It was during my sophomore or junior year in college when the draft was changed so that you are no longer able to get a student deferment. They had the lottery and I was in the first one. My number was about 260 so I was pretty much out of the possibility of being drafted.

With the draft you use to put yourself in the pile and if they didn’t draft you then you were free. That’s what I did. At that point nobody wanted to go to Vietnam. We were all marching against the war. I marched against the war!

I was going to the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and a couple hundred miles north of Cincinnati was  Kent State. In 1970, four kids were shot there.

When that happened that set off everything within the university system for everyone who wasn’t active in the demonstrations this was enough to push them over the edge. In fact, they closed the university a month or two early that year because of the shootings and demonstrations.

I remember marching with, jeez, it seem like 10,000 people, marching down to the heart of Cincinnati. I had long hair and the whole bit.

My freshman year in college, 1968, everything was still very conservative. I remember going to college in nice cuffed pants, a nice shirt, and wing-tip shoes. The next year everything started changing. Bell-bottoms came in, long hair came in, and the Beatles were bigger than ever before.

Most everyone went through this change. It was very interesting. It was a big change the way everyone looked at things, just within one year. My folks thought I was nuts, of course. But I don’t remember whether they supported the war or not. I really don’t remember.

In 1976 and 77 I started spending a lot of time in Santa Cruz. It was a nice small-town atmosphere. You could walk down Pacific Avenue and go to the different restaurants and bars. You saw the same people. It had a very local feeling. There was the old Cooper house.