Cornell '69, 50 Years Later

I was a senior government major at Cornell University in the spring of 1969, when the campus was in turmoil after an armed takeover of the student union building by eighty members of the campus's Afro-American society.

This site is a discussion forum for participants and observers of those events. It was launched at the 40th anniversary of those events, and continues now with the 50th.

To contribute your thoughts and reflections, click on the "Comment" tab at the end of the "Remembering 1969" post or any of the other posts.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Frank Borman, Carl Sagan and SDS at Cornell 1969. Information request.



I received the following interesting query from researcher Alan Andres regarding the visit of astronaut Frank Borman to Cornell's campus in the spring of 1969.  If you have any leads on this, please contact him, or leave a message here.

I am trying to research a visit to Cornell in the spring of 1969 by astronaut Frank Borman and his wife Susan. This followed shortly after the flight of Apollo 8, but I'm not certain of the date and whether it happened before or after the Willard Straight Hall incident. Borman conducted a series of visits to university campuses that spring including Notre Dame and Columbia, and encountered protests and unrest at a number of them. While at Cornell Borman was hosted at the home of Carl Sagan where he was confronted by members of the SDS who asked Borman about war crimes in Vietnam, a subject Borman said he felt unable to address in his capacity as an Air Force Colonel in NASA's astronaut office. His account of the Cornell incident appears on pages 235-236 of his 1988 autobiography Countdown. There is no mention of his visit in the Cornell Daily Sun that I can find. In the book, Borman mentions that Sagan was an advisor to the SDS, however this is not something that I can find documented elsewhere. Can anyone shed light on this incident, and ideally, does anyone have images from Borman's Cornell visit?

You can contact Alan Andres at 'alan' to be found at 'wmedia.com'