Those years at the school were tumultuous. In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. The Vietnam War was in full escalation, and at least one graduate had died there. Drugs were increasingly finding their way into the school, and there had been several expulsions. Before arriving, I had somehow believed that all of this was peripheral, that the hallowed halls would continue to be inhabited by scholar athletes of the type I imagined my father and his friends to be, and that I now hoped to be.

By the spring of 1970, all of this was gone. Resistance had turned to rebellion. The school was shut down for nearly the entire spring semester, in solidarity with the colleges, after four students had been killed by the National Guard at Kent State. The stakes seemed high, the righteousness unfathomable. There did not seem to be a going back. The School was no longer what it once was. In its place rose something entirely present, no longer part of a nostalgic past, but rather a possibility for the future. A fierce, if unironic optimism, pervaded everything.

Yet in the midst of this, a certain hedonism crept in. Those who had not been involved in the strike were content now to use the academic reprieve to do more drugs, more often, and to retreat from the world. The rear guard of the 1960s had arrived. What had begun with a momentum born from the civil rights movement had vanished, along with the lyrics of the earlier protest songs, as it turned into the easy listening rock of the 1970s. It was as if a post-traumatic incident had resulted in total amnesia.

The difference at the school, from one class to another, was almost generational. Seniors went off to become investment bankers, juniors eventually went into government, politics, or journalism, and many sophomores eschewed college altogether, went off to the farm, or were never heard from again.

At the end of the spring semester in 1970, a group called the Hog Farm, a travelling commune made famous at Woodstock, came to campus and set up a carnival on the baseball field. I do not know who invited them, surely not the administration, for on Saturday night, on the baseball field, among massage parlors and hookah dens, one watched faculty members smoking joints with students, as strange girls showed up in the showers in our dorms. Everything had changed. Sides had been chosen. Younger faculty members were with us. Older ones had fled.

The School remained an ashen carcass of itself for the next two years. Classes resumed in the fall, but the spirit of academic life was gone. Everyone was searching for a way forward. Eventually, the school returned to its prior tradition of academic rigor, producing some solid citizens, musicians, artists, statesmen, etc.

Two weeks after graduation, I slept under a semi-trailer in a yard outside a mill in Grants Pass, Oregon, waiting for the next phase of my life to begin.