The Year that Was 1967

Headlines from The Spectrum

• “Locally and nationally—students protest: against the draft, the war, CIA and the DOW Chemical Co.”
• “University will get new computer; remote typewriter facilities foreseen”
• “Hippies: a real happening”
• “Mono cases increase; smooching blamed”

Around campus

• The Black Student Union was founded (though it took another year to gain official recognition from the Student Association).
• Curfews were abolished for female students living in dorms.
• Plans for a temporary campus on Ridge Lea Road were pursued to accommodate a growing student body.
• Members of UB’s Pithecology Club went on an eight-day research trip to Lake Ochakeenawanabacki to study the migratory habits of the feared Aleurocanthus Woglumi—at least according to the yearbook. Sound like a joke? We think it might have been.

Notable visitors

• Muhammad Ali, stripped of his heavyweight title after refusing induction into the U.S. Army earlier that year, gave a talk on campus.
• A year before his death, Upton Sinclair visited UB to discuss his novel “The Jungle.” Other literary legends appearing on campus included Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, John Updike and Leonard Cohen.
• A 16-year-old Janis Ian performed to an overflow crowd of students in Norton Union. At the time little known, she would later rise to musical stardom with her single “At Seventeen.”
• Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in front of more than 2,000 people at Kleinhans Music Hall at an event sponsored by the Graduate Student Association.

1967 was a year of firsts

• First issue of Rolling Stone
• First Super Bowl: Green Bay Packers vs. Kansas City Chiefs
• First African-American justice appointed to the Supreme Court: Thurgood Marshall