Vietnam Era Legend (Jacob Cruger)

Title: Vietnam Era Legend

General Information About this Item:

Informant Data:

FO+M worker, started working for the college over 30 years ago. Has worked in multiple FO+M divisions. Originally from the Upper Valley, the child of a former FO+M employee.

Contextual Data:

One of many stories passed to informant by older FO+M employees. Takes place in the early seventies, about ten years before the informant started working for the college. A story about the ramifications of a protest of the Vietnam war, which was fought between 1955 and 1975.

Item:

Students protesting the Vietnam war were confronted by FO+M employees with children enlisted. This confrontation led to a physical scuffle. According to the informant no individuals involved were sanctioned in any way.

Transcript:

“Back during the Vietnam War… there was a bunch of Dartmouth students, I believe it was all male, were protesting the war. And here, B and G (Buildings and Grounds) we had a lot of fathers and their kids were in the Vietnam war, and even though they didn’t agree with the war when you protest you should protest the war but not the people that were in the war… it boiled all day, so finally at the end of the day a crowd of fathers confronted the protesters and I guess it was quite a melee up there. I don’t know who won, if anybody did, but there was some touching… nobody got fired, nobody got expelled.”

Collector’s Name: Jacob Cruger

Tags/Keywords:

Dartmouth Folklore Archive