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My name is Jim Black. I graduated in 73 and was a member of Baker College. I can tell um about some events, I'm not sure it was a tradition. I can tell about some events that happened in the year in the academic year 69 to 70.

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My freshman year was a big experience for me in general and I was in uh 152 Baker College with uh seven other young men all away from home for the first time. The most memorable thing about that year is what was going on in uh the

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United States and in Vietnam. And uh it was the uh of course very up um a very turbulent time and in the spring semester, um the United States invaded Cambodia and everything erupted on college campuses across the country. So we had at Rice. Um some events

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um there was a Abbie Hoffman and his group, the Chicago sevens, those people wanted to come to Rice. And there was a group of students who wanted them to be able to speak at Rice and that was denied by the administration. So we all got up

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in arms. Um And somebody in fact even tried to burn down, uh, some part of the RMC. There was a big event where we all walked across Main Street to Herman Park and went to a big amphitheater there. I can't remember the name of it

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and we heard, um, these political speeches and so forth and so on. The biggest, um, impact of that year upon me personally was that I was taking, um, American history class under, uh, Professor Hyman and it was a very good class, very difficult class and I

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was proud of my performance there. But during the final exam, the, um, a bomb threat was called in, this was pretty common in the spring of 1970. And so they had to clear us out of the lecture hall. I think maybe we were in the physics

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lecture hall at that time or something, taking the exam, we had to go back to our colleges, finish the exam and turn it in and somehow mine got lost in all of that. And I didn't get, um, a very good, um, semester grade because of that,

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um, of that thing. So that was, that certainly stuck out in my mind and I was so shy about, uh, you know, holding my hand up or whatever. I didn't even go back and challenge it, but I'm quite sure that's what happened. There was also, um,

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during that year right in front of our room at Baker College, one of them more in, um, sort of, uh, in, uh, active young men, um, desecrated the American flag in ways that you could imagine. And, uh, uh, there was, um, a junior who lived above

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us, junior or senior who was very conservative and he, I believe, called the police filed a lawsuit or something. So there was a big to do, uh, uh, within the student body about political beliefs. So that is a, was a very memorable year. One of the

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most memorable years in our lives, I think, um I think Rice handled it pretty, pretty well and we all came out of it and went on afterwards, but it was uh far from uh a normal year for, for us. Thank you very much.