Right in the Middle

Due to its convenient location on campus, Uni High had a front row seat to a lot of the counterculture activities taking place in the U of I. I didn’t realize this before, but some passages from an interview with Mark Rubel opened my eyes to how the counterculture might have been experienced at Uni:

“That would have been 1970, which would have been my first year at Uni High. We were all very aware of what was going on. There were a lot of protests and there was a lot of rioting and so forth...We were aware of it because it was just right in the middle of what we were doing because we were going to school on a university campus. There were times when we couldn’t get out of the school because of all the military and police. Other times we couldn’t get to school because of similar things.”

On the topic of Uni, as I was signing out of WILL on Tuesday afternoon, a woman asked me if I went to school there. After I replied, she smiled and said, “I graduated from Uni in ‘79. When I was there, we didn’t come here [to WILL] at all. It’s a wonderful connection that you have here.”  I not only found it interesting to run into a Uni graduate in Campbell Hall, but upon thinking about what she had said, realized how lucky we are to be able to collaborate with WILL and what a wonderful experience it is to be working on this project.