Talk:The Reflector (Mississippi newspaper)

A Vietnam War Vignette
In the 1960's it was common for supporters of the war in Vietnam to say that opposition to the war was "bicoastal," or even "only in New York and Berkeley." In 1968 I was keynote "speaker" of the annual conference of the National Students Conference, the association of many hundreds of college and university student "governments" and "student leaders," held in El Paso, Texas. M keynote was a multi-media presentation called "In Search of America," run on 24 slide projectors, 7 16mm movie projectors, with a variety of actors intervening, e.g. to "tear-gas" the audience with fire extinguishers, and a sound system the power of which could be measured in horsepower. Well, about a horsepower or three, anyway... RMS. As a result I was invited to speak around the country, attend conferences, and just goof off a lot on other people's money. Fast forward to 1969, and I'm an Assistant Editor, very junior, on Horizon Magazine, a plush hard-cover general interest mag published by American Heritage in New York. All the editors had a get-together every few weeks at the Harvard Club, on 44th (or so) street, usually with a guest, and one day the guest was J.S. "Jack" Plumb, a famous Oxford historian, porcelain collector, and quite possibly spy. After lunch he gets to nattering on at all of us, all but me Americans, about how the uproar against the war was nothing but a minor bicoastal piffle, and I was able to do a rather nice "Ahem." "I had dinner last night in Washington with Sharon Smith, the Editor of the Missississippi State Reflector, because they publish some of my stuff," (slight stirring among the editors: Mississippi? Lloyd-Jones?  Our official house long-hair?) "and she told me that they'd tried to have Maxwell Taylor speak on the campus.  They figured at least MSU would be safe.  But a kid came after him with a bazooka he'd borrowed from ROTC, and that was the end of that." I was able to round out the story with how my later wife, the excellent Susie Schidt, had blown up the University of Kansas campus that week simply by reporting how she'd blown up University of North Carolina the week before that. Sic transit gloria "bicoastalism."

And that's the way it was in the SMU Reflector in 1968. David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 04:53, 21 October 2014 (UTC)