The blaze was discovered during a Powder & Wig play rehearsal, and it raged on as fi remen from four local departments searched in the dark for the hy drant ( fool ishly painted dark green so as not to offend the landscape) . The fire sta rted in an attached shed, housing a 1966 Ford station wagon belonging to the Air Force ROTC.42 Through the wi nter American forces reached a wa r-high peak of 350,000. Casualt ies and wa r resistance mounted at the same time. In April, a new Eng lish inst ructor, David Stratman, encou raged the formation of a Colby chapter of Students for a Democratic Society ( SO S ) , a nationaJ counterculture organ ization formed ten years before. Its manifesto, written mostly by the Univer sity of M ich igan student newspaper editor, Tom Hayden, called for a fully par ticipatory democracy, and i n it ially focused on the fight for civil rights and the battle for free speech. By 1966 it had become more radicaJ, mounting antiwar demonstrations on nearly one hundred campuses across the country. The Weather Undergrou nd, a SOS spli nter group, was formed that year, preaching the violent overth row of the government. The Colby SOS chapter did not flourish. While its leaders were often at the center of local demonstrations, the events themselves were not centered on SOS.
When their offspring acted up, many parents kept their own counsel, but there were others who were unafraid to move into the fray and set things straight. In January 1969, some seventy-five black students took over the communications center at Brandeis, making "non-negotiable" demands, including that the university hire more black teachers. As the standoff entered the second day, the mother of one of the protestors came out of the crowd, walked through the front door into the build ing, and returned with her son in tow. At Colby, the president of the new SOS chapter appeared one day in the dean's office, slumped in a chair, and said he was going to quit his SOS post and needed some ad vice. He wanted to know how to break the news of bis resignation to fellow radicals. He worried they would laugh when he said his mother made him do it.
42. The worst Colby tragedy of the year occurred in February 1969. Two students were examining a pistol in their room on the second floor of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house when the gun accidentally fired. Across the room their roommate, sophomore Robert Crowell, was killed instantly. A grand jury ruled the death accidental. 172 }
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