When I enrolled at Simon Fraser University, I anticipated an academic education. What I received was also an education in life. During my years as a student, 1967-1971, the university came under the influence of professors and student leaders with radical, anti-establishment, anti-corporation, anti-American views. It was the time of the counter culture and my conservative Mennonite upbringing and outlook were significantly challenged. I entered the university a small town sheltered young man. I emerged at the other end of the experience changed, probably somewhat radicalized in my views.

It had been with considerable trepidation that I had given in to the urging to begin this journey. The main reason for my hesitation was the realization that I would have difficulty reading the small print in text books. Extensive reading of small print was becoming an issue for me.

The winds of change were already blowing strong on a number of U.S. and Canadian campuses when I began attending lectures in the Quad at SFU. Berkley was a hotbed of student unrest. Four students were shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State. Groups like The Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and The Chicago Seven were creating anxiety and fear among conservative minded citizens, especially in America. At concerts and rallies of the young, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan sang of freedom, change and protest. One of the main reasons for the disquiet in the United States was the unpopular war in Vietnam. In a very real sense, the earth was shifting on its moral and values axis.

The thinking behind much of the protest originated with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their ideas were embraced, adapted and propagated by a number of highly articulate intellectuals. Author, professor and public speaker Herbert Marcuse became one of the better known and most influential of these. He advocated intolerance of right wing political movements and tolerance of left wing movements. His critiques of capitalism inculcated the young generation with a growing anxiety and distrust of the society in which they were growing up. The leaders of what became known as the New Left fomented emotions of anger and despair.

In Canada, SFU  was in the forefront of this philosophical shift taking place especially among university students.

At the beginning of our SFU journey, Linda and I rented a poorly heated basement suite from an elderly widow in Burnaby. For some reason, she didn’t trust us. Possibly she was aware that at times I kept a light on while I worked through the night preparing assignments due the next day. This expense may have agitated her. Possibly she thought that since I was a student at SFU, we must be communists.

Our landlady evidently felt a need to keep us under constant surveillance. When we went away, I sometimes placed an object behind the door to our suite. Often it had been pushed back, so we knew she had entered. When my parents came to visit, she just happened to be doing a little gardening at our living room window. At one point she sent us to her son to be interrogated by him. He was a decent man and appeared to be as mystified by his mother’s suspicions as we were.

After three months of this, we told her we would be moving out. She said “that’s good, then I won’t have to evict you.” We had paid our rent faithfully and had caused her no problems. Her seeming unfairness brought out the worst in me and I was tempted to tell her we were Communists, but she was an elderly woman and I thought better of it.

After that we moved into a two room suite in the front end of the old B.C. Tel office on Gladys Avenue in Abbotsford, across the street from several sets of railway tracks. Initially the train whistles and rumbling of the wheels on the tracks woke us at night, but after a few weeks we were able to sleep through this. Linda got a part time job at the Royal Bank and I carpooled to SFU.

I had begun with a history major. When I discovered the PSA department (political science, sociology and anthropology), I switched. Sociology became my main focus. It was in PSA that my real education began. A number of extremely radical American professors had made their home here. One was an avowed Marxist. The others weren’t far behind. They focused on the evils of the capitalist system. I was assigned to read “The Communist Manifesto,” “Red Star over China”, “The Wretched of the Earth”, and “Soul on Ice” (by Eldridge Cleaver, a leader in the Black Panthers), etc. They held up Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as icons.

The PSA professors seemed motivated by a zeal to radicalize us. They wanted us to rebel against the traditions and values of our society. Several of them seemingly believed that to accomplish this they must first wreak havoc in our minds. They were smart, well informed and able to communicate their ideas in a way that caught our imagination. In time they succeeded in fostering a radicalization among many students, especially in the PSA department, but also in other departments. Eventually charismatic, radical student leaders persuaded a significant number of students to participate in a strike and occupy the administration building. This resulted in an early morning raid by the RCMP.

In the midst of the growing agitation, there were other groups, such as the small contingent of hard-core Marxist Leninists who had their own agenda for world revolution. I was particularly fascinated by the Hare Khrishnas in their hooded light brown robes shuffling in tight circles chanting words unintelligible to me. The Hippie movement was also gaining momentum and I was amazed at first that guys would let their hair grow to shoulder length and walk around barefoot in torn jeans. Marijuana, a drug about which I knew nothing and with which I had no experience, was in vogue.

To enhance our understanding of the damage done to Aboriginal culture by white society, 3 PSA profs organized a Royal Hudson train trip to the Mount Currie Indian Reserve near Pemberton. I was sitting in a circle with other students and a skinny “ rollie” was passed around. Each time it came to me, I accepted it and took a drag. Only later did it occur to me that I had been smoking pot. This was early in my days at SFU and I was still the small town boy who had lived a pretty sheltered life.

I attended many of the noon hour meetings organized by the leftwing student leaders. Sometimes the speaker was Martin Lowney, who was generally thought of as the key spokesperson and leader. Martin proved to be a charismatic personality with an ability to whip up emotions. By exposing myself to their ideas, I was being inexorably and increasingly drawn in by the philosophy he and others espoused. I’m sure my parents and also our friends in Abbotsford were astonished at the change in my appearance. I

grew long sideburns and then decided to allow them to meet , which meant I had a beard. Also, I stopped going to the barber and my hair grew very long. My brother in law gave me a pipe which, like other students, I sometimes smoked in the tutorial classes.

In the midst of the accelerating emotions on the part of a number of students against the university administration and the senate, I needed to work hard to get decent marks to qualify for student loans and bursaries. Occasionally, when I began falling behind, I called on Linda for help. One day I brought home several textbooks and said “I have a paper due tomorrow. Can you scan these books and lightly pencil mark any paragraphs that pertain to my subject?” Linda very effectively selected paragraphs with information I wanted. There were no desktop computers and I worked all night on my manual Smith Corona typewriter. At 8 am I drove to the university and handed in the paper.

I needed to discover ways to compensate for my inability to do as much reading as my courses required. Fortunately, a number of my profs based a large percentage of their marks on written papers. I decided to focus on writing papers that were both well researched and well written. Linda helped me as much as she could with the research and my marks on these were predominantly A’s and B’s. In an English course focused on poetry, I memorized parts of a number of poems. An angel must have prepared the final exam with me in mind. The main question required an essay length response. This allowed me to use the portions I had memorized and I quoted extensively from them.

I wasn’t aware of it, but Linda told me later she had become concerned that we were drifting apart. Also, she felt that attending university must be easy compared to working. She decided to take a few courses herself. This had several benefits, one of which was immediate. She quickly realized that university expectations were more rigorous than she had imagined. Also, she enrolled in a PSA course taught by one of the radical American professors, and her thinking was considerably influenced. Our views became more synchronized, and this was good for our relationship.

Our time at SFU had one outcome that, in retrospect, we still somewhat regret. With little money in the bank, we had been able to buy the house and five acres mentioned earlier, and also a couple of lots. Selling the lots had brought us a substantial profit, and we were keen to embark on further endeavours of this kind. The teaching of the PSA professors persuaded us, however, that this type of activity was part of the despised, evil capitalist system. We made a decision to cease these activities and it would be many years before we again got back into real estate. Because we had been out of the market so long, we had fallen behind and could participate only in a limited way.

Our experience during the time of student unrest helped us understand that a small group of committed, highly persuasive individuals can at times shape events because the majority are willing to follow. They may have the power to shape events, but the change they bring will not necessarily be desirable. Student dissatisfaction and clamouring for change persuaded the President of the University to resign. Our rejoicing at this was short lived. We had succeeded in deposing the president, but when a new individual replaced him, we discovered that he was even less understanding or tolerant of student wishes.

Linda and I learned from this that it is important to carefully assess the character, ideas and direction of the people we are following and working with. We respected most of the left leaning student leaders, but in time we came to understand their motivation was based more on ideology, than what was best for the majority of the students. Also, while they had some valid insights into issues facing our society, they had little positive understanding of what needed or could be done.

As happens so often after a crises, university life following the strike pretty much returned to its regular ebb and flow, but without the frequent left wing meetings and rallies. I was able to make up for the time lost during the five week strike and realized that my marks were high enough to attain an Honours BA if I took additional courses for extra credits. I did two substantial research projects. One was on the evolving Mennonite culture in the Abbotsford area. The other was on inmate culture at Matsqui Institution. Both required dozens of interviews and hours of writing.

For Linda and myself, it is still interesting and enlightening to look back at the SFU years. Getting me through university was the first time we collaborated on a significant challenge that required full commitment by both of us. We agree that we learned at least as much outside the classroom as inside. Some of what we learned we have subsequently discarded because it does not serve our purpose. We do value and have retained a great deal though and continue to build on it to this day.

I admit willingly, even with a dose of embarrassment, that it was a dumb, irrational, foolish decision. Reflecting back on that time now, I shudder inwardly at the memory of what we did. I’m sure our parents shuddered then already, upon hearing of what we were contemplating.

Linda and I were young, newly married and happy in our relationship. She was a bank teller and I was a heavy equipment operator. We had bought a home with five acres on Defehr road, near the Canada-U.S. border. The house needed updating, but we were delighted to not be renting. Our only real problem was that we both felt utterly unfulfilled in our work On a Saturday in early May, 1967, we had just completed breakfast when I asked Linda a question that had been percolating in my psyche for some time.

“How do you feel about what we’re doing?” I asked. She seemed to understand the meaning of my rather vague query.

“I know I really hope I won’t have to be a teller for forty years,” she said.

“And I don’t want to be a cat operator for forty years,” I said.

That conversation ended with our seemingly ill-conceived decision. We gave notice to our employers and found a renter for our home. Two weeks later we loaded our chevy panel truck with camping supplies and food, and set out along the Trans Canada Highway. A couple of innocent, small town kids, we were looking for more from life. How to find more was still well outside our sphere of understanding. We didn’t even know where we were going.

That first evening we pulled the chevy into a campsite near 100 Mile House in central British Columbia. One night in our new sleeping bags convinced us they were more suited to California summers than to this area’s minus zero temperatures. It had not occurred to us that May in the Caribou would not be as pleasant as in the Fraser Valley. Even fully dressed, we shivered. A couple of weeks later we spoke with an elderly local realtor. In spite of our severely limited funds, he seemed to take an interest in us. “Meet me here tomorrow at 8 a.m.” he said.

The next morning, after an hour of travelling in his pickup along an unpaved road, we eased his canoe into the pristine water of Sheridan Lake By sunset, we had fallen in love with the leased lot the realtor showed us on the rugged, far side of the lake.

The next day we set up our tent on the property. At about 5 the

following morning Linda roused me, agitation in her voice. “What’s that noise? I hope it’s not a bear”. Heavy breathing just outside the tent had awakened her. I unzipped the flap of the tent and realized we were surrounded by a herd of curious long horned cattle. The realtor had not informed us that this was open range cattle country. After breakfast I built a corral around the tent.

For nearly 3 months our only visitors were an overly bold black bear, a shrieking demanding squirrel, a curious cow moose and her calf, and the local rancher patrolling on his ancient dirt bike.

We cleaned up debris on the lot and in the water. Needing a place to prepare meals, w created a fire pit and circled it with stones. In the evening we sat by the fire, often talking about what might lie in the future for us. With no real sense of direction, we considered the idea of building a log cabin and staying over winter.

Our days on the shore of Sheridan Lake were taken up with

physical work. Each evening, sitting around our campfire, we read a few pages of the biography of Madame Curie. As a university student passionate about scientific research, Marie Curie existed largely on buttered toast and tea. She and her husband Pierre conducted their research in a cramped storage room, the only space the university could offer. During one phase of their experiments, the Curies, mainly Marie, treated 8 tons of pitchblende to obtain one gram of radium. They could have sold it for $150,000 but decided to keep it for further research. Their commitment and sacrifice deeply stirred our imaginations.

Toward the end of summer, we began to realize we were living in a world with an extremely limited horizon. Marie Curie’s commitment to science awakened in me a desire to further my education. Swatting at hungry mosquitoes and trying to avoid the smoke of our campfire one evening, I said, “I’d like to go to university, but I know we don’t have the money.” Without hesitating, Linda said, “I could work.”

A few days later, while we were working in the water at the front of our lot, the black bear jumped over my corral and damaged our tent. It really didn’t matter. We were preparing to depart and broke camp a few days later.

Back in the Fraser Valley, I enrolled at Simon Fraser University and we found a basement suite to rent in Burnaby. In September I began working toward a BA in the social sciences.

That was 46 years ago. Now my hair is the colour of snow and I have retired after many years of working with inmates in provincial and federal corrections and then with young offenders in a remote setting. I still like to reflect on Marie Curie’s unswerving commitment and wonderful passion. Her life infused Linda and me with a sense of direction and purpose. Because of her example, our foolish decision had a good outcome.