| Inspired by your aerial photo of San Diego State last week I scanned a negative from Fall '58 or maybe Spring '59, showing my photography buddy Neil Cunningham '61 sitting in the Greek Bowl. It was a gag shot -- the guy who showed up on the wrong day, or something like that. Do any or your readers remember the Greek Bowl in Spring '62 when George Lincoln Rockwell (head of the American Nazi Party) was speaking there? One of the football players, who happened to be Jewish, walked up on state right past his guards and knocked him out cold. I wasn't an eye witness, but certainly heard about it an hour or so after the fact -- Bob Richardson '61
I attended the George Lincoln Rockwell speech at SDSU. I think I was a sophomore then. Any store that carried eggs within a wide radius of campus sold out all their eggs. The audience was armed and dangerous so GLR got what he wanted by being pelted with eggs and becoming the subject of national and international news. I thought it would have been better if we had all sat in stone, cold silence. The audience just played into GLR desire to be a controversial rabble rouser. The late Don Waters ‘59 was serving in Vietnam at the time and wrote to me that he thought he was safer in Vietnam than I was going to the GLR speech, which turned into quite a raucous debacle. He had seen or heard about the event somehow while in Nam. I also attended the graduation ceremony where JFK spoke. Somehow in the national news I think his appearance in San Diego got overshadowed by other events. When I tell people that he spoke at SDSU graduation in June 1963, they always ask “Are you sure? Why would he have spoken at San Diego State?” Well, I tell them I was not hallucinating! Ginger Barnard (‘60 Crawford, ‘64 SDSU)
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