Interview with Bruce Plenk

ORAL HISTORY OF UTAH PEACE ACTIVISTS UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY OREM, UTAH INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE PLENK 10/12/2006 Tucson, Arizona Interview Conducted by Dr. Kathryn French Page 1 of 13 Interviewee: Bruce Plenk Interviewer: Kathryn French Date: October 12, 2006 Subject: Utah Peace Activists Place: Tucson, AZ KF: Tell me a little bit about yourself. When were you in Utah? BP: I was born in Utah. To make it short, I grew up in Utah. I went to high school here then I went away for college. Then I came back and was in Utah for a little while. Then I lived elsewhere again. Then I came back to Utah and taught high school and went to law school. I was a lawyer in Utah for about fifteen years. Then I moved away. I’ve lived out of Utah for the last 12 years. KF: Where did you grow up? BP: Salt Lake. KF: You went to all your school in Salt Lake. BP: I graduated from Olympus High in Holladay. Then I went to college in Massachusetts and came back to Utah and got a masters degree at University of Utah in teaching education. I taught high school in Murray for a while. Then I went back to University of Utah and got a law degree. After that I was a lawyer in Ogden for a while and then in Salt Lake. KF: Tell me how you first became a peace activist. BP: In college I was involved with... [tape interrupted] KF: Let’s go back and how did you become a peace activist? BP: I was in college at Williams College, which is in Massachusetts in the late sixties. I graduated from high school in Salt Lake in 1965. I was in college from 1965 to 1969. That of course was the height, the beginning of moving into the height of the Vietnam War. While I was in college, after learning about the war in Vietnam and being exposed to the potential for being drafted, I got involved with SDS which stands for Students for Democratic Society, which was a primarily white, upper class college student peace group that was formed in the mid sixties. There was an SDS group that formed at Williams College where I was a student and I got involved with that group on campus and at other schools that were involved in SDS. The short answer is the Vietnam War and on campus fallout, with classmates getting drafted. KF: What was your role in SDS in Massachusetts? Page 2 of 13 BP: It was a relatively small chapter of SDS. People including me that were in the chapter were involved with primarily organizing and sponsoring teach-ins about the war in Vietnam, leafleting on campus and in the town near the campus and going to big demonstrations in Washington, at the Pentagon and in New York. That happened pretty much every spring or fall starting in about 1967, if I remember correctly. KF: In 1969 then you came back to Salt Lake? BP: In 1969 I came back to Salt Lake and there was actually an SDS chapter at the University of Utah that I got involved with. You may have already talked to some other people connected with that. That was started by a group of people that were opposed to the war in Vietnam. They were doing various kinds of peace activities in Salt Lake and in Provo before that. KF: You mean at BYU in Provo? BP: Yes, there were some BYU students. There were a couple of people from Provo that were quite involved. One of them has since died of cancer, unfortunately, a guy named Willie Cowden who ran a book and record store in Provo. He was involved with putting on one of the first peace rallies in the park in Provo. His ex-wife is still alive. She works for the Salt Lake School District I believe. Her name is Linda Brown. KF: Was she active also? BP: Yes, she was involved. She was active. They lived on a farm in like Lindon or somewhere in Utah County and had this little store in Provo. Actually this is the first place I’ve ever heard of that sold the Whole Earth catalog. They sold books and magazines and so forth. They were involved with the peace movement in Provo. There were at least a couple of peace rallies in that park right in downtown Provo on Center Street. I can’t think of the name. It’s sort of by an Albertsons. It’s basically not too far from it. There is a new courthouse that wasn’t there at the time that’s about half a block off center. This park, if I remember right, is basically right on Center Street. I thought it was across the street from an Albertsons. I might not be right. That’s where there were a couple of peace rallies there. I’m sure the Provo Daily Herald would have something. In fact one of the peace rallies that this guy named Willie Cowden put together, the Provo city fathers said you couldn’t have a peace rally in Provo, period. No, we’re not allowing that. A law professor who is still at the University of Utah, his name is Bill Lockhart, represented the people in Provo. I forget if they settled out of court, or if the judge ordered them to allow the rally to go on. It was a pretty blatant violation of first amendment rights to say, “If you want to have an anti-war rally, too bad,” when there were a million other kinds of events happening at that park all the time. Every thing from Boy Scout bake sales to Veteran’s Day parades and so on and so forth. It was very obviously rejected because of the content of what people’s message was, which was unconstitutional. Bill Lockhart was their lawyer. They settled the one case and had a Page 3 of 13 peace rally. There was at least one other one, I believe after that, in Provo. There was another guy whose name I’m trying to think. His name was Jerry something. I can’t remember. I think he had a little head shop in Provo. He was some sort of peripheral involvement with it. Bill Cowden was really the person that I remember from Provo. Then he moved to Salt Lake and was involved with SDS in Salt Lake. The people that were involved with SDS at the University of Utah were a pretty broad group of students, many people from Utah and some people from elsewhere. There was a guy named Jim Beavers, who is a psychologist in Salt Lake still I believe. He had been involved with SDS either at the University of Michigan or Michigan State. I forget which. He had moved to Salt Lake and was one of the people that had been involved with starting the SDS chapter. I may be repeating stuff you already know. KF: You are not. BP: The main people that were involved with SDS for a while were Jim Beavers, a psychologist, Kathy Collard, who is my ex-wife. She’s a lawyer in Salt Lake. A guy named Laury Hammel who is going to be in Tucson tomorrow morning. He lives outside Boston. A bunch of other people. Those were the ones that were my friends. Jim Beavers was involved for a while. There was an SDS chapter at the University of Utah. There’s a lot of stuff written about that in the University of Utah papers, like the Daily Chronicle. There was a pretty active SDS chapter and I got involved with that when I came back to Utah after I was in college. After the draft board decided I was not suitable to be drafted, I didn’t get to go to Vietnam, which was fine with me. KF: When you say you were active in SDS, what do you mean by that? BP: SDS was run as a non-hierarchal organization so there wasn’t a vice president, president or secretary. There was a sort of leadership grid. I actually can’t remember the tenets exactly of how that worked. There were a number of people that took on leadership roles. I wasn’t one of the main leader people. But it was a fluid group. Sometimes there would be 100 people in the meeting and sometimes there would be 10 people at the meeting. Meetings were on campus. It turned out later that there were several FBI informants that came to all the meetings. If you really wanted to get the records, they apparently were wired and I guess somewhere, in the FBI office in Salt Lake they have all the transcripts of all the meetings. If you really wanted to dig it out you could go get it. At later times that became clear as I’m talking about how they were working for the FBI and some were getting paid. That’s not too surprising. Anyway. The SDS chapter had a variety of meetings and demonstrations. I came back to Salt Lake in the fall of 1969. I was accepted into VISTA program. I was working in one VISTA program in Massachusetts and was moving into another VISTA program in Oregon when President Nixon canceled all the VISTA money for the fall of 1969. I couldn’t go to Oregon to be a VISTA volunteer. Then I signed up at the University of Utah as a student and was what we used to call a non-matriculated grad student who is a grad student who hasn’t chosen a major.

Load more