Abstract
Daniel Brustein is a physician and industrial hygienist and has lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio since 1976. In this interview, Mr. Brustein discusses his experiences as part of the anti-war movement during the 1960s. Specifically, he covers the topic of draft resistance and his involvement with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Boston-based resistance groups The Resistance and the Boston Draft Resistance Group. He was also a part of the Pentagon Protest in 1967. Mr. Brustein served almost eighteen months of a three year prison sentence for resisting the Selective Service Act. Much of the interview centers on his experience in Franklin County jail and later Ashland federal prison. The Kent State University shooting and Attica prison riot are also mentioned.
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Interviewee
Brustein, Daniel (interviewee)
Interviewer
Randt, Naomi A. (interviewer)
Project
Protest Voices
Date
7-29-2016
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
78 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Daniel Brustein interview, 29 July 2016" (2016). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 750008.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/770
Transcript
Naomi A. Randt [00:00:01] My name is [Naomi A. Randt]. It’s the 29th of July, 2016. I’m with Daniel Brustein.
Daniel Brustein [00:00:06] That’s correct.
Naomi A. Randt [00:00:07] In Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Would you please state your name for the record?
Daniel Brustein [00:00:10] Yeah, my name is Daniel Brustein.
Naomi A. Randt [00:00:12] Could you spell your last name?
Daniel Brustein [00:00:14] B as in boy, R, U, S as in Sam, T, E, I, N.
Naomi A. Randt [00:00:19] I’ll start with some basic questions. When and where were you born?
Daniel Brustein [00:00:24] I was born in New York City in April of 1950.
Naomi A. Randt [00:00:29] Did you grow up in New York City then?
Daniel Brustein [00:00:30] Yeah, we lived in New York from the time I was born until I was 13 years old. When the family moved to Columbus, Ohio.
Naomi A. Randt [00:00:38] That must have been quite the move for you.
Daniel Brustein [00:00:40] It was pretty disruptive. None of the family particularly cared for Columbus, but my dad’s business was here and I was just entering high school, so it was a complete change of friends and, and atmosphere. And as I say, it was pretty disruptive.
Naomi A. Randt [00:01:01] Did you have any siblings?
Daniel Brustein [00:01:03] I had a younger brother and a younger sister, and we all loved Columbus so much that when I graduated high school, I immediately left for college. When my sister finished her junior year in high school, she moved to Israel. And when my brother graduated, he immediately left for college and took two or three months. Later, my parents moved to Cleveland. [laughs]
Naomi A. Randt [00:01:24] That’s quite the whirlwind tour.
Daniel Brustein [00:01:26] Yeah.
Naomi A. Randt [00:01:27] What did your parents do?
Daniel Brustein [00:01:29] My mom was mostly a homemaker when I was growing up. She had worked as a bookkeeper earlier and stopped working outside the house when I was born. While we lived in Columbus, she went back to work, first doing retail sales and then eventually going back to bookkeeping. My dad, when I was growing up, was a shipping clerk in a women’s garment factory in New York. And they discovered that he was a pretty personable guy. And eventually he started doing a few days a week in the sales room. And then he started traveling in a Midwest territory, and eventually he ended up selling women’s blouses at wholesale in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia, which is why we moved to Columbus.
Naomi A. Randt [00:02:18] And what was your childhood like?
Daniel Brustein [00:02:21] Ooh. Do you want to be more specific? I mean, I can babble, but-
Naomi A. Randt [00:02:27] Maybe a little bit about your time in New York City versus Columbus?
Daniel Brustein [00:02:29] Okay. Yeah. I was born in the Bronx, and we moved into the house that I. The apartment that I remember growing up in when I was 18 months old. So although I don’t remember the neighborhood that we first grew up in, my aunt and several friends still lived there, and that was in the central east Bronx. We moved to an area that we always called the West Bronx, but it’s now called Morris Heights, and since it’s south of Fordham, it’s also called the South Bronx. When I was there, it was primarily Jewish and some Italian. And in the area that drew folks to our public school and junior high school, there was a fairly large Black population and some Hispanics. I grew up across the street. I grew up near Tremont, University Avenue, across the street from a junior high school, which also had a kindergarten in it. So for my first year of public school, I actually walked across the street to go to school. For the next six years, I guess I walked almost two miles to another public school that was an elementary school. And what I remember was, in school, when I was growing up in New York, students were rated essentially in the school you were in, in the grade you were in, you were rated from one to whatever the last number of students was. And then they put the first 30 in the first class, the next 30 in the next class. So if you were in 512, you knew that you were at the bottom in that school. And having never been in 512, I don’t know what effect that might have had on kids, but having been in the top crew, I can tell you that we got an excellent education. The teachers were superb, and the teaching was great. And that was both in public school and in junior high school. There were four of us in our second grade class who skipped the third grade. That was a fairly standard sort of thing, but there was no formal program about it. That is, the second grade teacher could name those kids who, almost always women, she thought could afford to skip the third grade. And then you just went to the fourth grade, which meant I arrived without knowing how to write in script and without having certain other basic skills. The teachers in the fourth grade were used to having a handful of students in their class like that, and so they worked with us. And, you know, the reason you did that was because the teachers thought you could do it. We all did fine. At the school system was divided so that you went to junior high school for 7th, 8th, and 9th grade. And there was another program where you could take the 8th and 9th grade together. And that was done with a full classroom of students. The school that I went to, I believe the first three classes, about 100 students were in that program, which was called the seven eight special progress program. So I was in the group that was in the chorale. There was another group that did orchestra music, and another that did visual arts, I believe. I wasn’t really great at chorale. Me and Dave Greenberg, one of the other kids who’d been with me, since we skipped the third grade, Mrs. Morris would reach out, and every once in a while I’d say, Dan, when I wave at you, you and David just mouth the words. [laughs] But again, the teaching was excellent.
Naomi A. Randt [00:06:05] Was the junior high then a private school, or was that-?
Daniel Brustein [00:06:07] No, the junior high school was a public school, 82. This was one that was directly across from the apartment that I grew up in. And we had 1700 students from as far away as the South Bronx and northern Manhattan. Most were closer in, like I was, but we had kids from all over, from a fairly wide range of New York, but it was geographically determined.
Naomi A. Randt [00:06:34] Was there a lot of interaction between the different classrooms in the same grade level?
Daniel Brustein [00:06:39] Not a whole lot. That is, you spent your whole day in a classroom with one teacher. No, that’s not true. You spent a whole day moving with your whole class from one classroom to different teachers. So all 30 kids who were in my homeroom were also in my same science class, same chorale class, same social studies class. We had a huge schoolyard, and there was interaction there. And actually, I had friends in both the- I pretty good friends in the orchestral music group and some in the visual arts group and some who were in the special progress group but not combining classes. If you were younger, they wouldn’t do that. So one of the four folks who I skipped the third grade with was also in an advanced program, but he took 7th, 8th, and 9th grade separately. And I kept in touch with Peter through junior high school until I left, because at the end of junior high school, he still had another year to go and I moved to Columbus.
Naomi A. Randt [00:07:47] How did you feel about having to move to Columbus?
Daniel Brustein [00:07:49] I hated it. I didn’t have a- I thought it would be an adventure when we set out to do it, although I was not real happy about leaving my friends, and I found that the social situation in Columbus was very different from New York. One major thing was many people in many of the kids I knew in Columbus during my sophomore year in high school began to drive, and I couldn’t because I was two years younger than they were. And that was a big part of the social life. But it’s also a very big move from, from a dense urban community to a suburb. And Columbus is far more conservative town than, politically conservative than New York, certainly than the areas the community in New York that I was part of.
Naomi A. Randt [00:08:46] What was your high school experience like in Columbus?
Daniel Brustein [00:08:54] I made several friends. I did well in high school, and I always felt like I was on the outside. I was anxious to finish up and get out, and my first assumption was that I assumed I would think about going back to college in New York, but I’m not sure at what point I made the decision to consider something different. Although actually, during the first two summers, at the end of my sophomore year, end of my junior year, I did actually go back to New York, live with an aunt, and worked at the Jewish Community Center summer camp, where I’d been going as a camper since before I entered the first grade. And that was fun because I was pretty much on my own. My aunt treated me as an employed young adult, which was pretty good for a 14 year old, and I had been riding the New York City subways by myself since I was six or seven. So I had the run of the city and still had many friends who lived in and around New York from junior high school. So spending the summers in New York was great. By the time I was- I may be one of the very few people who can say that my parents were the ones who encouraged me to go to Antioch College, which is where I ended up going. They came home, I don’t remember, sometime in my junior year, perhaps, and said, we just went to a Shakespeare festival in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and there’s a college there we think you’d be really interested in. I don’t remember when I first visited. It’s possible that I didn’t visit until one of my acquaintances from Columbus, who was a year ahead of me, went down there and I went down to visit him. But I sure liked the campus. It was described in an article in the Post magazine or something like that, as a small slice of Greenwich village among the pig farms of southwestern Ohio, which was not a bad characterization. So I applied to Ohio State University. I applied to Columbia. I applied to a few other schools and to Antioch, and the only schools that admitted me outright, or Antioch and Ohio State. And there was no question where I was going. So I was happy to get out of Columbus and start Antioch in 1966.
Naomi A. Randt [00:11:46] Is that where you got involved in the draft resistance?
Daniel Brustein [00:11:50] No, actually, I was involved in antiwar activities starting during one of the summers that I was in New York. And I- Boy, I may or may not have attended any anti war demonstrations in Columbus. I suspect I didn’t. I suspect there weren’t any during the time that I was in high school because, remember, I graduated in ’66, but in November of ’65, I attended the second large SDS nationwide antiwar demonstration in Washington, the one where Carl Oglesby spoke. So I was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement since before graduation. Certainly during the end of my junior year and during my senior year in high school. And I continued that activity when I got to college.
Naomi A. Randt [00:12:43] What was that SDS meeting like in November 1965?
Daniel Brustein [00:12:49] Oh, well, it was- It was a large demonstration in. Well, large by those days’ standards. There were, I don’t know, maybe there were ten or 20,000 people there. Demonstration in D.C. And there were buses that came from other places to participate. I was in Columbus, and there was a. There were, I don’t know, three or four buses, I think, that went from Ohio State. And I was one of the younger folks on the bus. Most of the students were college students. I was still high school, and it was a fairly conventional Mall demonstration. There was no march. There were a batch of speeches. I don’t remember chants, but I suspect there were. I know there were signs. And as I say, Carl Oglesby gave a speech that was, that over the next couple of years became a very notable speech in the antiwar movement and on the left, because he went a lot farther than simply saying the war was violent and wrong. He made a point that the war represented- It was not a mistake. It was a conscious outcome of U.S. foreign policy. And although I know that there were other people who had thought about that until then, up until then I think that the only real tone of the antiwar movement was a pacifist and nonviolent tone. Oglesby’s tone was not violent, but it certainly was not pacifist. His critique was not a critique of war. It was a critique of the politics of this war.
Naomi A. Randt [00:14:34] What did you think of Oglesby?
Daniel Brustein [00:14:38] I was raised in a pretty conscientiously left-wing family, and these ideas were not new to me, but I recognized the fact that they hadn’t been part of the antiwar movement up until then. I thought the speech was great.
Naomi A. Randt [00:14:54] Did you end up joining the SDS?
Daniel Brustein [00:14:56] You know, I cannot find my old SDS membership card, but, yes, I formally joined SDS at Antioch for a couple of years and attended meetings there.
Naomi A. Randt [00:15:06] What was that experience like?
Daniel Brustein [00:15:08] I have absolutely no memories of it. What I do remember was that at Antioch, especially, there were many sectarian left-wing groups, SDS being the least sectarian of them. And I was interested enough to try and draw the distinctions between them, not very successfully. I could certainly recognize different styles, but in terms of actually understanding the difference in their politics, I still couldn’t really tell you. [laughs]
Naomi A. Randt [00:15:47] Do you think that was part of the problem of the left at the time, that there were so many-?
Daniel Brustein [00:15:50] No, not yet. And that is, whereas there were at Antioch and elsewhere, there were many different groups. It was not until probably after the ’68 Democratic Convention that actually began to splinter the left, but not during those first couple of years. And I also think that, whereas the eventual effect was really destructive, the type of ideological seriousness and the level of analysis that led to that was very healthy. People had different views of how the world works, and it was reflected in how they organized themselves into groups and how the groups organized others. And I think that that’s- You have to do that.
Naomi A. Randt [00:16:45] Was there a lot of that kind of organizing at Antioch?
Daniel Brustein [00:16:48] Antioch was a small place. We recognized for the most part that we were just organizing other students. There were demonstrations in Dayton, at Wright-Pat Air Force Base, and down in Cincinnati. But Antioch is a very, what, what was, and to some extent still is, a very unique place in that, when I was there, it was a five-year school with a comprehensive co-op program. So of the five years, you spent two years, maybe two years and one quarter away from campus on co-op. Some people did co-op on campus, but most did it away. And so there was. People got out into what we always call the real world and were involved in other things, so that I actually ended up doing some of my co-op in, well, some in Boston, and became active in the Boston draft resistance movement.
Naomi A. Randt [00:17:41] What was the nature of the co-op in Boston? What were you doing there?
Daniel Brustein [00:17:47] In Boston, I worked for the geology, geophysics department at MIT, and I helped to establish the reference sample of minerals that was used to analyze the rocks that came back from the moon in 1969.
Naomi A. Randt [00:18:01] What was it like to work on that project?
Daniel Brustein [00:18:05] It was interesting in the abstract. I thought I was a geology major. I ended up not doing that, but I love geology. It was interesting in the abstract in that I understood why this was important and what we were doing. It was interesting for about two or three weeks, learning the technology. But what you’re doing when you’re operating an X-ray diffractometer to establish a reference collection at my level as a technician is you sit in a really nice lab office overlooking the Charles River, and you grind up rock samples, stick them into a machine, wait two hours while the machine processes them - now it probably takes 15 minutes - pull off the paper graph - now it all just goes into a computer - and set up the next one. So it was on a day to day basis, it was really boring. On the other hand, I had the run of both Harvard and MIT campuses, where there was lots of stuff going on. And it was Boston which was a fun place for a college student in the sixties.
Naomi A. Randt [00:19:13] What were some of those things that were going on?
Daniel Brustein [00:19:15] Well, there was lots of political stuff. There was lots of cultural stuff in terms of music, speeches and that sort of thing. And there were also other odd opportunities. I actually enrolled in the amateur shooters club and learned how to use a 22 long rifle in the MIT basement where they had an indoor shooting range. So there were lots of different things. I also was a fairly serious photographer, and I would spend days walking Boston taking pictures, some of which I still have up in the wall here. They’re not bad, even in retrospect.
Naomi A. Randt [00:20:00] How long were you in Boston for?
Daniel Brustein [00:20:02] Well, several different co-ops on and off. My first co-op actually was at Cornell University, and that was the beginning of ’67. I think my second one was the end of ’67. And then I know I was there January. I was supposed to be there January, February, March of ’69. But actually by then I was already involved- By then I actually had been arrested, had been tried, had. Well, the- We can get into the chronology, but I didn’t spend all of that quarter in Boston.
Naomi A. Randt [00:20:41] How did you end up being involved in the Boston draft resistance movement?
Daniel Brustein [00:20:50] There was a guy named Lenny Heller from Berkeley who came through Antioch sometime fairly early on - I don’t remember when - and he talked about draft resistance as a political means to raise opposition to the war. And as I remember, he was quite specific about the fact that college students are privileged and that we’ve got a way out of the draft, which a lot of others don’t, but that we also have access to a critical part of the population, which is a voting middle class in terms of our parents and friends. And we needed to grab their attention. That the demonstrations we’ve had so far had not seemed to do that, but that by refusing to register for the draft and being willing to serve time in prison, we could get people’s attention. And I found that pretty compelling. In October of 1967, there was a huge antiwar demonstration in Washington D.C. Abbie Hoffman got permission to levitate the Pentagon four feet. I don’t think we quite made four feet, but there were several hundred thousand people there. And in the week, I believe, was the week before that demonstration, there was a major anti-draft, major anti-draft demonstrations all over the United States. In Boston at the Old North Church, I believe, there was a demonstration where people burned or turned in their draft cards, and I don’t remember how many did that. It was probably 50 people or so. I was still 17, but I’d already made the decision that I was not going to register for the draft. And so I filled out a little note pledging not to register for the draft, and I dropped that into the urn as it went around. And then the next weekend, I was in D.C. for that big antiwar demonstration, and I went to pretty informal meetings of the Boston Resistance. There were actually two groups in Boston at that time, the Resistance, which are those folks who were refusing to register for the draft, and the Boston Draft Resistance Group, which was counseling people in how to get deferments, including deferments as a pacifist, but also other deferments if they qualified for it. And if you’ve done it, I don’t know if you’ve done any research on this. There’s an interesting book out about the Boston Draft Resistance movement that paints the two groups as being at ideological odds and continually fighting, which is not true. They got along just fine and had a good-natured competition over ideology. For instance, in one of the Boston, in one of the newsletters, and I can’t remember which newsletter it was, it was probably the Resistance newsletter, reviewed the previous week’s touch football game, which the Resistance won because we weren’t weighed down by draft cards. [laughs] The book is by Mike Foley, and a lot of ways it’s really very good. It does a good job of laying out the chronology and events that went on. But I think that he over, as I say, I think he overemphasizes ideological differences which were there, but in, at least in Boston at that time, did not divide people.
Naomi A. Randt [00:24:34] Can you describe a little bit what those ideologies were?
Daniel Brustein [00:24:37] Well, the difference, as I’m saying, between the Resistance and the Boston Draft Resistance Group was whether you use the techniques of the draft system to avoid going to Vietnam, or whether you refuse to cooperate with the system completely as a protest against the war. And make no mistake about it, the folks in the Boston Draft Resistance Group were opposed to the war, often for the very same ideological reasons that the folks in the Resistance were opposed. In some cases, it was simply a question of tactical differences. In some cases, it was a lot more substantial than that. But like I say, these were not groups that were at, at war with one another by any means.
Naomi A. Randt [00:25:27] Can you talk a little bit more about that, when you turned in that note saying that you wouldn’t register for the draft, but what that day was like?
Daniel Brustein [00:25:37] Well, it was part of a whole- Well, it was a part of about a month, a very, very active political work across the United States. There had been the organizations separately for the for a draft resistance demonstration that had been organized throughout the east coast. I think it started on the east coast, but eventually it covered all of the United States. That was also the week that Che Guevara was killed, within a month at least, of the October 16 demonstration. And then there was a demonstration in D.C. that was aimed at the Pentagon. It started as a rally on the Mall and then was a march across the Potomac to the Pentagon. And I suspect that, well, it’s obvious that a lot of people understood that this was not going to be a peaceful demonstration. When demonstrators arrived at the Pentagon, there were chain link fences that I believe were not routinely there, I’m not sure, that had been set up all around the Pentagon. And they just came down under the weight of people literally just leaning on them and walking across them. People didn’t have to climb over them. There were enough people that they just came down. And I remember being at whatever entrance of the Pentagon it was that I arrived at - I have no idea geographically now - that about 30 people, once we cleared the fences, there was a couple hundred yards to the front door. About 30 people just began running and hit the front door of the Pentagon, which was open, went in, and I said to myself, this does not end well. And within five seconds, they literally came flying out, followed by the 101st Airborne, which clearly had enough, had thousands of troops inside, and there was probably other groups beside that, but I’m pretty sure the area where I was was 101st. And they surrounded the Pentagon with fixed bayonets and secured the perimeter. This was late in the afternoon. There were enough demonstrators to surround the Pentagon outside their ring, 20, 30, 40 deep. And then folks in the back began throwing stuff. Folks in the front began yelling that you’re hitting us and you shouldn’t be throwing stuff at the troops anyway. There were clearly a batch of folks up- All the folks that I saw up- I don’t know what happened in general. The fact that there were people throwing stuff at the troops told me that some people were not doing what I saw up front happening, which was talking to the troops about how they were being used as pawns in a war that they shouldn’t have been fighting. And the troops just looked scared. I don’t think that they were particularly scared of us. We were unarmed. They had weapons and bayonets, but they had folks behind them who, and I think that they didn’t know exactly what they were expected to do. I didn’t see any brutality on the part of the troops, once they secured their perimeter. They were pretty rough getting people back. Once they secured their perimeter, I didn’t see anything. But once night came down, they, whoever, the authorities, selectively lit up sections of the perimeter. And then federal marshals, not the troops, began circulating behind the troops and selectively pulling individuals from the demonstrators and beating the shit out of them behind the lines. And that went on for about an hour and a half. And somewhere around 10:30 or 11:00 I said, it’s time for me to leave.
Naomi A. Randt [00:29:30] What did the group do when they started seeing these people getting pulled?
Daniel Brustein [00:29:33] Well, for one thing he did was he just backed up three or four feet. The marshals were clearly not going to come much farther through the police lines than that. And at first, people were actually grabbing at the folks who got grabbed and trying to keep them from being pulled through, which in some cases did work, in some cases didn’t. And there was a lot of yelling.
Naomi A. Randt [00:29:55] How did you feel while this was going on?
Daniel Brustein [00:29:58] It was very easy for me to just back up enough with other folks so that I didn’t feel like I was in direct line where I was at risk. I felt that it was important to have a really spirited demonstration. And I also felt that at some point we weren’t going to be proving very much more by being there. And I said, and that was the point. When I decided that I was going to leave, it wasn’t because I felt more threatened at that point, although I was perfectly aware that other people were drifting away. The fewer demonstrators there were, the more likely that they were to be in danger. But that was also the fewer folks you have, the less point you’re making. At some point it’s better to have an organized end to the demonstration and no one else was organizing it. I left, and I think that what happened was within an hour or so of when I left, most other people did. I don’t know. I don’t remember. I’m sure it was publicized. I’m sure I read it in the paper. I don’t remember what happened for the rest of the night. I think there were people there till the next morning.
Naomi A. Randt [00:31:09] Were you involved in any other demonstration like that and that large scale?
Daniel Brustein [00:31:17] Yes, and I can’t remember specifically which one. I know that fairly, that fairly late there was a large demonstration in New York with another draft card burning and that I was there, and I don’t remember when that was. That was. That was not the October ’67 demonstration, but I think sometime in ’68.
Naomi A. Randt [00:31:48] Was this at the Whitehall?
Daniel Brustein [00:31:50] No, I don’t remember. Whitehall was associated with another demonstration. I don’t remember which one it was. I think that was later. I think that was ’69.
Naomi A. Randt [00:32:02] Were you involved in trying to spread the antiwar movement to other people, get other people involved?
Daniel Brustein [00:32:08] To some extent? I certainly spoke to, I certainly spoke to other students and lots of folks I knew. When I was on co-op jobs, I spoke to people, but the co op jobs I had were the ones that I had at that point were all, were all either in academic atmospheres or- I worked the summer of ’68 at the South Side Settlement House Camp out of Columbus. The south side settlement house was a traditional, classic settlement house in a poor neighborhood in Columbus that did a wonderful job of providing services in that neighborhood and ran a summer camp in southeastern Ohio. And I worked as a counselor at that summer camp. I wasn’t challenging anybody’s politics at that camp, although actually one of the other counselors at that camp was in favor of the war, made a decision to enlist, and three months after being sent to Vietnam, he was killed in a munitions explosion, in a U.S. munitions explosion. Somebody I did not know well, I can’t remember his last name. I, you know, I did- I did some pretty basic stuff, like when I was at Cornell in January, February, March of ’67, there was, there was often or always an SDS table up in the student union and I would sometimes man it. Even though I wasn’t a Cornell student, they were perfectly happy to have me there. I don’t remember specifically doing stuff like that when I was in Boston, but I suspect I might have.
Naomi A. Randt [00:34:01] Can you talk a little bit about the chronology of how you came to be arrested?
Daniel Brustein [00:34:08] Yeah. Having made the decision that I wasn’t going to register for the draft, I pretty much knew what I was going to do. And in April of ’68, I prepared a news release, sent out a letter to progressive organizations in Columbus asking them to join me. And on my birthday, I went down, I put on a jacket and tie, and I went down to my draft board and handed them a statement saying I was refusing to register for the draft because of my opposition to both the draft and the war. And the statement had my name, address, and birthday on it. And essentially the clerk just accepted the statement, didn’t say anything, and that was the end of it. I don’t believe there was any press actually at the draft board at the time. And then I- That was April. I waited about six weeks for something to happen. Nothing happened. And I decided that- And during that time, I was working on and off with one of the anti war offices at Ohio State. I decided that I needed to see more of the country before I disappeared, so I hitchhiked from Columbus to Los Angeles to San Francisco and by a circuitous route back to Columbus over several weeks. When I got back, still no contact or anything else, so I arranged- That was when I arranged to work with the South Side Settlement House, SSS camp, and I worked there through the summer. At some point in the middle of the summer, when I was home for a weekend in between camp sessions, the FBI came to my door on a Saturday morning, and I was arrested, taken downtown, fingerprinted, booked. I had the name of a local attorney’s group or attorney who I called, and after a couple of hours, they came down. I was released on my own recognizance, and that was it for then. The trial was scheduled for October of that year, of ’68. So it was just about six months after I failed to register, and the trial was in Columbus. So I was actually back at school at Antioch, off co-op and back at Antioch, and I came up for the trial. Several friends came up as well. I had decided at that point that I didn’t- I didn’t need to make any more. Refusing to register and being consistent about that was all that I necessarily needed to do, and I didn’t need to inflame the court. So I asked my lawyers what the best way to handle it was, and they said, whatever you want. We’re here to do what you want. However, if your goal is simply to go through the process and not inflame things, let us make the legal arguments. You don’t make a statement, and we’ll leave it at that. I said, fine, let’s do that. So that’s, that’s what I did. And then the judge was very busy with a whole bunch of other stuff, so I went back to campus, October, November, December, and then in January, I went back to Boston to work at MIT. And in mid-February, I g
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