An enduring memorable moment

On Dec. 1, 1969, my fate and the fate of all American males who had reached the age of majority, had been drawn from a glass canister filled with 366 blue capsules at Selective Service headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Based on my birthday, my lottery number was 288, which meant my being drafted and going to Vietnam was unlikely.

My roommate, born one day later, was number 5. He would be one of the first called to serve.

The following spring, I attended a Black Panthers meeting at Jorgensen Auditorium and a protest rally on the quad behind the Student Union.

A thousand or more of us were protesting racial and class injustice, Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia and the National Guard’s killing of four American students at Kent State University.

Middle-aged men in ties and sports jackets — the FBI, everyone said — wandered through the crowd taking pictures.

At rally’s end, we marched from the quad to the ROTC hangar, where the most radical among us painted the walls with flowers and butterflies.

Having declared the building a daycare center for children of the poor rather than a tool of the military-industrial complex, UConn students had decided to redecorate.

My father answered the phone when I called home to tell my parents I was on strike.

“The hell you are!” he yelled.

“Get to class!”

But Nixon and Dad were interchangeable that season. I boycotted my classes and exams in favor of the administration-sanctioned pass-fail option.

At 19, I was on board for the student revolution and blind to its excesses.

The world was broken and I thought we could fix it.

Two years later, I graduated and became a high school teacher — a member of the establishment myself, albeit one in turtlenecks, bell-bottoms and hair that touched my shoulders.

I taught teenagers for 25 years, went bald, wrote a few novels, and did a stint as a UConn professor.

These days, I teach writing to inmates at Connecticut’s maximum-security prison for women.

My students teach me, too, about the uses and abuses of power and the reasons why the justice system needs fixing.

In the spring of 1970, a sociopolitical earthquake rocked the country. Its epicenter was Washington D.C., but the shock waves were felt in Storrs.

While I was a UConn student, the political became personal.

From those days to these, I have held fast to my convictions that the socioeconomic status quo is unacceptable, that war solves nothing and that the world is in dire need of fixing.

I remain an unswerving, unapologetic liberal.

— Wally Lamb ’72 (CLAS), ’77 M.A.

Wally Lamb is a critically acclaimed, bestselling author. His latest book, Couldn’t Keep it to Myself, Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters, is published by Regan Books.