by David DeKok
But Ann Arbor and the Michigan campus were not just rock and roll. They were politics, too, deeply left-wing student radical politics. Here was where Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was founded in 1960, and where its members organized the first teach-in against the Vietnam War in March 1965. (Teach-ins were originally somewhat similar to debates, with both sides represented, but evolved into something more like a campaign rally.) SDS leaders Tom Hayden, Carl Oglesby, Bill Ayers, and Rennie Davis, among others, were students here at one time or another in the 1960s. Hayden, editor of the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper, authored the Port Huron Statement, adopted in 1962 as the SDS manifesto. He and Davis were among the Chicago Seven, radicals put on trial in 1969 for allegedly conspiring to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the previous year. Ayers, who was a national leader of the violent SDS Weather Underground faction, went on the lam for a time with his lover and later wife, Bernardine Dohrn, and spent most of his later life as a respected academic in Chicago. His younger brother, Rick, also a Michigan student in the 1960s, was briefly the lover of Gilda Radner, an acting student at Michigan from 1964 to 1969, and later, a member of the original cast of the long-running NBC late-night comedy show, Saturday Night Live. It remained for the director Lawrence Kasdan (Michigan ’70) to memorialize his fellow radicals at U of M, capturing their Reagan-era angst and guilt in his 1983 film, The Big Chill.3
We know how Betsy Aardsma felt during her first weeks at Michigan because of a letter she wrote in September to her high school friend Peggy Wich. She missed her friends at Hope College and was surprised to find that Ann Arbor wasn’t necessarily the modern-day Athens she seems to have expected. “Intellectually,” Betsy wrote, “this place is not as alive as it should be. I run into asses every day. Michigan seems to have a good share of university zombies and fact regurgitators. It also has a good number of acutely aware people. That’s the wonderful part of it; it has a good number of almost any classification.” She admitted to veering from being happy and excited about her new world to feeling lonesome amid her forty-five thousand fellow students. She also worried about the tougher academic standards at Michigan.
Betsy told Peggy she was planning to go to “some damn fraternity orgy” that night, even though she didn’t expect to enjoy herself. “I don’t make that kind of scene very well,” she admitted. A friend named Bill, apparently an old boyfriend from Hope College, had not contacted her since he, too, had transferred to Michigan. That left her feeling both let down and relieved; relieved, because she dreaded getting involved with him, which she was certain would only lead to “an emotional disaster. And yet I feel like I’m being cheated.” Betsy liked the attention from men that she received but was wary of letting anyone, male or female, stand in the way of the life she wanted. She wasn’t cruel—no one ever accused her of that—but she wanted a regular infusion of new friends and experiences. Sometimes old friends or old places fell by the wayside.
But old ghosts sometimes returned. Betsy told Peggy that she had resumed going out with Darryl, the young man from Hope College with whom she had had an angry, dramatic breakup during the second semester of her freshman year. “He’s at Michigan, too,” she wrote, “and he has also changed. He is a beautiful person. The fact that my parents don’t approve adds a certain intrigue to it all. Damn—why can’t I fall in love with a more sensible type?”4
Her roommate at Michigan was Andrea Yunker from Sturgis, Michigan, a small town of about ten thousand located a hundred miles west of Ann Arbor, near the Indiana border. They lived in the Oxford Houses, which opened in 1963 and housed about four hundred women students in seven, modern-style buildings. Betsy and Andie were randomly assigned as roommates but stayed together for the next two years. Both were English majors, although they shared no classes. “Oh, we got along great,” Andie said. “I had a little motorcycle and sometimes she would ride on the back. I feel like I got along great with her.”5
Every young man who met Betsy was crazy about her, Andie recalled. Her friend was pretty, if not drop-dead gorgeous, and was smart, provocative, and interesting. Even though she had mild acne scarring on her face, Betsy could “cover it up with a great big smile. I don’t think I ever saw her use any kind of makeup,” Andie said. She and Betsy talked about boys while they smoked cigarettes in their dorm room. “I never considered her a saint,” Andie told a reporter many years later. “She didn’t carry herself that way.” As Jan Sasamoto had said about her high school years, Betsy was no prude, but not promiscuous, either. She was a normal college girl, trying things out, sometimes making mistakes, and unwilling to settle down with any one man. Jeff Lubbers, one of her prom dates at Holland High School, was also a junior at Michigan, where he was majoring in pre-med. He lived off-campus in an apartment but would run into Betsy now and then, walking around campus. They got together two or three times at parties and once at his apartment, but that was all, much to his regret.6
In the spring of 1968 she also dated Elbert Magoon, whose mother, Johanna Meijer Magoon, was one of the founders of the Meijer Markets/Thrifty Acres chain in Michigan. By that time, the Magoons had been cut out of the company by Fredric Meijer, Elbert’s uncle. Magoon, who became an ophthalmologist, recalled taking Betsy to a dance on their first date and on a couple of movie dates, but the relationship didn’t last long. Like so many who knew Betsy, he had warm memories of her.7
Betsy’s friendship with Jan Sasamoto hit a brief rough patch when she transferred to Michigan. As high school seniors, they had talked about rooming together, but then Betsy acceded to her parents’ demands and went to Hope College while Jan went off to Ann Arbor. They saw each other during breaks and summer vacation during their freshman and sophomore years. They both took summer school classes at Hope College after their sophomore year, leaving “Hi!” notes on each other’s cars. But by the time they were juniors and living on the same campus, their worlds had changed, and a number of factors conspired to limit their time together and, at least for a time, put a damper on their once-intense friendship.
Jan had joined the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority and lived in the chapter house at 1322 Hill Street, not that far on foot from Oxford Houses. Betsy was not a fan of either sororities or fraternities, considered by many students of the time to be über-establishment and decidedly uncool, and resisted being drawn into that scene. Ironically, Jan did not see herself as a rah-rah sorority girl either, viewing membership mainly as a better housing option than dorms or off-campus apartments. She never tried to recruit Betsy to join Alpha Gamma Delta. But another important factor was that Jan now had a steady boyfriend, her future husband, Jim Brandt. They began dating during the second semester of Jan’s sophomore year at Michigan and were spending a lot of their time together. In high school, Friday had been girls’ night and Saturday was date night, but things were more complicated in college. Betsy was dating a number of young men, but no one exclusively or for any length of time. With her desire for new people and experiences, Betsy seems to have wanted her friendship with Jan to be different, not quite as close and intense as it was in high school. There were geographic issues, too, on the sprawling Michigan campus. Jan was studying physical therapy and spent much of her day on the Medical Campus, a considerable distance from Angell Hall, where Betsy went for her English classes. In the end, they viewed the situation as the normal ebb and flow of a friendship and expected that, once they were out of college, they would be close again. But there was no doubt that high school was over. When Betsy hung out or went to the movies, it was more likely to be with Andie than Jan, who does not recall ever meeting Andie.8
What first got Betsy actively involved in the politics of the day is hard to say. It could have been the death of a high school friend, Scott Freestone, who was in the army in Vietnam. He was mortally wounded in the Tet Offensive on February 12, 1968, while giving first aid under fire to a wounded comrade, and died three days later. The offensive by the North Vietnamese Army and
its Vietcong allies in the South had begun on January 30 with a coordinated series of attacks across South Vietnam. Tet ultimately was a tactical defeat for the Vietnamese Communists, but a victory for them in the minds of the American people, who were shocked by the ferocity of the offensive after having been repeatedly assured by General William Westmoreland, the commander of American forces in South Vietnam, that the enemy was no longer capable of mounting major operations. Unlike the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, the last major offensive by the German army, Tet presaged ultimate victory for the enemy rather than defeat. Among other things, it led to the entry of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and then Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York into the Democratic primaries in opposition to President Johnson, and to Johnson’s announcement on March 31, 1968, that he would not run for reelection.9
Betsy’s mother did not call her about Scott Freestone, but Jan heard about it from her mom and called Betsy to break the news. One or both of Jan’s parents drove to Ann Arbor to pick them up and bring them back to Holland for the funeral, which was held on February 29, 1968, at Bethel Reformed Church in Holland. Burial was in Pilgrim Home Cemetery. Afterward, they talked about how ironic it was that Scott, a short-timer, had been counting the days remaining until his twelve months in the country were up and he could go home. Jan thought of the silent peace vigils she had observed on the steps of the Graduate Library at Michigan. She and Betsy were becoming close again. That summer, Betsy took the bus to Ann Arbor to celebrate her twenty-first birthday with Jan, which was on July 11, a Thursday. Jan, who was taking summer courses in her physical therapy major, wasn’t yet twenty-one, so she declined to join Betsy at the bar. Betsy went out by herself and reported back later that she had her first drink with the bartender. When Jan turned twenty-one later in 1968, Betsy gave her one of her paintings.10
Andie remembered visiting Betsy in Holland during the summer of 1968 and going out to one of the Lake Michigan beaches, probably Oval Beach near Saugatuck, where a Eugene McCarthy supporter was handing out mccarthy for president buttons. They each took one and wore them proudly. She remembered her friend as “fairly political,” as do Betsy’s other close friends. That apparently didn’t extend to membership in SDS or any other group on the Michigan campus, although one of her senior-year apartment mates, Terrie Andrews, remembered her going off to various meetings of a political nature.11
During their senior year, beginning in the fall of 1968, Betsy and Andie shared a two-bedroom apartment at 441 South First Street, Ann Arbor, a nondescript, modern apartment building on a street of 1920s bungalows that appeared to have about twenty-four units. Their apartment was on the second floor in the back and had a balcony overlooking the parking lot. Angell Hall was about a fifteen-minute walk from here, or less if they cut across the railroad tracks at the rear of the parking lot. Oxford Houses had been a little farther away in the opposite direction from Angell Hall, but not by much. The advantage here was that the rent was lower, plus they were among many other students of both sexes. Andrews, who had lived on the same floor in Oxford Houses as Betsy and Andie, and Olga Lozowchuk, who had answered an ad in the Michigan Daily, shared the second bedroom.
Terrie Andrews was from Union Lake, Michigan, a little town in a picturesque lake district in Oakland County on the far northwestern edge of the Detroit suburbs, almost in farm country. She, too, was an English major but planned on becoming a high school teacher.12 Like so many others, Terrie thought of Betsy as an artist who marched to her own drummer, someone who was fully aware of the issues of the day. “And would speak her mind from time to time,” she added. Then there was Betsy’s quirky personal style. “She did what she wanted to do and dressed the way she wanted to dress, and didn’t feel affected by peer pressure and didn’t feel she had to impress anybody or prove anything to anybody,” Terrie said. Expanding on that, she said Betsy was a little bit flashier than most girls, though not in a slutty way and not in a hippie way. “But at the same time . . . she had her own taste. If she wore louder clothes, and clothes that maybe clashed a little bit more, or wore long scarves when nobody else was wearing a long scarf, you’d have said, ‘That’s Betsy.’ ” Terrie considered herself a small-town girl with a conventional approach to life, too busy trying to get good grades to get involved in issues like the Vietnam War. When there were demonstrations planned on the Diag, the grand plaza in the middle of campus, she tried to avoid going near. “It was a very turbulent time, and I remember there were a lot of protests going on. It’s not that I didn’t care, but I just didn’t get involved.” Betsy did, to a certain extent. Terrie saw her as a good person, with strong ethics and morals, “and she wasn’t into drugs or anything wild or weird.”13
Olga Lozowchuk, who was born and raised in Detroit, had been a pharmacy major during her freshman and sophomore years but had switched to sociology as a junior after being assigned a human cadaver for dissection in anatomy class and deciding a career change was in order. Her opinion of Betsy dovetailed with that of Terrie. Betsy was “quiet, studious, dependable, even-keeled, nonconfrontational, artsy,” Olga said. To Andie, Betsy was the girl who, after they all returned to the apartment from a three- or four-day vacation, could whip up dinner from whatever was in the refrigerator. And when Andie got angry about something, or was having a bad day, it was even-keeled Betsy who was the conciliator, Terrie said.14
Another reason Terrie Andrews liked the apartment at 441 South First was that her boyfriend, Jerry Newman, lived in the apartment directly above them. They had been dating since high school, making it the most serious sort of relationship. Like her, Jerry had three roommates, Jim Schoolmaster, John Burpee, and David L. Wright. All were members of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. Both Jerry and David were pre-med. In due course, Betsy was introduced by Terrie to all four of the young men upstairs. It was David that she hit it off with, and that seems to have surprised nearly everyone.
David was from Elmhurst, Illinois, an upscale western suburb of Chicago, and as noted was the son of a respected psychiatrist, Dr. Donovan Wright. His family had high expectations that he would become a physician, and David was dedicated to getting the good grades he needed to get into medical school. This has never been easy, but the hurdles were higher in the late 1960s, when there were fewer seats in American medical schools. “David was a lot of fun,” said his friend and roommate Jim Schoolmaster. “But he was as devoted to getting into medical school as anyone I knew. He may have had a few drinks like everyone else does in college, yet David was one of those individuals who would [still] get up at eleven o’clock in the morning and go study.” Schoolmaster recalled how David took one of the early University of Michigan pass/fail courses and still got an A in it. Nothing diverted him from his goal of getting into medical school and becoming a doctor.15
But he did not spend all of his time with his nose to the grindstone. Jim and David and the other two apartment mates enjoyed late-night bull sessions while watching television. Even at the University of Michigan in 1968, women students had parietal hours, although they were far more liberal than at Hope College: midnight on weekdays, 2:00 a.m. on weekends. Jim didn’t mind that so much. After they “got rid of” their dates, it was back to the apartment for some late-night TV. John Burpee and Jerry Newman worked at Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burger, an Ann Arbor institution not far from the apartment, and would bring burgers home after their shift let out. “I really enjoyed spending time with [David],” Schoolmaster said. “He had a real nice sense of humor.”16
David and Betsy began dating. In his recollection, two of the young women who lived in the apartment below—Andie and Terrie—were pushing him together with Betsy, not that he minded. Betsy told Peggy Wich that their first date was for ice cream. They went to parties at his fraternity or to dinner in Detroit. Sometimes they studied together at the library. She accompanied him to the Pretzel Bell, aka the P-Bell, a popular Ann Arbor bar, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday and watched him buy and
drink his first legal beer just after midnight. Traditionally, at least among some students, the first drink was an entire pitcher of beer consumed while standing on the table. This sort of excess, though, was out of character for David. His roommate, Jim Schoolmaster, considered him “kind of a Nixon type of person,” Republican and conservative. They all wondered how well David would mesh with Betsy, who was liberal and Democratic, a Eugene McCarthy supporter who was eager to save the world.17
Like so many others, David was smitten by her. “She was just a very brilliant person, extremely smart. . . . Good sense of humor. Just a wonderful person,” he said. And he could overlook things that were not consistent with his worldview. “She was Democratic, I’m sure,” David said. Politics wasn’t something he particularly cared about one way or another at this stage in his life. He was nearly totally career-oriented, and getting into medical school was everything. He admired Terrie Andrews, who had nearly all As, for her dedication to her studies, calling her, “the world’s best grade-grubber.” Jim Schoolmaster, David’s roommate, got to know Betsy a little bit when they walked together toward Angell Hall. He considered her a free spirit, kind of “a hippie person,” no different than many young women at the University of Michigan.18