Romance Accompanies Solidarity Inside Occupied Buildings

Moving into five Columbia buildings for nearly a week, student protestors came together for a common cause and left with a deep bond that many say changed their lives forever.

In the close quarters of University buildings, participants ate, slept, studied, discussed politics, and listened to music. Close friendships were inevitable as they depended on one another to procure food, guard the building, provide daily news, and keep each other entertained.

The 1968 protests “created a lot of people who then became dedicated to spending their lives helping other people through politics,” said Kathy Seal, BC ’69. The protests also brought people together, as students stood by the neighboring community and worked and lived together to push for change.

“We danced and partied at night,” said activist Roz Payne, who worked as a member of the Newsreel Film Collective, of her experience in Fayerweather Hall. Many spoke of the great sense of camaraderie among the students. And for two of the students in Fayerweather with Payne, friendship blossomed into something more.

Richard Eagan and Andrea Boroff, nicknamed “Mr. and Mrs. Fayerweather,” were married in a candlelit ceremony held in the building by University Chaplain Reverend William Starr. She wore a white veil and dress. He also dressed in white, wearing beads around his neck.

“As the spirit in Fayerweather was so high tonight,” Eagan said after the ceremony. “We decided it would be entirely appropriate to be married.” The students living in the building cheered and laughed along with the newlyweds.

Boroff spoke of the closeness among the students saying, “Fayerweather was not only holy grounds but was our home.”

Reverend Starr, who brought a cheesecake in lieu of a wedding cake to Fayerweather, pronounced the couple “children of a new age.”

“Before that, everybody put on white dresses and went to church or a big fancy hotel,” Payne said. In his view, the unorthodox wedding was just one of the many signs of change that marked the era. “This was ‘children of a new age’ and we were all doing things different,” he said. “We were part of what happened in Paris in ’68. We were part of so much else that was happening all over the world.”

After graduation, Boroff went on to found the Writer’s Room, providing a physical space in the city for freelance writers to work. Eagan became a writer and performer in New York.

Seal and Boroff met years after graduation, and Seal had not heard much about the wedding at the time of the protests. “I’m sure I thought it was cool, it was very nice,” Seal said. She asked, “I personally was not ready to get married.”

For Seal, the protests were a life-changing experience. She went on to lead a sleep-in at Barnard’s Plimpton dormitory after the protests. The sleep-in called for an end of parietal rules that imposed a curfew and kept boys out of the dorms during certain hours.

Seal said that 1968 definitely marked a “new age” for her. She said there was “a new feeling of freedom and adulthood and that we could make a difference ... that I could be the kind of citizen that I had always studied about in school.”

alicia.outing@columbiaspectator.com