Posted on 04/26/2005 10:52:29 AM PDT by Wally_Kalbacken
It's easy to imagine old hippies around Madison raising gray eyebrows over the Mifflin Street Block Party dispute.
Back in 1969, the party was held in defiance of Mayor Bill Dyke, who refused to give the hippies a party permit.
This year, the Madison Police Department scheduled officers for the traditional first Saturday in May, but students lobbied to move the party a week earlier so they wouldn't be hung over for exams. I can imagine a party planning conversation between a 1969 hippie and a 2005 neo-hippie.
Hippie: "500 block Mifflin, be there."
Neo-hippie: "Love to, dude, let me check my BlackBerry.
Hippie: "Dig it!"
Neo-hippie: "Naw, sorry, the 7th's no good, got a calculus exam on the 8th. Can't be loaded for logarithms."
Hippie: "The revolution will not be televised."
Neo-hippie: "Oh, good point. Don't want to miss "The O.C." either. How's the 30th? Does that work for you?
Hippie: "Off the pig."
Students have changed, and so have Madison police. Lt. Mary Schauf said the department only cared about the date because it had scheduled work shifts so that fewer officers would be on overtime. But faced with the prospect of two parties, the police backed down, agreed to April 30, and will eat $93,000 in overtime costs, instead of an anticipated $38,000 to have it May 7.
In 1969, it doesn't sound like police worried about their budget, or ever backed down. They marched into Mifflin Street in full riot gear and a melee ensued. Campus-area aldermen Eugene Parks and Paul Soglin were both arrested. Police cut Soglin's long hair when he was being booked into jail.
"It was a bad haircut," said Soglin on Monday, adding that you can't compare the two parties. "The purpose is so different. The first was a political statement."
Mifflanders have changed, too. Soglin is now an executive with Epic Systems, and I reached 1969 partiers Karl Armstrong and Bill Limbach on Monday on the golf course.
Limbach was playing baseball outside Witte Hall in May 1969 when someone ran past and said Soglin had been arrested. He joined other students streaming toward Mifflin Street.
"It was a lot of fun before the police showed up in their riot gear and their gray truck with the battering ram," Limbach said. "It was just an ego trip for the mayor and the police."
Armstrong remembers standing on the steps of the Mifflin Street Co-op, watching the tear gas bombs go off.
"It was more like a police riot," said Armstrong, who took shelter in the Mifflin Street apartment of co-ed Sarah O'Brien. She grew up to become a Dane County judge.
By 1973, Soglin was mayor, the Mifflanders had a permit, and the party - according to veterans - was ruined.
"Everyone is pretending to have a good time, but they're not, because it's not illegal," Beth, a Mifflin Street resident, told the State Journal in 1973. "Miffland Street is all washed up; it's a has-been."
Of course, that's the secret of Madison. Just when your party is over, you're replaced by another generation of students, who think cold beer and a warm spring day are good enough reason for a party - as long as it's on their terms.
Quoting from The Bombing of Sterling Hall :
Less than a week and a half after the act, the FBI had pieced together what happened and put four men on its most wanted list: 23-year-old Karleton Armstrong and his 19-year-old brother Dwight, from Madison, 18-year-old David Fine, from Wilmington, Delaware, and 22-year-old Leo Burt, from Havertown, Pennsylvania. Fine and Burt were both students at Wisconsin. Karl had been an on-again, off-again student in previous years. The Armstrongs and Fine were eventually caught, convicted and served time in prison. Leo Burt has never been found.
Well a lot of water has flowed under the bridge, I guess, and half-assed pseudo journalists like Susan Lampert Smith can make an oblique comment about finding Karl (Karleton) on the golf course in 2005 - and what a wild time he had evading the police in 1969 - but she neglects to identify him as one of the bombers.
I read a piece on the family of the late Robert Fasssnacht - the graduate student who was buried under debris from the bomb blast - who drowned in the water from ruptured pipes, and they had achieved a state of forgiveness that seemed to be more a state of willful forgetting. Amazing. But so typical of Madison.
My wife and I went to Mifflin in 95. Good times. Fortunately we were intoxicated so as not to let the hippies bother us.
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