The year was 1968. The hot issues were the Vietnam War, international relations and education. Students at Ohio University staged a mock political convention April 26 and 27. Filmed by NBC, 1,000 demonstrators staged a nonpartisan parade ending at Baker University Center, where speeches representing 13 candidates were delivered in the ballroom. Other events included a 14-hour mock Republican convention.

As we prepared the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Ohio Today we discovered photos from a 1968 mock Republican convention and chose one for publication. While we found hundreds of photos of this nationally televised event, we had little written information about the proceedings. We issued a call to alumni to share their stories; here is what they had to say.

• John “Jack” Gilson, BA ’70, MA ’72
• Bob Wuerth, BS ’71, MS ’73
• Judy Myers Hanson, BSED ’70
• Steven Mills, BA ’70
• Lee Borgman, BA ’68
• Dale Holshu, BMUS ’71
• Susan Horner Husted Stuart, BA ’68
• Ron Moss, BBA ’71

Imagine my surprise when upon looking through my Fall/Winter 2008 copy of Ohio Today I see a very youthful photo of myself on the back cover! I am the young man with the striped tie in the middle of the picture (above). I've been showing colleagues at work the photo, and they're cracking up. I was actually 20 years old when that picture was taken, and I think I look about 13. Maybe it's just all the gray hair staring me in the mirror each morning.

The year 1968 was my first presidential election in which to vote. The voting age then was 21, and with a Nov. 1 birthday, I turned that age just several days before the election. It was also my first, and last, time to vote for a Republican presidential candidate! Oh, if only we could have predicted the Nixon presidency. My vote was mostly an anti-Vietnam War vote, as I am sure was the case for many others at that mock political convention.

After leaving Athens, I moved to Georgia at the U.S. Army’s request. (I had one of those incredibly low lottery numbers in the draft. But I was lucky and never had to go fight a war I didn’t believe in.) I made Georgia my home and now work for the Georgia Department of Labor in the area of vocational rehabilitation and assistive technology. It’s been a good career and an opportunity to help people with disabilities.

I have been married to an OU classmate (Darla Grow, BSHS ’71 and MA ’72) for 36 years. I still have family in Ohio, and up until two years ago, I’d journey back to the campus in April to run the Athens Marathon. The last time there, I determined there was not one single bar bearing the same name as during 1966-72. Those names are gone, but the memories of classes, floods, riots, good times and even a mock Republican convention remain.

Forty years later, and politics and elections are still exciting. I thank Ohio U. for my education, and for being part of a time in our history when going to college was more than just attending classes.

John “Jack” Gilson, BA ’70, MA ’72
Fayetteville, Ga.

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The photograph of the 1968 mock political convention brings back many memories. During the spring of 1968, Roger Scholl (AB ’74) and I were finishing our freshman year. Roger had been an active Young Republican in high school. He was excited by the mock convention and worked to become a state chairman.

Forty years have blurred many details; I believe he took the reins of the great state of Georgia. He recruited me to join the delegation. I assumed that we would be observers of a great spring spectacle.

Roger had a different idea. During the speeches by the candidates, we organized the Southern block. We negotiated that during the first roll call vote the Southern block would pass.

After the first vote, as best I can remember, Florida and a few other states joined the Southern block. We voted again as a block and during that vote, I distinctly remember turning to Roger and with absolute astonishment saying, “Roger, we’re running this show.” He just grinned.

After the second roll call vote, New York came to us, and in a smoke-filled room, we negotiated an acceptable candidate. An interesting footnote to this story is that I do not remember whom we nominated.

I remember a pervasive naiveté on campus. During the 1967–68 academic year, women still had “hours,” members of the opposite sex were not allowed in dorm rooms and students had to dress for Sunday dinner. The administration asserted “in loco parentis,” meaning that they assumed some sort of parental obligations over the students. Route 33 was a narrow umbilical to civilization. Long-distance telephone calls cost something like 30 cents a minute. Much of our news came via Parkersburg, W.Va.

In many ways, that convention was the swan song for Athens’ age of innocence. Campus was a much different place in the fall of 1968.

Perhaps, there are a thousand points of view, an equal number of stories and many more lessons as a result of the mock convention. I learned that a little power can first influence and then invigorate many people.

Perhaps most importantly, I have a great appreciation for our current system of primary elections. While an election season now is a couple years long, and we are inundated with nonsense, the alternative is much worse.

Bob Wuerth, BS ’71, MS ’73
Brecksville, Ohio

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Thanks for printing the picture of the convention. It brought back great memories as it was educational and fun at the same time. I was on the Ohio delegation, and I remember meeting with other delegates at the old Theta Phi Alpha sorority house. This was a couple of days before the convention, and we discussed platform topics and general information about the convention to make it as authentic as possible.

The day of the convention, we went to Grover Center and stayed with our delegation and listened to speeches from spokesmen for different candidates. We cheered a lot, and it seemed exciting at the time. I don't think we nominated Nixon though, in the end. I think it was Rockefeller, but I really can't remember. It was a great learning experience. 

Thanks again for the great magazine. I enjoy reading it.  I got back to OU for the first time since I graduated in 1970 and thoroughly enjoyed seeing all the changes, especially the re-routing of the river, which really made it an easy walk from the South Green to the West Green. 

I guess nobody misses the floods.

Judy Myers Hanson, BSED ’70
Fort Myers Beach, Fla.

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I was ready to toss my latest Ohio Today in the recycling bin when the back-page photo of the 1968 mock Republican convention caught my eye. Was I in attendance, you ask? As a proud but bewildered delegate from one of the Dakotas, hell yes, I was in attendance, sport coat, tie and all. Bewildered, because I have no idea how I, as a staunch progressive, left-wing liberal ended up being a delegate from one of the Dakotas and supporting Tricky Dick Nixon. To this day, I still haven’t figured that one out. Somewhere, though, I still have the “Nixon for President” pin I wore as we marched around Grover Center.

But what really struck me from the photo is that for a bunch of dope-smoking, hippie radicals and outside agitators (as college students of that era were commonly portrayed in the media), we were really a pretty clean-cut and well-dressed bunch. But then again, we mustn’t forget that it was a mock Republican convention.

So what do I really remember about the convention? We were a bunch of young, naive, starry-eyed kids playing an adult game in Grover Center. When the day was over, we drifted back to our dorms or to the Lantern or the Union for a (legal) 3.2 beer (or two), and the next day we were back to being students again.

The bigger political eye-opener for me occurred later that summer at a real convention in Chicago, when I watched TV with both fascination and horror as the Chicago police bashed in the heads of real hippies (and anyone else standing nearby) with such malice outside the Democratic convention. That was the evening when some of my naiveté, just like Elvis later on, left the arena.

Speaking of hippies, when are you going to publish pictures of Iron Butterfly’s “free concert” at Memorial Auditorium in 1967?  ’68? ’69?  They had played a show in Columbus earlier that evening and drove down because, as they announced during a break in the concert, “they heard how cool the OU chicks were.” I am fairly certain, however, that their show was the first time Athens ever saw an oil and water ’60’s light show as the band played “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” over and over and over again. Loudly.

Steven Mills, BA ’70
Hilliard, Ohio

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The picture of the 1968 mock Republican convention in the Fall/Winter 2008 issue really brought back memories. As one of the officers of the Pennsylvania delegation, I was hurrying to it from my trailer in Chauncey when my “unsafe at any speed” Corvair locked up its brakes on a wet curve on Route 13. The only thing that stopped me from ending up in the Hocking River was a bunch of trees that the car wedged into.

Physically, I got only a few cuts, a seat belt burn, and lots of bumps and bruises. Mentally, however, I must’ve been in shock because after scrambling up the embankment, I went right back down again to save my precious eight-track tapes before the stupid car would catch on fire. Also, I thought the policeman who showed up wouldn’t be able to tell how fast I’d been going, so I told him it was the speed limit.

Chauncey’s finest added insult to injury because on top of totaling the new car, I received a ticket for conditional speed because of the wet road! At least he gave me a lift into town so I could take part in the convention. It’s hard to believe it was over 40 years ago now!

Lee Borgman, BA ’68
Hardy, Va.

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I read with great interest the back page of the Fall/Winter 2008 issue, for I was a participant. I had been recruited to play in a pep-style band for the convention.

As the only sousaphone playing in said band, I was constantly being urged by the student director to play louder all of the convention. A formal symphonic band concert had been scheduled for the following Sunday. As a result of all of the loud playing that I had done on Saturday, I was able to scarcely sound a note for the formal band concert!

I came away from this experience having learned two things: 1) Be in better shape both physically and musically, and, 2) don’t, don’t ever play that loudly again!

Dale Holshu, BMUS ’71
Marietta, Ohio

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I love the photo on the back cover of the magazine. Attending OU from 1964 to 1968 and graduating that spring, I recognize students in it. There was so much going on that spring — let’s not just remember the glossy version of events.

Your caption states “hot issues were the Vietnam War, international relations and education,” but I hesitate to embrace that list, leaving education and international relations on the far back burner. The National Guard patrolling Court and Union streets in jeeps with machine guns quite visible, the demonstration at President Alden’s home, the anti-war protests, closing campus early for spring break because of a union strike, the Psychedelic Lighthouse, Jonathan Edwards and Bruce Armitage singing our times — these are just some of the vivid memories I have of that time. Things were becoming crazily un-buttoned down and not altogether collegiate. There was static in the air, and the times, they were a changin’.

I was not at that convention, as I was stumping for Democratic candidates as early as the  Goldwater/Johnson election of 1964, my first year at OU. The child of Ohioan, Republican parents, I was not in line with them but was finding much to learn and appreciate about the whole political process as a government major for four years at OU. I had some really terrific instructors whom I revere even today.

By the time this convention was happening on campus, I had “plugged out” of the sorority/fraternity and J-Prom scene and was hooking into national civil rights and anti-war movements. I married my OU college sweetheart in 1969, and we bought land in Northern California with another couple from our Athens days. We “homesteaded” in that grand back-to-the-land movement that embraced so many college graduates then. Many strong projects and community organizing grew out of our efforts — and are still perking along nicely. After the election of 1968, we said, "We can't change the national scene, so let's start again, get back to basics, affecting change for ourselves and our kids to come." And we have.

I am now an adjunct theater arts teacher at Cabrillo College here in California. I got my master of arts degree in theatre arts and directing in my 40s, having taught social science and drama in high school for years. (I have secondary teaching credentials in social science, drama and literature). I was involved in theater productions and classes at OU as well but was not a theater arts major. I did co-found a theater company in Northern California, when I moved here in 1973, that is still going strong and is very influential in its community to this day.

I am blessed to this day to have gone to Athens in 1964 and left a more sober, more idealistic, more informed, young American, challenged by the world and the possibilities it afforded, the participation that I could manifest and the change I could help effect. I was part of something there. It was and still is part of the very real and deep essence of my life.

Susan Horner Husted Stuart, BA ’68
Santa Cruz, Calif.

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Yes, I was in attendance at the mock Republican Convention in April of 1968. I looked at that picture on the back of the issue of Ohio Today and wondered where the last 40 years have gone.

I can’t remember much about the details of that convention, only to say that I still have my California delegate badge with its red ribbon attached. I guess I just wanted to be involved at a time when there was so much tension in our country, from the death of Martin Luther King Jr. only weeks before that mock convention, to the continuing social unrest caused by the war in Vietnam.

Even before the mock convention, I struggled as to why I should be supporting Richard Nixon and the Republican Party, and in the weeks that followed, I became a supporter of Bobby Kennedy. As the school year was coming to a close, I signed up to go with a group to Indiana to support Kennedy and pass out literature. I’ll never forget coming down into the lounge in Perkins Hall that morning to hear that Kennedy had been shot and killed. Obviously, our trip was canceled.

The spring of 1968 was a tough quarter to be in school; the death of King and Kennedy, along with the historic flood of the Hocking with its muddy water rushing through the East Green, changed a lot of us as students. And yet after 40 years, it is a bit ironic that we as a nation have finally embraced what Martin and Bobby were fighting for with respect to human and civil rights and have now elected a man of color as our president. I hope the passing years have taught us it doesn’t matter whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, black or white; peaceful political activism can lead to change.

Now, if we could only figure out how to end the wars that we continue to seek. I hope it doesn’t take another 40 years — but it probably will.

Ron Moss, BBA ’71
Canton, Ohio

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