where she would answer the door with pepper in her hand,nready to blind a possible attacker. Stephen Sondheim wasndoing word puzzles for the fledgling magazine New York.nThe newspapers were 10 cents. You could get a studionapartment in Manhattan for somewhere between $100-n$250. You could get a bag of heroin uptown for around $3nto $5, which is also what it would cost you to see Joan Baeznat the Fillmore East.nIt’s funny to look back and see how old some of thenheroes of that youth culture were. Ken Kesey, with his OnenFlew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and acid tests and Americannflag tooth, was 33. Abbie Hoffman, who’d said “never trustnanyone over 30,” was himself 34. Warhol was 40-something,nAllen Ginsberg was 42, Norman Mailer was 45. (Henpublished Armies of the Night in ’68, but he’d had his firstnbig success with The Naked and the Dead 20 years before.)nTimothy Leary was 48. Leonard Bernstein, with his benefitnfor the Black Panthers ahead of him, was turning 50.nThese were the days when the black flag of anarchy wasnflying over the Brooklyn Academy of Music as the LivingnTheater performed there (in the nude, and encouragingntheir audience to fly); when New York was “a small town”nand in most neighborhoods you could walk around at 3nA.M. and be perfectly safe; when during one winter, at least,nif you wanted to you could really live in Central Park.nAmerica was going to start from ground zero and build anNew Society; from that Utopia we somehow ended up withnWatergate, the oil crisis, the BeeGees, and Mr. Goodbar.nMore than one person has observed that what politicizednyoung people in the 60’s was the single burning issue of thendraft. No war, no 60’s. But we forget that for somenpeople — and not just six-year-olds—their oblivion extendedneven to Vietnam. For her and her circle, says CherylnTerry, then a model for Wagner and Ford, “Somewhere innthe background we knew that there was a war, but it wasnalmost as though we were living in a time capsule; we werenso untouched by it. I never once remember anybody havingna serious discussion about the war except to say we shouldnget out or we should stay in. We didn’t have a politicalnconscience. We were totally unaware of it. It was all acrossnThe New York Times every day, but our big thing was tonlaugh at the world and not to trust anyone over 30.”nAs for “anarchists” like the late Abbie Hoffman, to bentaken seriously was the last thing any of them wanted. Theirnlack of seriousness, or coherency, was in fact the point. “It isnimpossible for me to describe our ‘ideology,’ for we simplyndidn’t have one,” wrote Raymond Mungo, who helped runnthe Liberation News Service, a clearinghouse for thenunderground press. “We never subscribed to a code ofnconduct or a clearly conceptualized Idea Society, and thenpeople we chose to live with were not gathered together onnthe basis of any intellectual commitment to socialism,npacifism, anarchism, or the like. They were people whonwere homeless, could survive on perhaps five dollars a weeknin spending money, and could tolerate the others in thenhouse.”nAbbie Hoffman told an interviewer that, being miffed onennight that a police inspector wouldn’t arrest him (“I keptntelling him to bust me, and he kept saying I hadn’t donenanything”), he looked around “and saw this display case, fullnof, like, Littie League trophies,” the inspector’s favoritenthing there in the station house. “And I just slammed into it.n”It was my favorite bust,” Hoffman said, “because it wasnso existential.”nFred Eberstadt, a photographer then working for Life andnVogue, says, “In the early days at least there were few thingsnmore fun than marches. I went to a number of peacenmarches and black solidarity marches. I don’t mean to saynthey weren’t worthwhile, they probably were, but . . . it’snalso true they were fun. It was kind of collegiate.”nHe and his friends also used to go bail people out of jail allnthe time. One night when he went to bail out a friend who’dngotten busted at a protest at the Women’s House ofnDetention (then in Greenwich Village), he was surprised tonfind out the sit-in had been to legalize prostitution. “Thisngirl was really quite a feminist, and I said, ‘How do younsquare legal prostitution with your point of view aboutnfeminism and antipornography?’ She said, ‘Well, I didn’tnreally know what it was all about. I’m so used to joining anyndemonstration I see that I just sat down where everybodynelse did.’ That was what it was for a lot of us,” Eberstadtncontinues. “Whatever the demonstration was, we’d join.”nThe strike at Columbia was also typical. It was sort ofnabout Columbia’s continued support of the Institute fornDefense Analyses (IDA), which was doing research for thenwar; sort of about Columbia’s building of its new gym innMorningside Park in Harlem, which would have separatenand unequal facilities for the community’s use; sort of aboutnuniversity president Grayson Kirk’s edict forbidding anynnnLIBERAL ARTSnAFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN ACTIONnThe principle of the thing too-perfectlynunderstood by an unfortunate woman atnNorthern Illinois University:n”Obtaining a position with falsifiednrecords is an unusual occurrence, but itnhappened when a new assistant directornof affirmative action for the NIU Officenof Affirmative Action was hired innJanuary. . . . [Vivian] Hammoud’s credentialsnstate that she completed twonyears of law school as of Spring 1988 atnthe State University of New York innBufFalo. However, records from thenNew York Supreme Court state that shenfailed out of SUNY law school twice,nand then sued for readmission. She lostnthe case in May 1986.n”Hammoud also claimed to havenearned a master’s degree from [the Universitynof Michigan] in 1978 and andoctoral degree in 1983. When ThenNorthern Star checked Hammoud’snUM records, it was found that she hadn• not earned a doctoral degree and hernmaster’s degree was earned in 1971, notn1978 “n—from The Northern Star,nApril 13, J 989nAUGUST 1989/25n