A Look at BCC’s Early Days

from President B. Jean Floten's Opening Day Address 2005-06 on September 13, 2005

Join me for a trip back in time for a moment, to 1966: The Vietnam War was raging, student draft deferments had just been abolished by Lyndon Johnson and SDS Chapters were springing up on campuses throughout the United States to protest the war; the Supreme Court ordered cities to desegregate and the Black Panthers were forming amid immense civil unrest; Betty Freidan and others started NOW to advance women’s rights; cigarettes packages posted their first health warning; the Beatles released Revolver, their seventh album, and completed their last official concert; Star Trek went boldly where no man had gone before in their first television episode; Mary Quant introduced miniskirts and Pierre Cardin was putting his name on the outside of clothes for the first time; Miranda and Medicare came on the scene; the genetic code was cracked -- and the Eastside was finally getting its own college! Happy fortieth anniversary, BCC.

In 1966, BCC classes were held in borrowed classroom space at Newport High School in the evening. BCC wouldn't have its own campus until 1969; but, that didn’t stop it from opening on Jan. 3, 1966, with 464 students—all of whom it would appear attended this orientation! The course schedule fit neatly on one page and was heavy on liberal arts subjects, such as Chemistry, English, and History. What were then termed vocational classes included secretarial sciences, practical nursing, basic aircraft blueprint reading and food service management. You could tell it was a different time from this newspaper article that talked about classes for girls, and featured the college’s Homemaking Department for sewing, pattern-making and upholstery.

For its first three years, BCC was shuffled together in borrowed classrooms and portables at Newport High. Pauline Christiansen recalls that it was such a tight squeeze in the faculty office portable that instructors had to coordinate with others at nearby desks to even stand up.

BCC students were destined for greatness from the very beginning: they elected their first officers and launched a campus newspaper in 1967. Men's basketball debuted in December 1967 only to win the state championship their very first season. Note that very young first coach—Gary McGlocklin!

BCC finally started on its own campus in September 1969. Some classes remained in portables until a second phase of construction ended in 1973; and, that was about it for buildings for the next 20 years.

Back to 1966: This was a year of protests that lasted through the decade. Students were at the core of transformational changes sweeping the country at that time, from free speech to civil rights. These appeared at BCC, too. BCC added a class called “`Negroes in History”' in 1966; created its minority affairs program in 1971; and, in the following year, opened the women's center. Many Vets, fresh from combat, availed themselves of the GI Bill to come to school.

The first board chair, Pat Duffy, recalled the thinking that went into the design of BCC’s president’s office. Any of you who have visited it may have noticed its fortress-like qualities: two sets of double locking doors in 11/2 inch hardwood, a back exit, windows opening onto the roof and centrally placed for viewing the main entrance and courtyard at the same time—all strategic decisions for Duffy and first president, Merle Landerholm, so they could make a quick escape if any militant students might decide to barricade them in. It was a different time!

Former security director and early student, Karl Palo and some of his friends formed the People's Freedom Democratic Revolutionary Society to publish their own independent newspaper in response to campus sanctions of the legitimate student paper. They printed it on yellow paper to signify their ”yellow journalism.” This occasioned BCC’s first free-speech controversy in 1967. Karl remembers these students, far from being radicals, were Vietnam vets who relished tormenting the administration with their tongue-in-cheek reporting. After the group published a rather rude picture of a student body officer, the state sued them. In response, they hired a flamboyant attorney who loved controversial causes. As the students stood in the courthouse waiting for their case to be heard, their attorney browbeat the state’s attorney so effectively that he dropped the suit.

While long hair was the norm on most campuses, the Eastside was a little more conservative still with crew cuts and back-teased dos, as evidenced by this picture of the first graduates. Karl remembered one particular evening he and a high school student were standing outside Newport High School making derogatory comments about the ”hippies'' arriving for college classes. Pointing to a carload of particularly scruffy individuals, the kid asked how these folks could be serious about their education and how BCC could allow students to dress like that. Glancing at the car, Karl said with a grin: “Those are faculty.”

It was fun glancing into our past, wasn’t it? Throughout the year, we will dig deeper into our archives and launch more fun activities to commemorate our forty years and … the half-million students that we have served. Isn’t that astonishing?

I think in some ways this opening day is not too very different than that very first one forty years ago. The emotions are probably the same: bursts of energy interspersed with fits of floating anxiety. The joy/anxiety of our founders was due to the newness of the experience; new people, a new place, new wonders yet to be discovered, and not knowing exactly what to expect. Today, the experience is not new to most of us. We greet our college like an old friend with whom we can always pick up the conversation, no matter how long the interruption. Well-attuned to BCC’s rhythms, we know the intensity of our activity will only build throughout the year and to expect joy and sorrow, hopes and dreams, and success and failure along the way. 

Our founders probably felt a similar familiarity 40 years ago, even though the college was just beginning -- because of the timelessness of the values and traditions of academia, manifest in the coming together of teachers and students to create meaning and significance in the same way others before have for over a millennium. This dynamic doesn’t change.

Former Yale University President Bart Giamatti characterized this as the “constant conversation. "The university today is very different from the one 25 years ago, or 50 or 100 or 250 years ago, and yet it is not different. It is still a constant conversation between young and old, between students, among faculty; between faculty and students; a conversation between past and present, aconversation the culture has with itself, on behalf of the country…. Perhaps it is the sound of all those voices, over centuries overlapping, giving and taking, that is finally the music of civilization.”

Constant conversation of overlapping voices becomes the music of civilization…That is a nice thought -- this joining produces energy that connects us, our ideas, our values, our spirit, and our aspirations, into something that is distinctly ours, but also deeply rooted in tradition. BCC is what we, and all who have gone before us, have created; we are its agents for a short while, and it is the common vehicle through which our individual achievements and accomplishments gain power and importance as we, in community, blend them together for our collective purpose.

This upcoming year will provide many occasions to merge our voices in strengthening our college and articulating the values and purposes which will shape the next 40 years.

Back to College History