"People Were Ready to Die That Day"

Dale Corson, the Cornell official who helped quell the 1969 protest, and then was named president of the university, died in April, at the age of 97. In the obituary appearing in the New York Times on April 6, Homer Meade, one of the occupiers of Willard Straight Hall, said Dr. Corson had an acute understanding of "how close we were to a Kent State." "He knew a lot of us in that building, and he understood that people were ready to die that day," said Meade.

Homer "Skip" Meade, Before and After Cornell

Homer "Skip" Meade was one of the students who occupied the Straight in 1969, and appears in some of the dramatic photos of the group exiting the building, including the cover of Newsweek.

Sharon Matchett, who knew Homer in elementary school in New Jersey, offers her fond memories of him from those days in a "comment" buried deep in this blog, so I thought I should bring it closer to the fore! You can link to it here.

I Was There, But I Didn't Know Much

In the spring of 1969, I was wrapping up my senior year at Cornell and looking ahead excitedly to the summer and fall. I had been accepted for graduate work in international studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies—in Bologna, Italy!-- and I had an interesting summer job lined up with a think tank in my hometown of McLean, Virginia. So when the Straight takeover happened that April, I was only marginally engaged and involved. Mentally, I was mostly out of Ithaca already.

So when I recently read Donald Downs’s history of those events—Cornell ’69—I was transfixed and stunned to find out how much was swirling around me in those days; how potentially dangerous the situation was; and how little I knew about all this at the time. I was, after all, a senior government major, and the Department of Government was centrally and critically involved in the faculty deliberations and negotiations at the time. Downs’ mesmerizing narrative is packed full of accounts of people who I had classes with: Walter LaFeber, Clinton Rossiter, Eldon Kenworthy, Walter Berns, Allan Bloom, Paul Marantz, and Andrew Hacker. Every one of these people had shaped me and my view of the world, and set me on the course of my future profession. Yet I was oblivious to almost everything they did and said that spring. Plus, two guys who were in my freshman dorm—Tom Jones and Skip Meade, were central actors on the student side of the drama.

Until I read Cornell ’69, I did not realize how bitterly torn was the Cornell faculty, and how much tension there was between many of the faculty and President James Perkins. I also did not know at the time—or maybe I just forgot—the irony of Perkins’s fate, since he was instrumental in integrating Cornell, and expanding the number of African-American students. I did not know that spring how radicalized and close to violence the whole situation was. In a radio interview in the midst of the crisis, AAS leader Tom Jones said, “before this is over James Perkins, Allan Sindler and Clinton Rossiter are going to die in the gutter like dogs.” How could I not have known about THIS? Maybe I knew at the time, but forgot? But how could one forget such a thing?

And I did not know that when students were assembled in Barton Hall, ready to march on another university building, there were several hundred sheriff’s deputies, many of them recruited from little Upstate towns, assembled in the parking lot at Woolworths downtown. They were armed and ready to confront the students. A veteran Ithaca Police Department officer later said that “young rednecks from the hills” were being deputized in the Woolworths lot that night. “They were loading their shotguns with double-0 buck and saying, ‘Tonight we’re going to get some Niggers and them Jew commies.’”

Reading all this was, for me, both chilling and disconcerting. How could I have not known these things at the time? Or, even worse, is my memory really getting that bad that I simply do not remember? I have queried friends and classmates from those days, and many of them confess to not remembering much either. So either we were all oblivious, or all getting senile!

I think, mostly, though, that it was because of the things I mentioned in my first paragraph. I was 21, graduating, on my way to graduate school and Italy. Other Cornell friends have told me that they were absorbed with final exams and papers and preparations for graduate, law and medical school.

And why did it take me so long to get around to thinking about all this, and reading about it? I left Cornell, went to Italy, met my wife there, got married, went to Indiana for a Ph.D,, had kids, and started a career. I was busy. This year I retired, and have time to think about these things. Time, but not the memory.

The Photo That Changed My Career

In 1969 I was a photographer for the Cornell yearbook, and on the day the AAS students were about to emerge from Willard Straight Hall, I was waiting outside the building with my camera. I was there a long time, and eventually some friends came by and started mugging for me, asking me to take their pictures for The Cornellian. I obliged, and promptly ran out of film. Just then, Tom Jones, Skip Meade and the others emerged from the Straight, with their bandoleers and rifles. The guy next to me snapped the photo, which appeared on the cover of Newsweek. Steve Starr won a Pulitzer Prize for that photo. I gave up photography and became a college professor!