In high school I was in the band. I wrestled for the high school wrestling team. I never made the A team because I was at the weight level of the guy who was All-State champion the four years he was in high school. I got to be his sparring partner. I knew how many lights there were on the ceiling in the gymnasium. But, it was good. It’s a good experience to do sports I think in high school.

I played in the band. I started playing trombone when I was in sixth grade. I went to – my grade school experience was nice. We had a little school that they had just opened out on our side of town and I went from the first grade through the fourth grade. It was so small that the third and fourth grade was all in one room and we had the same teacher. The teacher would teach the third graders part of the day and she would teach the fourth graders part of the day. It was very progressive, although we didn’t know it at the time. It was trying to blend the learning experience.

Then, I went to a high school there. I did a lot of the social stuff in high school. I guess that was when I really first started understanding, you know, politics and started becoming a little radicalized in my political thinking. It was more through the church experience. My family belonged to a congregational kind of church so it was not a real religious, kind of Protestant church. It was more a social thing. I would go to my older sister’s Sunday school classes where they would be talking about philosophical debates about whether God is dead. It was a very progressive learning experience for me and it was a place for me to start understanding that you don’t just accept everything, you start questioning stuff. And I did that. I started questioning more about politics and this and that.

When I went on to college that’s when we all get radicalized. We all start challenging authority etcetera. So, we formed a local chapter of the SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society at Okalahoma University. That wasn’t easy. You had to have seven members in order to have a local chapter of SDS. Even the left wingers had their bureaucracy. So, there were five of us that were pretty interested in doing this. Then we went and found a couple of guys that we told them we’d go and have beer every Friday and if they joined the club or something like that. (Laughter) That’s a great experience at Okalahoma because Okalahoma was a dry state so talking somebody into doing something by bribing them with beer was not an easy task!

The Weathermen was the very radical wing of SDS. Yeah, they were the very radical part. SDS was, for their time, was a pretty left wing organization. Mostly they challenged the war in Vietnam and that was really the main effort there. That’s really what we were doing was opposing the war in Vietnam.