AT Shorts: The Sixties in Tucson
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of 1968—and to accompany an exhibit in Special Collections—we pulled together a few slices of life from 1960s Tucson.
VO: This is Archive Tucson, the oral history project of special collections at the University of Arizona libraries. I'm Aengus Anderson. 1968 was probably the most tumultuous, creative, and pivotal year for America in the second half of the 20th century. We're marking the 50th anniversary of 1968 over here at Special Collections with an exhibit that will be running throughout the fall 2018 semester. And we hope you can drop by and check it out.
But Archive Tucson also contains a lot of oral histories about how the '60s were experienced locally. And I want to play a few of those for you right now. Let's start with Beth Alvarado and Cecilia Ybarra, who were 14 and 30 respectively in 1968.
ALVARADO: OK. So one thing that I did with these older kids, I smoked pot. But we also did things like we made movies. We went out--out by Tanque Verde, there's a bosque, a big woods out there of mesquite trees. We went out there.
And we made these movies about the different seasons. And then we made dinosaur movies. Himmel Park. And they were really campy. So there was that kind of wild creativity. And after school, we would hang out at the parks. Sometimes we'd smoke pot, and sometimes we wouldn't. And there'd be music. I mean, a lot of people played music. So it was fun. I mean, it was really fun.
YBARRA: My generation, as far as I know, none of us were into anything like that. Yeah. You knew who was doing what and why. [LAUGHS] There was no secret. Yeah, you knew. You'd say, well, no. I can't go. I can't go with you because--and you wouldn't tell them why. But they knew why. It was very different. Our parents didn't have to worry about that, because they knew that we wouldn't hang around with those people.
VO: The Vietnam War was one of the defining issues of the '60s. And it was as controversial in Tucson as it was elsewhere in America, as you'll hear from John Schaefer and Rich Harper.
SCHAEFER: The Vietnam issue certainly flared up on campus as well. ROTC, at the time, was housed in the Old Main building and there was real concern that students would make an effort to actually unseat the ROTC. And there were concerns that there was going to be an effort to burn the building down. And I remember, as a faculty member and department head at the time, being asked to help monitor the building in the evening. And we had a lot of administrators walking around well into the night at Old Main to make sure that the building wouldn't be torched by activist students. So that was all part of the turmoil raging in society about America's participation in the war.
HARPER: You know, my uncle, my dad's brother, did three tours of duty in Vietnam. He was a marine. After his second tour of duty, he became a drill instructor. And he was sort of like my hero. I mean, in terms of--on one hand I thought the Vietnam War was wrong, but on the other hand, I had this. And my dad went to Vietnam as well. My dad and my uncle, I mean, they were heroes in my eyes from the perspective of: they were willing to defend our nation from the perspective of what they felt was a threat.
So I went and saw a marine recruiter. And I told them, yeah, my uncle's a drill instructor over at Camp Pendleton. And I wasn't thinking… he called him!
My uncle drove from Camp Pendleton in California to our house in Tucson, Arizona. I think he drove, like, nine hours straight overnight. Well, I went to bed. I got up in the morning. And there's my uncle sitting at the breakfast table drinking coffee, tells me to come over here and sit down. And I sat down. He said, your dad served and I served and, he said, that's enough. We've made our contribution to Vietnam. We don't need to make any more contribution.
VO: Fighting for civil rights and equal treatment was the other great theme of the 1960s and Tucson certainly had some influential activists pass through town, as you'll hear from former DJ Ernesto Portillo, Senior.
PORTILLO: I developed a weekly program on Saturdays. At 12:00 the regular musical programming was stopped. And I went live Charlas Portillo—Chatting with Portillo—with people coming in to the program. And it got to be quite popular.
One day I was in the control room with a couple of microphones when, all of a sudden, I see the front door of the building open up and people start coming in, more than a few. And I went out to see what was happening. As I go out to the front door, I see this big car letting out a couple of German shepherds. And then two or three husky fellas came out. And then I hear “[unintelligible] Neto!” It was Chavez coming to visit on the air with me.
VO: What was it like to interview him?
PORTILLO: It was meaningful because I knew him. I knew what he was doing. I knew what he meant. That's what led me to really believe that what we were doing had a meaning.
VO: These are just small edited excerpts. But you can find the full oral histories online in their entirety through our website or at www.archivetucson.com.