The Burlington Free Press from Burlington, Vermont • 33

The Burlington Free Press Sunday, February 24, 2008 www.burlini;tonfreepress.com 3D ,1 Stories By Susan Green Free Press Correspondent APRIL 15- With a draft notice just days away, Andy Megrath, then 20, of Rutland joined the Army for a three-year tour to secure a more skilled position than that of an Infantry foot soldier. APRIL 4 joe Moore of Burlington had already played sax for Wilson Pickett, Junior Walker and other major talents when he took a steady job with Lloyd Simms and the Untouchables, a soul revue that toured North America. Right after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the band witnessed riots while performing at clubs or hotels in Detroit and Asbury Park, N.J. "I stayed away from the violence and the drugs that were around then because I didn't want to kill myself," Moore, 59, says. "I wanted to become He also wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, even though his own hair had been damaged by processing.

So Moore purchased "a huge Afro wig" and tied a scarf wrapped around his head. "Nobody else realized," he "But It would get so hot at gigs, I'd take the wig off, and they'd be stunned." Since moving to Vermont in 1975, Moore has become adept in several other genres, including jazz, rock and Irish music. His Celtic alter ego: "I go by Jo' Mo', the Irish Bra'." Even so, his surveying responsibilities In Vietnam required setting up perime- ters in hostile territory. Beyond that, from Saigon to Pleiku, he would volun- teer for dangerous patrols and what were dubbed "hunter-killer" teams. "We'd ride shotgun in small helicopters at treetop i level," explains Megrath, i 59.

"Charlie (the Viet Cong) used tracers, so we'd draw fire and zip out of the way when the big Cobras flew I in to finish the job. We I were the hunters; the 5 Cobras were the killers." Although more skirmish- es than major combat, his a timeline HS- of 1968 events online at freepress.com a tSJf WmiJ4 Jrviimuhn -r-'(-r(-i t- fi i-i'ii lnAmfHf JtjBiT.i.. Associated Press file photo Police lead a demonstrator from Grant Park during demonstrations that disrupted the Democratic National Convention In August 1968 In Chicago. Converging antiwar demonstrators were told to come for a fight, and they got one. The convention became the focal point of bitter confrontations between police and antiwar demonstrators.

battles produced casualties that he prefers not to discuss. "I don't like talking about the bad times," said Megrath, who was discharged from the military in April 1971 as a decorated Specialist 5 "the equivalent of today's three-stripe sergeant." Today, he is president of Chapter One of the Vietnam Veterans of America and heads the board of Dodge House, a facility for homeless vets. Megrath holds on to his anger about civilians who opposed the war, particularly a certain controversial actress. A patch on his vest refers to Jane Fonda as an American traitor. 1978.

Kunstler tried to tackle the immigration issue, at one point telling the court in Burlington that his own Eastern European grandparents "came over here on a pickle boat." His bigger challenge was the FBI's assertion that Berster, allegedly a terrorist wanted in her homeland, had conspired with U.S. citizens. The jury rejected that claim and found her guilty only of lying to Customs officials. During Berster's four-month trial, snipers were positioned on the roof of the downtown Federal Building and the judge had a 24-hour bodyguard. After applying for political asylum, in October 1979 she voluntarily went back to Germany, where the charges of "criminal association with known terrorists' were dropped.

Spielberg plans film of Chicago 7 trial Steven Spielberg is planning a movie about the raucous trial of the Chicago 7, starring Sacha Baron Cohen of "Borat" fame as Abbie Hoffman and Philip Seymour Hoffman as defense attorney William Kunstler. This project intrigued Maria Garcia, a Goddard student in the early 1970s when she attended a party there with comedian Dick Gregory, Kunstler, and defendants Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger and John Froines, her chemistry professor. "Gregory was at Goddard to perform, and to push his candidacy for president," Garcia writes in an e-mail from Manhattan, where she is a magazine film critic and novelist. "I mostly remember listening in rapt attention to every word Dellinger had to say. He was a quietly charismatic guy and we would have listened to him had he been reciting menus." During a debate about the extreme tactics of the Weather Underground, Garcia continues, "Kunstler, always a humanist, expressed grief and then said: 'In a free society, it's always sad when anything has to go Later that decade, he defended a young West German woman whose underground existence ended at the Vermont border.

Kristina Berster had crossed over illegally from Quebec in July APRIL 23- Rick Winston came down with strep throat and couldn't participate in the Columbia occupation or subsequent strike, though he was then a junior there. He soon transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, another campus in turmoil. "I was rank-and-file," says Winston, 60, now owner of the Savoy Theater in Montpelier. "Whenever they held a march, I'd march. I had friends in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), but I've never been a joiner." As unrest spread to colleges across the country, "it was like a prairie fire," says Winston, who lives in Adamant.

"When Robert Kennedy was killed so soon after Martin Luther King, a friend of mine said: 'This is the end of 'GIVE PEACE A CHANCE' JUNE 6 Jay Craven of Peacham, a poetry-loving Pennsylvania peacenik who had been campaigning door-to-door on behalf of Robert Kennedy's presidential bid, graduated from high school one day after the assassination. In August, he intend A MOM FOR PEACE "By 1968 everybody was opposed to the war," says Kevin Graffagnino, executive director of the Vermont Historical Society in Barre. That partisan perspective may be due to the fact that, while he was growing up in A lhirlt lliiouuli ed to reach Chicago in time for the Democratic convention, but his 1954 Renault broke down on jo- Montpelier, his single mother had been an TUNY WHtDON the way. At Boston University that fall, finances dictated that Craven take ROTC to get early and lone champion of many seem ingly lost causes. Myrtle Lane, who died in 2006, "just burst out of being I I Hu" a break on tuition.

During his first day on campus, an AWOL soldier took sanctuary in the chapel and stu a 1950s housewife, braffagnino says. In an era when public school students had to "march around like soldiers as part of phys ed," he adds, Lane did not want her two sons "contributing to the military-industrial complex." dents maintained a weeklong vigil. "I spoke at a rally about the war and never showed up for ROTC," Craven says. "I lost the financial aid but found myself." His newly minted sense of identity was tested when plainclothes From ban-the-bomb to give-peace- a-rhanre she was i mafraiii tr pynrpss A IV APRIL 4 Tony Whedon, 66, found himself in the whirlwind of civil rights issues at a key moment. "I was teaching at Morehouse College, Martin Luther King's alma mater in Atlanta, was very much engaged in the 'movement' as it spiraled out of control away from nonviolence," he says.

Now a professor of creative writing and literature at Johnson State College, Whedon re-examined those experiences in "A Language Dark Enough," his 2004 book of autobiographical essays. The chapter about King's death's titled "Liberal cops, who were breaking up a protest about General Electric's military contracts, clubbed him. Craven ran afoul her views. Consequently, Lane often became the target of intolerance, such as X. ft of the law again while selling charcoal-broiled, all-beef hot dogs with wheat germ, when some local boys threw snowballs at her.

An editorial in New Hampshire's conservative Manchester Union-Leader newspaper praised their actions. "Most people we knew told her, 'Don't make says Graffagnino, who remembers classmates picking fights with him because of the family's notoriety. "My mother was years ahead of her time. She wanted to get America to a better place." sliced carrots and green peppers from a cart on Free Press file photo school grounds. jay Craven "I took the business over when the guy who was doing it got busted for competing with the university food service," explains Craven, now a 56-year-old filmmaker.

"My logo was a clenched fist holding a hot dog. Within a week, I was selling 2,000 a day which made up for losing that ROTC money. After seven or eight weeks, I got busted." I White AUGUST Lou Andrews was raising two young daughters and working to put her husband through college in Wisconsin. He went to Chicago to protest at the Democratic convention; she remained home with the girls. "I was laden down with children and a little bit out of it," she says of her own political awareness.

Andrews was then still two years away from an epiphany women's liberation, to be exact at a rural commune in Franklin called Earthworks. "Suddenly, people were paying attention to me for the first time in my life," she marvels. The hardscrabble existence was daunting. "We had 300 acres, but it was a small house with four couples," explains Andrews, 64, a Burlington human resources specialist. "The kids all slept in the same room.

We tore out the telephone and washing machine. Diapers were done by hand. We grew veggies, farmed with horses, slaughtered our own meat and sold maple syrup." These chores did not come naturally to people who hailed from cities and suburbs. "We learned a lot from neighbors willing to converse with us," Andrews acknowledges. "Others in town were terrified." Courtesy photo Roz Payne.

Animals) took it away," Payne says. David Dellinger, a respected proponent of nonviolent disobedience who moved to Vermont in the 1980s, is seen at several points in the film. He told a Boston crowd: "New England will once again be an inspiration for a second and badly needed American revolution." As melees took place throughout the city, he contended: "Chicago is a concentration camp." Along with Hoffman, Rubin and other fellow organizers, Dellinger and John Froines who would soon begin teaching chemistry at Goddard College in Plainfield were charged with conspiracy to incite a riot in Chicago. Those convictions were eventually overturned. subsequently arrested; many of them were beaten by police as the cameras rolled.

Newsreel's "Summer '68" is a pastiche of organizational efforts leading up to August's Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police night sticks were wielded against activists, journalists and delegates. Payne was there, shooting as she ran from tear gas and cops in pursuit. She also accompanied her pals Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin leaders of the mischievous Yippies (Youth International Party) when they purchased an Illinois farmer's pig to use in a satirical campaign: Pigasus for President. "After a few days, the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to lowered to supporters on the street below. The Newsreel folks observed and participated, as serious dialogue was tempered by celebration.

The Grateful Dead even performed outside. Payne can be spotted in the footage. "There are shots of me doing the Limbo, smoking a cigarette and climbing in through the window," she says. "It was one of the most wonderful times of my life." Remarkably, one day she noticed her City College professor walking past the building. "I put my master's thesis in the bucket and handed it down," Payne explains.

"I'm not sure what she thought about that, but I got my degree." Payne was not among the 700 Columbia occupiers APRIL 23-roz Payne of Richmond was in a New York City filmmakers' collective documenting a protest at Columbia University, where hundreds of students opposed the school's plan to build a gym in the nearby black community. Her cinematic career, begun the year before, involved chronicling most of the dynamic activities in the late 1960s. As a member of Newsreel, a team of radi-cals-with-cameras, she covered almost every development that gave the era its oomph. In 2007, Payne released a four-disk DVD box set on the Black Panthers that includes three Newsreel films on the subject. She also maintains the collective's archives.

"Columbia Revolt," a documentary that traces the seven-day takeover, conveys the raw energy of youngsters denouncing their school's corporate ties and obliviousness to Harlem neighbors. During the occupation, the basic necessities were smuggled in via a bucket.