Victor Bruce (Bruce) Pacht ’67

Dartmouth College Oral History Program

The Dartmouth Vietnam Project

August 4, 2014

Transcribed by Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft

REED-WESTON:        All right. This is Anne Reed-Weston. I’m sitting down with Bruce Pacht in his home in Lebanon, New Hampshire. It is August 4th, 2014. Is it all right if I record this?

PACHT:                      Yes, it is.

REED-WESTON: Awesome. Can you please tell me your name and where you grew up?

PACHT:                      My full name is Victor Bruce Pacht, but we don’t do the Victor. I go by Bruce Pacht, and I was born in Newport, Rhode Island, at the end of the war [World War II], and when the war ended, we moved to Brooklyn, and I went to high school in Great Neck [Long Island, New York], and I came to Dartmouth after high school.

REED-WESTON:        Okay. Mm-hm. When were you born?

PACHT: Nineteen forty-five.

REED-WESTON:        All right. So how much time did you spend in Rhode Island before—

PACHT:                      Six weeks.

REED-WESTON:        Oh, so you grew up in—

PACHT: Essentially, and then we moved after three years from Brooklyn to Great Neck.

REED-WESTON:        Great Neck.

PACHT:                      I grew up in Great Neck.

REED-WESTON:        Grew up in Great Neck?

PACHT:                      Yeah.

REED-WESTON:        What were your parents’ names?

PACHT:                      Harold Pacht was my father,—

REED-WESTON:        Okay.

PACHT:                      —and Jeanette Pacht was my mother.

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm. What did they do?

PACHT:                      Harold was in the women’s knitted outerwear business.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      He started with sweaters, and then in the ’60s started making shells and pants and then things like that and got pretty big. Jeanette was at home, although she graduated high school at just 15 and couldn’t afford to go to college, so she started working as a secretary, and she did some accounting in the office, but she was at home when we were kids.

REED-WESTON:        Okay. Can you describe your childhood a little bit? What kinds of things did you do?

PACHT:                      It was basically an upper-middle-class Jewish upbringing in the suburbs of New York. Great Neck had and still has one of the best school districts in the country. That’s why my parents moved there. So school was the most important thing in our—in my upbringing. You know, if I was doing okay in school, everything else was okay. So it was—that was basically what I did, was go to school.

                                    We didn’t take a whole lot of vacations. I mean, I remember going to Amish country for a few days, but we weren’t that “Oh, let’s all get in the car” family vacation kind of thing and “Oh, yeah, I remember when I did this.” That wasn’t it. I remember the holidays, when we had big family gatherings and things like that, but we weren’t—we didn’t—I don’t have these memories of going, “Oh, yeah, every summer we went to Gramma’s house.” Gramma’s house was in Brooklyn, so we didn’t—we didn’t do that.

                                    I remember going to the theater in New York and learning about that.

REED-WESTON:        So did you have any siblings?

PACHT:                      I have an older brother, Michael [Pacht], who went to law school and worked as a lawyer and a judge for a while and then bought a B&B [bed and breakfast]. He lives over in Taftsville, Vermont, with his spouse, doing the B&B. And I have a sister who’s nine years younger. She lives in Wayne, New Jersey, and she works for an orthopedic surgeon, in his office. Her husband is in the fragrance business. My youngest just got married, so everybody was up for the wedding over at Lake George, so that was fun.

                                    But my life—you know, my early life was pretty much, as I said, was school. Went to Hebrew school. Went to summer camp for 13 years. That was fun. In Pennsylvania. So that was good. I went there as a camper and a counselor and did that for 13 years. That was great, until second year of college. I guess sophomore year was the last year I was at camp. And then it got—I couldn’t go back because there were other things. The horizons of the world were calling, so I had to go elsewhere.

REED-WESTON:        So did you do any sports or any extracurricular activities—

PACHT:                      I played a little football when I was in high school, just junior varsity football. I was on the track team, and I enjoyed that. I threw shot and discus. And that was okay. I took a third once in a regional discus, but it was New York, and so the competition was pretty stiff. I remember that my best put, shot was just under 50 feet. Fifty feet was like—if you could get 50 feet, it would be great. Well, this is—

                                    I’m going to shut it for a second.

REED-WESTON:        Yeah, pause for a second. Hold on.

[Recording interruption.]

PACHT:                      I remember football.

REED-WESTON: [Unintelligible].

PACHT:                      Yeah, so mine was 49 feet, 11 and a half inches, and that’s the best I ever did. It didn’t get me anything. But when I came up here, I read the Valley News and read about who the high school champions were, and I would have been the high school champion in New Hampshire. But there was just too much competition in New York. I was just another schlub on the track team. But what’s interesting is the people I remember most from high school were the people who were on the track team. There were a lot of people on the track team. It was a big deal. So I remember some of their names. And that was the place where, you know, even the cool guys and the nerds—everybody got together on the track team because it takes all kinds, especially the weight events, the runners. So that was neat. But when I got to Dartmouth, you know, I wasn’t interested in that.

                                    I took trumpet lessons for ten years with a guy who played on The Tonight Show, in The Tonight Show, and that was good. I got pretty good at that, but then I went out for it at the college, but the guy who was doing it didn’t follow up with me, and I was too much of a wuss to follow up with him. There are other things to do at college than keep playing the trumpet.

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      And also I went out for the track team and saw what that was, and I didn’t want to lift weights as much as being a shot putter required.

                                    Is that your car? Can you pull straight ahead and park?

[Recording interruption.]

REED-WESTON:        All right, we’re back.

PACHT:                      I switched to guitar, because this was—you know, I got to Dartmouth in ’63, and I taught myself how to play guitar the summer of ’60, when I was a camp. And Bob Dylan and Joan Baez started singing in ’62 and became—you know, the folk revival was happening back then, and it’s much easier to bring a guitar to a party than a trumpet, so I played guitar with a bunch of other guys. We’d get together and play at the Top of the Hop [at the Hopkins Center for the Arts]. And, of course, the cool guys would come and say [imitates, ironically, a dumb-sounding man], “Hey, we’re trying to read here.” And I’d say, “No, the Hop is for entertainment.” And had to go to the dean and get a ruling, so that was—

                                    We were always in trouble. You know, we were growing our hair over our ears, and nobody had hair over their ears at that time, so—plus I was in DKE [pronounced Deke]. There used to be a DKE chapter on campus, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and it was—oh, we were last in academics and last in sports and, you know, a small number, and I was the only Jewish guy in that fraternity, so they made me chaplain. But it was—it was sort of a non-fraternity fraternity. But I also enjoyed it for that reason. I was very pleased that it wasn’t the mainstream kind of Dartmouth cool.

                                    There really was a Dartmouth cool back then. I don’t know if there still is. But there was a way you were supposed to be when you were at Dartmouth, and if you weren’t that, then people didn’t quite know what you were. [Unintelligible], gay students here. There were a couple of guys who we thought were gay, but I didn’t know anybody who was close enough to me to actually come out, so it must have been rough.

                                    So I didn’t get involved with those things. I acted a little while I was at Dartmouth. In fact, I acted with [Robert B.] Bob Reich in a play once. You know who Bob Reich is?

REED-WESTON:        Nn-nn.

PACHT:                      He was a secretary of labor for [President William J.] Bill Clinton.

REED-WESTON:        Oh!

PACHT:                      He’s an economist. He’s at Berkeley [University of California, Berkeley]. He’s a person of small stature. He’s about four-seven, four-eight. But he’s brilliant. He and Clinton met each other when they were both in a boat on their way to [the University of] Oxford because they both had—whatever that scholarship is there that everybody wants.

REED-WESTON:        Oh.

PACHT:                      It begins with an R.

REED-WESTON: Rhodes Scholar.

PACHT:                      Yeah, they were both Rhodes scholars, so the apocryphal story is that Reich fed him chicken soup when he got seasick on the way over to Oxford. But they became friends, and Clinton had him in his first term. But Bob was much more liberal than Bill, and so he left in the second term. He’s written lots of books about it, but he’s a brilliant speaker. He comes up to Dartmouth every once in a while. In fact, you can go to his website and check it out. He simplifies economic things and draws pictures. He was a great actor. He was a great leader. He was a great speaker. He was the chair of Palaeopitus. He’s a great guy.

                                    So anyway,—and I had the fortune of being in a play with him once. So I acted in a couple of plays, and—what else did I do there? That was about it. I was a French jock, so I went to France in my junior year and my senior year. I was a leader in my second year. It was three months in the fall term. And so I missed two fall terms, two out of my four fall terms, and I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t care about foot- —even though we had four winning years of football while I was there. Bob Blackman was the coach. It was a big football time and everything, but it was okay, but I didn’t— I went to one football game here.

                                    But I did do French, and there were about five French majors in my year, so we—we really got all our great stuff. [Lawrence] Larry Harvey was there. He headed the French department at the time. David Sices [pronounced SIGH-sees] was there. [Richard E.] Dick Gregerson was there. He was my mentor. Larry Harvey was—you know, an international reputation.

                                    And he—when I started trying to decide my major—you know, I was speaking to Dick Gregerson, who was just four years older than I. He’s a Dartmouth ’59, and he was almost finished with his thesis, not quite, and he—I said, “I don’t know whether to major in French or in English.” He said, “You know, you’ll always be able to read English.”

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      He said, “Go major in French, and you’ll be able to read the great French literature.” I said, “[Unintelligible], you’re right.”  So I did that. And then when I was getting to the end, I applied—I wanted to go to Columbia [University], the Ph.D. program, and I got accepted and then bought my victory keg. That was what you did when you got accepted in graduate school. I bought the victory keg, and then I was called over to the French department, and Gregerson and Harvey were sitting there, and they said, “Hey, how’d you like to go to California?” I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “Well, we have a four-year, all-expenses-paid, National Defense Education Act Fellowship to get a Ph.D. at Stanford University]. And I said, “I already bought the victory keg, c’mon!”

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      And this paid everything: tuition, books and a living allowance and everything else. And so I said, “Aw, man! You know, I want to be a bachelor in New York and do that thing.” Dick says, “Look, if you don’t go to California now, when are you gonna go to California?” So with the same impeccable logic, that got me into a French—to be a French major. So I said, “Okay.” So I went off to California and started living in Palo Alto.

Of course, Vietnam was heating up at this time. It was already an issue when we were on campus because, you know, when we were singing antiwar songs at the Top of the Hop, we’d take shit from people who were standing around. But it was mild shit because we weren’t really deep into it, you know. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was, what, in ’64?

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      So things were happening, but we were pretty insulated from them. You know, it still took—at that time, it still took eight hours to get to Dartmouth from New York City because the interstate wasn’t finished until ’67, so we were a long way—and you still couldn’t get [New York] Yankee games on the radio; that’s why I became a [Boston] Red Sox fan.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      And it was—not everybody really knew what the hell was going on, you know? Protests against ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] were just starting. I don’t even remember anything happening when I was on campus. But when I got to Stanford, things were really getting hot. It was the—I arrived in September of ’67, which was right after the Summer of Love, which was when things were starting to turn bad. You know, Haight-Ashbury was starting to fall apart. The bad guys were getting into the trafficking in hallucinogenic drugs. You know, they weren’t—you couldn’t tell—you couldn’t be sure that what you were getting was what you were looking for. So things were starting to—things were starting to fray around the edges.

                                    And protests. People started to protest. There were protests virtually every week, even on the Stanford campus or in San Francisco. Stanford had something called the Stanford Research Institute, which was working on things like the soldierless battlefield, guns that would automatically shoot whatever—you know, when things moved. So we would protest there, and get gassed in San Francisco—all kinds of things.

                                    So that’s when I became active against the war and joined SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, when I was out there. I hadn’t done that at Dartmouth. I wasn’t really politically active at Dartmouth. I was socially active. I had long hair—not really long hair, just actor long hair. But still took shit for it. You know, thinking about social causes and things like that.

                                    But when I got to Stanford, I began getting politicized, so I joined SDS, and I happened to wind up in the lunatic fringe Maoist cell with people I had never met before, and there was a black guy and a guy from Latin America, you know, and women, and it was in this guy’s apartment, which was filthy and disgusting, and, you know, I was like Mr. Wide-Eyed, Innocent, Jewish Kid from Great Neck.

                                    We were talking one night about one of the cities we were going to empty out, you know, and people were going to come, needing places to stay. [Chuckles.] I was so fucking naive. I remember the kid yelling at me. I’m trying to remember what he said. He said, “We’re gonna come take your apartment.” And that’s when I said, Huh! Somethin’ different happening here. I never heard about this before. So that when I began to grow up, I think. You know, it wasn’t—it wasn’t playing around at protest anymore. There was some serious stuff that was going to be happening.

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      So what did I do? I ran away. I realized that I was so involved with politics that I my academic work—I wasn’t able to do the kind of work that would be necessary to finish a Ph.D. I couldn’t close myself off the way an academician needs to close himself off from what’s happening on a day-to-day basis in order to be successful. You can’t do the kind of scholarship that you need to do to get a Ph.D. while you’re paying attention to what’s going on daily. I mean, you just can’t, because you don’t have the time. Maybe after you get your Ph.D. and you get tenure and all that, you can become politically active, but if you do it while you’re a student, I don’t know how people would ever finish their theses, get the work done.

                                    So I dropped out, and I started traveling around the country, seeing what was going on, what people were doing to try to take action to end the war. And I first headed up toward Oregon and Washington. I figured I’d become Paul Bunyan up there. And found—because a few people were experimenting with living together at the time. Like, a bunch of people would rent a house together and call it a commune. You know, it was just mostly to save money. But it wasn’t the same as the people who I knew who were living off campus at Dartmouth. You know, it was a conscious effort to live together, that the living together was more important than whatever else they were doing. And I guess that was the thing that defined the way they were living together versus what was going on in—you know, just anywhere where students live together.

                                    But these were students and people who had jobs, and so I dropped in on one place when I was in Seattle and then another place when I was in Portland and stayed there for a couple of weeks and then went back to Stanford and told them I was dropping out and to end my fellowship. The head of the department was very nice about it. He said, “You know, if you want to come back, I don’t know if I can ever get this back for you.” And, of course, I was pretty cavalier then. I didn’t care. And I said, “Well, I understand,” I said.

                                    But that was the big change of direction in my life, because up until then I’d been really a child of privilege and following a script. I wasn’t exactly on my own. You know, I still had—what I had was the credit card. My father paid for the gas in my car. So he knew where I was because he would see the receipts. But he didn’t yank it or anything. You know, I wasn’t really poor. I wasn’t ever really poor. I was living poor, but I wasn’t really poor, because I could always go back there. But I didn’t. But he did pay for the gas.

                                    And so after I dropped out of Stanford, I drove south until I could sit naked someplace and not be molested, and that turned out to be Big Bend National Park, the desert of Big Bend National Park. And I figured I’d do 40 days and 40 nights in the desert, come out to save the world. And I managed four days and three nights [chuckles] and was going nuts, and so I came screaming out of the desert.

                                    I remember where I stopped. I saw a guy who was up on top of a rise, Missouri license plates, a station wagon, and he wore his pants up to here [demonstrates], and he was looking through goggles. The guy must have been in his 70s. And I went up to him and said, “Hi. I just spent four days and three nights in the desert.” [Laughter.] And he said, “Don’t worry, you’ll meet a nice girl. You’ll get married, and you’ll be okay.” [Laughs.]

                                    And then that’s when I decided, You have to go back to Dartmouth and see–because I kind of imagined this reunion moment—you know, everybody would be drawn back to Dartmouth from Green Key [Weekend] 1969, and we’d all figure out what the next step was to save the world.

                                    So I went back—I had a job. I actually had a job. After I came out of the desert, I got a job at the Chisos Mountains Basin Motel inside Big Bend National Park, which was—there are these mountains. You know, it’s about a 5,000-foot plateau there. The Rio Grande [River] cuts through the channels. It’s the southern border of the United States—you know, where it comes down from Mexico and the southern border of Texas goes up like that and then empties into the Gulf [of Mexico]. Big Bend National Park is in that big bend in the river.

                                    But there’s a mountain range that goes up about 7,000 feet, and right in the middle of that there’s a motel. So I worked there for six weeks, made enough money to get back to Dartmouth. Came back to Dartmouth, saw my mentor at the French department, then saw a commotion over at the administration building and went over. And [David H.] Dave Green was there, and he came to the door with a megaphone, and he said, “We’re gonna lock the doors in five minutes.” I said, “What’s going on?” He said, “We’re protesting the end of the war.” I said, “Aw-right!” So I went in. And we occupied the building for 12 hours and then got arrested, and that was the takeover of Parkhurst [Hall], which I blundered into.

                                    I’ve just got to check this recipe here. [He is making chili.]

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      Make sure that I’m doing that right. Yep, “Add beans and stir.” That looks good.

                                    So I walked in, and then we spent 12 hours talking with lawyers and trying to figure out: All right, how do we get out of this alive, and are we going to go to jail? We were going to be charged with contempt of court because there was a court order that came and said that you have to get out of the building. You know, you’re trespassing and you got to get out of the building. And so we said—you know, we were saying, well, what’s the consequences, and should we stay in? We wanted our lawyer to take it to the Supreme Court and blah, blah, blah, all these things.

                                    And then we all got arrested. I got booked, and we were on trial two days later. Forty-six of us, I think, were convicted and sentenced to a month in jail and a hundred-dollar fine for taking over—for not leaving the building, we were in contempt of court. And this requires more beans.

                                    And so we wrote manifestos, you know. And there were guys—I think—I don’t know. I think I was the oldest. I was a ’67. There were a couple of ’68s. There were ’69s who were going to graduate in a month, so they were trying to finish their courses. And then there were some guys from ’70 and ’71 also. We had fourteen men in our county jail. We were in Rockingham County. That was the most in any jail. They sent us all around New Hampshire because there were too many for one county to bear the expense.

                                    And so we kind of had a little bit of a power base. You know, when they tried to put one guy in solitary, the rest of us used my cellmate, [Donald E.] Don Miller, who was a ’68 or—I forget what he is; ’69 maybe. But he was tai chi. You know, he was the only guy who resisted arrest when we left Parkhurst, so he got Maced. And when we were walking up the stairs after having my dinner, which they served us at four o’clock, he was walking too slow for the guard, and the guard said, “Move along,” and he gave the guard some shit, and they wanted to put him in solitary, so—but we protested. We refused to go back into our cells, and they released him.

                                    It was an interesting time. At the end of the month, we had over 300 books in the 14 cells—seven cells; there were 14 of us. It was an interesting time, but we learned that, you know, you can’t do anything when you’re in jail. You have no power, and nobody listens to you. [Chuckles.] You have no— unless you’re Nelson Mandela or something, nobody cares what you write when you’re in jail. All of our manifestos were nothing.

                                    But we did decide that when we came out, we’d have to get together, so we came out and watched the commencement in 1969, and then—and a bunch of us decided to rent a house together in Hartland, Vermont, which we did. And so that was the beginning of the Wooden Shoe Commune. There were one guy from ’66, David [H.] Guest, who still lives in the Upper Valley, who runs Killdeer Farm, and [Edward M.] Ed Levin, who was a ’69, and [Robert G.] Rob Nichols, who was a ’69. Rob and Ed are both dead. And me, Odessa [Piper] and Carol [Pacht].

                                    So we rented this house in Hartland, and that was the third commune. I count, like, the first 12 hours in the administration building. That becomes the first commune. And then the 26 days at Rockingham. (They gave us four days off for good behavior.) That was the second commune, and then the third commune was the Wooden Shoe. So we rented it for a year, and then we realized that rent was just pissing money down the drain. We decided we had to buy a place, so we borrowed $9,000 from Jake’s father, who was a professor at the Tuck School [of Business at Dartmouth], and $1,000 from Andrew Leddy, who was a professor at Dartmouth, and we bought 35 acres in Canaan at the end of a dirt road.

                                    And we called it the Wooden Shoe because the root of the word sabotage is sabot, which means wooden shoe in French. And we started—that’s when we started living real lives. Nobody knew anything, because we were all [chuckles]—Ed was a philosophy major; I think Rob was a history major or something. Jake was the only one—because he was a little older. He had dropped out of college and gone into the military, so he—he was in the Quartermaster Corps, so he learned a lot about—he could get stuff, a lot of stuff he wasn’t supposed to have, but stuff.

                                    And he was the one who really had the farming bug, so we bought these books on organic gardening, and we started reading, and then we started growing food.

                                    And Carol was pregnant. Carol and I were together then. And she was pregnant with our oldest son, and she didn’t want to eat the food. Food had terrible things in it back then, all kinds of artificial crap. She said, “I can’t eat this. I’m growing a baby.” So we decided we had to grow our own food, so I’d know what was in the food.

                                    So that led us to buying food, and it was very expensive. You couldn’t buy good food. There was no co-op. I mean, there was a Hanover Co-op, but it was still selling the same crap everybody sold. There was one—Honey Gardens, which was—back then, health food stores sold lots and lots of pills and supplements and maybe a little organic food in the corner. So we spent a lot of time learning how to grow food. And by the end, we had, like, two and a half acres under cultivation, and we were running the town dump for money. We were modeling the Dartmouth life growing classes. We had lots of different bodies.

                                    And it was good pay. It was, like, five dollars an hour. It was good pay. We had to hitchhike in, of course, because we couldn’t afford to take the car. And we could stay over at Jake’s parents’ house, and we had hot showers. We had a cold-water pump in the house, and we had a shit pit about a hundred yards away from the house, which we composted and then spread on the hay fields.

                                    And we had Jesse and we had to take care of the kid, and we had a cow, and we had milk with cream. Made our own butter and cream and everything else. And we lasted for five and a half years. It was the longest-lived commune, egalitarian commune in this area. By egalitarian, I mean we didn’t have, like, a spiritual leader. You know, communes really only last if they have somebody who can arbitrate and make a decision at the end, because otherwise you spend all your time making decisions.

                                    We’d have a meeting every Sunday, and on good Sundays, you know, it would take us an hour and a half to say who was going to take care of the cow, who was going to be on kids what day, who was going to clean the house, who was going to cook, who was going to split the wood. And it’s hard living in the wintertime up there—you know, no electricity, no heat source except wood. And we cooked with wood, too.

                                    But on the long days, there would be, like, “Well, I didn’t like what you said to me yesterday,” and so we’d have an encounter session for six or eight hours, until it was worked out. So I learned a lot about human beings.

                                    Carol was elected to the New Hampshire state legislature and served a term, and then she got pregnant with Orin [Pacht], who you just met, and she decided—she got pregnant—the second time she got pregnant with Asher [Pacht]. We already had one, and then she was pregnant with Asher, and so she took her—she backed out of the election. Even though she was on it—she was not running—she still got more votes than anybody else. But she told everybody she wasn’t going to run, so she didn’t do that.

                                    And that’s when—we left after five and a half years because we got tired of going through eight consciousnesses to get a glass of water.

                                    So that was—that’s mostly the Vietnam stuff. I mean, by then it was 1975. We left in October of 1975. So our activism—you know, we were very peripheral to what was going on at the college from ’70 to ’75. We were anti war. People would come and stay with us for a while, but we had this vision that, you know, the urban lefties would come up to the country and relax and then they’d go back and get involved with stuff. None of that ever materialized. What we essentially did was carve out a path in a place, which was previously very conservative, where we earned the respect of the people who were living in that town and made lives that had meaning outside of the mainstream. We weren’t part of the war machine. You know, we weren’t contributing to the war economy, we thought, so—

                                    We hung out with a couple of interesting people. I mean, we went to some events with a guy named Murray Bookchin, B-o-o-k-c-h-i-n, who was a thinker who was up in university—I think it was at the University of Vermont or Goddard College or one of those colleges. But he wrote several books on, you know, what was going to happen after—what did he call it?—the post- —it was, like,—it was a time of plenty, and he was writing books about what happens when this time of plenty passes. He was pretty interesting.

                                    And we read lots of books, and we did things, but basically what we did was change the way we lived and make our lives start to reflect some of our values of egalitarianism—you know, that women learned how to change the oil in the cars, and the men learned how to take care of the kids. Sometimes we’d sneak into a dormitory and take a hot shower.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      But most of the time—most of the time we weren’t involved, so that’s the whole story.

                                    When we got to ’75, you know, that’s when—that’s when the commune sort of started breaking up. Carol and I left, and that’s when I got a mainstream job. Take care of people with developmental disabilities.

REED-WESTON:        All right. So there are a few things I’d like to go back to,—

PACHT:                      Sure.

REED-WESTON:        —just to talk a little bit more about.

PACHT:                      Okay, sure.

REED-WESTON:        Thanks for giving that really good outline.

PACHT:                      Okay.

REED-WESTON:        So when you were a kid, you said that there was a lot of pressure or a lot of emphasis placed on schooling.

PACHT:                      Yeah.

REED-WESTON:        How do you think that affected how you viewed what you would do after high school?

PACHT:                      Well, yeah, it’s true. My father had told me that he wanted to be doctor, and he was only able to do—is take a couple of courses at community college before he had to start working. He was born in 1917, so he wasn’t drafted until 1943, because he had a kid in 1942, and having a kid kept you out until ’43, when they really needed everybody. And then he was assigned as a—he didn’t make chief petty officer, but he was a petty officer. He was the guy—have you ever watched the old war movies? There’s a guy up on a platform leading everybody in jumping jacks.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      That’s who he was. He was the athletic instructor and the fitness guy. And he was training people, the sailors, who would go over. And he said—he told me that if he had been promoted to chief, he would have had to ship out, but the war—they dropped the atomic bombs, and the war ended before he made chief. So he really had dreams that he wasn’t able to fulfill, so he really wanted—he wanted to make sure that I did something that was meaningful. You know, he was very successful in the women’s clothing business. But that was part of it.

                                    And my mother—you know, my mother came from really peasant stock, and she didn’t get a chance to go to college because she had to go to work. And so I always felt like I have to make sure that I’m living up to this. And even when we weren’t—you know, when I decided not to go on with my Ph.D. and not to get a job in the war economy, I still felt like I was being true to the values of looking for what was going to be meaningful and doing something that was going to be purposeful.

                                    And I also grew up—you know, the Jewish values, what I thought were Jewish values at the time, which was to take care of other people, you know, not do—don’t make death—you know, make life instead of death, and make the table big enough for everybody to pull up a chair. And that’s—so those were the guiding values in my life, and I did it in the work that I got paid for. I worked with people with mental retardation, then I worked in affordable housing, then I worked for senior citizens, and now I can devote all my time to Rotary [International].

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      Till I have to get a job again, because [unintelligible] is not making enough to support us. So it was the values, you know, which learned in Hebrew school and which I learned from my parents that made me look forward—even when I, you know, was arguing with—my parents—you know, my mother was only afraid of my health and my safety, you know. She couldn't quite understand it. But when she couldn't understand it, my father helped her, and then when my father couldn’t understand it, she helped him. I get this from my sister, who was nine years younger. She was in the house in the early days, so when we dropped out—

                                    And, of course, when I came home with a pregnant blonde who looked like, you know, a Valkyrie—Carol’s hair was straight, blonde, down to here [demonstrates], and she had ripped shorts with rawhide stitching, and my mother went to the bathroom and puked.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      She was—oh, she got used to it, and she loved, you know, having a grandchild, and it’s a grandchild. Grandparents are suckers for grandchildren.

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm. So what did you think you were going to do after college—after high school?

PACHT:                      After high school?

REED-WESTON:        Yeah.

PACHT:                      Well, the first thing I thought, actually, was I wanted to go to a military academy. I wanted to become—I tested, you know, for engineering and all those kinds of things, and I knew that the military academies were good engineering schools, and I thought I looked great in a uniform. And we weren’t at war. And then suddenly we were at war. And so I—I didn’t want to go to any military—I didn’t want to fight anybody! I just wanted to—I thought it would be cool, but—

                                    So then I just needed—I didn’t really know why I was going to college except that it was better than the alternative, which was getting a job somewhere, doing something. So I knew that—I knew the path needed to include college, but I really didn’t know. It wasn’t until I was at college that I started thinking—and then I thought I would teach French. That’s what I thought my career was going to be. And I loved it. I was good at it. You know, I won awards for it. And then I had this nice fellowship, and everything was hunky-dory except the stinkin’ war.

REED-WESTON:        Do you think your father would have approved of a military career when you were considering it?

PACHT:                      You know, I think he—I mean, he—he—it took him a while to understand what I was doing when I was working. Even when I left the Wooden Shoe—I mean, he began to understand what I was doing there, and he sort of envied the freedom of that life, but when I came out, he really didn’t quite understand what my work does—what my work was for a long time. But then he began to understand it when the company got bigger and bigger, you know. The budget was a hundred and twenty thousand when I started. We had nine part-time employees and were serving 17 individuals. And when I stopped, it was seven million bucks, and we had 100 employees and 50 contractors and 250 families. Then he could grasp that it was okay.

                                    You know, he had served in the military, but we weren’t a military family, you know. You know, I don’t know how that path would have affected him because, again, my vision of the military was serving in the military and saying, “Yes, sir” and traveling the world and not getting shot at.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      It had nothing to do with actual war! So it was really unrealistic, I think. I was glad—you know, when the draft came along because I was born cross-eyed and had to have a couple of operations. Back then, that was the state of the art, because the—you know, the eye was turned in, so they figured, well, they’d cut a bit of the muscle out here [demonstrates] and then have the eye like this [demonstrates]. And then my eye continued to go out, so now my eyes are like that [demonstrates]. And that’s what I used to stay out of the war, stay out of the draft, was I went to an eye doctor and he measured it, and there was a certain number of diopters of separation that you would be let out for, so I got all the way to my pre-induction physical, but I had this letter that I held up, and I said—you know, we’re all standing in a circle, naked, and I said, “Excuse me.” And he grabbed the paper, and he made me go sit on the Group W bench. And I was classified 1-Y, which is “physically unfit to serve except in time of war.” And no war was ever declared, because we never declared war in Vietnam, so my 1-Y held up for a while.

                                    And there were a lot of guys in the early days were getting 1-Y for psychiatric reasons. Like, they would go in and they’d say, “I like boys.” And the first few that went in—you know, they said, “Oh, we don’t want you!” And then they said, “Wait a minute,” and they started investigating. You know, they would go ask your neighbors, you know, “Did you ever see this?” And then they wanted you to be actually seeing a psychiatrist every month or something like that, so that didn’t pan out as a way. So luckily I went through my physical history, and I found that. It kept me out. So that’s why I didn’t serve.

                                    But I didn’t want to go. I was afraid—you know, if I got in, I was afraid I’d—see, I’d do everything, like, up to here [demonstrates]. I did trumpet that way, I did shot and discus that way, you know, I did French that way and did alternative life that way. And if I had gone into the Army, I’m afraid of becoming a killing moron. You know, I just could kill everything I could see. And I didn’t want to put myself in that position. And I didn’t want to get killed, either. So—so that’s why I resisted.

REED-WESTON:        So do you think you just had a very idealistic view of the military as a child?

PACHT:                      I think so, yeah. And, of course, you know, when I started studying why we were in Vietnam, that sort of disappeared. It’s, like, Who are we protecting over there, the oil interests, the rubber interests? What the hell are we doin’ over there? Those vague issues of the domino theory: You know, “If Vietnam falls, Australia’s gonna become Communist” or something. Just all that crap. So I didn’t believe that. But I believed in America. I believed in freedom and defending freedom, but I didn’t want to go to war for those reasons.

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm. What did you think of the draft at the time?

PACHT:                      You know, I just thought of it as an immutable thing that needed to be dealt with. I didn’t really think—we started talk- —I thought it was unfair because the people that were actually going were overwhelmingly minorities and poor people, so—but I didn’t think so much as to say, Well, therefore I have to go, to equalize it. It was, No, sorry, I’m privileged, and I’m not goin’ if I don’t have to. So it was—you know, just dealt with it, you know.

                                    And then the number thing came out while my 1-Y was starting to look shaky. What did they call that?

REED-WESTON:        The lottery system?

PACHT:                      The lottery system came out, and I got a, like, 340.

REED-WESTON:        Where were you when that happened?

PACHT:                      I was already living in Hartland. That was the first year that—after we got out of jail. I think that’s—no, it must have been after that because while I was in Hartland, I went for my pre-induction physical, so it was the winter of ’69-’70, was when I went for my pre-induction physical, so the lottery must have been after that, because I had a high number, and was never—they never got beyond the low numbers, so—

REED-WESTON:        So did you worry about the draft at all while you were in college or—

PACHT:                      Not till—it was not till I got to Stanford, so I became an active draft resister at that time. But I didn’t have the courage to go to Canada or the courage to burn my draft card or anything. I wanted to be—use my brains and see if I could get out of it, so I went to draft counseling, you know, and they had the regulation book like this [demonstrates], and they had all the physical requirements—you know, if your foot is this flat, you don’t have to go; if your eyes are this bad. And I did the research and then went back to my doctors in Great Neck and got the eye doctor to write something that was official, so—

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      But that was when I was already in California.

REED-WESTON:        Okay. So why did you choose to go to Dartmouth for college?

PACHT:                      Oh—[Laughs.] I—I’m going to try to remember all—but I applied to Brown [University], Dartmouth, Oberlin [College]—what else? Oberlin because there’s music coming out of every building when I went to Oberlin. Everybody was riding bicycles. It was flat, and there was music everywhere, and I thought music—I’d like to be there. Brown was my safe school, and Dartmouth was just because it was there. I mean, I don’t—I think—it’s all boys, and it was far enough away—as I said, it was, like, an eight-hour drive, far enough away my parents weren’t going to drop in. But it wasn’t—I didn’t want to go—nothing attracted me about the Midwest. (Sorry about Kansas.)

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      It’s beautiful. I’ve been through it.

REED-WESTON: [Laughs.]

PACHT:                      It’s lovely. But—no, 100 degrees in the summer; it didn’t really have any attraction for me. California? Maybe, but, you know, I didn’t need the earthquakes, and it was so far away, and I didn’t care much about that. I didn’t know much about the Northwest. But it was my—I had a cousin who went to Dartmouth. My father’s first cousin [Rudolph (Rudy) Pacht] was the Class of ’35. And he came to the house to visit, and he was talking about his father, who was my father’s uncle, having just received some award and they were going to have a dinner, and he said to my father, “Well, if you can’t go, I think a congratulatory telegram would be in order.” And I thought, You motherfucker! Who are you—you fuck! I’m definitely gonna go to Dartmouth. I’m gonna have a better record than you did, so I can piss on your grave.

                                    And sure enough, I get up there—and he was a big football jock, and everybody knew him. The guys who were handing out the uniforms for football—I don’t remember their names; they were, like, Joe and Eddie. Everybody knew who they were. All the jocks knew who they were. And they were the guys who were there, had been there, and they—the guy went, “Pacht, Pacht. Rudy Pacht?” he says. I said, “Yeah, he was my cousin.” So he was a great football player. He never passed a language course. And so I had to go to Dartmouth. That’s why I went to Dartmouth, was because Rudy insulted my father.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      But when we came up, you know, we flew up in April of ’63 in a [Douglas] DC-3. It’s a plane that sort of rests on its tail, along like that [demonstrates]. And I actually was on the same plane with Jerry [J.] Zaks. I don’t know if you ever heard of Jerry.

REED-WESTON:        [No audible response.]

PACHT:                      Well, Jerry and I—we were each the first person we met from our class, so we went out—my father took us out to lunch, so Jerry and I knew each other, sort of, through life. He became very famous [as a movie and television actor and director]. But he was an interesting guy because he didn’t—he really changed when he got into acting. He went on a protein diet. He was kind of a chubby guy, and then he lost all this weight. Took up dancing and had a great career.

                                    And let’s see, I was talking about Dartmouth. Oh, so we got off the plane, you know, and drove into Hanover, and I got out of the car, and I said, “This is what a college should look like.” And it just—it just looked like the right place. And, as I said, it was far away from all of my previous—I didn’t want to go to a school that was overwhelmingly Jewish. I didn’t want to go to a place where my parents could drop in, so—

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm. So can you describe a bit of what the campus climate was like at the time? How much political activism there was?

PACHT:                      There was almost no political activism. There was an accepted kind of cool, you know, and the cool was conservative. You know, you had short hair, khaki pants, penny loafers without socks, you know, with button-down shirts, and that was what you’d be. And your hair was a certain length, and you had to have a certain right-moderate outlook on life, you know? So—

                                    Maybe we ought to shut this off.

REED-WESTON:        Yeah, we’ll pause for a second.

[Recording interruption.]

REED-WESTON:        All right, we’re recording.

PACHT:                      So it was—you know, what can I say? It was not a very Jewish culture. To me, it was a culture with which I was somewhat familiar, although Great Neck High School was about 80 percent Jewish. But it was something that I could put up with because it was Dartmouth. You know, and having a degree from Dartmouth was going to be important.

                                    As I said before, I joined a fraternity, but it was kind of an anti-fraternity fraternity. We used to be able to rush in the fall of sophomore year, so we made the decision early. And then I was away in France in the fall of my junior year and the fall of my senior year, so I really wasn’t very connected. Like, I missed the whole football hoopla, you know, and the initiation and rush in my own fraternity. I had nothing to do with the new people who came in, so I wasn’t—I wasn’t connected in that way, but I was connected through French.

                                    And I was connected through the Jewish community, which was growing pretty rapidly there. When I first got there, the number—the percentage of Jews was pretty low, but I think the college was beginning—the medical school was expanding, and they needed to make things more hospitable for Jews. And that’s been my connection. I became the president of the Upper Valley Jewish Community, and I’ve been on the board there, and I’m still editing the newsletters, so I’ve been very involved with—and we share the—the rabbi of Hillel, you know, is the same as the rabbi of the Upper Valley Jewish Community, so I’ve stayed involved with Dartmouth through that connection for a long time.

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm. Okay. So you wound up at Stanford—

PACHT:                      Yeah.

REED-WESTON:        —after you went through Dartmouth.

PACHT:                      Right.

REED-WESTON:        What did you think—how different was it?

PACHT:                      Well, I thought it was completely different. It was California, and the football culture there was even worse [chuckles] than it was at Dartmouth. And, you know, when I was at Dartmouth, the guys in the French department would call Stanford—they called it the Dartmouth of the West, but the people in Stanford call it the Harvard of the West.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      And it really is. It’s where all the privileged children who have a lot of money go, and if they have the academic moxie, they go to Stanford because it’s a great place, if they don’t go to UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] or something like that.

                                    But I was very divorced from the college culture, because I was a graduate student. All I really cared about was the courses I was taking, the other people who were in my department, and the lunch place where I played bridge for two hours every day, so I learned how to play bridge. But I wasn’t connected to undergraduate stuff at Stanford at all and really didn’t care about the politics except as they applied to, like, teaching assistants and graduate students and things like that.

REED-WESTON:        So how did you become involved with campus activism or political activism at Stanford?

PACHT:                      At Stanford I actually sought out the SDS chapters there and joined an SDS chapter but only went to a couple of meetings because the wacky philosophy that I ran into with these guys was not to my liking. But there were lots of demonstrations. It was like having a demonstration every week. You know, the Free Speech Movement was happening at Berkeley, so there were all these things happening, and that’s where all the people who I thought had their heads on straight were hanging out, so I would hang out at the demonstrations, too. I could meet people and be part of it. So I didn’t put myself on the line very often. I got gassed once at a demonstration in San Francisco and got picked up by the cops but didn’t get arrested.

REED-WESTON:        What was your opinion of the Vietnam War at that point in time?

PACHT:                      Again, I thought it was, you know—I didn’t—I didn’t see the justification for us to be involved. That was basically it. I didn’t know what we were trying to prove about being there except protect the puppets that we had set up after the French. But, you know, the French had—it was a losing investment for the French, so I didn’t think that we were going to make it any better by stepping in and taking up their burden. We could have learned, but—so I was opposed to it, and I didn’t want more Americans to die for that reason.

REED-WESTON:        How did you choose the SDS?

PACHT:                      Well, it was the most active thing that was going on at Stanford. You know, they were actually doing things, so they were engaging and putting bodies on the line. You know, I didn’t do a lot of research into it, but later on, when I came back and was living at the Wooden Shoe, we went to an anarchist convention in Black River State Forest in Wisconsin, and that was—you know, we weren’t really anarchists. You know, we were still living in the regular society. We weren’t really revolutionaries. But theoretically, at least, that was closer to what I thought was reasonable. Anarchism, the way we interpreted it, was the formation of groups for the purpose of getting something done, and then the group disperses, you know? You don’t just maintain the bureaucracy. But you can’t have a society of millions of people without a bureaucracy. You have to have a bureaucracy. So that was another idea that was just bullshit. Didn’t work out.

                                    It doesn’t even work with the small people living in a commune. Everybody can’t just do what they want. There has to be a sense of sacrifice, and I didn’t see any sense of sacrifice in our society toward the things I thought we should be sacrificing for, which was helping each other and taking care of the people who can’t take care of themselves.

REED-WESTON:        Can you describe the culture of SDS? You mentioned previously that it was Maoist.

PACHT:                      Well, I was in a lunatic Maoist—you know, a cell. It was divided into—they called them groups, but, you know, we called it a cell because that was more politically correct. But these guys were—you know, they thought Mao [Zedong] was the right way, you know, that he was representing the people and everything, and they were just—you know, they were saying, “Oh, well, property doesn’t have any rights, you know, and we’re just going to—when people come out of the city, you know, because we’re going to blow up the cities, you know, we’re going to need to take over your apartment.” And I said, “Jesus Christ, man! Not my apartment! I’m a good guy.” So it just didn’t seem a productive pathway to me, either. You know, it was just more yacking and more throwing around of power and this and that in unproductive ways.

                                    I’m not talking about the SDS leadership, you know. I’m just talking about this handful of people who were in this cell. So I went to, like, two meetings and then stopped going to those meetings, too, because it wasn’t the right path. The path for me was disassociating from everything that we could possibly disassociate from, and making our own society, and picking and choosing where we intersected with regular society in productive ways, and trying to change what we could.

                                    You know, it was more Confucius than Mao. You know, you drop a pebble in the pond, and then the ripples go out to the edge, and that’s what you do. You take care of your family, you take care of your farm, you take care of your community, and then maybe, over time, things will change. That seemed to me ultimately the only way to make it work.

REED-WESTON:        Did you find like-minded individuals in California?

PACHT:                      You know, I was there from—let’s see, from September of ’67 to January of ’69, so I was really there only about 14 months before I threw my stuff in the car and drove off to the Northwest. It was after [President Richard M.] Nixon’s inaugural ball. In fact, it was January 20th. The night that he was elected, I was watching the coverage on TV, and I just—I freaked out. I thought the world was going to come to an end because he became the president, and I had to—I really had to leave.

                                    So I took my stereo and my guitar and my books, and—I didn’t see anything at Stanford or on the campus besides being in French, which, as I said, you know, I had to be 24 hours in an ivory tower doing only French, and I couldn’t pay attention to it anymore. I had to figure out—so I just had to get away from it.

                                    And I didn’t see anything there that was worth putting my energy into supporting. There were a few people around, but nobody was really—you know, I can remember them sit- —Norman was getting his Ph.D. in German, you know, and John was getting his Ph.D. in materials engineering, and David [F.] DeSante was going from one thing to another. They all finally became successful in their firms, in their pursuits, but it wasn’t—it wasn’t for me.

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm. You said earlier that you were exposed to different types of people in California, when you met different people, like black individuals. Can you describe how that was different from what you’d previously seen?

PACHT:                      Yeah. I mean, again, the people who I met at Dartmouth were, you know, if not—no, we were middle class. We weren’t wealthy or anything; we were middle class. And, as I said, Dartmouth cost something that my father could afford, so I didn’t even have to ask for aid. But the way that has escalated—I mean, everybody else that I met there was pretty much the same, cut in the same—I mean, my group that I hung around with were mostly other Jewish kids from suburban New York City, from Connecticut or New Jersey or something else, who mostly had very similar upbringings to mine.

                                    There was a black kid who lived next door I met. Used to sing a little bit with a guy named Frank [A.] Mwine [pronounced MWEE-nay] from—I think he was from Uganda. So he taught me a couple of songs, but I didn’t hang around with him. You know, I didn’t do anything active to see anybody—I met a lot of people in my fraternity who grew up differently from the way I did, but they weren’t guys that I would look up to, either, you know? A couple of guys who had some real problems with honesty and a real problem with alcohol. A couple of good guys. All the good guys I knew are dead now. You know, the nicest guy, who was the president of our fraternity, dropped dead unloading his kayak on the shores of Lake Michigan one day when he was, like, 58 years old.

                                    But since then, I’ve met some guys from Dartmouth who I admire, like the president of my class, [Samuel D.] Sammy Ostrow, who’s also a Jew. He was—he’s really deep into Dartmouth, and he does good things for Dartmouth, and I like the way he thinks. And we compare thoughts about politics and other things, but he works—he’s in a position to be very supportive of Dartmouth with his money and everything else that he does, and I support him. I became his reunion chair because I want to help him because he does great work.

                                    I met a few other guys—you know, guys—when you get to the 45th reunion or something, nobody really cares about what kind of assholes you were when you were on campus.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      You really don’t care. You care about, like, “You’re almost 70. How the hell did you make it?”—you know?

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      “What did you do?”—you know? And a lot of guys have, you know, regrets that they didn’t do more things that were outside the mold, you know. But then again, they have retirement and enough to live on. They don’t have to keep working when they’re 70 years old.

REED-WESTON:        Yeah.

PACHT:                      So you pays your money and takes your choice.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.] So what did you think about Nixon while you were in California?

PACHT:                      I thought he was just horrible. I thought he was going to get us into the war worse than we ever were, he was going to nuke China or something, that he was going to be completely out of bounds, and that it was going to be terrible, and that we had to not participate in the war economy. That was the driving thought. So that’s why we dropped out and decided to make our own economy, you know, in a small town in New Hampshire.

                                    But it turns out, you know, I mean, in retrospect, you know, they look back at Nixon: Oh, he opened up China. Well, it’s like—it’s like some other things, you know? Who negotiated—who got [Anwar El] Sadat and—whoever the Israeli was. Was it [David] Ben-Gurion still, back then? Together, to make the Egypt-Israel pact [Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty]? I don’t think it was Ben-Gurion. Maybe it was Golda Meir or the one just before her. Anyway, it wasn’t—it has to be somebody who has been, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no” and then “Okay, yes, I’ll go visit China,” and then all of a sudden we’re trading with China. You know, but it was the guy who was—you never would have thought would do it.

                                    So—so yeah. But he was—you know, he was a crook, and he was a mean-spirited little shit, and I just was afraid that he was going to, you know, pull the plug. And we need to learn how to survive if everything was going to get bombed out, and survive in a place where the nuclear winter wasn’t going to happen or was going to—you know, where we’d have clean water and be able to survive. I mean, we were really apocalyptically thinking at that time. We didn’t know where it was going to go.

REED-WESTON:        Did you have regrets about leaving your program?

PACHT:                      Yeah, I do. I mean, now that I’m—you know, I’ll be 70—well, I’ll be 69 in August. Three weeks. And it would have been a nice life to be a French professor, and I was good at it. You know, I was getting accolades for it, and I could have had a nice career as a professor—and, you know, sabbaticals and visiting France. All that would have been great.

                                    But I didn’t do it, and so now I just do what I’m doing. My boys are healthy, you know. I’m glad that I found Lori [Fortini] after Carol and I split, you know. It would be nice to have a little more money so I wouldn't have to worry so much about what’s going on and wouldn’t have to go back to work after I finish being district governor. But, you know, that’s the choice I made.

REED-WESTON:        Can you describe what it was like—I mean, you went to the Northwest. You mentioned that you were seeing communes there. Can you describe what that was like?

PACHT:                      Yeah. Well, it was really—it felt like I had been an ox in a yoke and pulling this plow that had been put on me when I was eight years old, and I was, you know, living the script that had been written for me, to go to college and to go to graduate school. And I remember that night—I mean, like, it was the inaugural ball night. It was January 20th, 1969, and I put stuff in the car, and I just drove away, drove away from my apartment and got to Yreka, California, which is up in the north part, past the redwood forests and everything, and just parked and felt a sense of freedom that I’d never felt in my entire life.

                                    Of course, you know, the responsibility of paying back the stipend that I hadn’t used and all that was—I hadn’t thought about that yet, but I felt free for the first time, a different level of freedom than I’d ever felt in my life. Like, I could do anything that I wanted. Of course, I had that credit card. So I could fix the car and had gas and everything, so my folks were really supporting my breaking away, so if they had taken that away, I don’t know what I would have done.

                                    But it was a sense of freedom that I never—I never experienced before, and so I just drove into Eugene, you know, because I knew there was a university there, and when to the coffee shops because there were coffee shops there; it was a place where the hippies would get together. And, of course, there were a lot of—you know, a lot of professors who were there having coffee.

                                    But then there was another coffee shop on the other side of town, which was where a lot of poor folks come around, so that’s where I met some high school kids who were cutting, you know, and I wasn’t that much older than they were and started hanging around with them and stayed for a week here and there in Eugene, just seeing what the scene was. And it was mostly, you know, this kind of stuffy sort of leftie academic scene. Nothing much was happening.

                                    Then I went to Seattle, and I quickly found a house where some people were living together. That’s the place I was referring to, with these people—I think there was a couple, and then there were a few other people there. And there was a woman there that I was I able to hook up with, and we stayed together for about a week. Everything was awash with drugs. I mean, you could get any kind of drug that you wanted. And then there was—there were good drugs in the Northwest.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      There was clean mescaline, you know, which was—it’s a very nice drug if you can get it clean. And there was—I didn’t do any acid [LSD] when I was there. I’d done acid when I was at Stanford, and it was already going bad. They were cutting it with some stuff. You could tell because you’d get a backache. It just wasn’t good. But there was nice stuff there.

                                    And there was—marijuana was as easy to get as cigarettes.

                                    So it was—it was an eye-opening time. You know, I didn’t have anything to do. I had a few hundred bucks in my pocket, and there was nothing—nothing costs like what it costs now. Gasoline—I don’t remember what it was. It was pennies a gallon. Maybe a dollar a gallon or something. It as hardly anything. I don’t think it was even that much, so a couple of hundred bucks went a long way. I mean, that’s all I earned when I was in Big Bend. There was enough to get me all the way back across the country, up to Dartmouth, and not have to think about money. You know, slept in the car.

                                    So staying there in Seattle, though, and trying to see—you know, there was the beginnings of something going on with these people living together. That’s what I saw there, some effort of people. But they were still very separate. You know, they had their own money, and, you know, they sort of were sharing on a micro level.

                                    Do you have a deadline?

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      Okay.

REED-WESTON:        So did you want to stay in that kind of environment or did you—

PACHT:                      No.

REED-WESTON:        —want to leave?

PACHT:                      I’m trying to think about why—you know, why I left. I think I got a message that I had to go back to Stanford and wrap things up. You know, I had to tell the people at Stanford that I was definitely done, and I had to make arrangements to pay back the stipend, to give them back the money that was in my account, you know. And so I had to go back there to wrap that up. That’s what brought me back, so I went back to Palo Alto.

                                    And then it was after I wrapped that up in Palo Alto that I drove south, because it was winter. It was January 20th when I left, and it was still going to be winter for a long time, and I wanted to be completely free—a place where I could sit naked in the sun. What’s what I looked for. So I drove south until there weren’t any more fences, and that was inside Big Bend National Park. It’s the first place that I found. But I stopped along the way at the University of Arizona, you know, and other places, and I met the one hippie at Arizona State University.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT: Everybody else was in ROTC, and there was nothing happening there. He commiserated with me, and he said, “No, man. You know, there’s nothin’ here. Nobody’s doin’ anything.” And then I just needed to go sit in the desert and see what that would do, so that’s what I did. And I had, you know, my little Svea stove, and I ate rice and pasta and wrote a song. I lived in a tent there, then came screaming out of the desert.

                                    Then I was—again, I was looking for anybody who was doing something that I thought would be significant, a significant change in direction and that had some sense of sustainability to it, you know?

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      So it wasn’t marching. You know, it wasn’t just sitting down in front of the buses, although we continued to do that for years. It had to be something more than that. And so when I came—you know, I gradually figured I’d go back to Dartmouth to see what Dartmouth was doing, and that’s when I got into the takeover at Parkhurst.

REED-WESTON:        Did you have any specific goal of what you were looking for at this point?

PACHT:                      Except for finding a woman who was big enough so that when she massaged me I could actually feel it in my muscles—

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      —and who wasn’t a baby and, you know, who had had at least one significant relationship before and who knew—who would be able to be my equal. That’s really the biggest thing I was looking for. And I found that. Of course, she was with another guy at the time, but we both—Ed—she was with Ed Levin, who’s now—he passed away suddenly about two or three years ago. But Carol and Ed were together. But the way Carol told me, there were sort of at the end of their relationship. She was looking for something else. And I—he was in SDS at Dartmouth, and SDS was the leader of the occupation at Parkhurst, so when I got to Dartmouth, you know, I got into the Parkhurst thing, so I met Ed and Jake, and Ed and I were in the same jail. And so Carol came to visit him, and she said that’s the first time she remembers—she had to get him a message, and his visiting time was used up, and I was there at the visitors’ window, so she handed me the message.

                                    But I remember her from the court, because we were all at Grafton County Courthouse, the old courthouse. They have the new courthouse now. But the sunlight was coming through the window, and she was wearing this really short corduroy shift, and the sun was shining on her thighs, and so I—that’s what I watched during the proceeds.

                                    One more little side story: The prosecuting attorney was a guy named George Papademas. He was the county attorney. He was a Greek guy, bald, big walrus moustache. He wasn’t that tall, but he gave a big impression. Had a booming voice. And what he did was he’d bring the arresting officer—he asked each one of us—our name would be read, and we’d have to stand up, and then he’d ask the arresting officer if he recognized the person in the picture. And if he did, then they said, “Well, everybody in the picture—their picture was taken at the armory, and they were in a bus from Dartmouth, and there was a cordon of state cops from this to—so if we got his picture, it’s because he was in the building.”

                                    Six years after that, I was inducted into the Rotary Club of Lebanon, and George was a member, and after the induction, you know, everybody clapped, and we sat down, and he raised his hand, and the president called on him. He said—he stood up, and he said, “Mr. President, I didn’t know they allowed jailbirds in Rotary.”

REED-WESTON: [Laughs.]

PACHT:                      And he was sort of grandfatherly to me. You know, I was about 30 years old; he was probably 55 or something, so he’d pinch my cheek, and he was jealous of my hair, so he always messed up my hair because he was bald. And he became like a grandfather to me. So that was—

                                    But I was really looking for permanence. You know, I’d had a lot of different relationships, and they were all—you know, they weren’t going anywhere, so I was looking for something that was going to go someplace. And—I’ll stay on this for a while because it was really crucial about why I stayed around here, because after we got out of jail, we hung around. There was a graduation. You know, it was June, and, you know, we were still wondering what the hell to do.

                                    I left some money—some people were talking about renting a house in Hartland, so I left some money with them, and then I had to go see my parents because I hadn’t seen them since I dropped out of Stanford except for when they came to visit me in jail. [Chuckles.] So I had to go see my mother.

                                    Carol was on her way back to Newton, and I said, “Well, I’ll give you a lift.” And so I went down 91, and when it came to Interstate 90, which I would have to turn left to take her to Newton, I said, “Ah, I’ll take you to Great Neck with me.” So I took her to Great Neck, and that’s when my mother came to the door and puked.

                                    And then we drove back up. Let’s see, we stayed at Carol’s uncle’s place in Greenwich Village, and we were there—you know, they were just having this anniversary of the walking of the man on the moon. It was 25 years ago, 45 years ago—45 years. And we watched that together. And that was the same week we found out she was pregnant.

                                    And then we decided, well, you know, we have to get an abortion because I don’t want to have a kid, and so we drove up to tell everybody we’re going to Poland to get an abortion. Somebody told us you had to go to Poland.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      So we come up here, and we see all the hippies are still hanging around. You know, it’s the summer and everything. It’s the end of July, and we took something—I don’t know what it was. Something good. And the snack bar at the Hop used to have a grassy area out past it that you could just hang out in, you know, and we were all laying there, watching the clouds go by.

                                    And I went to visit my old cellmate. Ed and Carol and I went to visit my old cellmate. But this was while we were—while we were watching the clouds, and I started thinking, So where is this path going? You know, we’re gonna go to Poland, we’re gonna get this abortion, and I’ll be on the streets of [sounds like Grgovich], Poland, with this woman who I hardly know, who’s just had her womb scraped out. Where the hell do we go after that? This is a nowhere path.

                                    So I turned to Carol. I said, “Let’s have the kid.” And that was what—that’s when I really changed my life. So then we had to take the pilgrimage to go see Don—you know, the karate expert, my cellmate, so he could bless the union. It was a strange parade. It was, like, I was walking in front, Carol was behind me, and Ed was behind—he was at 41 College Street, which used to be that place where people lived. And we were there, and we’re walking in front of—it was like the scene in Ingmar Bergman’s movie, where they’re all in shadow, going—have you ever watched Bergman’s Seventh Seal, I think it is?

REED-WESTON:        No.

PACHT:                      Death is leading a bunch of people up a mountain ridge, up to the clouds. Storm clouds were coming in from the west, and Dartmouth Row was still shining bright, and we walked right in front of it. And then just as we got into 41 College, thunder and lighting, crashing rain and everything, and we’re sitting there in this—I’m sitting on the floor, and Don is sitting up on his bed, you know, and he’s asking questions, and I said, “Yeah, this is the path.” Because we were brothers, you know. We spent 26 days in a six by nine cell, so—he said, “Yeah, this is the right path.”

                                    So that’s—that’s what made the commitment, and then Carol and I made certain agreements about what we were going to do about the child, and we didn’t---we didn’t get married until—legally married until Jesse was six. Like, once we left the commune and we were living downtown, we went to the town clerk and got married. But we had already—our agreements were holding us together. We said, you know, for at least the first 16 years of this kid’s life, we got to stay together. So we were together for 30 years.

REED-WESTON:        Wow.

PACHT:                      Yeah. [Both chuckle.]

REED-WESTON:        Why did you want to come back to Dartmouth?

PACHT:                      Oh, because I—you know, I thought that—as I said, this union moment, you know, that if I was feeling this way, everybody in my generation would be feeling this way, and all of us who had been melted in the crucible at Dartmouth would be going back to campus for Green Key in 1969. So I truly thought that maybe there’d be people there who would be thinking the same way, because I had been bent in a certain way by being at Dartmouth and that maybe these other people would come back; maybe something would grow from that. So that’s why I went back.

                                    And I didn’t know where else to go. I mean, it looked like the best possible place. I’d just been in the desert in Texas, traveled around, stopping at college campuses, went up to the Northwest. Maybe something would be happening at Dartmouth that would be part of that path—you know, the path to something sustainable. And then I saw the takeover and said, This is it. I gotta get in on this.

REED-WESTON:        Did the takeover actually happened as soon as you got there?

PACHT:                      It was—no, I arrived—I don’t remember. I arrived there late one night, and I slept in my fraternity, on the floor. The next day, I went to see my mentor at about—it must have been after lunch.

                                    I got to stir this [chili].

                                    And I came out—you know, people were playing baseball on the Green, you know, and playing Frisbee and stuff, and there was a commotion over at Parkhurst, and I just saw the commotion. So it was, like, 48 hours, less than 48 hours after I got back to campus. So it was all this—it was working. Something was happening, and I needed to be part of it.

REED-WESTON:        Did you know anything about the issues behind the Parkhurst takeover when you got there?

PACHT:                      Not until I got there, not until I walked in. I could tell—I don’t remember whether I asked David, you know, “What are you doing?” and he said, “Well, it’s anti-ROTC” or something. But that was enough for me. You know, to know that it was antiwar was enough, and so I just went in. I found out, you know, about the deal about promises that had been made to stop this and stop that. You know, all of that shit didn’t really matter. What mattered was we needed to bring the war home because the war was being fought so far away and so many people were dying. It wasn’t until the middle class of the United States felt the deaths inside that they said, “I don’t want my kid to go there. Why is my kid dying? Is he dying for some good reason, or is it some bullshit?” And the more people that realized that it was some bullshit reason, the quicker the war was going to end.

                                    So anything that drew attention to bringing the war—whether it was guerilla theater or the takeover of an administration building for 12 hours, you know. I didn’t care, you know, if a chair got broken. I didn’t care about that. You know, what we really cared about was we had to bring the war home. We had to dramatize what was going on.

REED-WESTON:        Did you know about the relationship and negotiations that had been occurring between the administration, faculty and students?

PACHT: Nothing. I learned about that all afterwards. I learned about that during the 12 hours, and then I learned about it during the 26 days.

REED-WESTON:        Okay. Can you walk me through exactly what happened once you went inside the administration building?

PACHT:                      I have to tell you that everything I wrote from 1973—1963—actually, it was before ’63. I started writing journals probably in ’59. Everything I’ve written from 1959 to when the barn at the Wooden Shoe burned in 1973 was destroyed, so all of my notes from this whole era are gone. So it’s simply memory. And I’ve learned—Lori just found some pictures of what our kitchen looked like before we redesigned—we redid it, which is probably 2003 or ’4. And when I describe what the kitchen looked like, it’s like a caricature of what it really looked like. I made it ten times darker and ten times smaller, and it was just ridiculous. So memory—and they’re discovering this in law. You know, eye witness accounts are just worthless.

                                    So you wanted me to describe—tell me again what you wanted me to describe.

REED-WESTON:        Can you just tell me about what you saw and what you experienced while you were in Parkhurst?

PACHT:                      In Parkhurst? Well, like I said—I thought about it in retrospect as the first commune, you know? There were, I don’t know, upwards of 50 people—at the beginning, there were 50, 60 people in there, and nobody really knew what to do. You know, at the beginning it was trying to—there were people still working, and I remember Thaddeus Seymour, who was the dean of college, you know, and guys were taking him out, you know, and he was sort of token resisting, you know, because—later on he said, you know, he actually had some sympathies with the students because we were courageous enough to be taking action and things like that, so he got hustled out.

                                    And then there was—what was his name? [Waldo (Spike)] Chamberlain. He was working in his office, and he locked the door. He said he was not leaving until the end of his workday. [Chuckles.] And so he stayed in there, and the rest of us were roaming around. People went into the president’s office, you know, and put their feet up on the desk, just because they could, you know, and—Spike, Spike Chamberlain. That was his name. And he finished his work, you know, and we sort of escorted him out over the furniture to the back door. We had moved some furniture to block the back door.

                              Somebody had brought in a little piece of metal, like two inches by four inches, with a couple of holes drilled in it, and they put that across the front door of Parkhurst and put some screws in it so it couldn’t be opened easily.

                                    And then a lot of the time a lawyer came in, somebody called [William A.] Bill Baker. He’s dead now, too. There was a firm called Baker & Page here in Lebanon, and Bill Baker was brought in because people wanted to know what are the consequences? Because by that time, the takeover of administration buildings had been occurring in other students. And the big one was at Columbia. And I guess the people there came running out in a wedge, and they all got their heads cracked open by the police—you know, with batons and everything else. They got beaten up, and they got arrested.

                                    And so we at least knew that we were not going to do that. And we talked about it. You know, there’d be meetings, and there were lots of little meetings, you know, where people who were in the leadership of SDS were still meeting. And because I knew Don Miller, who was already an alum at that time—Don was—he must have been Class of ’68. It must have been ’68. Yeah, he was at least a year behind me. I don’t think he was a ’69, because the ’69s were still on campus, so he was a ’68. And Jake, who was Class of ’66—he was there, and he had been in the Army, so they were part of the leadership.

                                    And the reason I was admitted to part of the leadership was because I at least knew Don from the old days, from when I was on campus, so I was able to sit around—at that time, I wasn’t talking very much. I was reading the I Ching. I carried the I Ching with me all the time, and I read it, and I would cast the sticks or the coins every day, many times. And so I didn’t talk much. So people who do that—you tend to listen to them when they speak, even if they’re not very bright [chuckles], so I was living by the I Ching, and Don, because he was studying tai chi and everything else, respected the I Ching, and some of the other people, who had studied religion, knew it, knew what it was, and so—I was pretty deep into it. And I was seeing the whole world as a metaphor of the 64 hexagrams.

                                    So at the meetings—you know, I was part of those meetings, and we were discussing tactics, and we finally discussed that we would be nonviolent civil disobedience. You know, we would let the police come to us, and we would not resist arrest except Don got a little antsy, and so he started struggling, and they maced him or something.

                                    But, I mean, you quickly figured out who was the power, you know, and who was organizing this. So Bill Baker would come in, and we’d ask him questions like: “Well, what are the possible—what can they do to us?”  And he told us, and so that’s what I remember. I remember long discussions. I remember the African-American Society [sic; Afro-American Society]—there used to be an Afro-Am Society. They sent in pizza. That was nice. And they started a little bonfire outside to stay warm, you know, because it was—from 3 p.m. in the afternoon to about 3 a.m.—they busted down the doors at 3 a.m.

                                    And they were a little perplexed when they broke down the doors. I think they still would have expected us to do something, but we didn’t. We were arrayed on the staircase of Parkhurst, chanting antiwar slogans. Fifty-six of us were arrested, and 45 of us eventually went to jail. A few kids’ parents pled something else than what we—what the bulk of us pled.

                                    And then, you know, even when we were in jail, Bill came to us. We wanted to take the case to the—appeal to the Supreme Court. Nothing.  Jonathan—there was a teacher of Chinese named Jonathan—I can’t remember his last name. He might still be alive, but he was the guy who raised the forty-six hundred bucks to pay our fines, and so a lot of people chipped in.

                                    But, you know, all of this stuff that we were thinking about before we went in jail sort of drifted away during the time we were in jail because none of it was sustainable. I mean, some guys spent time writing these beautiful manifestos, you know, and letters. They were great, but they didn’t get us anywhere. They didn’t get us out of jail any quicker, and they didn’t end the war. They sort of justified what we were doing, and it was like—big deal. Didn’t mean anything.

                                    So that’s when we decided—at least we decided we were going to live together and share our money when we came out.

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      I think I have to turn this [stove] off, but let’s see if it gives me any sense—

REED-WESTON:        Did you know that [Dartmouth president John Sloan] Dickey had requested an injunction against the protesters?

PACHT:                      No. What kind of injunction?

REED-WESTON: Instead of having a criminal matter, he had talked to—he had previously talked to a judge and the New Hampshire governor and requested an injunction, which then came into effect, which was the—which was what eventually got the protesters out of the building.

PACHT:                      Ah!

REED-WESTON:        Did you know anything about the legal aspects of that?

PACHT:                      No, not really. The only thing I knew was we saw [Governor Walter R.] Peterson’s car parked. It was, like, “NH-1” or something like that. So we knew the governor was involved. But, no, all I knew was that there was a contempt of court citation, and that was going to be the charge. We could have gotten up to one year, contempt of court, and probably a heavier fine.

                                    I have to see if the sweet potato is cooked, if I can find the piece of sweet potato.

                                    So we knew that the governor and the president of the college and probably the judge were all trying to figure out what they should do with these boys—you know, that they didn’t want to hurt them too much. We knew that. But maybe some of the guys knew this.

REED-WESTON:        Were you prepared to be arrested?

PACHT:                      Yeah.

REED-WESTON:        Did you think that it was a very likely possibility?

PACHT:                      Yes. Yeah, we were sort of expecting—I mean, this was civil disobedience, and you had to go to jail, so—

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      We didn’t think we were going to go to jail for 26 days.

REED-WESTON:        What were you expecting?

PACHT:                      A week, overnight, something like that.

REED-WESTON:        Yeah.

PACHT:                      But when Bill talked to us and he told us what we were risking, then we became aware, and we understood what was going on. But he said—you know, we were in that perfect position. I mean, we didn’t have kids, we didn’t have jobs, and this was our job, and we were trying to save the world. And so we had the time. We could do the time. And so it was a time in our lives to do this, so that’s why we were able to do it.

REED-WESTON:        Do you think the administration handled the incident appropriately, especially given the context of other college protests?

PACHT:                      Yeah, no question. I think they handled it much better than Columbia, you know? But I think that—you know, when [President John G.] Kemeny was in, he was handling things in a different way. You know, when he closed—after the Parrot’s Beak [Cambodia] invasion, when he shut down the college for a talkathon or something like that—that was probably a better way. And even when—what’s the current president’s name again?

REED-WESTON:        [Philip J.] Hanlon.

PACHT:                      Yeah. When Hanlon—when Phil faced that, the occupation, it was perfect, the way he handled it. You know what I mean? What are you going to do? Here are kids that, on the one—every day you tell them they’re the elite of the world and they need to find their own way, and you don’t respect them when they come to you and talk to you, and they want to sit around longer than the office hours? And so he just handled it, you know. And that’s the way to do it.

                                    And that’s what Kemeny did. He said, Okay, this is really important. You know, the United States has bombed into Cambodia. They didn’t have any right to bomb into Cambodia. And so he shut down the college, and they had a whole symposium for the day. And then everybody says, “Well, okay, what are we gonna do, burn down the—how is burning down the administration building at Dartmouth going to help this?”

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                      It’s not, you know? So we get to hear all the things that people need to say, and maybe the college changes its investment policy or whatever it does. But at least it’s taken seriously. So I thought Phil handled it better than anybody. But I don’t think he could have handled it if Kemeny hadn’t handled it the way he handled it and if John Sloan hadn’t handled it the way he handled it.

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      You know, he had to bridge some really old-fashioned attitudes about what was going on, you know, and Peterson was, like, the first Democratic governor in a hundred years or something, so they all had to handle it the way that their constituents would allow them to handle it. And so did we.

REED-WESTON:        What did you think about the college-specific punishments that happened for the students who were currently enrolled?

PACHT:                      In the main, I thought they were commensurate with what the students had done. You know, the guys who wanted to finish got to finish. Even Dave Green, who was separated from the college—he became great buddies with Dean Seymour over the years, and he went back and finished. You know, I mean, it worked out. I mean, the college—like I said, the college has to do what the college has to do. But, you know, they divested from their investments in South Africa when they needed to. It was a hard pull, but they did. So institutions can’t change overnight.

REED-WESTON:        Mm-hm.

PACHT:                      But I thought we had, you know—Dickey was at the end of a long career, and I thought he was courageous to handle things the way he did. But Kemeny came along, and then there was, you know, James O. [James Oliver Freedman] did what he had to—Freedman. You know, all of these guys moved the college in better ways, and so far Hanlon’s done good things, you know?

REED-WESTON:        Yeah. Do you think that the Parkhurst takeover was successful?

PACHT:                      Well, you know, that was 1969. The war didn’t end until— what?—’76  or something?

REED-WESTON: Seventy-three.

PACHT: Seventy-three? Yeah. So I think we contributed a little something. You know, we changed some minds, and we mostly changed our own minds, too. I mean, you know, as district governor now, I’m going around—I have to speak to every one of the 42 clubs in my Rotary district. And the district governor is supposed to carry the message, the theme of the Rotary international president. And our theme this year is Light Up Rotary. I’m not going to talk about that. But I start out by telling them a little bit about who I am and how I got to where I was. And I can’t—

                                    I realized quickly in my talks that I can’t—everybody who’s my age went through the Vietnam era, and every one of us made choices. You had to make a choice. You had to either—whether you were consciously making the choice or not, you either went or you didn’t go. And if you didn’t go, then what did you do, you know? And if you did go, then what did you do? How did you comport yourself when you were in there?

                                 So the whole—our whole generation is defined by that—that event, whether we were killed—May ’58 [sic], a thousand-plus were killed, you know? A hundred more Canadians. There were hundreds of Australians, if not thousands, and untold numbers of Southeast Asian folks. So it was—it destroyed the economy and the agriculture of a country. I mean, it was, like, a huge cataclysm.

                                 And I tell people, you know, that my path was on the other side, you know? And mostly it ended. You know, it ended when the caskets coming home washed into the current consciousness of the people, and they couldn’t—it’s the same way when Israel is doing this shit in Gaza, you know? And I’m Jewish, and I realize the situation of Israel, surrounded by millions of Arabs saying, “We’re gonna push you into the ocean.” And I understand that. But that’s how Israel stops these things. When the Israeli public sees the caskets coming home, it’s, like, it’s not worth the price.

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm.

PACHT:                    You know, we got to figure out something else. So I think we contributed in a small way to changing a couple of things at the college, changing some consciousnesses of people, you know, from the classes of, mmm, ’69 to ’75 or something. Made some more even more conservative, but maybe opened some other minds. But, you know, it wasn’t earth changing or anything.

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm.

PACHT:                    It was a little contribution.

REED-WESTON:     What was it like in jail?

PACHT:                    Well, there’s nothing soft in jail. We had a plastic mattress about two inches thick on a steel frame that lowered down on a couple of chains from the wall. There were two of them. So if you put both of them up, it was about six feet wide by nine feet long by about eight feet high. And we were confined there for most of the day. We only got outside once in the 26 days. And everything was either concrete or steel.

                                 We went down for breakfast. We had to go down to the cafeteria for breakfast, lunch and—dinner was, like, at 4:30. And then—and lights out at 10 or something, 10 or 11, I forget. So it was—it was a very inward time.

                                 The thing about our jail—we had more people in our jail than any other jail. There were only three in Coos County Jail, so they had a much more isolating experience than we did. There were 14 of us in Rockingham, and, as I said, we were a power block. I mean, we had one whole tier to ourselves, seven cells filled with Dartmouth people.

                                 And so the murderers, the guys who were in—usually in jail there’s this hierarchy. You know, like, the murderer stays in a cell, and the other people do his bidding because he’s such a badass. So when we first walked in, they were holding up, from the second tier to the—let me explain to you: So the building is built like this [demonstrates], with brick walls on the outside, and then there’s a cell block on the inside, which is like a block of concrete with three levels on both sides, all encased by bars. And then the individual—there’s a walkway of about three feet wide on each tier and then seven cells. So that’s what the old Rockingham County Jail was like.

                                 And we were on the top tier, which was very hot in July because all the heat rose—and everybody smoked back then, so all the smoke and the heat was up there, so it was lousy. So all the other prisoners were on the first and second tier, and the badass was on the second tier. So when we were first marching in to our cells—not marching but walking in to our cells, they held up, like, broomsticks with little—crude little sexual drawings on them, to try to intimidate us. And we thought they were hysterical. We were, like, laughing at these crude little drawings of [an] ejaculating penis or something, you know? We didn’t give a shit about that.

                                 And they also gave—they gave everybody cigarettes, a brand you never heard of but cigarettes, and I gave them away to the guys on the second tier because we didn’t, like, smoke. Many people didn’t smoke, and a lot of us didn’t want to smoke that shit, so—oh, like, we’re best friends, giving them cigarettes.

                                 And we tried to talk to them about how “We’re not the enemy. The screws are the enemy. We’re in this. We’re just like you. We’re locked up.” So we were able to get along. But it was good to have 14 because the guards—you know, they were guards, but they couldn’t intimidate us because we had so many people.

                                 So, I mean, we had, like, 300 books at the end of the time we were incarcerated. They didn’t restrict the number of books that we had. A professor came to talk with us for a few minutes, came in. He was allowed into the tier, and we all crowded around and talked to him. He was, like, kind of a leftie. He didn’t stay at Dartmouth very long.

                                 But we got into routines. You know, I was able to do my yoga early in the morning out on a far end of the tier, and Don did his tai chi exercises, you know, and everybody cleared away. And mostly people read and talked. Again, at the beginning, a lot of people were writing manifestos, and we were talking about, “Oh, maybe we’ll get out by Thursday.” After the first week, we realized we were going to do the time. We were going to do the whole month. Again, we were talking about what we were going to do when we got out, toward the end, and that’s when we talked about, you know, renting a house together.

REED-WESTON:     What was your goal with what you wanted to do after you got out of jail?

PACHT:                    I think, again, you know, I wanted to settle down. I wanted to find somebody and make something meaningful out of my life and go in some meaningful direction, and so that’s why—I didn’t know whether it was going to be back in Hartland—that’s where they finally found the house, but it was testing out with Carol whether Carol was going to be the person. And then we went through that whole thing about whether we were going to have Jesse, and then once we were going to have a kid, we had to—I had to make an environment for this kid. So that was—there was no way—and the best way for me to make an environment without having a job was depending on these other people. You know, everybody had to do something.

                                 So that first year in Hartland—I mean, some of us came with money in our pocket, some of us didn’t have much money, some of us had cars. Like, we had six cars. You know, he was smoking Marlboros; I was smoking Winstons. Gradually, you know, we out of money because we were, like, doing odd jobs and things, and so that was—living there, renting in Hartland that we evolved the system of the common fund. Everything that was earned went into the common fund, and everything that was spent came out of the common fund. And the cars gradually died, and the cars that were staying had to be cared for communally, so we had to start—I mean, if you’re putting money into what used to be my car, we have to make a different arrangement, you know?

                                 So that’s when we began to develop the communal ideals and the ideas that, when we moved to the land in Canaan, were already in place. You know, everything we earned went into the common fund. Ten percent of that got put off into the medical fund. If you wanted to buy a candy bar, you had to take the money out and write down, you know, “Bruce, twenty-five cents, Snickers” so that we knew where the money was going. And there was no bullshit, you know. And then we actually had to make money, so we started a roofing business, and we ran the town dump, and we modeled, and whatever else we had to do.

REED-WESTON:     Were your parents still supporting you at that point—I mean, financially?

PACHT:                    No. There was no money coming from the parents at that time.

REED-WESTON:     What kind of contact did you have with them?

PACHT:                    Well, by then, you know, it became exotic, you know? Like, commune life was exotic. My mother—[Chuckles.] It’s funny, because my mother—they came up to visit, and, you know, we didn’t have any indoor plumbing. We just had a cold-water pump and the shit pit, so, you know—I actually built her an outhouse with a toilet and a five-gallon pail underneath it so she wouldn’t have to go down to the gas station every time she had to pee.

                                 There was a place called the Canaan Inn in Canaan, an old, ramshackle inn, and it had a bar, and it had some night life, and so my mother always enjoyed a toot, so—and there was a woman who was running the bar, whose name was Lori. And her tall, skinny friend was the chef. But Lori turned out to be Jewish, so Lori and my mother—they were about 15 years apart. I mean, my mother was down there drinking and talking to Lori, and Lori said, “So how did you react when your son was going to live in a commune?” My mother said, “Well, for the first four years, I cried.” [Both chuckle.]

                                 So I think—you know, they just—they didn’t know what was going on any more than I did until, you know, they saw that we were making a life—you know, that this was the way people lived maybe in the 1700s, you know, and that we were serious about it, and we were good at it, and we were going to make it work.

                                 We had systems to keep our health together, and we were taking care of Jesse, who was thriving. Of course, you know, a grandkid makes a lot of things change because it’s their blood, you know, so they had to get involved, so once they saw Jesse was okay and—you know, the fact that we took off our clothes in the summertime when it was hot didn’t matter as much as—you know, we weren’t as weird—they began to see that we had the respect of the people in town, and we were nonviolent, and we were actually growing food and taking care of animals, and it was working.

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm. You mentioned earlier that egalitarianism—

PACHT:                    Yeah.

REED-WESTON:     —was a big part of that.

PACHT:                    Oh, yeah.

REED-WESTON:     Can you talk a bit about that?

PACHT:                    Well, the women’s movement was getting pretty hot at the time, and so the women who lived at the Wooden Shoe were wanting to be treated equally.

REED-WESTON:     How many were there?

PACHT:                    Well, there was Carol and Odessa, Esther and Ann were the—

REED-WESTON:     Out of how many?

PACHT:                    Well, it would have been—there would have been me, Jake, Ed and Rob, so it was four and four. You know, people would come in the summer. They’d come walking down, looking for some hippie haven or some shit like that, and we would say, “You’re on dishes.”

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                    And, you know, “When you use the shit pit and you come back in, here’s how you have to wash your hands, because if you don’t, you’re going to make everybody sick, and then we’ll kill you.”

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                    So not too many people stayed for the winter, because we were heating with wood. You had to work from sunup to sundown to keep the systems going, and people would come in and say, “Boy, you guys are pretty strict!” And we’d say, “Fuck you. You want to be a flower child, there’s the road.”

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                    You know, “We don’t have time for that shit. You’re here, you gotta work.” So that was it. I mean, the women—and it was much more subtle than that. I mean, the easy things were the big ones, like, “Okay, well, you have to learn how to fix the car,” and not everybody has the talent for fixing the car; your genitalia doesn’t matter. But we had to work through that, you know? So, “Yes, you have to change it,” and “You gotta learn how to do the babies”—we had to learn how to take care of babies because babies—everybody has to take care of babies. “And you gotta learn how to split the wood. I’m always gonna split it twice as fast because that’s the way it works, you know? And you’re always gonna be better at taking care of the kids.”

                                 But everybody had to cook, and if you didn’t know how to cook, somebody would help you, and then you made your two dishes when it was your day, and then we ate it. You know, if you made bread that didn’t rise, we all ate rock bread.

REED-WESTON: [Laughs.]

PACHT:                    That’s the way it was. But it was more subtle. It was in the meetings that we had to learn to respect each other’s styles of speaking. Whether you were a man who didn’t speak up much or a woman who was assertive, we had to recognize that these things were—that’s the way it was, and that’s what—we had to deal with it. It didn’t matter—your place in the discussion—your genitalia didn’t matter, either. Or your sexual preferences didn’t matter, regardless of your genitalia. But we spent a lot of time working on that, and a lot of strong women came out of the Wooden Shoe.

REED-WESTON:     Do you feel like you developed interpersonal skills—

PACHT:                    No question about it.

REED-WESTON:     —as a result of—

PACHT:                    No question. Nobody had as tough an ass as I do to sit through a meeting—

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                    —without having to go pee. You know, you had to learn that. And then—that’s the only management training I ever had to then go out and get a job at UDS [United Developmental Services] and take over.

REED-WESTON:     Yeah.

PACHT:                    I studied a lot, you know, once I got to UDS. I read a lot more about it. Also when I was in California, you know, I participated in encounter groups. I don’t know how much you know about that.

REED-WESTON:     Nn-nn.

PACHT:                    Did you ever hear [of] the Esalen Institute, E-s-a-l-e-n?

REED-WESTON:     Nn-nn.

PACHT:                    You should Google that because it was a big thing in the ‘60s. It’s still going on. E-s-a-l-e-n, the Esalen Institute. Some of the people who had been to Esalen—they developed these things called encounter groups, where we were supposed to encounter each other as pure human beings you know?

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT: Without all the trappings of society. So they—some people developed what they called marathon encounters, where 24 hours you’re all in the same room. You’re not allowed to leave the room—and see what happens. And people would talk to each other. And those could get pretty brutal.

                                 And then we had smaller encounters that would be for two hours, and, again, the rule was you had to be in the room, and you couldn’t leave. So usually it was be somebody who was experienced at it would take somebody out of the group and sit down and encounter them and say, “Who are you?” And the person would do their thing. You know, like, “Well, my name is Shirley.” And it’s, like, “Why are you blinking your eyes like that?” You know, “What are you hiding behind?” And just shred the person’s personality. It was kind of brutal.

                                 And a bunch of amateur psychoanalysts sitting around, and everybody’s watching somebody going, “Hey, don’t do that!” and they would say, “Shut the fuck up! He’s getting’ somewhere.” And it was, like,—so I learned a lot from that—

REED-WESTON:     Yeah.

PACHT:                    —about masks that people wear and ways that we use to avoid talking about what’s really happening. We used to double so that two people having a conversation that are pussyfooting around what they really want to say, so somebody stands behind this person, stands—and then says what you think that person is really trying to say instead.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                    So we learned about all of those things. A lot of risk, but, you know, nobody could leave, so you can’t leave till it’s resolved. And that’s what happened to the Wooden Shoe. You know, you can’t keep living when you’re carrying some kind of thing about what you said or how you treated me or—so. And then, you know, we were practicing freedom, so people would have the freedom to have sex with anybody you want. You have to accept the consequences of having sex with anybody you want, but you’re free to do it. But the consequences took a lot of time to work out. So whether it was about sex—the important things: sex, money, religion, work—all of those things take a lot of time to work out.

                                 You can be as free as you want, but you try to live in a three-person relationship and you almost don’t have enough time on the planet to live a life and be in an intimate relationship with two other people and actually work it out so everybody feels good.

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm.

PACHT:                    So that’s one of the things I learned.

REED-WESTON:     What do you feel like you got out of that experience?

PACHT:                    I think a deep understanding of humans, and more than I had before. I did psychotherapy for nine months three or four times a week, too, so I learned a lot about my own—I did that when I was at Stanford. So the communal experience after that was also learning a lot more about people and their motivations, so it helped me when I was a CEO, which is what I did for 40 years.

REED-WESTON:     What was your relation and opinion on politics during that time period?

PACHT:                    Strictly left. Very far left.

REED-WESTON:     Were you activist at that point?

PACHT:                    Only through voting, you know, and helping get people elected and writing letters. I mean, I didn’t run for office, although I supported Carol. Carol was elected to the New Hampshire House. Did I tell you that already?

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm.

PACHT:                    Yeah. She got the largest plurality of anybody in—anybody who was running for anything in Canaan except the town clerk, who had been the town clerk for 15 years.

REED-WESTON:     When was she elected?

PACHT:                    She served in—I guess it must have been the elections of ’76, so she served ’78-’79.

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm.

PACHT:                    And then she won the election in Canaan, in the election of ’78, but she had withdrawn already. Her name was still on the ballot, but she wasn’t going to serve.

REED-WESTON:     Okay.

PACHT:                    You know, “If elected, I will not serve.” Because she was pregnant. By then she was pregnant with Orin.

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm.

PACHT:                    In ’79. We already had Jesse, who was about nine years old.

REED-WESTON:     Do you think your experience with Parkhurst and getting arrested there changed your political views at all?

PACHT:                    More confirmed than changed. You know, I mean, back then what I was looking at was tactics. You know, my views have always been the same—you know, egalitarian and socialist, but the question was: What do we do about it? You know, what can we do about it?

REED-WESTON:     I’m going to pause for a second.

[Recording interruption.]

REED-WESTON:     All right, we’re back.

PACHT:                    Yeah, so nothing—it didn’t really change my politics, but it made me realize that the tactic of taking over the administration building was—had played out. You know, there was no—it wasn’t going to take us anywhere. And that’s what everybody else realized. You know, you can keep doing this, but that wasn’t going to do it. What we had to do was go out and make a life that was different and show people that you could make a different life than supporting the death machine.

REED-WESTON:     What did you think when the Vietnam War finally came to an end, and especially then when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese?

PACHT:                    Yeah. I mean, it was a great sort of ignominious—you know, the picture of everybody crawling up the ladders onto the helicopters. You know, it was too bad that it ended that way, but—and then too bad that the South Vietnamese collaborators of the United States got such harsh treatment after that. You know, we ignored them, and then they got killed or they got sent to slave camps and all of that.

                                 But, you know, the oligarchs that we had set up in power and who were benefiting from ripping off all their other countrymen—just like we did in Latin America. I didn’t have any sympathy for that. I was glad the war was over. What was terrible was, you know, those 58,000-plus men and women who died and, you know, their families, you know, that they had started. And, you know, a whole bunch of families who were going to have political opinions based on the fact that they lost somebody, you know? What was that going to do to the country, you know?

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm, mm-hm.

PACHT:                    So it was a just a sad, sad time. I was delighted to see the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial [sic; Vietnam Veterans Memorial]. I loved it when—I forget her name—May—I can’t remember her whole name [Maya Lin]. But when the sculpture was chosen for that, it was a perfect design. I remember feeling reverential when I went there to see it. You know, you go down into the earth, and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and then the deaths diminish toward the end. It was a fantastic concept. It was a wonderful thing. And I think it was a big step towards feeling some of the horror. But some of it will never be healed.

REED-WESTON:     Yeah.

PACHT:                    You know?

REED-WESTON:     Yeah.

PACHT:                    But it felt great to have it be done.

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm. Yeah. What did you do after you left the commune in 1975?

PACHT:                    Oh. Well, Carol and I moved to—we became caretakers for a house in Dorchester, New Hampshire, and I got my job as the CEO of what became United Developmental Services.

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm.

PACHT:                    Of course, I had to go to LISTEN [Community Services] to get a jacket for the interview.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                    It came down to here [demonstrates]. But I think that the people who were doing it realized that if I got the job, I would do it up to here [demonstrates], the way I did everything else in my life. And I did. It was a wonderful business to be in because the tide of civil rights reached people with developmental disabilities in the 1980s, and New Hampshire was right out front with that movement. We were the first state to close its institution for people with mental retardation in the whole country, so we were nationally known.

                                 I was in a position where we were going to national conferences. I was meeting people at the forefront of thinking about how to liberate people with disabilities, how to treat them, how to do mainstreaming in the right way, how to—because mainstreaming then started—had other effects on people with autism, on thinking about boys versus girls, how do they mature, you know, what kind of structures do boys flourish in versus, you know, rule-bound things. So it was a great time. It was a great time. I was making $14,000 in 1976, so it was good money. I actually bought my first car.

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm.

PACHT:                    So it was nice to have some money and do great things, so it was a wonderful time. I really had a great time. It got bad toward the end because the politics, too, began to feed into everything that we were doing. This is toward the end, after 2000 or something. The government in New Hampshire had changed. You know, we had that guy [as governor] named Craig Benson, who was this Libertarian disguised as a Republican, and he really just raped the Department of Health and Human Services so that mental health and mental retardation services started going downhill, and we couldn’t keep up with kind of individualized services that were good.

                                Nobody wanted to have a tax. We still don’t have a broad-based tax in New Hampshire, so the bridges are falling apart, and everything just sort of—and they thought that they could save a lot of money by consolidating—there were 12 area agencies, each one of which had regional responsibility, and I had Hanover-Lebanon area. And they decided to make 10 out of them, so they took my contract and gave it to the people in Claremont.

REED-WESTON:     Mmm.

PACHT: Because my management—everybody on my management team had been working for 15 years, so even if you start at $10,000 a year and you get two or three percent raise a year, you’re making substantial money after 15 years. So I had a very expensive management team, and they said, “Oh, we’re gonna save four hundred and fifty thousand”—actually, the combined agency lost seven hundred and fifty thousand the first year. And now everything came true. Their offices are in Claremont, you know.

REED-WESTON:     Yeah. What have you been doing since then?

PACHT:                    Since then, for the next six years after I left, I got hired by Twin Pines Housing Trust, and I got into affordable housing, so I had to learn—John [H.] Vogle [Jr.], who’s a professor at the business school, was on the board of directors, and he said—I went from kindergarten to graduate school in about eight months. I had to learn the business—not only learn the business of affordable housing but learn how it was practiced in both New Hampshire and Vermont because Twin Pines operated in both states.

                                 I got good at that and got some projects going. We built the Gile [Hill] development in Hanover, which was the first affordable housing in a long time except for senior housing in Hanover. We did a few things in Lebanon. We did a bunch of things in the town of Hartford [Vermont], and we got—we started an affordable housing venture in Woodstock [Vermont], which finally, about a year and a half ago, was taken to court by neighbors and finally got approved. I haven’t seen them break ground yet, but all the approvals are in.

                                 So I think I put Twin Pines—you know, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together when I got there, and I was raising a lot of money from local contributions, and also got us properties, that built nice places for people who didn’t have much money to live, and at the same time got the organization on it, so it’s flourishing now. The guy who succeeded me is doing fine. I check the [Form] 990 every once in a while.

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                    And they’re doing fine. So that’s what I did.

                                 And then after Twin Pines in 2012 I started working part time as the development director for the Grafton County Senior Citizens Council and only did that for about a year and a half, and then my Rotary duties became so consuming that I was falling asleep at work, and I couldn’t keep up, so—Lori is still working, so she said, you know, for a year and a half I’m going to be able to do this without doing anything else, which is good because I spend about eight hours a day on it. [Chuckles].

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.] What kind of impact do you think Vietnam has had on the rest of your life?

PACHT:                    It completely changed my direction. The first thing I thought—I mean, I dropped out of my career. I would have been a teacher, and I wanted to come back and teach at Dartmouth, so at least half of that I got—you know, you live in the shadow of Mother Dartmouth, at least.

                                 But it was a complete turnaround. You know, I stepped out of my life and got into a different life because of Vietnam. And it’s not—I mean, it’s a different life. It’s a harder life, I think, than I would have had, but it’s had lots of positive—you know, things that I’ve done I’ve been recognized for. It’s nice.

REED-WESTON:     Yeah.

PACHT:                    Yeah.

REED-WESTON:     Okay. Is there anything else you want to talk about that we haven’t touched on already?

PACHT:                    No. I’m just—I’m glad this is done. Periodically, we talk to people who are interested in it. It’s nice to have an academic—a comprehensive academic approach to looking at it.

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm.

PACHT:                    And I’ll be looking forward to the product of your work.

REED-WESTON:     Mm-hm.

PACHT:                    After you shut this off, tell me what you’re going to—

REED-WESTON: [Chuckles.]

PACHT:                    Where do you think you’re leading yourself?

REED-WESTON:     All right. Well, thank you very much for doing this.

PACHT:                    Okay.

REED-WESTON:     All right.

[End of interview.]