Site of the East 11th Street Townhouse that blew up in March 1970, killing Teddy Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins. Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson (who published a book in 2010, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times As a Weatherman) survived the blast (more). For decades I had a very hard time believing that Teddy Gold would want to blow up GIs and their girlfriends at a dance at Fort Dix, NJ. After all I, an ex-GI who had been stationed briefly at Fort Dix, had been his friend at Columbia 1966-68 and knew him as a nice, normal, fun-loving guy. It made absolutely no sense to attack soldiers, especially since so many of them were draftees, and especially not at Fort Dix because just a few months earlier, "hundreds of GIs imprisoned at the Army stockade at Fort Dix, N.J., rose up in rebellion. Half the stockade burned as these troops, many of them active opponents of the war in Vietnam, defended themselves against an attack by 250 military police."[2] (see Columbia U leaflets about this here, here, and here). When I was in the Army just two years earlier, I was hard-pressed to find any enlisted men — even grizzled NCOs — who were in favor of the Viet Nam war. In the late Sixties the Left was intent on recruiting soldiers to the cause, and well-attended antiwar GI coffeehouses were to be found at the gates of every Army base. 240,000 Americans moved to Canada during the Vietnam War[3], and so did some active-duty American soldiers. But recent writings of surviving Weather Undergrounders, notably Mark Rudd, make it seem increasingly likely that Ted and few others did, indeed, go crazy.

Meanwhile, in the Small World department... In 1981, I and my wife and 3-year old son and 1-year-old daughter met a young mother with her 1-year-old son, whom she introducted as Chesa, in the yard of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (a couple blocks from Columbia on Amsterdam Avenue), which in those days was a gathering place for families with small children. We sat and talked for an hour or two while the children played together. The very next day, we saw on the TV news that she had been arrested at the Nanuet NY Brinks truck robbery; she was Kathy Boudin from the townhouse, who had been living undercover in the neighborhood for some years, as did Bernadine Dohrn, who, with her husband Bill Ayers, became Chesa's legal guardians while Kathy was in prison; she was released in 2003.

1. Resistance and Revolution: The Military Draft During the Vietnam War, University of Michigan, 1965-1972, accessed 10 August 2019.
2. John Catalinotto, Imprisoned soldiers rebelled during Vietnam War, Workers World, 2 June 2019.
3. A brief history of Americans moving to Canada, Toronto Star, 9 March 2016.