --U.K. standards.
PETER: Hm.
HOLWERK: Um, but, uh, at the time, my main activities, such as
00:02:00it was, was, uh, working on the Blue Tail Fly, which was
an underground--well, it wasn't really an underground newspaper, but it passed for
one here.
PETER: Um-hm. Right.
HOLWERK: Um, it was more or less a left-wing newspaper, although it,
I don't think anybody could have found any consistent--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: consistency in its span. Um, that's what I was doing(??);
I was a part-time student.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: I was a, I belonged to, there were a lot of,
I think it, I don't know if there's still a lot of
hangers-on at U.K., people who are almost through or, or essentially not
considered students. There were at that time at any rate.
Um, and I was more or less one of them I would
say.
PETER: The Blue Tail Fly, um, my understanding is that that its,
00:03:00its origins go back to a group on the Kernel--
HOLWERK: --yeah--
PETER: --that were dissatisfied with, uh, some promotion, uh, positions. Some
people weren't picked to be editors--
HOLWERK: --yeah, that's--
PETER: -- ----------(??)--
HOLWERK: --yeah, that's, uh--
PETER: --were you part of that? Just?
HOLWERK: Yeah, that happened while I was, while I was not--uh, just
the veterans that were of the, the Kernel staff just had a
view at the time, occurred in the--see, I gave you the wrong
date--it occurred in the spring of '69, which is when I was
with the National Student Association. I had been editorial page editor
of the Kernel in the fall of 1968, and in the spring
I went, uh, was in Washington. And during that time, uh,
the Kernel editor was selected. And the logical, it ----------(??) seemed
00:04:00to be the logical successor of the editor for the Kernel was,
uh, Guy Mendes. And, uh, he was not selected largely through
the, what, what looked like to, to us, the, uh, imaginations of
the, uh, advisor to student publications. And Herbie(??) chose seemed to,
um, seemed to me, well, not me(??), like as I said, I
wasn't here, but it seemed to people that it wouldn't be much
fun to work for him. And the editorial policy of the
paper, which had long been controversial and against the war specifically and
for such things as the civil rights movement, it seemed like that
wasn't going to be maintained with any vigor. And I came
00:05:00back from Washington on, on a visit during that spring right after
it happened and found number of people sitting in the office thinking
of names for the newspaper. Um, I guess that that was
the night it was named Blue Tail Fly, although I don't know
who thought of the name.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um.
PETER: What exactly was that? Do you, do you remember what
it meant, Blue Tail Fly?
HOLWERK: Well--
PETER: --I heard one story, but I--
HOLWERK: --yeah, it was, it was essentially derived from the, the old
folk song, "Jimmy crack corn and I don't care," uh, the, the
last verse of that song goes something like, uh, we were big
on the last verses of songs. ----------(??)----------, but yeah. "Master's(??)
died and gone away," something like that, "He died and the jury
00:06:00wondered why, the verdict was the blue tail fly."
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: And, uh, since the blue tail fly was in theory opposed
to the oppression of the masses or something, and the, uh, overthrow
the international ----------(??) conspiracy or something, it seemed appropriate. I didn't
think much of the name, but it was okay with me.
PETER: Right, right. Uh, let's see. I, I have you
down as writing, uh, a, a group of editorials for the Kernel
under the heading of, uh, "The Cynic's View."
HOLWERK: That's, that's not--
PETER: --is that right--
HOLWERK: --exactly right. It was "Cynic View."
PETER: The Cy--
HOLWERK: --C-Y, not, not "The Cynic," just "Cynic View," C-Y-N-I-C. Uh,
which seems absurd to me now. Seemed very clever at the
time. But I did do that, yeah, I did that for
00:07:00more, more than three years.
PETER: Ah.
HOLWERK: Uh, started it in my sophomore year and did it a
couple in fact even in the, the year of the ROTC building
incident(??).
PETER: Okay. What was, uh, campus life like back then?
That's a broad question. What were the, uh, concerns of the,
the average student?
HOLWERK: Well, difficult to answer. Um, U.K. cam-, the campus life
changed dramatically in my, in, in the time I was a student
at U.K. Um, when I went to U.K. in the fall
of 1965, there were about half a dozen people, uh, with long
00:08:00hair. And they were generally subject to suspicion and/or abuse.
Uh, the first antiwar demonstration that I saw at U.K. drew maybe
nine people--
PETER: --hm--
HOLWERK: --ten people--
PETER: --when was that--
HOLWERK: --twelve people. That was in the fall of 1950.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um.
PETER: Do you remember how that got started ----------(??)?
HOLWERK: Students for a Democratic Society, which had been organized by
a guy named, uh, Robert Frankton(??); he was a graduate student in
the mathematics department, I believe.
PETER: Hm. Yeah, so anyway, getting on the SDS, uh, someone
told me that, uh, that at some point, that U.K., there had
been a, a national or a regional--
HOLWERK: --SDS convention--
00:09:00
PETER: --convention. Was it, do you know if it was--
HOLWERK: --yes--
PETER: --one or the other?
HOLWERK: Yes, it was, it was a, I believe it was a
National SDS Convention, and it occurred in the, in the summer of
either 1967 or '68. Well, it must've been the summer of
'67, because I was in town although I didn't go to it.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: And I wasn't in town the summer of '68. So,
I think it was in the summer of '67, I don't know.
PETER: Hm.
HOLWERK: I could check, I'm, I'm sure, you know, you could find
it better(??).
PETER: Right. Um-hm. Um, know anything about it other than
that, what went on?
HOLWERK: ----------(??)--
PETER: --I didn't know it was in the summer for one thing.
HOLWERK: Well, I, I may be wrong about that again, but, but
I think that I'm not wrong about it.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, I don't have the impression that much went on.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, it, it didn't make much impression on me. I
00:10:00was not an SDS member. Um, the SDS, that, that, that
was right as the SDS began to be torn apart by ideological
factionalism. Uh, before, when, when SDS first started, U.K. really was
sort of a bunch of people huddled together for warmth. Um,
like I said, there were, anyone who had hair, say, as long
as yours, would've immediately been presumed to be a SDS member.
There were about nine SDS members on campus. Two of them
were poets, one of them was a physics student, the Franktons, Frankton
and his wife were graduate students in something. There were another
couple of graduate students. Uh, that's about it.
00:11:00
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, and they had, it would've been impossible to, uh, find
a really solid, ideological line in the group. I mean, they
were all, they were all against the war and for civil rights.
Beyond that, most of them didn't have any ideological line.
Uh, the big, the first real controversy with SDS at U.K. came
in, I guess, the fall of sixty--well, I guess it was the
fall of '66. It could've been the fall of '67, a
free, sort of a piddling free speech controversy. You perhaps got
some talk about that. A guy named Brad something.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, and he wanted to give a talk on socialism, sponsored
00:12:00by the Socialist Workers Party or, uh, the inevitability of a socialist
revolution or something. And they wanted, the, the details escape me,
anyway, they, it came to be some kind of, uh, controversy about
it.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Now ultimately ----------(??) controversy was a faculty member from the anthropology
department, whose name I, whose name I think was Lee something but
his, that totally escapes me.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Uh, he had made the mistake, I think, of saying he
was an atheist and a socialist, and, uh, a bunch of, bunch
of students had told their parents and, you know.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: It was kind of absurd, you know, to say that now,
00:13:00but it was--
PETER: --do you remember that, uh, as being the origins of the
free speech area?
HOLWERK: No.
PETER: No.
HOLWERK: I don't believe that that was the origins of the free
speech area. We had the free speech area came about as
the result of the burning of the ROTC building.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, in fact, I'm fairly sure that is the case.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Because they didn't come about until the office tower, basically they
came about because of, because of the controversies about whether you could
gather, say, two thousand students around the office tower in the plaza.
There was just, if you're going to have a gathering at
U.K., you know, at the central part on campus. I may
be wrong about that but that's my memory.
PETER: Um-hm. Were you involved, other than the Kernel and the
Blue Tail Fly, were you involved with any organizations who had anything
00:14:00to say about the war?
HOLWERK: Well, let's see. Uh, not really.
PETER: Not really.
HOLWERK: Um, I mean, the organizations which were available were, it was
largely SDS. Uh, there was a National Mobilization Committee here during
the, um, I guess, during that winter before the, during the fall
before, uh, the ROTC building was burned. But I, I had
known some of those people when I worked at NSA, and they,
they didn't strike me as knowing what they were doing. I
went to a meeting with one of their, um, one of their
00:15:00organizers, and he seemed like a jerk to me. So, I
didn't pursue that. I was involved in Appalachian Volunteers, which was
by no means an antiwar organization, but as I said, the, the
left wing on campus, up until the spring of 1969, at U.K.
was so small that all those organizations, organizations were much stronger, were(??)
all those groups--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --knew, you know, knew each other. And, and while I
wasn't really in groups, I did know, I guess, you know, 70
or 80 or 90 percent of those involved in antiwar ----------(??)--
PETER: --Appalachian?
HOLWERK: Appalachian Volunteers--
PETER: --what were those?
HOLWERK: --was a, um, well, there's a subject that ----------(??) an oral
historian. Um, it started out as a group of college students,
00:16:00which, uh, warped in one-room school in Eastern Kentucky on a Saturday.
Fixing up the school, playing games with kids, tutorial programs.
It went from that to a major end-poverty program, which a fulltime
gist of volunteers working for it and fulltime organizers that organized those
things as a, um, well, in Breathitt County, grassroots craftsman organization.
Probably the most, the most notable thing Appalachian Volunteers ever really accomplished,
value is questionable, uh, was that they brought Arnold Miller to the
forefront, because they organized, the president of the United Mine Workers, they
organized the, uh, West Virginia Black Lung Committee, and that led to
Arnold Miller's becoming head of the UMW. Uh, and then it,
00:17:00it had all kinds of, it had a classic set of splits
and fights and ideological disputes. And should they take federal money?
And this is while the war was going on, and there
was a lot of dispute about federal money. And then it
just sort of disintegrated. David Lowell was a fieldworker for Appalachian
Volunteers.
PETER: Hm. ----------(??).
HOLWERK: Anyway, that's.
PETER: Right, right. You say, the spring of '69, up until
then, there was a just a few kind of insignificant groups on
campus. Was there, was there a transition about that time would
you say?
HOLWERK: Yeah, and I wasn't at U.K. I missed it.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: Uh, but the transition had to do largely with, um, drugs.
Well, it had to do with war, too, you know.
Up until, up until the spring of '69, um, I dare say
00:18:00that you could've, you would've found a lot more people on U.K.
campus who would've, who, if you'd have interviewed, say, all of the
males, I think you would've found well over half of them saying,
you know, they're ready to go kick butt in Vietnam.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, well, no, none, not many of them dropped out to
go, you know, but they said that. Um, I guess you,
I guess U.K.'s been, U.K. probably just was pretty close to the
national, to the whole national viewpoint on Vietnam, you know. It
seems to be that the national viewpoint of Vietnam changed between 1969
and 1970, and U.K.'s did, too, in part because of drugs.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, there weren't, well, there was very little drug use at
U.K. in 1967 or in 1966. And by 1969, there was
00:19:00a fair amount of it, and a lot of marijuana use, which
is what prompted this whole thing. The, the first U.K. revolution
is how some people viewed it. Out, out in Washington didn't
seem like that to me. But, um, there were a lot
of people, the, the circumstances of this, I do not know, I
think that some people got arrested or something, and the U.K. administration
or cops were in on it in some way. Anyway, it,
it engendered a big rally in the Student Center ballroom. And
then these people decided to sleep in the Student Center, a thousand
people or something, I think. And they did sleep in the
Student Center. And they marched over to Maxwell place and climbed
the walls and ran around outside. The 1969 yearbook has nice
00:20:00photo coverage of that. Have you seen that?
PETER: No, I haven't. That's an incredible source I never thought
of--
HOLWERK: --just a second I'll get you one--
PETER: --of looking.
[Pause in recording.]
PETER: Did you ever have dealings with Oswald?
HOLWERK: Yeah, yeah, I knew him. I had served on, on
some president's panel or something.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: And I liked him. I thought he was a good
guy.
PETER: Hm. What was the reaction on campus when, uh, what
were the circumstances to begin with? You said that, uh, that
Nunn had something to do with his, his leaving.
HOLWERK: I don't, I don't know the circumstances. I know that
it was commonly, Nunn, Louie Nunn did sort of force him out.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, he had only one supporter on the U.K. Board of
Trustees at the time he left.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: ----------(??), and that would be a guy named Sam Gazelle(??), who
00:21:00was head of the AFL, state AFL-CIO, which gives you sort of
an idea of how lines were drawn.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Louie Nunn on one side, Sam Gazelle(??) on the other.
Um.
PETER: Do you remember the rea-, reaction on campus?
HOLWERK: Well, there were a lot of people, it was kind of
a, this was, man(??), this was in the spring of '68, I
guess. ----------(??) And there were, there was some kind of
demonstration on the steps, just sort of ----------(??) the administration building, and
I think its only real purpose was to show people's appreciation for
Oswald. And there were, oh, I don't know, several hundred people.
So, ----------(??) was a kind of astonishing thing for U.K.
And so, there's no, I guess you could say that there was
ferment at U.K., you know. It, it was building. The
00:22:00antiwar demonstration, each one got somewhat larger but they weren't large enough
to really make any, any real impact. This CARSA, which was
the Community Alliance for Responsible Social Action, in which was organized by
a bunch of sort of roving unaffiliated leftwing organizers who had come,
who had gotten connected with a minister named Crave(??) somebody who had
a project going in Pralltown. It was, it was, it was
organized right after Chicago. It was when school, U.K. started two
days before the Chicago Democratic Convention in '68. And, uh, there
was a lot of agitation at that time. Um, and these
00:23:00people organized that. And there was a fair-sized march through downtown
Lexington, people carrying pictures, and there were people carrying caskets and stuff,
and that was, there was sort of maybe, I'm guessing two hundred
people, something like that.
PETER: Back to this transition, you say in the spring of, of
'69, you weren't there, but you mentioned, uh, drugs as a possible
factor. Do you want to, aside from the, the Mother May
I protest, involving marijuana over ----------(??)--
HOLWERK: --no, that's, that's pretty much all, all that I mean, you
know.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: The issue, well, the, it tied in with the war, of
course, because if you got thrown out of school for smoking marijuana,
the most likely thing that was gonna happen to you was that
you would be, you were gonna get drafted. Um, and that
00:24:00made, I think that that, by that time there were enough people
at U.K. smoking marijuana that that must've seemed like, it must've made
the issue clearer to a lot of people, you know.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: Um, if you, if you, if smoking marijuana is gonna lead
you to getting sent to Vietnam, there were a lot of people
at U.K. who were gonna end up at Vietnam ----------(??).
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: Uh, so, I think that kind of clarified the issues.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Uh.
PETER: Back to, uh--
HOLWERK: --clarified it. Made it--
PETER: --uh, "protest groups." Do, do, uh, were there any others prominent
in your mind connected with, uh, antiwar protests, uh?
HOLWERK: Hm.
PETER: I know that student government they were pretty active along those
lines.
HOLWERK: Well--
PETER: --yes, no?
HOLWERK: You know, they were in the, in the year that, that
you, that you're centering on, yeah, but that was, up until that
00:25:00year, no.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: The head of student government the year before was anything but.
PETER: That was, uh--
HOLWERK: --Ken Futrell(??).
PETER: That's right, that's right.
HOLWERK: Uh, he, he will reappear in Kentucky politics at sometime, I'm
sure. But, um, Steve Bright was. Now, Steve Bright is
an interesting case. Have you talked to him?
PETER: He's in D.C. now with the, uh, office of, uh, public
defenders, I think. There was an interview made with him concerning
the time that I've listened to.
HOLWERK: Well, Steve Bright is an interesting example in the transition itself.
My first meeting with Steve Bright came over when he was
a member of some fraternity, or other, and was on the board
00:26:00of student publications. And the issue, if you can fathom such
a thing, that, that I remember him particularly for was the issue
of should the band play "Dixie."
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: Okay, uh, well Steve Bright was, the Kernel had come out
saying, you know, that no, the band shouldn't play "Dixie," and the
board of student publications in theory ran the Kernel, and Steve Bright
was infuriated at this. You know, how could anyone, how could
any black person be insulted by "Dixie"? And then two years
later he's the, you know, the antiwar leader of the U.K. student
government. So, there's some kind of transition there.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: I don't know what you'd make of it exactly, but there
is(??).
PETER: How about, uh, the, uh, Student Mobilization Committee, I think you
mentioned them earlier. Any significant role?
00:27:00
HOLWERK: Not that I can recall. I don't think that there
really was one at U.K. You know, like I said, a
guy came through.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Well, maybe not, I think Karen Schroeder worked with that.
I don't know(??), I, I don't really know.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, there may have been one, but if there was, it
was essentially indistinguishable from, like I said, none of the organizations at
U.K., to my knowledge, had any kind of real organization, any kind
of a firm membership or hardcore, uh, people came(??) and went.
The SDS people, there were a lot of people who were, who
have said, who would've been called SDS people, and who'd call themselves
SDS people, you know, had no real organizational allegiance or even role.
PETER: Um-hm. Okay, another broad question, how would these people, uh,
00:28:00say, viewed by the administration? Was there?
HOLWERK: Well--
PETER: --were they ignored? Was there?
HOLWERK: Now we're talking about in nineteen-, in'69 and '70 school year?
PETER: Say, if you wish, if you want to trace it up,
fine, you know, whatever.
HOLWERK: Well, I think it's safe to say that by 1969, '70
they were viewed as an active threat to the university. Uh,
I don't think, I think it's possible that some members of the
university administration viewed, viewed the student, viewed student unrest as, as an
active threat to the running of the university, but I think more
than that they were viewed as an active threat to the university
in the sense that the governor would do something horrendous. I
mean, the governor had already, there was this, Oswald and Nunn didn't
00:29:00get along, and one of the reasons they didn't get along was
Oswald's vision of the university was considerably more liberal than Nunn's was.
Um, Nunn, and Oswald was, of course, replaced in the interim
by Kirwin who was replaced by Singletary. Uh, I don't think
Singletary's view of the university was particularly liberal, whether it was, that's
the case or not, he is, what he is known for is
a political realist, and, uh--
[Pause in recording.]
HOLWERK: --I think that -----------(??), I know, and felt that the, that
these students, whatever their own personal motive, endangered the un-, laid the
university open to outside interference, open to being shut down, you know,
00:30:00having funds cut off, having funds cut by the legislature, so forth
and so on.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Now there were people within the university administration who simply thought
that students were, that these students in question presented a clear and
present danger to the university and should be gotten rid of.
PETER: Hm.
HOLWERK: Primarily the name that comes to mind is Jack Hall.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: A former dean of students.
PETER: Do you remember any particular instance?
[Pause in recording.]
PETER: Do you remember any, uh, particular incidence, say, uh, that would,
that would lead you to believe that there was this, this transition
of attitude between, uh, uh, Oswald and, and, uh, Singletary? Anyway,
any direct way that the students were dealt with, these people were
00:31:00dealt with, to illustrate?
HOLWERK: Yeah, I think so. One is, one is the change
in the student code.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, discipline, the idea of disciplining students, and the things in
which students were, were disciplined became much more codified under, um, -----------(??),
which was good, I thought(??), uh, under, as time went along, but
also a lot more of it was left to, there was a
lot of it left in the hands of the, uh, of the
dean of students. They got the student judicial board but the
way the thing's set up, you had this choice. You would
go, you could go, if you were, if you had been accused
00:32:00of doing something. Uh, I know all of this because I
went through this whole judicial board process after the, the burning of
the ROTC building. Uh, first thing what happened would be you
get a thing in the mail, and then you go see Jack
Hall, and Jack Hall said, "Well, you know, ----------(??), just plead guilty,
essentially." Uh, you know, "I'll set some punishment, you know, or
you can go before the, the judicial board," which he had(??) chosen.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: And, uh, "And they can decide what to do." And
then generally there was some notion at the time, which as, as,
as you see from having this conversation that, that the judicial board
was, the notion that the judicial board was, uh, sort of the
lackey of the administration. That turned out not to be the
00:33:00case in these, uh, at least in my case and in a
lot of the cases that had come(??) standing by the burning of
the ROTC building that night. But that's sort of getting ahead
of the story.
PETER: Right, right. Okay, well, let's, let's go on, uh, to
that night. The last days of, uh, April of 1970, Nixon
went into Cambodia. And the following Monday, May 4, the Kent
State killings occurred. Uh, do you remember where you were when
you heard those, of those two events, and how you felt?
HOLWERK: No.
PETER: No?
HOLWERK: No, I don't. Um, that wasn't the best time in
my life just in general. And I don't, I don't remember
where I was when I heard that. In all likelihood, I
00:34:00was at my mother's house.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: But I'm not sure.
PETER: Okay.
HOLWERK: Uh, we had -----------(??) our Blue Tail Fly office and I
was living at home--
PETER: --right--
HOLWERK: --at that time.
PETER: The, uh, the next day, May 5, there was a--(coughs)--excuse me--a
board of trustees meeting on the eighteenth floor of Patterson Office Tower.
And my understanding is that there was a one o'clock meeting
out by the patio that was organized by, uh, somebody named Spud
Thomas--
HOLWERK: --yeah--
PETER: --is the way the Kernel reported it. Were you, uh,
were you involved with that, uh, with that meeting?
HOLWERK: No.
PETER: No.
HOLWERK: I don't, so far as I know, I was not at
the--well, now wait, one o'clock in the afternoon. Shit. Now,
00:35:00is this the day the thing got burned down?
PETER: Yeah.
HOLWERK: Okay, yeah I was, yeah, I was, I spoke at it.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, yeah, and that, who the hell Spud Thomas is, is
something I have no idea about. Uh, but another guy who
was in SDS, and I presume Spud Thomas was an SDS member.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: By that time, I was not spending a great deal of
time on campus. And was not really involved in any kind
of campus organization.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: The Blue Tail Fly was a strictly off-campus organization. And
I suppose at the time I knew who Spud Thomas was, but
I, I don't have any idea who he is now.
PETER: How was it that you, that you were speaking there?
Do you remember in what capacity, what connection?
HOLWERK: Um, yeah, as an SDS member, and they just asked me
if I would speak.
00:36:00
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Uh, behind -----------(??)----------- asked me if I would speak, and I
said, uh, "Sure," you know.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, and, and I was, I was very, I remember thinking
that, that this was an extraordinary situation for U.K. There were
a lot of people, and they were very angry and very upset.
And there was a lot of frustration. Um, nobody was
really sure what was gonna happen. Um, you know, it, it
was the kind of situation where someone really could've lead, you know,
a march into, uh, in, into a building, a seizure of building,
taking over building. I remember, and seems to me that there
were a great many of state policemen on campus at this point.
And I remember thinking now, wondering whether I should try to
00:37:00do that. And it seemed to me to be an -----------(??).
You know, I couldn't see not doing(??) it. Casting myself
in the role of charismatic student leader didn't seem very likely to
me.
PETER: Do you remember what you did say?
HOLWERK: Uh, yeah, I remember fairly clearly. I said that, uh,
I said that there was a lot of rhetoric going around that,
that just about, passing as SDS rhetoric about bringing the war home,
but that I thought that the war was already home. And
that it could be, the stakes could be seen in the relationships
of people my age to their parents, and the relationships to their
teachers, and the relationships at the university. And that so far
00:38:00as I was concerned, the thing which, uh, if, if you didn't
believe me, all you had to do was look at that goddamn
fucking building. That goddamn fucking building referring to the Buell Armory,
which the meeting took place on the patio of the Student Center,
and I was standing on the, you know, how this is kind
of under overhang there. Well, the, the microphone was right out
in the front of that.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: And, uh, I got kind of worked up in the speech,
and I said, so I, so I said, "That goddamn fucking building,"--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --which turned out to cause a lot of trouble later, as
you'll see. Uh. And--
PETER: --hold on. Have, have we jumped ahead here to the,
to the evening rally that--
HOLWERK: --no--
PETER: --this is, this is still the one o'clock.
00:39:00
HOLWERK: This is still the one o'clock.
PETER: Oh, that's interesting. My impression of that was that it
had taken place at the, at the fountain, just out in front
of POT.
HOLWERK: Okay, well, it's possible that I've told that, that I'm wrong.
PETER: There were a lot of rallies--
HOLWERK: --okay, yeah--
PETER: --right, right, around that period.
HOLWERK: Well. I don't know, I, I guess that you may
well be right then, because, um, I don't know. I was,
I was not at the rally up on the--
PETER: --right--
HOLWERK: --up on the--
PETER: --the fountain.
HOLWERK: --the fountain.
PETER: Did you go to the eighteenth floor?
HOLWERK: No, I did not.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Did, did the eighteenth floor thing happen after the one o'clock
rally?
PETER: Yeah.
HOLWERK: Okay, yeah, I didn't go to that.
PETER: Okay.
HOLWERK: I heard about it. There was some scuffling, and somebody,
Happy Chandler punched a student, or some variation on that classic thing.
Okay, I didn't go to that. It was some time
after that.
PETER: Um-hm.
00:40:00
HOLWERK: I mean, so if you have questions about anything in between
there--
PETER: --right--
HOLWERK: --you should ask them.
PETER: Well, let's go back to your, uh, your Student Center patio.
HOLWERK: Okay. That, that, I came over, I guess I, I
heard about that--I'm just conjecturing about this--and came over to campus, sort
of see what was going on.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Uh, where I was asked sometime in the late afternoon, I
had the impression that this was a late afternoon thing. Asked
to speak, and that's when I did speak.
PETER: Um-hm, right. How was, um, the speaking, uh, arranged at
these things? I, I, I get the impression that, uh, more
or less whoever had the microphone, uh, you know, had, had the
microphone, uh.
HOLWERK: Yeah, that's fairly much true. Um, there was some, there
was some organization to it.
00:41:00
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, at least up to a point, and then after that
point, which was some time after I spoke, uh, I gave a
rather inconclusive speech. I couldn't ----------(??)---------- I, I didn't know what
to urge people to do, you know. Um, I ----------(??)
urging anyone that was going to get beat up by the Kentucky
state police, which looked to me like where things were heading.
Um, some guy named Al something got a hold of the microphone
and really started laying it out. You know, they were gonna,
uh, "We're really going to show them," I, I don't remember what
he said, but he was a somewhat more -----------(??) speaker than I
was.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, and I had the impression that, that that led, but
I may be wrong, tell me ----------(??), I had the impression that
led to the march, that, that there was some kind of a
00:42:00march over toward the, toward the complex--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --coming from that, but I may be wrong.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: I, you know--
PETER: --okay, well I think, I, I don't want to, uh, I'm,
I'm not, you know, I, I suspect that this is the, uh,
the rally on, on, on May 5 that, uh, preceded the, that
ended up in front of Buell Armory.
HOLWERK: Yeah, right.
PETER: Yes?
HOLWERK: Yeah.
PETER: Okay. Do you recall, uh, any of the other speakers?
At, uh, the Student Center patio?
HOLWERK: I do not.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: If, uh, if you had a list of them, I, you
know, if you told me who they were, I might be able
to tell you what, it might come back--
PETER: --right--
HOLWERK: --but I don't--
PETER: --there was a, there's a tape, uh, in the oral history
department that someone--I've yet to know, uh, find out who--made of, uh,
00:43:00of speeches early at the Student Center patio and then later at,
at Buell. Uh, it's hard to know where they divide exactly,
but, uh, I suspect that, uh, there was a talk by Don
Pratt.
HOLWERK: Yeah, I think there was.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: I, I'm sure there must've have been.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: I can't imagine an, an occasion like that without one.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: I'll say that.
PETER: Right, right.
HOLWERK: Um.
PETER: Was he, uh, was he a central figure in all this?
HOLWERK: Well, I don't know if you'd call him a central figure.
PETER: He was(??).
HOLWERK: And you've talked to Don. Don talked about Lexington(??) now
about like he did then. So, it's hard to imagine that
he was a central figure, but he, he was going to jail.
You know, he had, he was viewed as a figure of
some importance. You know, he had laid it on the line.
He was going to go to jail; he refused induction(??).
00:44:00And, uh, uh, stupidly, I thought, since he only had one lung
that collapsed(??) on him, he couldn't, there was no chance of him
being drafted anyway. But he had, uh, you know, he was
waiting to go.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: In fact, I think he had been and was out on
appeal.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Or something like that, I'm not sure about that.
PETER: I'm not sure either. Um, Joe Gardner.
HOLWERK: The English department.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: Yeah.
PETER: Do you remember a talk that he gave?
HOLWERK: Now that, now that you say it, I can remember seeing
him there, but I don't remember anything he said.
PETER: Um-hm. Okay--
HOLWERK: --it seems to me that Frank Shannon might've spoke, but I,
I'm not at all sure about that either. I think Shannon
was a student and an SDS activist.
PETER: Um-hm. Uh, okay, well, my impression is that, uh, from
00:45:00the Student Center patio, there were apparently some, some, some coffins that
were picked up--
HOLWERK: --yeah--
PETER: --some symbolic coffins. And the route is, is very vague,
as reported by the Kernel as, as to who went where, how
many, uh, could you, could you trace the route of the, uh,
the march?
HOLWERK: I didn't go on the march.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, my impression is that the march--
PETER: --lost forever.
HOLWERK: Hm?
PETER: Lost forever.
HOLWERK: Yeah. Um, I think that the march fitted more or
less by this Al guy, but I think there was a lot
of controversy within some of the elder statesmen of the U.K. radical
community as to where he had come from, what he was up
to. But my impression is that the march wandered across campus
00:46:00to the Haggin/Donovan, and the Haggin/Donovan complex, and then off of the,
uh, dormitory towers.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: And then came back, but I'm not at all sure that
that is the case. That's just, that's, that's just a vague
memory. In any event, I didn't go on it.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: It didn't seem.
PETER: What were you up to?
HOLWERK: I think I was standing around talking to the SDS people,
um, trying to decide what we would do when they got back.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, you know, it had, it had dawned on, well, I
had, I had a little experience in organizing large rallies when I
was with the National Student Association, and I, I, well, I don't
know who I talked to or when--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --but I had the, but it seems to me that when
00:47:00the rally went off, we stood around trying to figure out what
we were going to do, you know, if they came, when they
came back with two thousand people, or whatever, however many people there
were, what we would do. But there was no, there was
no clear answer to that question.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: You know, uh, nobody really had any real ideas. Um,
it seems to me that, that the only idea that anybody had
was, "Why don't we meet, meet in front of the ROTC building?"
Not the annex, which subsequently was burned, but Buell Armory, which
I think is what happened, as I recall. I don't know.
I don't know how to judge anything else you've heard.
PETER: The Kernel reported that there was a, uh, on, on the,
uh, the way back from, uh, the complex, there was a, a
sit-in at the corner of, uh, Euclid and Limestone.
00:48:00
HOLWERK: Well--
PETER: --no idea.
HOLWERK: Uh, no, that's, that's--
PETER: --right(??)--
HOLWERK: --so far as I know, the first I ever heard of
that, but, you know, for all I know there could've been a
panty raid and I ----------(??).
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: You know, there was, there was a fair amount of that
kind of air to it.
PETER: It's very interesting, Sue Ann Salmon, Salmon said the exact same
thing.
HOLWERK: Yeah. Uh, well, anyway, there, there was, there was that
element, too, you know. There was no, there was no organization--
PETER: --that's quite interesting, because here this is right after, to me
it is, it's right after Kent State. And you have here
supposedly, uh, I would think, uh, kind of a mourning-type of, uh,
atmosphere. And yet I get this, this, this panty raid idea,
too. What would you, do you recall the atmosphere, say at,
uh, the Student Center, uh, patio when you gave the talk?
HOLWERK: Well, it's not fair to say that, that, it's not fair
00:49:00to say that it was a panty raid atmosphere. It, it
was not a particularly mournful atmosphere. Um, nor, it was somewhat
angry. Um, somewhat angry. There's a lot of frustration and
confusion, and the anger was heightened by the fact that there were
all these state cops around. You know, there was, there was,
there were arms in evidence, you know. And you knew people
had gotten killed, you know, ----------(??) either gotten shot--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --you know, U.K. hadn't(??), it was not the same as it
was on other campuses where you had a long history of large-scale
antiwar activism. And so, you had a feeling of camaraderie.
00:50:00You know, most of these people, the first time they'd ever turned
out. And I don't think they knew what to feel.
I don't think they knew what to expect.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, the people who hung back and didn't go on the
march and stood around and tried to figure out what to do,
had been to Washington for the Nixon inaugural demonstrations, had been to
Chicago, had been in marches at U.K. before, so forth and so
on. And I think that, that they felt some mourning.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: And a lot of anger about it. But, you know,
most of the people, it's the first time they'd ever turned out
for anything.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: I mean(??), what, what the hell should they feel? You
know.
PETER: A couple of questions, you said some of them hung back,
didn't go on, on the march ----------(??) students. How many people
were at that, that patio rally? I, I don't want numbers,
say, uh, give me the area--
00:51:00
HOLWERK: -- ----------(??)--
PETER: -- ----------(??) leading up to Buell?
HOLWERK: Well, I had the impression that that grassy knoll was full
of people.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: That, I know that there were more than say two hundred
people there.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: But exactly how, how many there actually were, I, I really
couldn't say.
PETER: Okay. How about the, um, ----------(??) state police in evidence,
do you recall? How many, how much in evidence?
HOLWERK: They were pretty well in evidence. I know that.
I remember looking at them, you know, I remember when I was
speaking, I could see some. There were a lot of U.K.
cops. And then still a lot, there were a bunch of
U.K. cops, and Jack Hall, and Ken Brandenburg, and, uh, the woman
who runs the Student Center now, Mary Jo Mertens, she was out
there. Um, acting friendly, but taking notes, I think, or ----------(??)
00:52:00exactly what she was doing.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: But, you know, all those people had been dean of students
and vice president of student affairs and staff, you know, they were
out there. As it turned out, they were out there keeping
watch, you know.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Uh, we heard from all them later when we got around
to having judicial board proceedings.
PETER: Um, well, what time did you pick back up with the,
uh, with the marchers? Did you meet them in front of
Buell or did you not meet them? Or what were you
doing? You want to just go ahead and, and, uh.
HOLWERK: I think what I did, I think that I--well, I don't
know.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Okay. What I think happened, but, but again, it's purely
is the vaguest of memory and sort of reconstruction of what I
suspect we did was that we went to the Student Center Grill
and got a Coke and sat down and said, "What in the
hell are we going to do when we get, you know, a
00:53:001000, 1,500 people back here?"
PETER: That was a big meeting spot for, uh, for radical sorts
I'm told. That and the Paddock.
HOLWERK: Well, yeah, I mean, the Student Center Grill was also, at
that point, the Student Center Grill was a big meeting spot in
general.
PETER: It was some place to get Coke, I--(laughs).
HOLWERK: Yeah, uh, there, there was, for instance, it had become, like--well,
at one time, just going back in ----------(??) the Student Center Grill,
the Student Center Grill was divided into, the whole front, the very
first table was essentially by ----------(??) reserved for the Delta Tau Delta
fraternity. And it went back from there in descending social order
of fraternities and sororities. And all the longhaired people sat in
the very back. As there got to be more and more
longhaired people, they took over more and more of the Grill, but,
00:54:00you know, that's.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, yeah, by this time, you know, just hang around the
Grill was what, uh, longhaired people did, but so did everybody else,
you know. I imagine, I say that I imagine we went
to the Grill because I can't imagine we stood around outside.
You know, I imagine we got a Coke, so we went out
there, but that's just a guess, so. And as I say,
the conversation, as, as I vaguely recall, ----------(??) because there was nothing
to decide. And what was either, like I say, nobody knew
what was an insane crowd like this at U.K., and these people
in the crowd had never been in anything like this, and there
was no way to predict what they would be willing to do,
what they could be led to do, nor was anybody sure what
the hell they wanted them to do. You know, uh, it
seemed, it seemed clear to me that any kind of demonstration that,
00:55:00that even bordered on violence would be met with a show of
force, which turned out was, you know, reasonably accurate. And I
think that seemed clear to other people, too.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, well, anyway, so, so I don't recall--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --when I met up with all these people.
PETER: Were you a part of the group that, that in front
of Buell--
HOLWERK: --yeah--
PETER: --at that point?
HOLWERK: Yeah.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: I was, when all the people got in front of, I
have a very clear memory of being in front of Buell.
PETER: Okay.
HOLWERK: I don't remember how I got there, but I have a
very clear memory, memory of being there. And seems to me
that various people stood up, stood around. And there were two
00:56:00campus cops, it seems to me, standing on the, in the doorway
to the national, to the ROTC entrance. And people stood up
and made speeches. You know, and it was, it was obvious
that we had that, that it was a timed decision. And
either we were all going to stand there, or, you know, we're
gonna storm the ROTC building. Um, somebody went up, and walked
between the cops, and rattled the doors, but the doors were chained
shut. Um, and there were speeches, but I don't know, again,
they didn't, the speeches were, you know--
PETER: --do you recall your feelings? Did you have a, a
particular plan of action?
HOLWERK: Not at that time.
00:57:00
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, at some point while we were standing there, all of
the sudden there's this big outcry that goes up from the crowd.
And everybody turns around and looks over the, the top of
the Student Center, okay, to see, uh, flames. Okay, how long
have we been standing there, you know, what time did the flame
go up, do you know that?
PETER: I believe around eleven.
HOLWERK: Yeah. We must've been standing there for a long time.
You know, we must've been there for, I don't know, two
and a half, three hours, something like that. Uh, while we
were there, let's see, our incidents if I can recall include Mason
Taylor hurling the lock through the door. He was promptly nabbed
00:58:00by two or three U.K. policemen and carried off. And the
crowd was sort of, you know, it was real tense. When
that happened, and, and they just carried him off and nothing else
happened, I knew that probably nothing was going to happen. Um,
and at some point, and I have the impression of this, if
anything happened after the ROTC building burned, but I don't think we
reassembled over there afterwards, although I may be wrong. At some
point I gave up on, on the hope(??) that anything was going
to happen, and I concluded, but I concluded that it wasn't, that
the most likely thing which could happen, would be if we could
get people, would be they might be able to get a student
strike out of that. But that there was no way we're
gonna have a student strike if we didn't get some kind of
means of communications organized, telling people, or asking people not to go
00:59:00to class. There was a kind of fire escape ladder on
the front of Buell, and I climbed up on that thing, and
yelled, "Look, this is nonsense. We're all standing around here.
We're not gonna do anything. You know, the least we can
do is close the university down. You know, I, you know,
let's get some, some, you know, some people willing to work with
me. We'll put out journalists(??), and, and ----------(??) and we'll put
out a flyer. You know, to get it distributed tonight saying,
'No Class Tomorrow.' You know, 'No Finals. Nobody Takes Exams.
And Nobody Shows Up.'" And there were about four people
who said, "Yeah, that's the right thing to do." Uh, uh,
one of them was a lawyer, two of them are lawyers here
in town now; one was Barbara Southerland and the other was a
guy named Tim Murphy. And there was somebody, two or three
01:00:00other people.
[Pause in recording.]
HOLWERK: Um, and Don Pratt said he had a mimeograph machine or
something. And whether, I had a, I remember this being after
the ROTC building had burned. Don't think it was possible ----------(??)
been after the ROTC building burned, but I don't think, as soon
as people turned around and saw this big orange glow in the
sky, everybody ran around the Student Center to find, you know--excuse me--the
ROTC annex engulfed in flames. Uh, that's all I can remember
about that the front of Buell. You know, again if you
jog my memory ----------(??)--
PETER: --was there any reaction of, uh, the, the U.K. police, state
police when, uh, at that point when the flames were seen?
01:01:00I've got conflicting reports. Uh, some people say that there was
a, a charge at that point by the police.
[Pause in recording.]
HOLWERK: I think that, I think that there may have been a
charge to the, to the extent of coming--see, the thing that was
really peculiar about the whole thing is that, if you're familiar with
the layout where the ROTC building was, the, the annex, um, that
driveway area back in there, that rectangle driveway area was where state
police had been sort of hiding--not hiding, but they, you know, there
were a lot of state police cars back there and extra, extra
state policemen back there. And it seems to me that the
01:02:00state police may have charged across the street to keep people back
away from the fire, because all the people were basically ended up
on the Alumni Gym sidewalk, okay, and in that Student Center parking
lot.
PETER: So, this was, there was no action in front of Buell
by the police, but rather a, a charge to keep people away
from the fire.
HOLWERK: Well, if there was one, I don't recall it.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: Uh, I, I think if there had been a major one,
I, I would have, I would recall it, but I wouldn't swear
to it.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Uh--
[Pause in recording.]
HOLWERK: I, I think if there had been a major one, I,
I would have, I would recall it, but I wouldn't swear to
it.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Uh, there may have been something--well, boy, I just don't know.
01:03:00
PETER: Well, the next night, uh, the sixth--
HOLWERK: --yeah--
PETER: --there's another meeting in front of Buell. Apparently there was
a charge of some sort that night.
HOLWERK: Right.
PETER: Do you recall? Were you there?
HOLWERK: Um, yeah, I was there. Um.
PETER: Well, perhaps we can go back to that.
HOLWERK: Okay(??).
PETER: But, but, uh, at, at the flames of the ROTC building,
Air Force ROTC building, what, what, do you remember your reaction at
that point?
HOLWERK: Well, I was stunned.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: You know. Uh, I couldn't believe anybody had actually burned
the thing. And one reason I couldn't believe anybody burned the
thing was that it was literally surrounded by state policemen. You
know, I still don't, it still makes no sense to me.
It kind of, at one point, I believe in the state policemen
burned it themselves theory. You know, they, it was, it was
scheduled for demolition. There was nobody in it, et cetera, et
01:04:00cetera. There were rumors a janitor had been told to stay
out, you know, who would ordinarily be in there. That seems
improbable to me in retrospect.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: It seems equally improbable that anybody, that somebody just walked up
and torched the thing. Uh, I know people who say they
know who did it, but I don't really believe that.
PETER: So, do you have any idea how, uh, how it got
started? What, what, what do you suspect at this point?
HOLWERK: Well, I, I really don't have any idea. Um, when
I heard that they arrested Sue Ann, I, I knew that was
absurd. You know, Sue Ann was the least likely person to,
to burn the thing of anyone I know, I thought, that anybody
might be at that, at the, uh, rally. And well, that
01:05:00that was just patently ridiculous. You know, she's a classic place(??)
of being, case of being in the wrong place at the wrong
time. Um, but no one seemed to have any idea whatsoever
that, that, that it'd happened. Um, there I have a friend
that still thinks I did it, but, you know, he's wrong.
PETER: Uh, one imagines that there would be a lot of rumors.
HOLWERK: Yeah, there were very many rumors. There weren't any right
then. Really what there was then was as, you know, the
incident was everybody was running around, and for the next hour or
so, as people stood around the street, there was really a whole
lot of essentially jubilation. Uh, you know, somebody, "All right, you
01:06:00know, okay, somebody burned the building." Um, and there was a
fair amount of tension, you know, lots of the state cops, and
lots of regular--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --lots of city cops, and, uh, U.K. cops. And Happy
Chandler's son, Ben Chandler, noted all-around loser, was there trying to pick
a fight. He would, he would fight any longhaired student, he
said. He was standing in the middle of Euclid, waving his
arms, and beating his chest literally.
PETER: I hear that, uh, he was reported to, to have gone
around, uh, recruiting football players.
HOLWERK: Well--
PETER: --as, uh, as riot police--
HOLWERK: --I've never heard that--
PETER: --cops(??).
HOLWERK: He, he probably had limited luck, gauging what happened the next
night. But--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --um, a bunch of them come up over on the ground,
01:07:00and they, uh, ----------(??), anyway.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, there was a lot of that.
PETER: Right. Do you, do you recall any more of, say,
prominent rumors, as to, to what had happened?
HOLWERK: Yeah, the most prominent rumor was that the university or the
state police had burned it.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, nobody, that was the most prominent one I heard.
Um, there was the, in fact, that was the only one I
heard.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Uh, if, if there were rumors of individual students having done
it, um, well, I probably didn't want to hear them anyway.
You know, that, that seemed like the kind of thing that those
rumors were better off left--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --unrepeated(??)--
PETER: --perhaps I'm wrong on that ----------(??) when I first asked the
question, you paused, as though--
01:08:00
HOLWERK: --no, I'm just trying to remember. I really don't, I
really don't, I was trying to see if I remember anything else.
No, the thing about it is, is that one thing is
that I had seen those, I don't think anybody paid any attention
to that building. You know, if you thought of an ROTC
building on campus, that wouldn't have been one that I would've thought.
There were at least two others, the, the Buell Armory and
the Air Force ROTC building, which is, which was--
PETER: --the Air Force ROTC building was the one that was burned.
HOLWERK: Yeah, well there was another one though. There was another
Air Force ROTC building over on, um, Scott Street, is that Bom-,
Bomber(??) Street, which one is it that comes in by the education
building?
PETER: I think that's Scott.
HOLWERK: Yeah, there's a wooden building over there that was the--
PETER: --it's still there.
HOLWERK: Is it?
PETER: I think so.
HOLWERK: Well, it was an Air Force ROTC building, and I would've
01:09:00thought of it, I would've thought of both of those before I
would've thought of the thing that did burn as an ROTC building.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, the fact that there were so many cops around the
damn thing just made it seem improbable to me that it, you
know, that it had gotten burned. I mean, it would've made
it a bad place to want to march to, for one thing.
No one wants to march into a place where there're forty
or fifty riot helmet-, riot equipped state policemen, you know.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um.
PETER: Can I get you to trace your movement through all of
that? Where were you? Did you see the fire?
HOLWERK: Yeah, I was right in front of Buell. And then
I ran down, I guess I ran down the, the, the stone
steps, or down the hill into the lower part of the Student
01:10:00Center, and then around the sidewalk by the parking lot, on the
east end of the Student Center out to Euclid Avenue.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: As did everyone else. Now, I don't know how many
people were there when I got there. But there were, it
seemed like instantly the whole street was full of people. Sidewalks
were full of people. The cops, like I said, were keeping
people back, so the fire engines could get in there. It
was clear that the thing was gone. You know, there wasn't
gonna be anything left of it much by the time I got
there. That was clear. And I just sort of walked
up and down the, walked up and down the, the sidewalk.
And what I remember hearing people say was, "Somebody really burned it!"
And, um, "Was anybody hurt?" I heard that. The, the
01:11:00question to which nobody knew the answer. And, um, really there
wasn't anything, I mean, it was just, it was like a spectator
sport, you know. Well, this was my impression of it.
Like, um, because I don't know, again, I don't know what kind
of reaction the people would've had, you know, there was sort of
the general jubilation. It was like a release in a way.
You know, all these people had this pent up emotion, in
a lot of cases an unidentified emotion. And what do you
do with it, you know? Well, that released some of it.
Um, I don't, I thought that afterwards the light would go,
that there would've been a violent demonstration, say, or, you know, a
building takeover or something like that. It seemed, that seemed to
01:12:00decrease it in a way. Um, if the university did burn
the building themselves, which seems, as I say, highly improbable, um, they
might've think, it's possible they should've considered it, you know, because it,
it did, it was a kind of catharsis of the thing.
There, there was a lot of, there was a lot that went
on afterwards, but there was not the same intensity after that happened.
There was perhaps more unity.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: But it was a different kind of unity.
PETER: Did you ever get your, your flyer out that night?
Strike?
HOLWERK: Well, yeah, sort of. Um, Don Pratt showed, at some
point, Don Pratt showed up with his--now, I know--first, we went over
to get a mimeograph machine at Gene Mason's house. Gene Mason
was a political science instructor. His name you probably encountered.
01:13:00
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: And he had, his mimeograph machine was in pieces. And
we ended up over at the Presbyterian Student Center, I think that's
what it is, at the corner of, uh, Rose Lane and--
PETER: -- ----------(??).
HOLWERK: Yeah, and using their mimeograph machine. We turned out maybe--now,
I'm just guessing--it seems to me, like we turned out eight or
nine thousand mimeographed, uh, barely legible mimeographed things, getting through with them
at about two in the morning.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: And with really no idea what to do with them -----------(??)--
PETER: --what did they say? To the, to the effect?
HOLWERK: I think they said something like, um, well--
01:14:00
PETER: --haven't got one in the closet around here?
HOLWERK: No, I don't. I don't, I don't think I ever
kept one. I've kept almost everything else I've ever fooled with,
but I haven't kept one of those. And, uh, I think
it just said, "U.S.'s invaded Cambodia. You know, however many people
it was been killed at Kent State. And, uh, Stop the
Killing. No Exams. You know, Student Strike, Close the University."
-----------(??)-----------" bourgeoisie paper sexist, I don't know what it said, something like,
it was something -----------(??) sounding like that.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, and I don't think we got that many of them
distributed frankly. Uh, for one thing, there were only three of
us at that point fooling with it. It was two in
the morning. I went home and went to bed. And
I think the other two people did, too. Oh yeah, that's
right, I remember that very clearly. Tim Murphy and Barbara Southerland
01:15:00were living on the corner of either Lindenwalk or, uh, Aylesford and
Euclid, and, or very near the corner, and I was up in
their apartment, had the things, and they were going to get up
early and distribute them, you know, all over the Classroom Building.
And I got up and came over to campus and started distributing.
And seems to me I distributed some of the things.
But there, there wasn't, there wasn't a whole lot of people on
campus anyway, early. And I couldn't figure out what to do
with them. I don't know what I did with all of
them.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, they didn't get distributed very well. The ones that
did, I don't think had any effect.
PETER: To back a bit, um, the Kernel reported that in front
of Buell that night, there was a, a leadership called The Group,
01:16:00capital T, capital G. Uh, apparently some, a, a couple of
people who were very dramatic in what they were, and, and somebody
in, uh, uh, a motorcycle jacket. Uh, I'm not sure.
Do, do you recall that? Apparently they were like never seen
before, uh, never seen afterwards by the people I talked to, do
you recall?
HOLWERK: I don't ever recall seeing them at all.
PETER: Right, right.
HOLWERK: If the Kernel, you don't happen to remember who wrote the
Kernel article, do you?
PETER: David somebody. No, I don't.
HOLWERK: Okay, well, the Kernel was, the Kernel, like everyone else, was
subject to hysteria during the thing. You know, uh, who, I
had no idea what this The Group is. Uh, people never seen
01:17:00before or afterwards. God only knows, you know. It may
have been people that the Kernel never saw before or afterwards, but
that wouldn't mean anything.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, I don't recall. You know, it was about
75 degrees that night. Everybody was in short-sleeve shirts and things.
The idea -----------(??) that somebody in a motorcycle jacket--(Peter laughs)--sort
of improbable.
PETER: Right, so I was told. What can I say.
Um, okay, for the next few days, as, as, as a result
of that, uh, the burning, uh, Governor Nunn called out the, uh,
the National Guard. And there was a, uh, a curfew set
on campus. Uh, no gatherings. Uh, do you recall, what
do you recall of that period? Any significant memories?
01:18:00
HOLWERK: Yeah, uh. (pause) Let me think about that.
I mean, my impression--and this may be wrong too--but it seems to
me, if, if I have any impression of the next day, the
day, you know, during, say, until late afternoon, I have a memory
of standing around on campus. There were, there, there may not
have been a line of gatherings, but there were, uh, was that
no gatherings during the day too, in effect? I don't recall.
It seems to me that there was, may not have been
any gatherings, but there were a fair number of people standing around.
And at one point, it seems to me, some guy went
up and tried to take down the American flag, uh, or two
01:19:00or three people did and were summarily sentenced and hauled off.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, but the day(??) seemed to be kind of, you know,
a quiet period. Well, I, I, I think, like I say,
it was kind of a catharsis to see the building burn, and
I don't think anybody knew, none, none of the people that I
knew who, you know, who were trying to think of what these
two thousand people could do, however many people there were involved, I
don't know where I get that number, two thousand. None of
the, none of the people that I knew were trying to figure
out what to do with them, in their wildest dreams thought that
you could get them as a group, you know, just to tear
up the ROTC building, or burn it, or sack it, or anything.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: And so, I think that that, you know, events overtook.
(laughs) And it, the event outstripped the potential of the situation
01:20:00sort of. Um, at least that's the way I, I remember
it--
PETER: --hm--
HOLWERK: --the way it seems to me now.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: But that night, it was, as I guess you know, a
huge gathering of people. Well, comparatively huge on the grounds of
the, uh--
PETER: --seminary--
HOLWERK: --seminary. And exactly how that came about, I do not
recall. It seems to me that, I know that the word
was put out that the seminary had said it was okay.
And there were National Guardsman all over the place. You know,
they were all ----------(??).
UNKNOWN: Would you all like some tea or ice water ----------(??)----------?
HOLWERK: That's all right.
PETER: While we're on the subject, I would imagine, unless you just--
[Pause in recording.]
HOLWERK: Now, that was an interesting, that was an interesting thing.
01:21:00That was much more like a panty raid than the first night.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: For one thing there's nothing to do. You know, uh,
the most, it was kind of interesting, there were a lot of
interesting features to it. There was an entertaining feature when, when
four U.K. students skipped across Limestone Street, set foot literally on the
edge of university campus, and a squad of, uh, National Guardsmen appeared
out of one of these hollows down by the lower part of
the, uh, commerce building.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: And as they came running up the thing, ----------(??)---------- the lead
guy fell down. Well, of course, you know, that heightened, ----------(??)
high hilarity. Uh, there was, there were some speeches over there.
01:22:00One of which was delivered by the guy whose name escapes
me, who was a captain, had been the captain of the U.K.
football team, which I thought was, you know, it was just an
interesting, well, suggested that there was a lot of feeling.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: You know--
PETER: --in support.
HOLWERK: In support, yeah, the guy said something like, "Well, you got
something good going here," and he was trying to urge people to
keep cool. Uh, it was a pointless urge-, urging because there
was not, not much danger of anything happening. There were, uh,
the main cops who were in evidence over there were the narcotics
agents, you know. Uh, a lot of people smoking marijuana and,
and laying around. And, uh, it was a nice night, you
know.
PETER: People spent the night?
HOLWERK: Yeah, I spent the night; a lot of people spent the
night.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: Maybe four or five hundred people spent the night.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: And then that seemed pretty much, that seemed pretty much to
01:23:00do it, you know, that was, that was it. There was,
well--
PETER: --thanks a lot--
HOLWERK: --finals were over, you know. Uh, people went home.
A lot of the finals got cancelled.
PETER: The next night, May 6, there was apparently another meeting in
front of Buell that ended with a rush of police. I'm
very vague on this. Do you happen to know anything about
that?
HOLWERK: I don't believe that I was there.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, by this time, I had, I had sort of concluded
that the only thing that was likely to happen from hanging around
over there was that somebody was going to get their head busted,
you know, and, and someone did get tear-gassed.
01:24:00
PETER: There was, uh, apparently I think on the sixth some tear
gas in front of the, uh, Student Center patio.
HOLWERK: On the sixth? Okay, well I was, I was at
that, because I did get tear-gassed.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: But if that was the only time the tear gas was
out, than I guess it was. I remember seeing these guys
come out with this, you know, generator and--
PETER: --backpacks.
HOLWERK: Yeah, and start running the tear gas out. And I,
I remember getting gassed. But I don't remember anything about, but
that was the rush, yeah, that I was there for that.
I remember the effect of that was that everybody just kind of
went(??) running off, you know, there's nothing else to do--
PETER: --right--
HOLWERK: -- with(??) tear gas ----------(??). So, I guess I was
there but it didn't, I don't remember any details about it whatsoever.
PETER: Okay, uh, back to the j-board, which kind of dragged on
01:25:00over the summer apparently, uh. Do you want just briefly tell
me how that was called? What it was doing? Uh,
uh, who it dealt with, and then your involvement with it--
HOLWERK: --well, yeah--
PETER: --briefly--
HOLWERK: --yeah, okay--
PETER: --I'm sorry, go ahead.
HOLWERK: The, the, the judicial board was, uh, the way the university,
what the university set up to deal with student disciplinary problems.
Um, it was appointed basically by the vice president, I think by
the vice president over student affairs. And sometime after all this,
I got a letter or a packet of information saying I'd been
charged and under university's code of conduct. I didn't know quite
what to do because I thought I was pretty much through being
a student. On the other hand, I didn't think I'd done
anything that, that they could get me for. On the one
01:26:00hand, I thought, Well, if they want to throw me out of
U.K., that's fine, but I'm not gonna go back. On the
other hand, I thought, You know, I'm not gonna let a Jack
Hall do this to me. And that, that won out in
the end. And I, uh, I had, I had a fair
amount of personal antipathy for Jack Hall.
PETER: A lot of people did, uh--
HOLWERK: --one being a priest--
PETER: --apparently. Why was that? A little sidelight(??). I,
I get a lot of, uh, Jack Hall sentiment. Do you
recall any Jack Hall stories? Uh.
HOLWERK: Well, Jack Hall was, Jack Hall was a fool to start
with. He worked himself up from being a floor counselor at,
at, um, I mean a floor counselor in the dorms to being,
to being a students(??). Um, partly just, part of it had,
01:27:00had to do with his appearance. He used to wear slicked-back
hair, aviator sunglasses, and drive a ----------(??) Cadillac with enormous fins on
backwards, which I thought made him look so ridiculous that he became
an object of ridicule. But, um, well, Jack Hall has a
somewhat limited view of civil liberties in general. Uh, you know,
I, I take kind of a somewhat expanded view, you know, I
wanted to let people do almost anything they want to do short
of killing someone. Jack's military background that fit in that; he's
a former Air Force pilot and a, uh, collector of model airplanes.
Uh, he has a lot of them in his home.
If you call him up, he'll show them to you sometime.
Anyway, uh, let's, let's just say that Jack Hall was definitely the
wrong person at, at the wrong time, you know. He had
01:28:00no chance of getting, he, you know, his idea, he was one
of those people that I say thought that the university was seriously
being threatened, and that the students, the student threat should be met
with force. Uh, well, I went in to see Jack, and
he said I was charged with obscene misbehavior.
PETER: This was in reference to your, to your--
HOLWERK: --speech--
PETER: --comment about Buell(??)--
HOLWERK: --yeah--
PETER: --right.
HOLWERK: So I said, you know, so, you know, "What does that
mean? What do, what do you, what did I do?"
He said, "Well, you know, I'm not gonna tell you that information."
I said, "Well, what am I supposed to do, Jack?"
And he said, "Well, you know, if you, if you want, I'll,
you can take whatever discipline I give, or you can go before
the judicial board." And I said, "Well, what, what,"--no, I think
that he wouldn't, that I, that the charge--well, I don't know.
He either wouldn't give me the charge or wouldn't tell me the
01:29:00information or something. And I said, "Well, that's absurd. You
know, I'll see you at the judicial board." So I went.
And Bob Siedler(??), a law professor, civil liberties lawyer, I was
one of the first people tried. Um, I think that was
I lived in town, I was here, and it was easy for
me to come over. And the trial was one of the
most peculiar things I've ever gone through. Trial isn't the right
word: proceeding. Uh, the university had really prepared for it.
Um, and I think they were confident that the, that students on
the judicial board would come, you know, come off as clean, upstanding,
American citizens and give all these radicals the thumping they deserved.
[Pause in recording.]
HOLWERK: Well, it might've(??), you know, it might've happened. Um, except
01:30:00that, like in my, in my case these people, um, well, they,
they got several people up to testify to what I had said.
Uh, well, they asked me first what I had said.
And I said, "Well, I said, I got carried away, and I
said, referred to the ROTC building as 'That goddamn fucking building,' that's
what I said. I don't think that's particularly obscene, and I
don't think that constitutes any kind of misbehavior." So then they,
I don't know whether it was before or after I spoke, they
got a U.K. cop up. And he, and they said to
him, "What did he say?" And the guy said, "Well, he
said, 'That fucking building,' and,"--no, he said, "I don't want to say."
Exactly what he said, and Siedler(??) wasn't having it, and he
said, "No, you're not gonna ----------(??)." He said, "Well, I can't
01:31:00say it in front of these ladies on the judicial board."
Well, they finally made him say it. The guy said, "He
said, 'That, that fucking building.'" And then he just went berserk.
He said, "And he said fuck this! Fuck that!
Fuck the university! And fuck the U.S.A!" You know, I
don't know whether the guy had never said the word "fuck" in
mixed company or what, but it was just like he was going
nuts. And the whole place erupted. You know, the judicial
board was stifling giggles, and this guy was blushing furiously, sweating.
And so, I felt fairly confident after that, you know, and Siedler(??)
had this defense in which he established that I had written all
these editorials about the war, and I felt strongly about it.
Uh, during the, uh, he thought that this case was important because
he, he could establish with this some precedents with the other things
01:32:00on the board.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, and that, you know, I had said this. And,
uh, you know, it was simply a demonstration of this, you know,
my strength of feeling about the war and so forth and so
on. Well, the judicial board went out. They came back.
And they called me in, they said, well, they acquitted me.
I said, "Well, that's terrific and I appreciate it a lot."
We went back and they said, "You know, we found Mr.
Holwerk innocent of obscene misbehavior," and I said, "Well, ----------(??)." The
students all cheered and--
[Pause in recording.]
HOLWERK: --Ken Brandenburg(??) and Jack Hall left the room as I left.
And I didn't, I never saw this, but I was told
that, that, uh, Ken Brandenburg was seen weeping with Jack Hall comforting
him. That, that may have just been told to me to
make me happy. It did make me happy. I liked
01:33:00the idea. But, um, and that was it. You know,
that was the end. I didn't pay attention to the rest
of them; I didn't have much interest in the rest of them.
PETER: Um-hm. How many, how many others were there?
HOLWERK: I don't know.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: I had the impression that there were a lot. Well,
not a lot; I mean thirty or forty. But I don't
really know. There were a number of people that just took
some discipline. Like the guy, I think that the guy who
tried to take the flag down just took some discipline. They
threw Mason Taylor out of school. Um.
PETER: Do you remember what, if, if, if the person were to
take the discipline, do you remember what the standard?
HOLWERK: I don't think there was a standard thing. I never
knew, because, as I say, I didn't, I didn't go to school
anymore after that.
PETER: Right.
HOLWERK: So, I guess I never really heard.
PETER: Right, right. Um, Dave Walls, I think gave me your
01:34:00name originally. He, uh, he mentioned that a lot of you
moved to the, uh, uh, a coop for a while.
HOLWERK: Yeah, I never lived there.
PETER: You never lived there? Apparently this, uh, on Mentelle Park?
HOLWERK: Mentelle Park. 24(??) Mentelle Park.
PETER: Um-hm. Um, can you tell me a little bit about
that?
HOLWERK: Well, I got to know those people after I had been--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --uh, after all this had happened. Uh, and basically, the
coop had started; collective as they called it, uh, was started by
graduate students in the sociology department. And they, well, my main
working with them was we bought two very old A. B. Dick
printing presses in that, in the summer following the ROTC building thing,
01:35:00and we restored them. And I, I, the idea was that,
uh, when the next great student upheaval came at U.K. in the
fall, presumably, which never occurred.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Uh, we would be set to pamphleteer. And we did
put out some kind of "Welcome to U.K.," some weird student guide.
But there was, it was, there was a lot of discussion
of the Marxist ideology, various kinds in this, in this, uh, coop.
Um, let's see, I'm trying to think who else, who else
was in that and what happened to them. Well, Dave Wall
was in that. Uh, Mason Taylor was in there. A
guy named Dick ----------(??) and his wife Fran, and ----------(??) had been
in kind of an organizer in early antiwar stuff. When I
say that, when I said that, talked about discussions, uh, while that
01:36:00march was going on, he might've been in that, I don't know.
He was, he's, he's the kind of person that probably would've
been. Uh, a guy named Peter Mitchell--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --uh, who is now a lawyer with the, his wife, Susan,
or his girlfriend at that time. Um, Scott Wendelsdorf(??) and his
wife. Scott Wendelsdorf(??) had been a, he was later a student
government president. His wife is now Margaret Roache(??) who is, you
may read about from time to time trying to organize the U.K.
workers.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, a couple other people.
PETER: Okay. One more question.
HOLWERK: Sure.
PETER: What do you think happened to, uh, very broad, what do
01:37:00you think happened to the movement, if you want to call it
that, say, at U.K., nationally?
HOLWERK: What do I think happened to it at U.K.? Nothing
because I don't think it existed. Um.
PETER: At its best?
HOLWERK: Well, it's hard to tell what its best was. You
know, I mean, it, it existed sort of in the same way
a, a March snowstorm does. You know, it's, it's, it had
a lot of impact immediately, but it didn't last. Um, it
01:38:00reached its height at U.K. at the very time it was dying
elsewhere. Well, reached its, it reached its height at U.K. at
the same time it reached its height everywhere else. You know,
the Kent State and the Cambodian invasion demonstrations really were the, the
largest, you know, outpouring of, manifestation of student unrest in the whole
Vietnam War thing. Um, several things happened. One was, uh,
that they stopped drafting people. You know, they didn't draft as
many. They were just, they finally(??) stopped. And that, that
did it. You know, that, that took away the immediacy.
Another thing that happened was the economy went to hell in 1971.
01:39:00You know, that had a lot to do with it.
Um, I think, nationally at any rate, students didn't have, didn't have
as much money. I think just ending the draft shot the
movement. You know, you're not drafting students; students can go back
to, you know, the real world ceases to impinge on the student
world. As far as at U.K., I really don't think, I
guess I really don't think anything happened to it at U.K. because
it didn't exist.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: There was some, you know, there was a, there was a
reaction. But the reaction was so amorphous. I mean, what
form the May demonstrations at U.K. had was a form which was
copied from, you know, things that people had either done before or
seen before. And there was no--
01:40:00
[Pause in recording.]
HOLWERK: --that's, that's about all the things I can see there.
PETER: Okay. Terrific. Anything else I've, uh, drummed up you
want on the record?
HOLWERK: Let me think about that for a second.
PETER: Okay.
HOLWERK: Um.
PETER: Okay.
HOLWERK: I'm gonna have a drink of water; see if I can
think of anything worth saying. Well, yes, just, just sort of,
of a last impression about the whole thing. Um. Students
01:41:00acted--I didn't come out of there with any great opinion of the
U.K. student body, but I didn't go into it with any great
opinion of the U.K. student body. Um, students acted like students,
you know. Um, they, they didn't know, there wasn't a whole
lot of power up for grabs, and they didn't know what to
do with it if they could've gotten it.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: They couldn't have gotten it anyway. Um.
[Pause in recording.]
HOLWERK: But the university administration acted like fools. You know, they,
I mean they, they, they really, they really and truly did.
01:42:00Um, they caved in to Louie Nunn on the business of the
ROTC. On the business of the National Guard. I mean,
----------(??) they didn't have to do. Um, you know, the things
were, students were leaving. And students, you know, how it is
at finals at U.K., there're a lot of students that clear out
on the first day of finals. And more students left every
day. Um, the burning of the ROTC building really was a,
was a climax of the thing, and after that it was, you
know, there was some momentum going, but the momentum just lagged(??), you
know. You couldn't get much built up, and the more, with
more students leaving every day, the whole thing would have calmed down.
It wasn't like a school where you would have had a
01:43:00month of school left, you know, a lot of places closed and
sent students home.
PETER: That always struck me. I, I don't know the circumstances
involved, but why didn't Nixon wait a couple more days? He
could've saved himself. Uh, I don't know if U.K. was on
the national, uh, if that was the situation, finals week.
HOLWERK: No, see, U.K., you know, gets out earlier than most--
PETER: --um-hm--
HOLWERK: --classes(??). So, really were, I don't know why Nixon did
what he did, I don't know why the U.K. administration did what
they did either.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Um, you know, I, I suspected they ended up feeling that
they had done a bang-up job. Met force with force, you
know, which, which only suggests to me how divorced from reality their,
their views are. Or I don't know what their views are
01:44:00at this point. Um.
PETER: What did you get out of it? Was there a
personal transition? Was it a key point in your life?
HOLWERK: No, see, it came at a point in my life where
I had, I had only managed to, to get myself in a
situation where I probably wasn't gonna be drafted. And I had
also managed to get--
PETER: --how so?
HOLWERK: Um, I had a nervous breakdown in front of my draft
board, uh, during a hearing for a CO. And I, I
figured that that would get me drafted, but apparently my draft board
decided that, you know, we don't want to bother with him, and
they gave me some classification I've never heard of, like 2-N or
something, something like, uh, "Not subject to call at this time." And
I just kept it for, well, ----------(??). And then when they
had the lottery, and I had drawn 291 or something, and I
01:45:00said, "I was out." Um, and I was through at U.K.
Um, I'd, I hadn't graduated, and I had all my work
done, but I didn't get a degree until two years ago when
I just went over and said, "How about giving it to me?"
And they said, "Okay, here it is." It came in
the mail a month later. Um, you know, I didn't really
get anything out of, if I got anything out of it at
all, it came in that, well, I think the best, the thing
I got out of it most that I, that stayed with me
longest is simply beating that idiot rap with the judicial board.
You know, that, that, that was the only positive thing, the most
positive thing that could've suggested to me that at the core of
the whole thing, the U.K. student body was smarter--God forbid--than the administration.
01:46:00Um, so, I think that still may be the case, although
I having taught over there a couple of years ago I'm not
sure. I think it may be a dead heat. But,
you know, the, the fact that they, that they didn't do anything
with me, and that they were fairly lenient with all those students
suggested to me that, um, you know, that there was some measure
of sense in the world. You know, beyond that, man, I
just didn't, you know, it was hard to see a whole lot.
It was exciting, you know. I mean, I wouldn't, you
know, I sort of think every, it would be nice if every
college senior could arrange to have an experience like it, you know,
but I don't know what the long-range value of it is.
01:47:00You know, you, you get yourself in a tense situation, it lets
you, it lets you see yourself in a tense situation and lays,
and lays it out fairly clearly what the choices are, you know,
if you're gonna think about, uh, any kind of either revolutionary activity
or hard-core agitation activity. Lets you know, you know, let me
know that, uh, something I already knew, that I was singularly ill
suited for any kind of thing like that, and also that students
as a class of people are singularly ill suited for anything like
that. And, um.
PETER: I've got to ask you why.
HOLWERK: What?
PETER: Why?
HOLWERK: Why are students singularly ill suited?
PETER: Ill suited for revolutionary activity?
HOLWERK: Um. Well, first of all because the university, any university
01:48:00environment is so removed from the real world. Okay? Second
because the experience of being a student, unlike the experience of being,
uh, an autoworker, or a, um, teacher, or even a hobo, you
know, is transitory. You can only go through it for so
long. Um, you can only remain a student for so long.
There are people who can remain students forever, but there's no
likelihood that they will really become any kind of revolutionary. And
01:49:00the experience as a student, experience as a student radical doesn't translate
very well into experience as a, as any other kind of political
radical. Um, at least not around here, and I, I think
in general it doesn't, you know. Um, it, you know, when
you're outside the university, you have to find, if you, by simply
being at a university, you become a member of this class without
doing anything. It means that you have nothing at, at, in
these demonstrations you had a group of people, many of whom had
absolutely nothing in common. Okay. And who had no, who
01:50:00had few long-term interests in common, except maybe not getting drafted, um,
or not wanting their boyfriends to get drafted. And you can't
maintain anything in that situation. You know, you can't, you can't
maintain a long-term movement if you don't have long-term interests. You
can't maintain a long-term organization if a fourth of it graduates every
year. Um, you can't maintain, if your leadership is in graduate
school, eventually you have, you know, you have to chose between your
leadership and maybe(??) between leaving the thing and getting your thesis done.
And, you know, all those things combine to suggest that it,
that the university community can be singularly ill suited for building any
01:51:00kind of students or ill suited for building any kind of lasting
organization. They, they're singularly well suited for demonstrations, you know, you
know, uh, marches. But you just can't maintain it, because you,
you just have, you know, four years is not very long really
for, for the life of a political organization. And in four
years, the whole membership, much less the leadership in a student organization,
turns over, you know. Well, the organization at that point, the
continuity organization is in name only. You know, that organization has
nothing. They have ideals in common but that's all. Also,
there's no, students have no bargaining chips. You don't have anything,
01:52:00really the only, the only thing you have to bargain with is,
as a student, is being unruly, you know, in some way or
another, being uncooperative, being destructive, something like that. You know, when
we tried, tried to figure out, you know, we're sitting over there,
tried to figure out, okay, what could we do that would make
the university say, "We'll get rid of ROTC?" That was the,
you know, if you try, we tried those kinds of things we
tried to think about, you know, in these brief, in a, in
a very brief span of time. What can we gain?
What, what can we do to make it happen? Well, we
can get the RO-, get the university to get rid of ROTC.
How could we do that? There's no practical way.
01:53:00Um, the university gets money from the government to have ROTC.
You know, what are we gonna do? Say, "We're going to
stop giving the university money?" You know, we only give them,
you know, tuition, and hell, they want to throw most of us
out of school anyway. You know, so that, um, how, you
know, what else could you do? Well, you could get a
lot of people to, you could work with the faculty to get
them to vote down ROTC. The U.K. faculty, that wasn't reasonable.
The U.K. faculty is very conservative. Still is. ----------(??)
ag. school, engineering school, people like. Anyway, you know, that, that,
that was the kind, that's what I mean, and it was an
educational situation in that extent to me.
PETER: Um-hm.
HOLWERK: Because it showed, may not have been to other people, but
to me, it put it, put into a real context theoretical questions,
01:54:00you know, moral judgment, the university should get rid of ROTC.
I still think the university should get rid of ROTC. And
likelihood that, there's no likelihood that it will happen, you know.
To me ROTC is incompatible with the university. But, um, if
the leadership of the university doesn't think so, and if, you know,
there are hundreds of U.K. alum, alumni who think that it is,
well, that was, that was, it was educational to me in that
way. It was also educational to me because I realized that,
that I'd been giving a lot of thought to something that really
I didn't give a diddly shit about, you know. In a
way, when it was all over, I realized, you know, I had
01:55:00gotten more involved in U.K., and, and let the institution take up
a bigger piece of my, of my consciousness than it really deserved
or that I meant for it to. Um, demonstrated against, you
demonstrated against ROTC because you were a student. It was the
easiest thing, it was the main thing at hand, you know, but
I knew those jerks in ROTC, and the worst you could say
about them was that if they graduated and got to be first
lieutenants, they had a 70 percent chance of getting killed if they
went to Vietnam, you know, because it was, they ate first lieutenants
or second lieutenants up over there just like they were going out
of style. And, you know, it's hard, it's hard to feel,
you feel some anger toward the, the teachers maybe, you know, although
01:56:00in the Army the people they sent to teach ROTC, you know,
the people that they wouldn't dare send out in the field.
And, uh, I mean, anyway, and at the end, you know, I
just, I felt like I had had it, you know. And
if the university wanted to let Jack Hall run something, you know,
they could let Jack Hall run something. Um, and they did,
you know, they, he's still running things in the state. Um,
but I, I think I had, I think that I had just
outgrown, you know, the notion, that notion at that time, you know,
there's a limited amount of stuff you can hope. It, it
may put an end to the limited hopes for accomplishment in the,
in those circumstances, limited hopes for effecting any kind of a social
change. And in, from there, and also then the, the difficulty
01:57:00of effecting it otherwise. That may have been a bad effect
of the thing, but it may have made the, made it seem
more difficult than it really is in the real world. Because
it's never impossible. You know, you look at what, some things
happened at U.K. now in, in that period of time we're talking
about. U.K.'s, U.K. got a lot more liberal in some ways.
Women's hours for instance, you know, when I started at U.K.,
women's hours were 10:30 on weekdays. I don't think they have
any hours now. Um, you know, this, the student movement sort
of did things like that. Um, they don't even dream of
throwing a student out of school for smoking marijuana now. You
know, um. That sort of thing. But, um, those were,
01:58:00those were changes in the broader culture. You know, U.K. just
responded, you know, students were responding to changes in the broader culture,
and U.K., and Eastern did too, you know. Morehead did, Pikeville
College did, for Christ's sake, you know, so you can't say that
the student movement really had anything to do with that. Well,
I don't know if that's--
PETER: --that's great. Terrific. I thank you for your time.
HOLWERK: Sure.
[End of interview.]
