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Ann Arbor 200

AADL Talks To: Rick Ayers, Former U-M Student Activist and Member of the SDS and Weather Underground

When: April 25, 2024

Rick Ayers
Rick Ayers

In this episode, AADL Talks To Rick Ayers. Rick is faculty emeritus at the University of San Francisco where he was an associate professor of education focusing on English language arts and teacher education. In the late 1960s, Rick followed his older brothers to the University of Michigan and was soon radicalized by the civil rights and anti-war movements, participating in protests and demonstrations with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground. Rick traces his fascinating journey as a draft dodger working with deserters in Canada through his decision to enlist in the U.S. Army where he would eventually go AWOL and live as a fugitive for seven years. Rick also shares his memories of the vibrant campus film culture and the people -- including girlfriend Gilda Radner -- who shaped his student experience at the university, and he reflects on the legacy of the 1960s protests in light of today’s political environment.

Transcript

  • [00:00:09] AMY CANTU: Hi, this is Amy.
  • [00:00:10] ANDREW MACLAREN: This is Andrew. In this episode, AADL talks to Rick Ayres.
  • [00:00:14] AMY CANTU: Rick is an Emeritus faculty Associate Professor of Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. He came to the University of Michigan in 1965 and became active in the anti-war movement, the Students for a Democratic Society, and the Weathermen. Rick talks about his political activities at the University of Michigan, his time in Canada after dodging the draft, and his involvement with campus cultural institutions such as Cinema Guild.
  • [00:00:44] ANDREW MACLAREN: Thanks for speaking with us today. You grew up in Chicago. What brought you to Ann Arbor?
  • [00:00:51] RICK AYERS: My family is a Michigan family. My father grew up in Detroit and went to the University of Michigan. My mother grew up in Houghton, Michigan, and she met my dad there. I think they graduated in the late 30s just before World War II started. They were always big Michigan fans. He got a job in Chicago. We grew up in Chicago, but when Tim went to college -- my brother was four years older than me -- he decided to go to Ann Arbor. It wasn't anything about legacy admissions. As I recall in those days, admission was pretty easy. Two years later, Bill followed him to Ann Arbor. Interestingly enough, I really wanted to go to the University of Chicago. I liked the nerdy intellectual Chicago scene, but my father was very much against that, I don't know why. He felt like it was an urban school. He persuaded me to try a Big 10, so I went to Michigan, too. It's an easy four-hour drive, which we did often and that's how I got here.
  • [00:02:12] ANDREW MACLAREN: Did you have a sense of what you would study before you came here? Were you headed in some particular direction?
  • [00:02:20] RICK AYERS: When I was finishing high school, like many high school kids, I was in an existential crisis about Who am I? What am I going to be? Everyone feels kind of like kind of a dilettante and a fraud at that time, and so I felt like I really want to be an intellectual. I really didn't want to be a businessman like my dad. This sounds a lot like it's all about my dad, but it's really not. But I wanted to go deep into something. Actually, when I was in my senior year, I had left the suburbs and I went to a prep school, Lake Forest Academy. I was studying Latin all this time and my Latin teacher, Mr. Shapiro, had started teaching us Greek in a side class. I was learning Greek and Latin. I said, I'm going to be a classics major. My plan was to be a classics major and to learn Greek and Latin. When I visited Ann Arbor, I met Dan Cameron, who was the head of the Classics Department, I believe, and also led up the Honors Program at Angel Hall and the great books class he taught. It wasn't called that -- that's what it's called at Columbia -- but it's something like that. He sponsored me and he was very supportive of me getting into the Honors Program and doing classics. Basically, I came there studying Greek, Latin, and classics. Interestingly enough, while I was a political activist and kind of an art nerd, I also was a classics scholar for a couple of years.
  • [00:04:03] AMY CANTU: When you came to Ann Arbor -- given the period, the political activity, all that was happening on campus, and following your brother's footsteps to some degree -- how quickly did you get involved in anti-war protests? And how did you get involved? Can you talk a little bit about that evolution?
  • [00:04:23] RICK AYERS: Yes, of course. Well, first of all, in high school, I had become first inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King and the struggles in the South, and then the more radical developments, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and voter registration. I knew about that and followed it and read and showed up at certain fundraisers around Chicago. Certainly, I was reading the New Republic, which was a fairly left journal at the time and its critique of the Vietnam disaster. I was already critical and when it came time to go to college, and I found myself in Ann Arbor, it was a great atmosphere for protest, and I saw it going on and was immediately involved. As a matter of fact, I was involved in that work before Bill. I wasn't actually following in his footsteps. He was a frat boy. Certainly, he's a rebel fraternity boy, and also he also certainly had political insight. We were both reading James Baldwin and things like that but I don't know what he said, but he would say often that I got started first on this and he followed me into it. Then, of course, he stepped way forward because by October of my freshman year -- that means a couple of months in -- was a famous sit-in at the Ann Arbor Draft Board. Bill and I were involved in the planning of that and we decided only one of us should get arrested. He said, I'll do it. Bill was the one arrested at that Draft Board setting. I was among the demonstrators outside, as the police were carrying them out and throwing them into the wagon. So yeah, I was involved immediately.
  • [00:06:44] ANDREW MACLAREN: What do you ascribe...because Bill does describe himself as being...when he went to college he didn't really know anything about politics, didn't really care about politics as a neophyte, but you were already interested. But you were coming from the same household. So why the difference there, do you think?
  • [00:07:01] RICK AYERS: Well, I think it's a blessing of what year we were born, really, because the evolution of consciousness of young privileged white kids in America was proceeding apace through the '60s even the '50s was starting to wake people up with the Montgomery bus boycott and so on. But it was really in the '60s, the March in Washington. I actually went to the big rally when Martin Luther King came to Chicago. I think both of us were on this trajectory where by 1965, we were starting to really get it. You may recall in 1966, SNCC --even before that -- but SNCC was saying to white organizers, It's great you're down here in Mississippi. Thank you for your efforts. But you really need to organize in the white community. You need to go where racism starts. You don't need to be talking to sharecroppers. You need to talk to those white people. A lot of the energy from the South came back in these white students coming back North, like Mario Savio and the people who led the free speech movement. They had come out of the South and they were raising money for the southern movement. That was true everywhere. There were echoes of the struggle in the South in the North, especially on campuses because so many students had been radicalized by going down there. I was involved, even in my freshman year, in a thing called Friends of SNCC, which was basically just fundraising, walking around the Diag with buckets, and raising money for the struggle there. But we felt like our resources should be dedicated to the work there, and that we also had a responsibility to challenge the Vietnam War.
  • [00:09:04] AMY CANTU: You were involved in the SDS? How quickly did you get involved, and what did you do? What were some of the projects that you pursued?
  • [00:09:12] RICK AYERS: Students for Democratic Society was already going when I got there, and really some of the founders of SDS were Ann Arbor people. We got to know actually Jon Frappier, and Carl Oglesby, Beth Oglesby, Nancy Frappier. We started hanging around with them during my freshman year. These are the elders of SDS. They had been at the Port Huron Statement, and so on. Of course, we looked up to them with awe. They were only the age of graduate students but to us they were grown-ups. They had a very clear analysis of imperialism and how the U. S. has moved and so partly we were fortunate to get to hang out with people like that. We met them, I don't know how we exactly met them, but Bob Hauert, who was from the campus ministry was an activist minister, a great guy. I think he connected us. Anyway, so we had that. SDS meetings were really deliberating on what actions to do next. I confess that I didn't go all the time. I was not an SDS stalwart. I found the meetings a little boring, and I wanted to show up at things. I'd show up at demonstrations but I didn't really understand the sub-rosa power struggles that may be going on. We had the Socialist Workers Party, which is the Trotskyites over here and we had the Communist Party over there. SDS was a tremendously open spontaneous mass movement, but every cadre organization figured they should get in there and get a piece of the action. As often happens in a mass movement, there's those kind of struggles going on. I didn't want to pay attention to that. I didn't care about that very much. But things were growing so fast that it was easy to be involved without going to all the meetings.
  • [00:11:33] ANDREW MACLAREN: What was the mechanism by which you knew if you weren't at meetings? How did you know there was going to be a protest here, there was going to be an action there? How did you know where to go and when and what you were supposed to do when you got there to help out?
  • [00:11:44] RICK AYERS: Well, the meetings were just one thing. The actions that were going to happen were widely publicized through leaflets. I was in the Cinema Guild, which I want to tell you about later. But Ed Weber, who was one of the sponsors of Cinema Guild, he was the head of the Labadie Collection and it's funny because it was a collection of radical everything. Whenever there was an action on the Diag or, things being handed out, you'd see Ed come out and collect one of each for the archive and go back into the library. That was a great cultural moment. But I'll tell you a big one that happened, I don't know if people talk to you about this uproar at the Fishbowl But the Fishbowl now is just called the Fish Bowl study area. I was there last August and I realized it's gone from what it was. But it used to be a spot where a lot of people came and went and in the cold weather, some people would set up their tables in the Fishbowl. Now, I believe this was still the fall of '65, maybe early '66, you probably have that date, but what happened was the Marine recruiters had set up a table there, and some people put a sign above the Marine recruiters with an arrow pointing at them saying "war criminals." This was amazing. This was very exciting. What ensued was a huge debate that went on for a couple of days in my memory where people against the war were crowding in there, trying to get the Marines to leave and people who were supportive of the war, including plenty of professors were in there patronizingly lecturing us. It was a great education because it was an ongoing conversation. You could listen to one conversation and pick up some facts that you didn't know, and then you could move on to another one and use those facts that you just learned. I recall it as one of the greatest examples of dialogic education that I'd ever seen. The administration was really worried that it would get out of hand. It was a lot of excitement and concern there. I know it was the winter that's why it was inside the Fishbowl. That was the action that I was drawn to and stuck around the whole time and got a real political education because, early on, someone like me reading the New Republic and thinking that the war was a disaster. Our view was, This is a mistake. They should go to the UN. There should be negotiations, those kind of liberal solutions, institutionally acceptable. I think after that, many of us came to feel like the Vietnamese who are fighting the Americans, they're right, and we're wrong. When you make that leap from feeling like we should do a better policy to feeling like the enemy is my friend, and you're in opposition, that was very radicalizing. For many people, it was transformative. The people who had put up the sign against the Marines were a group called the Committee to Support the NLF. Unbelievable, they're supporting the NLF. It'd be like if someone now said the Committee to Support Hamas as far as what was popularly allowed. Frankly, though, of course, I think the NLF is a much more honorable opposition that the U. S. faced and Hamas is different. The parallel doesn't exactly work, but that's what it felt like. It was so transgressive to say that and they had these little NLF flags and so on, and buttons. It pushed us to just think about it, even for a small group to say that. Anyway, I was involved in that way and what happened later in the fall of '67 was a big demonstration in October in which we were encouraged to turn in our draft cards, not just burn them, but send them in as an act of defiance and I did that. That's what ended my time in Ann Arbor. I decided, I have to take a bigger step and building up to that, while people were planning that, the main meetings were the pacifists. I was meeting with the Quakers. I wasn't ideologically tied to SDS or communist this or that, but I felt like, Damn, I have to do something more. I can't just walk around with a picket sign. Many of us, especially young men who had a 2-S deferment, felt like, Yeah, we have to do something much more serious as Mario Savio said "to lay our bodies on the machinery. " So we turned in our draft cards. That was a big important demonstration. It was a big step in my life. I knew it would force me because as I say, most of my time, I was a Cinema Guild guy and a classics scholar. I wasn't out there all the time. But I said, I have to force myself to mean more in my opposition, because to be a little privileged student with my 2-S deferment saying, "Stop the war" just didn't seem adequate.But that act changed my life, obviously.
  • [00:18:18] AMY CANTU: Didn't you get drafted?
  • [00:18:20] RICK AYERS: Yes. Well, after I turned in my draft card, I waited. I didn't know what was going to happen. I mailed it back to my local draft board in Illinois saying I refused to participate. About a month later, I got a letter back saying, I didn't...because I violated the selective service law, I've been reclassified 1(a), and I'm going to be inducted. I'm coming in. I was immediately drafted and I appealed. You can appeal. I actually wrote a letter of appeal, which was -- I don't know, did I find it somewhere? That might be a good archive piece -- but I wrote this letter, which was very sassy saying, the United States is totally wrong, and this is a peasant resistance to colonialism, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I was assigned a lawyer by my draft board, which was what they had to do and my lawyer wrote me a letter saying, "It appears to me that you're a communist, and I hope you get drafted." This is my defendant. Anyway, I delayed a little, that was '68. They gave me a draft date of March 15th, the Ides of March. That was a big problem for me. I felt like either I'd go in the army and I would die. I express resistance and get beat up or I'd just get killed. I'd go to jail and get beat up or I could go to Canada. I went to Canada and actually, I shocked everyone in the classics department. I was a junior now in college in my spring semester. I know Dan Cameron, my advisor, wrote me a letter. Vice President Cutler -- I was on the Student Advisory Committee to the University Vice President for Student Affairs -- he wrote me a letter for the immigration people to say I'm a legit guy. A professor drove me up to the border. We didn't go at Windsor. We went a little further north, might have been Port Huron. What you do is you cross -- I had a lot of advice from lawyers -- you cross the border and the minute you're on the Canadian side, you say, I'm applying for immigrant status, and they pull you into an office and I show all my paperwork. That's the fastest way to do it instead of just going to Toronto. They immediately gave me a temporary immigrant status and they knew that I was a draft dodger. That's just what was going on at that time. I drove to Toronto. I had friends there. Some school reform people who we know. Bill was by then very involved in the Children's Community School. I got a job in Toronto. I've had all my Ann Arbor friends, people would come up and visit. It was a big shock. I didn't even tell my parents until I was set up in Toronto and then Bill had to go tell them, which was difficult. They were amazed. My father was very nice about it. He came up and visited me right away. But, a long story short, and I know this is past Ann Arbor, but what I did was, I spent time working with deserters in Canada, especially deserters because they have a harder time getting in. These are working-class guys who are like sick of the army and ran away and really were lost in Canada. We created a free hostel up there and I had moved to Vancouver. Did a lot of work with that and I came to realize -- oh, I'd also met my partner and we got married later when I was in the army -- but we came to realize that the army was a mess. I wasn't going to get beat up. The army was falling apart. No one wanted to fight. It was a very demoralized army. It seemed less frightening. I took another decision, which was again life-changing and dangerous. But I felt like I got to do everything I can, even if I get killed, and that was to go back and accept induction to the army, which meant to go back, they'll drop the charges for dodging the draft if I agreed to be inducted, which I did. I went to Chicago, turned myself in, went to the judge, said "I'll go in" and they gave me an appearance date, November 5th, 1969. I did go into the army then. I was in the army all through training and I was a very outspoken anti-war GI. It was, as I had hoped, a very positive atmosphere for organizing. There's nothing like an army in defeat to be an army that's open to other perspectives. It was good. I did good work there, and I was never going to go to Vietnam. I wasn't going to be trying to be anti-war in Vietnam. You basically get killed that way. Then I went AWOL at the end of my training. But anyway, back to Ann Arbor! But that's my story. I was sad to leave Ann Arbor. I had friends. Actually, I was dating Gilda Radner when I left, and she would visit me in Toronto, and I didn't really see her again until after I came back in '77. I was AWOL from '70-77. When I came back, she was a famous star on Saturday Night Live.
  • [00:24:30] ANDREW MACLAREN: Was it a hard decision to leave? Because the time that you left the first time, there was every reason to suppose you'd never be let back into the country again?
  • [00:24:40] RICK AYERS: Yes.
  • [00:24:42] ANDREW MACLAREN: So how hard was that decision?
  • [00:24:44] RICK AYERS: It was a wrenching decision to go to Canada. We look back at it now, and it's like, Oh, yeah, the Americans went to Vietnam. They were against the war and then later on they got amnesty. But it was...we were pretty sure we could never come back. Everyone up there had exiles trauma. We had support groups. It wasn't therapy, but we had groups where we would meet and talk about the situation. We had a newsletter in Toronto and another one we created in Vancouver to try to keep people's morale up. But yeah, and for the middle-class kids, they all were on some pathway to become doctors or lawyers and they were like -- they blew it up. I just feel, you know I'm older now so my life is more steady, but at that time, we were blowing up our lives every year. I'm going to do this now. I'm going to do that. Because we felt so passionate that we had to change things. You can imagine. If you understand that 10,000 people a week are being killed by the bombings, and I'm going to class, I'm taking a shower, I'm watching a cool movie. It was just very difficult if you actually face that. We know, and it's still true, the government's power is huge and our power is small. How do we actually bang on the castle gate? It was a.. it was a hard time. People talk about the '60s. Sometimes I'd say this. Talk about sex drugs and rock and roll like, Yay, it was so fun. I always say there was a lot of sex in the '60s but it was doomsday sex. It was like, We're all going to die, so let's go to bed. [LAUGHTER] It was not jolly. I feel the media has softened the whole thing.
  • [00:27:05] AMY CANTU: Before we pivot away from this topic, I'm really curious. I mean, from what you've just said, you were involved in the Quaker Pacifist Peace Movement. You were part of the SDS. You were a draft dodger, and you also then joined the army. That's a lot to be going through. Were you also then part of the Weatherman? How did you reconcile all of that?
  • [00:27:36] RICK AYERS: Yes, I was. After I went AWOL from the army, I was obviously close to Bill, and my wife at the time was in Chicago while I was in the army, and she got drawn into more and more weather SDS-type action. March of 1970 was when the townhouse happened, and that was right when my training ended. It was time for me to go AWOL anyway and so I met with my wife at the time and cadre from Weather, and they said, Do you want to come or not? Actually, we had a meeting in Chicago, then we drove up to Ann Arbor and we were in the Holiday Inn. This was after the townhouse. The Holiday Inn outside of Ann Arbor by the freeway, a bunch of people in there having a meeting and it was all kind of... I didn't want anyone who knew me to see me. I was AWOL already. They said the two of you know ID. We used to do fake ID in Canada. We knew how to do it because we did it for deserters. We need fake ID. Would you be willing to come in and be ID experts? [LAUGHTER] We said, Yeah, we'll do it. It was one of those times where I would be like, Do anything, do whatever you can. I had expected to go AWOL and just go back to Canada, but what can I say? This next level of struggle presented itself to me and I said yes. Again, people now would say, the Weathermen, they condemned anyone who was a pacifist and they condemned anyone who was liberal. But, it was a big gamosh. I didn't feel that I hated the Quakers or anything. In fact, we had Quakers and we had some Catholic resistance people who were involved in Weather Underground. There was a peaceful side to doing bombings. If you just do buildings, it's extreme vandalism. I understand that was a lot...you had to hype yourself up to cross that boundary from legal to illegal persons, and so there was a lot of heated rhetoric. But we were still part of a broader movement, and in time we became even more part of that. I was perfectly comfortable there. I was actually glad I missed all the street fighting with helmets and the orgies and stuff. That wasn't me. I'm an introvert [LAUGHTER] I was glad to be recruited late. But I was seven years in the Weather Underground. I don't regret it; some people have. I wrote a memoir which I've never published, but some memoirs are like apologia: This is why we did it. This is why we should have done it and explaining themselves. Others are a self-condemnation: We were crazy. We were wrong. I don't feel either of those. I feel that was the choice I made at that time in my life and we did all we could, and that's all you can do. After I turned myself in '77, I'm not going to go there for too long, but in '77, I did manage to turn myself in because there was Carter's amnesty, and so there was amnesty for deserters. I turned myself in. They knew I had been Weather Underground, but I was never grilled on that. They just figured I wasn't going to say anything. Then I just came back and moved to the Bay Area because I had a daughter and her mother, my ex were living in Berkeley, so I came back here and I've lived in the Bay Area ever since. I got married again and I still have been a political activist.
  • [00:32:02] ANDREW MACLAREN: When you were first in Canada, and then later when you were underground, how connected were you able to stay with various groups of people? Did you stay in touch, like obviously you were in touch with people who you knew politically, but were you able to stay in touch with your Cinema Guild friends, with any of your friends from the classics department? How connected were you to the community you'd already built in Ann Arbor?
  • [00:32:31] RICK AYERS: One of the secrets of fugitive life is you do need friends, you need support, and you need to be able to contact your family and others. The best way to do that is not to go to a well-known political activist, but to go to an old friend. We always would reach out to old friends. It was pretty common. Again, the atmosphere at the period was anyone who I would contact, would say, Oh, so great to see you. What can I do? Do you need a place to stay? There was no one saying, Oh my God, you're a fugitive, I'm calling the cops or anything. There's nothing like that. I kept in touch with Ann Arbor people and I didn't go to Ann Arbor. You know that when I first went AWOL -- that Ann Arbor visit when we were deciding -- I did walk around and I actually was trying to waste some time before a meeting. I went into West Quad downstairs, and it was just before Easter, and they were watching The Wizard of Oz. It was the most surreal moment. I'm standing in the back of a room with a bunch of college freshmen, doing what I had done only a few years before, and I felt I was floating above it because I'm in a different world. But here they are, they're in college, they're watching The Wizard of Oz on TV. In a different world, you know. But as you walk around Ann Arbor if you're a fugitive, you look ahead and try to make sure you don't see anyone you knew. But there would be people I could look up. I think Bob Hauert was someone we talked to. And of course not me, but other Weather people were friends with Pun and Skip and all of the White Panther people, so there was plenty of ability to move around that way and then you make new friends. But I never felt I had a complete discontinuity with old friends, although as I say I didn't see Gilda until '77 when I came back.
  • [00:34:48] AMY CANTU: Now did she know about all of your political activity, and was she involved in any of that? Can you talk a little bit about Gilda?
  • [00:34:57] RICK AYERS: Well, she was more in the art nerd side of my life which I was in the Cinema Guild. Ellen Frank had been the head of it as a great young woman who has died since then and she and I were in a relationship. Ellen and I were in a relationship for a while and she was best friends with Gilda, so Gilda and Ellen lived together with another woman named Elena Koplowicz and these three women had this really cool apartment in Ann Arbor. They were all hilarious. We would have dinners together with a number of boyfriends and these three women and it was just always like fun, crazy. It was just normal to be extremely critical of the war and extremely supportive of the Black Power movement, but it was different levels of what people would do about it. I remember just as different albums would come out. I remember when Sergeant Pepper came out. That was a big moment and we were all talking about it. These things now are oldies, but at that time every new thing was like a revelation. And so Gilda was wonderful. She was a theater major and had stage fright. She did not want to go on. The only theater she really felt comfortable doing in Ann Arbor was Children's theater and she was really good at it. She got most of her theater work in children's theater which was great and actually she knew people in Toronto too and I think after I left Toronto and went to Vancouver she got involved with the Toronto version of Second City and so that's what got her discovered by Saturday Night Live. But yeah anyway. Cinema Guild I can get to but we'll see when and if you want to.
  • [00:37:06] ANDREW MACLAREN: Well, I was just going to ask that you just said every new thing was a revelation talking about albums, but did that apply to films as well because there were a lot of films through these organizations coming to Ann Arbor that never would have been seen in the United States 10 years earlier, right?
  • [00:37:23] RICK AYERS: Absolutely. That was a big deal in Ann Arbor and I think in college campuses. I think the only other place that was happening in a big way would be New York and I did go to New York for the summer of '66 and took a film class. I was really into film and '67 I went to the British Film Institute in the summer, so I was pursuing the film thing while I was pursuing the classics and I started studying Italian too. But the Cinema Guild was this wonderful development and Hugh Cohen, who just died a few months ago and Frank is all close to all of this, and Ed Weber, were the advisors and they had a connection with Janus Films and Janus Films which is still connected to Criterion Channel had all these movies and we were doing self-education about film history. All the way from early film like Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith to Charlie Chaplin which was wild to the entire explosion of the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, Kurosawa, and the Japanese, so we were very excited by all of that. It's interesting. I think in Ann Arbor was one of the first places that someone -- probably in the English department -- started teaching a film class and I remember in Cinema Guild we were disgusted by that. We're like, No, they're going to academicize it, they're going to turn it into a discipline. The great thing about it was it's like outside of academia. Actually, there's nothing wrong with it being taught and Hugh Cohen taught film for many years, but that was very new. In the mid '60s that was not something considered appropriate for disciplinary work. Now, they teach graphic novels and stuff. They would have been freaked out by that back in the day. But yeah we were very involved in film. The Cinema Guild would have meetings and Ed and Hugh had a lot of suggestions about you know, what should we bring next semester, setting up the schedule, and then for each movie that was shown often I did this: Others would take it on too, but we would research the film, look up reviews and look up stuff and then we'd make a little one sheet that was like mimeographed off, so people would come into the A&D auditorium, pay their $0.50 and as they went in they'd get this one sheet which is an intro. We were self-educating while we educated others. We had a very clear sense of the auteur theory and the few books that were there about the grammar of cinema, very much into Godard and Truffaut, and again, remember they hadn't made all their ouevre was not done. They had only made a few movies. So we were waiting for the next one. For instance, Truffaut, I felt later he became kind of banal, but to me he was profound and life-changing. Godard was more radical of course, but Truffaut I'll tell you another thing. Something that changed my life was a Truffaut film which sounds like a tiny gangster flick, but it's called Shoot The Piano Player and for some reason at 18-years-old, I saw this film. I was actually at the Clark Theater in Chicago, which changed films every day, and there was something about that moment where this guy who's a piano player and he doesn't want anyone to bother him. He's experienced tragedy. He wants to withdraw from the world, but his brother shows up running from these gangsters and Charles Aznavour is forced into action and he has to help his brother and suddenly he has to do all these wild things. But this existential lesson hit me so hard, which is: You can try to withdraw from the world, but the world demands that you take action and even though it was a silly noir film in some ways, it really shifted me in a big way. I was obsessed with Truffaut until I was disappointed with him and Godard and the whole gang over there. Also, again, there are some things that I don't like as much now that I really like then, like Antonioni. I just was obsessed with him and again the existential depression which I fancied I had, although I never really had depression, but I had that coffee shop scowl and I thought he was great. I looked at some of his stuff recently, it was a little more boring to me. I don't know. When you look back at things that moved you when you were 18, 19, 20, they may look different when you're older.
  • [00:43:02] ANDREW MACLAREN: How did you go about that? How did you go about deciding what you were going to bring? How were you researching these films in the late '60s?
  • [00:43:12] RICK AYERS: Well, there are books and there was like the Cahiers du Cinema and different things like that that we devoured. But again, I would say, we relied on the expertise of Hugh and Ed who were really saying, "You ought to show this, you ought to show that." We certainly knew about Charlie Chaplin, we knew about Serge Eisenstein. Then there was this other thing which was getting into because the French did, then we did, getting into the American gangster films and the American Westerns -- John Ford, all of a sudden, he's also an auteur -- or getting into a... You know a movie I really liked was, well, I like the Marlin Brando Westerns and things like that. We did get into the more modern stuff. I think it was both our collective experience and reading, but as I look back, kind of, there's probably some insight from.. So it could be like Hugh would say, "Well, you should really check out this Ingmar Bergman." If I had never heard of Ingmar Bergman, I could say, " Okay, let's do it. Virgin Spring." There was kind of a mixture like that. But what was fun about it was the core group. Anyone could join Cinema Guild, and the core group was intensely engaged in talking about art and cinema. Then we filled the theater every night. The hanging out, the people there. I almost feel like now, especially post-COVID, people go somewhere and go home but there was more of a night-life where people would stay and talk after a movie. I imagine it was pretentious as I look back on it but I felt like I was getting an education all the time. It is an example of how art and the audience for art would feed each other. We were definitely a very intense engaged community. I didn't feel disconnected, by the way, from classic studies, I felt like, I'm looking at Italy and the Roman Empire and the American Empire and that's the similar corruption, and I'm looking at how people express themselves, and resistance. All of that was because even in the classics department there was a political struggle. Instead of the old view of classics that was like, this is the great knowledge of the great Cicero, here was a very much of a counter-view that like, Oh, this was a terrible empire and let's read the people who were critical or resisting what was actually happening in Egypt and so on. Everywhere they started questioning of the status quo or the received wisdom was going on. So that would be in the arts, that would be in all the disciplines. You may recall that in the '60s anthropology departments were basically blown up because they realized anthropology has just been used as spies for imperialism and now they've been reconstituted, but much more oriented towards respect rather than towards taking. This is before Said wrote Orientalism, but that was in the air. That's what I'm saying. Anyway, it was a very generative time artistically. Then there were people making films and making theater at the same time, there was the guerrilla theater, there were big characters, like I mentioned, Jerry Badanes. Jerry Badanes was involved with this big puppet theater, which went to protests. They were very interesting theater things going on. There was the ONCE group and George Manupelli and people like that, which Frank -- who wrote the book on the Cinema Guild -- is very much up on. My friend Andrew Lugg, who I'm still in touch with, he lives in Montreal, he was very involved with. I was never... I never got it about them. It's not like I bought everything, I actually never understood ONCE theater that they did. But when we got arrested for Flaming Creatures, which was this experimental film which the police deemed pornography, we had all kinds of people come to Ann Arbor, including Andy Warhol's group. Paul Krasner came, the guy who did the Realist magazine, came to Ann Arbor to do fundraisers for us against this police -- for the trial. We backed into the situation where we were in the forefront of this debate around experimental films. Again, I didn't think Flaming Creatures was that good, but I felt like, Well, we got ourselves into this, we got to win this battle for free speech. We had the Ann Arbor Film Festival every year, which had very interesting experimental films.
  • [00:49:24] ANDREW MACLAREN: Were you surprised about everything that happened around Flaming Creatures or did you think that there might be an uproar about that and that there might be some come and for showing it?
  • [00:49:36] RICK AYERS: I was surprised. I didn't really realize that it was that big a deal, and I hadn't seen it, we hadn't seen it before we showed it. We heard there was some controversy around it. I was surprised that the police showed up to look at it. This guy Staudenmaier. Then they stopped it in the middle of the showing which was kind of amazing. They arrested the projectionist, Peter Wilde, who was another great Ann Arbor character. They added in there, Hugh Cohen, Mary Barkey, Elliott Barden, and I think Ellen Frank. They didn't add me, I don't know why but that was okay with me. But in any case, that was how the indictment came down. We weren't scared, we were delighted. What a gift to get this publicity, and we were pretty sure we would win. Really the Michigan ACLU got involved in the defense and so on like that. But it wasn't something we planned for, it wasn't something we had made time in our lives for, but it all of a sudden became something we had to do.
  • [00:51:11] AMY CANTU: Shifting gears a little bit, Rick, did you also write for the Michigan Daily?
  • [00:51:16] RICK AYERS: Yeah, I was the... Roger Rapaport, who was a friend of mine, and also my rival for the affections of Ellen Frank [LAUGHTER] -- she dated both of us -- he was the head editor. The Daily was a great newspaper, as you may know. It probably still is. The head of the cultural desk or whatever it was Lissa Matross, who you should also interview. Lisa is out here in San Francisco, and she became an elementary school teacher in San Francisco, Chinatown. But she was my boss, and I would write movie reviews and reviews of plays and so on like that.
  • [00:52:06] AMY CANTU: Did you hang out in the Michigan Union Cafeteria? Did you go to any of the folk venues in town? Can you talk a little bit about what you did in your pastime when you weren't going to Cinema Guild Movies?
  • [00:52:23] RICK AYERS: Yes. Well, first of all, the Union downstairs was a dark cafeteria. Then my time there, it was quite the hangout for SDS people and radicals and leftists and so on. The way I got my studies done was I would get up at 5:00 in the morning. I still do. I'm an early riser. I would go to the Union -- I think they opened at six -- and I would study there for a couple of hours before my classes and yet during the day, there were tables of like-minded people who were hanging out. That was also a very generative space, which I remember fondly, and one of the characters, as I mentioned, was Jerry Badanes, who was a big hulking figure with a beard and a big old overcoat. I remember one time there was a young Black man in there who came in, and the staff challenged him and said, What are you doing here, this is for students, or some crap like that. And Jerry Badanes stood up with his big loud voice and his big body and said, ''You can't stop him. He's a friend of mine. He's a guest with me.'' Made a scene. I was so impressed by that because, again, I'm more of an introvert. I would have just been angry and let it happen and that's a beautiful moment to see. But the Union was a spot. Actually, but people like my advisor, Professor Cameron would be there, Bob Hauert, certainly my brother. Bill and I were very close. I had moved out of the dorm where I was supposed to stay and lived with him. We ran around a lot together. Actually, I bought a motorcycle, crazily enough. It was cheap. It was a used Matchless 500, and it was bright red. It was like a dirt bike and we would roar around town. I just can't imagine how we got away with this. I would park my... again, I was skinny, I'm not a skinny now, but I was skinny, not a strong person. I can't imagine how I held up this big motorcycle. But it was again, just constructing an identity that's very different from the mild suburban world I came from. You're reminding me that there was a cultural, social, personal, and political world that was really exciting. I don't say that just with the nostalgia of looking back. I think it was a very lively place for me.
  • [00:55:39] ANDREW MACLAREN: Did you feel like there were two campuses or more than two campuses, in a way? Because you were very involved in the arts and politics side of campus, but there must have been the square side of campus, too, that was there to get their degrees and go into business or become lawyers, or...
  • [00:55:57] RICK AYERS: I mean, that's always true in a big city, everything is going on. The Beta House -- I don't know if it's still there -- but it was just down from the Union. We'd always walk by there. They'd still be standing out there doing barbecue and whistling at women and shit like that. We just thought of them as ridiculous, and it's funny because Bill had been one, and some of his old brothers would be, Bill, what are you doing? He'd be like, forget about it. The other world was there. It's interesting you raise it because in my memory, it just hardly exists. It was background noise. I'm sure for other people they had entirely different experiences. Like you asked about coffee shops, I don't remember the name of it, but there were a number of coffee shops, you'd get warm cider and there'd be folk music and things like that. A Marxist economics professor I had was Michael Zweig, and his wife was Martha McNeil Zweig, and she was a great poet. I finally got it about modern poetry by listening to her. I heard her at coffee shops. Again, for me, poetry was blowing up. I didn't get it. In school it's an obligatory boring thing in English class, but all of a sudden, everything was coming alive. Yeah, there was the coffee shops. But someone who was planning to be a lawyer probably wasn't at the coffee shops.
  • [00:57:46] AMY CANTU: How did you get from all of that to Education and teacher education? How did that happen?
  • [00:57:57] RICK AYERS: Well, you got a couple of hours. [LAUGHTER]. To make a long story short, when I came back from being AWOL from the Army, I came out here, and I was still doing political activism, but I actually... For many people, the 80s was a time of depression, not clinical depression, but political depression. We really thought we were about to have the revolution. Now it turns out...not at all. There was a disorientation, and I became a restaurant cook for 10 years. A restaurant cook..at least I'm not harming anybody and I have my job. I just get my work done. I was a restaurant cook even when I had both my kids here. I had one child in my first marriage, so I have three kids altogether. I had two kids here and I was not paid that well, but I felt fine about it. Although physically it was very demanding in the kitchen. I learned Spanish in the kitchen. It wasn't until I was in my 40s, I was like, eh, I got to move on. I got to do something else. I know Bill was a big education guy, but it wasn't the first thing on my mind. But I did go to like a job counselor. I ended up saying, Well, I love literature, I love the arts, as you can tell from all my stuff. Maybe I should do this. Actually, by the way, I had finished my degree at Berkeley, because I quit in Ann Arbor. I had to make up credits and go to Berkeley while I was a cook, and I got a degree in nutrition science. But then I said, I could teach. I decided to try it out. I started observing classes and I loved it. I went to get my teaching credential at Mills College and said, I'm going to teach English. I could have taught biology, I could have taught history, but English is more radical really because you could do anything. I became an English teacher. I taught at Berkeley High for 12 years. Really, maybe it was 11 years. Not that long, but it was a big deal for me. It redeemed me. It brought me back to passion because I was a little withdrawn when I was a cook. I love teaching English. I loved the colleagues. It was a great change. Then when I turned 59, I said, Man, I'm going to be in my 60s. I'm going to have a heart attack here in the class. I want to teach into my 70s. I decided to get a PhD and do teacher education. People wanted me to go in to be an administrator but I couldn't do that. I got a PhD at Cal in education and I started doing teacher education at the University of San Francisco. That's what I did until I was 75. I loved that too. I loved working with young teachers.
  • [01:01:05] RICK AYERS: I retired at 75. I'm 77. Now, I actually still teach, but only one class. I'm not on faculty. I'm not like Hugh Cohen who taught till he was 93, but I think I do one class at San Quentin prison and I do one class at USF. That's good. I have time for grandkids and other stuff.
  • [01:01:29] ANDREW MACLAREN: Do you ever think about or talk about with other people that... You know there's a lot of people that you have mentioned, and you yourself, who were politically active, who wanted to change the world, and ultimately, you went into education. What's the through line there, because it seems to be a very common through line?
  • [01:01:48] RICK AYERS: Yes. I haven't really sat back and had an analysis. I think most teachers I know have some version of ADD or ADHD, could never sit at a desk. Part of it is moving around. But obviously, education is one of the few institutions in society where everything's up for question. In the classroom, even in a ninth grade classroom, there's a lot of contention. It's not just contention about what to do today, but it's contention about what kind of world are we going to live in and who are we? That doesn't happen at a lot of jobs. I feel like, for me, I worked too hard like many teachers, but it was so engaging and so passionate for me. It was the same passion that movement people get in organizing, which is the thing that keeps you up all night. For me -- I can't generalize to everyone -- but for me, it allowed me to you know, you're sort of recreating knowledge on who you are and what to do every week. It's not like you're just grinding it out. And I don't mean, Oh, I'm going to fill these little minds with my radical ideas. I mean, just pedagogy is radical in itself. I don't even know if my students could tell you my exact political views on a lot of things, but they knew I was... There's a lot of things you have to do as a teacher that are an agent of the state. You have to grade kids and you have to discipline them. But they could tell that I held out a vision of liberation and they appreciate that and it was fun. It was a great job. There's a lot of heartbreak. I had six students die in the period that I was teaching and how to negotiate that. I actually wrote a book about it. It's called The Empty Seat In The Classroom, and it's about what to do if a student dies. It's not actually a to do book, it's more a meditation, but then you see tragedy, but you see miracles every day. It's the great career. I recommend it.
  • [01:04:40] AMY CANTU: When you think about what happened to the Left, the movement, and all of the efforts, you mentioned that things were a little depressed in the '80s. What concerns you now? What do you focus on? What do you think about when you think about the state of the world and what people can do and how they should challenge what's happening?
  • [01:05:03] RICK AYERS: I'm 77, and I've had a lot of disappointments in my life as far as my political hopes for the world. I still feel like even though it's very dire, I feel like we live in an empire which is a declining or dying empire, and a dying empire is dangerous. Trump is a dangerous element and actually, so is Biden, and I just feel like it's pretty bad. Yet, and also at my age, I've backed away from grand pronouncements. Forgive me if I try to say something like that, but I feel like we've never seen something like has happened now around Palestine and Israel. For years it was just grinding away with just a small corner of the world of the U.S. saying they support the Palestinians. This is so transformative right now. I actually wrote a piece arguing that the U.S. and Vietnam was so blind because they thought they had the military power to blow things up. But the Vietnamese said, There's four elements to war. There's violence, but there's also political, moral, and psychological. We're winning on the other three. They'll always win on violence. It's like that in Palestine. They're pounding them and it's horrible with the violence side, but they're losing in a way that they're not even going to understand. They're going to reap it over the next decades in the political, moral, and psychological side. I've very hope... I'm very surprised how quickly and how huge the support for Palestine has happened, but having been through a lot of these moments, even like the George Floyd, Black Lives Matter uprisings, which, again, I thought, "This is transformative. This is it!" Before that, occupy Wall Street. "Hey, this is happening." It's still the U.S. State, it's powerful and the default position of business as usual hangs on. It's a long struggle, and global warming is real. All of those things are sobering, but in a way -- I hope this doesn't sound cliche or defeatist -- but I feel like the struggle itself is still beautiful and it's still worth it. I don't think actually there's some big win down the road. I think life is a struggle. I feel like I learned a lot in my youth, and I've lived my values and I've been wrong, but I feel like in the big arc of things, I've taken a pretty good stance and I have great kids and grandkids, and I feel very lucky.
  • [01:08:23] ANDREW MACLAREN: Thank you very much. Thanks for talking to us today.
  • [01:08:26] RICK AYERS: That was really fun. I appreciate your questions.
  • [01:08:32] ANDREW MACLAREN: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.