The Night They Burned Old Main Down

    Richard Gutierrez was buried last Tuesday morning with Military Honors. A big crowd of family and friends gathered in the fog at Fresno Memorial Gardens. The War in Vietnam broke up his healthy young body all those years ago and he received a 100% disability, but it took this long for the wounds and the cancer to finally call him home. Despite a cane and limp and obvious pain, he managed a full career at the U.S. Postal Service after Vietnam.

He graduated from high school the same year as I did, 1966. Many were called to serve. He went gallantly when the U.S. Marine Corps invited him into the chaos. I served later, but never in Vietnam. We all had chums who went off to the highlands and the jungles, never to find their way out. Putting Richard Gutierrez in the ground with a flag over his casket and a purple heart pinned to his chest while the twenty-four clear notes of Taps settled on our hearts will not settle things. For years and years he sat in the pew behind us at 9:30 Mass, dividing his faith between St. Anthony of Padua and New Covenant Church. Richard was a good man. He helped us recall what was honest and worthwhile and loyal about that era.

I still remember young faces twisted in anger and hate as the war wrenched and ripped and ruined our nation. Those were heady days with much more oxygen in the air than necessary and it fueled young passions to the point of exhaustion. There were bombings. Marches and shouting and sit-ins and vandalism, vulgarism, murder.   Things burned.

Colorado State University played its part and joined about 450 other colleges in shutting down while genuine leaders, activists, blowhards and hippies jockeyed for advantage. Ft. Collins was a sleepy little college town during the Vietnam Era. All of the real action was far away in the Big Time Universities — Columbia, Berkeley, Michigan, U-Mass. Those kids knew how to kick up a protest.

The weeks after four Kent State University students were gunned down were especially tense, and that was when somebody lit the tinderbox known as Old Main on fire. It was the night of May 8^th, 1970. A big rally and demonstration across campus was just winding down when a janitor noticed smoke coming from the basement of the 92-year-old structure.   The fire engines arrived within minutes but there was no saving the beloved old building with its creaky floors, stifling auditorium, freezing basement classrooms, windows stuck for 40 years, ice caked entry steps from January through April, and echoes of Freshman lectures on every subject from Geology 101 to Sociology 202.

We watched Old Main burn to the ground, trading breathless rumors and theories and rock-solid hunches. No one was ever charged, although investigators were certain it was arson.   And many of us were pretty sure who did it.

It’s a long road from the Days of Rage to what happened the night of February 3 on the Berkeley campus. Or is it? Was Vietnam a righteous war? Damned if I know. I was just a dumb kid trying hard not to go. What I DO know is that it stained America’s karma for a very long time. It’s still touching our lives as a fresh generation learns the jeers and taunts that inflamed so effectively half a century ago.

The proximate cause at the University of California, Berkeley was a right wing firebrand brought to campus by fools who thought Free Speech meant just that. After forcing Milo Yiannopoulos to cancel his speech, a large crowd moved off the campus and rampaged down Telegraph Avenue burning, smashing, disrupting, then on to Durant Avenue, north on Shattuck and over to Bancroft Way for more of the same.

Roughly 150 people in the mob were dressed all in black. They acted (up) in unison. They were professionals. We can expect more of the same in the future, because their hate is not fueled by an unpopular war, but by a man and movement they do not approve. There is something in the air that is unsettling and familiar – it’s as if all the old bitterness and hate has been waiting to return.

“A snarling press corps is turning ravenous.” Observed Mike Allen in Axios on February 16^th.   Forty-seven years after Old Main burned on the campus of Colorado State University, there is smoke all over America. I am glad that Richard Gutierrez is home from his war and will not see the new one.