 It's my feeling that the four years that I was here was unlike any other four years in American history to the point that I think it was CNN or public television did a documentary about the year 1968. They postulated that probably no 12 months in American history changed the social fabric, changed the country as much and perhaps the world as 1968. My class entered 1966. What life was like was pretty much like the 1950s. What the American dream was, leave it to beaver, kind of a stay-at-home mom, a working dad, the nuclear family as it was called. Fraternity rush, people were in suits and ties, girls went, and I say boys and girls because we were boys and girls and girls wore dresses. I remember, I think it was Friday night dinner on the university meal plan at Donner Hall. You had to dress up, but one night a week it was like dress up. People had short hair. The music was AM Radio, and it was whatever the playlist was by the program director. That's what you heard. That's what you were introduced to. That's where you listened to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. That's when they said, here's a new act, Herman's Hermits or something. So this is what life was as we entered campus in 1966. Most of the students here were in science or engineering. As I said before, you know, that short hair, they literally had slide rolls hooked to their belts. They literally had pocket protectors. The drama students were mostly in black. The art students were, you know, painstain blue jeans or a big shirt. The fraternities were mainly the course, any social life. Carnival was a Greek activity. Buggy was a Greek activity. We graduated in the spring of 1970. The world was upside down. Student life on colleges was upside down. It was Kent State, you know, four students being shot by National Guardsmen. Families were ripped apart. What we see today about, you know, one political bread versus blue, there were great parallels then, but it all stemmed from the Vietnam War. From 1966 to 1970, besides the anti-war feeling that came in the United States and college campuses, was also the advent of women's liberation. That came to the forefront. Also the fact that civil rights had been growing and building. In 1968 was the year that Martin Luther King was killed. Robert F. Kennedy was killed. Russia invaded Czechoslovakia. France was students riding all over the place. So you had anti-war sentiment. You had women's liberation. You had civil rights, I'm probably forgetting one or two others, all now in the front of everybody. Students now are being exposed to all this daily and even according to Milan. But then you also had the sentiment that had come out just before called, don't trust anybody over 30. So you had ageism coming in. And yet students going home to their families and to division in the family was horrible. You know, mothers and fathers saying, what are you doing? You have to support the president. You have to support this and that. And students seeing a whole different world, a different life on campus. Before this was the summer of love. It was, you know, hate asperger, hippies, flowers, putting in the soldiers' gun barrels, the famous pictures and stuff like that. Everybody should live in harmony and peace and love. And in 12 months it flipped completely opposite. There was no more peace and love. The music got harder edged. You had Led Zeppelin came in in the late 69, early 70s. So this is all the backdrop of what was going on on campus. The idea was to send waves and waves of American bombers, B-52s and whatnot, loaded to the gills, thousands of planes. And they would literally lay down a carpet of bombs over in North Vietnam. And then they wanted to Cambodia secretly, but then that came out. It was indiscriminate. It wasn't about bombing factories or military installations. It was about bombing humans, people. And it was just laying down a carpet of mass destruction and death. And the United States kept this up. And now the TV networks, which was again only three, started to show more and more footage of this. They started sending correspondence over to report back, Walter Cronkite and whatnot. And it changed the correspondence view of the war. And their tone, even though it was supposed to be objective, was getting more and more. This is wrong. This war is wrong. Showing the burned bodies, the babies being killed and whatnot. So in Congress and Senate, there still had hawks and dogs. More hawks because there are a lot of old white guys. My vision of the activities board is we would tell all sides of the story. So we had a lot of anti-war people come on campus and speak. But the most prominent hawk in the Senate was Senator Strom Thurman. And he was a proponent of carpet bombing. So in our wisdom, we decided to bring Strom Thurman to campus to speak to give that side of the story. It was the old student ballroom. They called it a ballroom. It was just a big open space in the old building. I think it sat maybe 400 or so. There was a U.S. senator coming to Pittsburgh. So back then, there were two newspapers in Pittsburgh. The Morning Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Evening Pittsburgh Press. They sent reporters and photographers. There was no video then. So the word spread. Strom Thurman was coming to speak. So he came and he started speaking to talk about why it's important that we're in Vietnam, why carpet bombing is important. I look back and I smile because even then it was comical. Our radical element on campus was so mild compared to other universities like Columbia, Berkeley, you know, the burning buildings, you know, police riot, tear gas and whatnot, all of these college campuses. And our radical element was really a bunch of art students, more than anything, but passionate. Well, during his speech, and I'm not sure what triggered it, but the one fellow who, his name is Kasebue, and I think he was the editor of the yearbook in 1970, he and a bunch of students stand up and they start throwing marshmallows on the stage. Because again, it was a small room, so they could easily reach Strom Thurman. They started pummeling with marshmallows. I'm up sitting on stage with him. And their cry was, don't worry Strom, they're not bombs. If I look back, I think it was a brilliant protest because it spoke to what the issue was. Aren't you feeling threatened but to just marshmallows imagine all the people being bombed? And it bothers me that if you Google this thing today, people don't understand, they don't report that this is why it was. It was about the carpet bombing, but that's what it was. Well, as this is happening, his office calls because Hubert Humphrey was the big liberal in the Senate and he was trying to get past the bill on health and welfare. I forget what it was. But it was basically spending to help poor people or something like that, which Strom Thurman hated. So they put that word to the office of student activities that he had to call his office right away. So after he sits down and there's the photograph that went around the world of him sitting there with marshmallows around him. Because nobody actually got the picture of the marshmallows flying. It was too sudden and it was short. So somebody comes in and says he has to call his office. So Bob McCurdy then takes him to his office, which wasn't very private. And he's calling and they say, you've got to get back to Washington to fill a bus through this vote. There was all this mayhem and people coming in and out, reporters and whatnot. And he asked me, his son is there someplace more private I could talk. So I got a small office downstairs. It was literally a desk, a door. I mean you couldn't, you had to stand up to let somebody pass you. So we go down and he has this little book and he's leafing through the book and he's using my phone and he's dialing the head of U.S. Steel, the head of Gulf Oil, Howard Valkor, Allegheny Ludlam, J&L. And he's looking for transportation back to Washington. MemoryServe, I think it was Allegheny Ludlam, but I'm not sure. So finally I said, yeah, we'll send you down to Washington on the corporate plane. The pictures get picked up by the wire services. At actually Time Magazine published the picture as well with an article about it. Some reason my name was given out as the head of this organization is if we were the organization that wanted to humiliate him. And letters are coming in, addressed to me because my name was out there. You know, you marshmallow-brained idiots, a Carnegie Mellon. How dare you treat the senator this way? You don't deserve to be in college. Nothing's supporting it because it wasn't really reported that students were protesting the corporate bombing. It was internationally famous for a brief moment. Well, after I left Pittsburgh and went back and started my other life in business, I was at the old Charlotte airport, which is small. I was at the gate waiting for my flight and there was this big entourage coming down the hall. I could see everybody was all about somebody famous, you know, as if it was Elvis Presley or The Beatles or somebody. And I recognized that it's Strom Thurman coming down and he had one assistant with him that they're all talking to him and he was like a rock star. Back then there was no selfies and people didn't really ask for autographs. They just wanted to be near him. It's south, so it's like his home turf. I don't know what possessed me, but I stood up and I started walking toward him right in the middle of the hallway so he would literally hit me. And he stopped in front of me and I said, Senator, you may not remember me, but we've met in the past. He said, how do I know your son? And I said, I was at Carnegie Mellon. I was the student that brought you to campus for the marshmallow thing. He said, were you the student that helped me? Were you the young man that helped me that day? I said, yes, I was. He said, well, come over here, boy. And he sits me down by the gate. Now, there's a whole crowd of people around listening to us. And he goes, how are you? How's your family? How the family? Tell me about your family. The man never met me, but this is the way they did things back then. So we chatted about this and that. What are you doing now, son? He said, well, you come to Washington, you come and we'll go out to dinner. We'll have a good time. I had no intention of doing that. So that was my Strom Thurmond story. I put Carnegie Mellon in the news internationally.