Kickass

Kickass and student demonstrations

Kickass, the doorstop dog, indulges the keeper as he recalls a bit of his experiences with student demonstrations, the first being when Willard Gonske climbed up into the country school’s lone pine tree and refused to come down. At issue was Willard’s pending discipline for having very accurately thrown an apple at Rachel Kolb.

As a reporter on the UW campus, the keeper mingled with the mobs of antiwar demonstrators in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, several times finding himself in the midst of them when they occupied a lecture hall or the student union.

On one such occasion he was very publicly attacked after being accused of being an undercover cop, and on another a sheriff’s deputy whacked him in the back with a nightstick during an evacuation exercise.

There were unpleasant teargas events, and he remembers when fellow reporter Frank Ryan punched a student who had thrown an egg at him. As Harvey Breusher, the AP man on the scene recalled it, “The punch only traveled 12 inches and knocked the kid cold.”

The keeper does not pretend to know how student demonstrations should be handled, but the role of reporters might deserve reassessment.

(Willard came down out of the tree when his mother showed up after school with a willow switch.)

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