War Babies: Prophets of Peace

 This article was originally published in the Toronto Star, Sunday 12/29/2019

-- By Tom Phillips

Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, c.1963

The 1960's turn sixty in 2020, with their meaning and value still in hot dispute. It might help to divide the decade in two; the first half peace and love, the last fear and loathing. Still, in both phases, the Sixties were an age of prophecy.

Bob Dylan sang “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”  Simon and Garfunkel saw “the words of the prophets written on the subway walls.”  New voices came out of nowhere, and found rapt listeners in the massive generation born after World War Two, the baby boomers. 

The prophets were not boomers themselves.  They were the big brothers and sisters of the boomers, the relatively small generation born during the war.  As elders, they knew from an early age that their voices would be heard. And they knew the world they were born into was not fit for future generations. Children of war, they became prophets of peace.  

Harvard of the Midwest

(In 1959, anti-war protesting was introduced to Grinnell College in Iowa, courtesy of a freshman from Long Island, New York who had no idea of the fuss it would create.  Following is an excerpt from my memoir, "A Beginner's Life," new from Full Court Press.)

Grinnell in 1959 was one of the top-ranked small liberal arts colleges in the country, and my high-school guidance counselor told me not to apply, as I’d never get in with my erratic grades.  I applied anyway, and to my surprise, they treated me like a prime prospect.  A wealthy alumnus invited me for an interview in his office at Time Inc.  A few days later I got a note from him, saying I was definitely “admissible.” 

           

I had my doubts about the place, based on the cover of the catalog, which showed a clean-cut fellow in a letter sweater sitting under a tree.  But my first choice was Oberlin, and they put me on the waiting list, so I decided to take the invitation from Iowa.  A few months later I crossed the Mississippi River on the Rock Island Railroad, with a carload of easterners bound for Grinnell.    

             

We didn’t know it but we were pioneers, the vanguard of a latter-day migration engineered by the ambitious president of Grinnell, Howard Bowen.  Without announcing it, he had set out to transform Grinnell from a prestigious regional school – the “Harvard of the Midwest,” they liked to call it – to one with a national reputation.