So there was this thing called the Baby Boom, you see. And then there was this other thing the Library of Congress Subject Headings manual calls the "Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975." Combine these two terms, and you have the main ingredients for the creation of The Evergreen State College.

Who are the Baby Boomers? We are the most labelled generation in U.S. history. At birth we were already given a tag. As teenagers, having a little hair over our ears made us Hippies. We hit the work force and became Yuppies. And now, as we age and become geriatric, we'll be called Gerries. You read it here first, kids.

Here's my definition of the Baby Boom: Those children born from 1946-1964 in the United States. The Boom peaked in 1957 at 4,308,000 estimated live births. However, for the purposes of this installment of Evergroove, I'll be mostly talking about the first wave of Boomers, those who were born during the Truman years and in Ike's first term, 1946-1957. The majority of TESC students in the 1970s came from this generation.

Our fathers had come back from WWII or Korea (or in the case of my father-in-law, both. I salute you, Bob. My own father was in during the Korean thing) and since it looked like the world was going to settle a bit, they went about getting married, finding employment, buying houses, and having kids. Lots of them. Lots and lots and lots of them.

We were born into a country with 48 stars on the flag. Where television was just starting to become the cultural glue that would, for better or worse, bind my age group together more effectively than any political or religious movement. Where computers were the size of a minivan. Where segregation was still alive in the South. And where the threat of Hitler (rumors that he was still alive persisted into the 1960s) and the Japanese had been replaced by the Soviet Union and China.

The United States went into panic mode when the Soviets launched the world's first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. To add insult to injury, that little chunk of metal flew over our skies on a regular basis and was easily spotted with the naked eye. The Cold War heated up and the Space Race began with a manned lunar landing being the prize in the contest. Once Armstrong set foot on the Moon in 1969, the United States gained a major psychological advantage in the struggle to be the #1 superpower.

When JFK took office the Cold War really got scarey. The Berlin Wall went up overnight. The Bay of Pigs got messy. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, many people believed WWIII was about to begin. At Roosevelt Elementary we had three drills: fire drill, earthquake drill, and nuclear war drill. The nuclear war drill was like the earthquake drill (get under your desk) except the siren had a more eerie and mournful pitch to it. After several of these drills, many of us kids wondered if we were going to make it to adulthood. When I was a Boy Scout, some of our troop fathers, who were stationed at Fort Lewis, would take us on field trips to the Fort to watch mock battles or sit in tanks. "That uniform you're wearing now is preparing you for the real thing later, " I remember being told.

This sense of being in a state of war, of being on the edge of disaster, persisted throughout our childhood and teen years. JFK was assassinated in Nov. 1963, Nixon resigned Aug. 1974, and those two dates in my mind serve as bookends for an era of chaos. In between them was an egotistical Texan in the White House who was basing a murky and unpopular war on a foundation of lies. Yes, history can repeat itself.

One world event that took place right before we were born, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, was the real dividing line between the way our parents viewed life and the way we perceived things. Having grown up in the shadow of that mushroom cloud gave us a sense of urgency in our protests. With the likes of LBJ and Nixon at the helm, working through the system seemed pointless. Something had to be done NOW!!!! before we blow up the whole world! It wasn't until Jimmy Carter was in office that I realized the country didn't have to always be in a state of war or riots or great social unrest.

Anyway, this Vietnam thing sort of crept in and somehow we found ourselves in a war we didn't understand. When that master of the media, Ron the Con took office in the 1980s, he did not allow the press free run in war zones. Reagan had learned from Vietnam. In the 1960s and early 70s, we saw the carnage, unedited, night after night on the news. This did not help the case for staying in Southeast Asia. And what happened was that the images we were exposed to did not match the rhetoric given to us by the political leaders. The closest event I can relate this to in modern terms was the debacle of Hurricane Katrina, where the President's contrived media presentations did not match the images we were shown by reporters. I'm sure if the press had the same kind of freedom in Iraq that they had in Vietnam, Bush might be in the single digits in the polls by now. As long as we don't see the war, then it remains a cherished and glorious concept. But we saw Vietnam in our living rooms night after night. We saw American kids, fellow Boomers, valiantly trying to make the lies of the leaders come true. And more importantly, our parents watched all this too. They didn't like it any more than we did.

I'm getting to Evergreen. Really. Hang on.

One big difference between Vietnam and Iraq was the draft. In the 1960s-early 70s, if you were male, you'd get a little notice from the Selective Service about a month before you turned 18 informing you that registering for conscription was the law. They had a lottery system based on your birthday. If you were assigned a number between 1 to 90, the odds of getting drafted were pretty high. My number was 68. But as fate would have it, Nixon ended the active draft that year. So, the way the Army got recruits was a deal called a "nudge from the judge." If you were a young man who got in trouble, the court would give you a choice, serve time or serve your country. Several of my high school buddies went into uniform in this manner.

But, you know how things work, even with the draft the rich kids managed to avoid serving in the war zone while everyone else did the dirty work. Back then, it was possible to avoid military service by simply being in college.

Now remember, we are the Baby Boom. Everywhere we went filled up. In Olympia, the grade schools were at top capacity in the 1960s. We opened up Oly's third junior high school, Reeves in 1969, built to accomodate our growing numbers. Olympia High School, which was Oly's only high school during this era, was as packed as a Japanese commuter train. And, thanks to the incentive of avoiding the draft, we filled up the colleges.

Now, when the Council of College Presidents released A Plan for Public Higher Education in Washington in 1964, calling for the creation of the first four-year school in the State in the 20th century, I'm sure they had all sorts of high-minded reasons and justifications. But the real deal was this: The Vietnam War was driving thousands of young men into the world of higher education, where they might otherwise not have gone.

And so the stage was set.