You can't always get what you want

Our first blog entry from the class comes from Sturgis, who has a tale to tell from an interview he attempted:

I conducted an interview the other day with one of Prescott College’s 1966 “charter class” to get a sense about what the town (Prescott, Arizona) was like back then and how the townsfolk reacted to having a bunch of hippies suddenly appear in their midst. By the time I got there in 1971, the atmosphere was so poisonous that I cut my long hair after only three days; I just couldn’t stand all the hostility.

So I think I’m on safe ground to seek details about the conflict between the values of this quintessential small Western town and those imported by the students of the new College, most of them from considerably more sophisticated urban centers on the East and West Coasts.

My interview subject however, had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY ON THE SUBJECT.

He couldn’t remember anything! His entire college career was lost in an alcoholic haze and he spent at least some of his college years in the strip of seedy cowboy bars on “Whiskey Row” getting along with the locals just fine.

Famously, during a political demonstration on the nearby Courthouse Square by Prescott College students protesting Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, these very same seedy cowboy bars produced an army of incensed patriots who, with the collusion of the local cops, swarmed from The Bird Cage Saloon, the Palace Bar and Matt’s Saloon to beat the living crap out of every long haired young person they could lay their hands on.

My interlocutor had never heard this story. No doubt he was curled around a boilermaker when he looked up to see he was alone in the bar on that infamous day. Rather than wonder where all his new friends had gone, he probably just helped himself to more of those yummy jalapeño peanuts and stole a shot or two from behind the untended bar.

Lesson learned: No interview is a complete failure. I got some new names from him, and I got some good practice asking questions, even if the questions didn’t quite take me where I wanted to go.