“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land. Don’t criticize what you can’t understand. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old road is rapidly aging. Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand. For your times they are a-changing.”

It wasn’t long before the music of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and Rolling Stones woke me up to the unrest unfolding throughout the country. I memorized the stirring words to many of Dylan’s songs and sang them to myself as I walked around campus.

The potpourri of sounds included ethnic music which I found enchanting, like Ravi Shankar with his trance-inducing Indian sitar music that wafted through the candlelit, incense-impregnated dorms. Miriam Makeba, South African singer and civil rights activist, stirred my heart to care about what was going on far away on another continent.

The passion for the music of those times served as part of the glue that held us together. We had a common language. Even I spoke that language.

Eventually the novelty of life on campus began to wear off, along with the feelings of isolation. I quickly learned the hip patois of the times and adjusted to the freewheeling lifestyle. Budding friendships helped with the transition.

Antioch was a hotbed of political activism, avant-garde ideas and social experimentation. Politics occupied every student’s mind. I got a crash course in the US government’s foreign policies, especially regarding the war in Vietnam.

When inquisitive friends asked about my parents, I didn’t dare reveal that my father had been a general in the army. Instead, I told about his new career as dean of students at a college in New Hampshire and his love of academia.

In spite of the marches and demonstrations, politics did not hold the highest place on my life agenda. Political activism would have to wait. A compelling need for self-discovery consumed most of my energy as I attempted to sort out where and how I fit into this new world.

Academic life at Antioch had little structure and hardly resembled what I had expected from college. Antioch had abolished letter grades in favor of individualized written evaluations by the professors, born from a belief that the motivation to do well should come from the love of learning and not from the desire to get good grades. Coming from an intensely competitive background, this unfamiliar concept left me feeling disoriented.

The freshman class took multiple tests shortly after arriving on campus so that the faculty could get an idea of our academic strengths and weaknesses. They told us that if we got high enough scores, the basic requirements would be waived. I tested out of many of the classes, including all the ones for math and science, thanks to the rigorous education I received in Germany.

The taste of freedom was exciting—and scary. Incredulous at the thought of no grades and no required science classes, I wondered if I would accomplish anything in college. But I soon got over the feelings of guilt at wasting my parents’ money on tuition and jumped at the opportunity to sign up for all the fun courses that I could find, like stained-glass window making, pottery, piano, theater, psychology, French literature, and geology. After a little reflection, I decided to be an art major.

Theater was a class that I looked forward to each week. The director gave me several roles in little sketches by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett and other off-Broadway playwrights. He told me that I should consider a career in acting. I loved to act and poured my heart into it. I took a special interest in trying to get inside the characters whose parts I was playing and imagining that I was seeing the world through their eyes. This trait served me well in developing empathy for others who were different from me.

While theater was a class that seemed “normal” to me, there were certain classes that had a reputation for being extreme−extremely entertaining, extremely risqué, extremely extreme. I strolled into one of those infamous classes one day as a curious visiting student. It was a class on Aesthetics. Only at the Antioch of the 60s would an Aesthetics class bring the beauty of the human form and the sexual act into the room for first hand observation.

On entering the room, I saw a handful of the students sitting around barely clothed, discussing the two students at the front of the classroom, on the floor, their bodies tightly woven lustfully together. The disheveled philosophy professor looked on without showing any emotion as he discussed certain concepts in existentialism, explaining that we are solely responsible for creating meaning in our lives and that we must live our lives authentically and passionately. I stood staring, paralyzed by incomprehension, wondering what the higher meaning was that I was missing. I was one of the few people in the room fully clothed, besides the professor. After several long and uncomfortable minutes, I left. My mind was blown, along with everything that I had ever thought was normal.

The living situation at Antioch defied accepted standards as well. There were, indeed, men in my dormitory, just as Miss Brill, the college counselor from high school had warned. In fact, Antioch was one of the first schools in the nation to have co-ed dorms. But being around men at such close quarters had the opposite effect on me from the one that my counselor had worried about. The mystery of “otherness” that fuels romantic sparks dissipated rapidly with the routine familiarity of the opposite sex. The men left the toilet seats up in the bathroom and didn’t clean up after themselves. It wasn’t that different from being around my brothers.

The dormitories had no adult supervision. Casual sex, drugs and loud music were pervasive. Peer pressure to join in on the fun was strong. I managed to dodge the casual sex, but my curiosity led me through a short-lived phase of trying everything the school had to offer, including cigarettes, alcohol, junk food, candy, sodas, pot, psychedelic mushrooms and LSD. In short order, I became emotionally unstable, exacerbated by sleep deprivation. I experienced an on-going state of minor psychosis, marked by what was then called manic depression with huge mood swings. No one seemed to notice.

After a few months, the thrill of engaging in these illicit activities wore off. I lost interest in the drugs and alcohol. This route did not appear to be my path in life.

My roommate, Loretta, hailed from Wyoming, a place in the Wild West beyond my limited mental map. She had an open and friendly nature but came from a different planet than mine. The unrefined, free and easy way about her struck me as both foreign and fascinating. I envied the way she moved through her day with what appeared to be a relaxed and unquestioning confidence, free of the angst and doubt that I thought were part of the human condition. Loretta’s mantra was “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.” How is it possible not to worry? Maybe in the West they don’t understand that there’s a lot to worry about in the world. 

The dorm room was small. Our beds stood at right angles to each other. Several nights a week, Loretta’s newly acquired boyfriend spent the night in her narrow bed. The squeaking bed springs and grunting and moaning sounds of sex at close range and the sharp smell of sexual fluids rattled my mind and robbed me of my sleep. I didn’t dare protest, thinking that maybe it wasn’t cool and would be regarded as prudish.

In geology class one of the students caught my attention when he looked at me across the aisle. He had a slender body with blond hair and piercing blue eyes. He resembled a contemporary version of Adonis with a black leather jacket and matching black pants. He stared at me long and hard in class with his electric blue eyes, in a way that I couldn’t ignore and found both distracting and stimulating. Overcome with shyness and awkwardness, I had to look away. My face flushed and my heart raced. Good thing that there were no grades because I could no longer pay attention to what the professor was saying.

At the end of class, I dashed off, too shy to make contact with the handsome student. But before leaving, I leaned over and asked the woman next to me for the name of the staring student. She answered, “Jeff Elliott.”

I enjoyed the attention that I received from other male students as well. Jim from Kentucky with his melodious voice and soft southern accent took a shine to me and invited me to spend the weekend with him at his family’s cattle and tobacco farm. Little did I know that he would become a lifelong unrequited suitor and a loyal friend.

Anonymous notes, each with the same handwriting, came every few days to my student mailbox—love notes with little colored ink drawings and quotes from Le Petit Prince and other sources. It was exciting not knowing who the author of the notes was. Every man I encountered was a possibility. The author never revealed himself.

While adapting to life at college, I was also trying to remain faithful to Jean Pierre in Paris, my first love from high school days, and whose family-heirloom engagement ring I wore on my finger.

Coping with the foreign and often harsh and bizarre world of Antioch, while maintaining a fantasy-like relationship with Jean Pierre in France, added to my existential disorientation. I felt like I was leading a split life.

In spite of our oaths to be faithful to each other forever and ever, and in spite of my promise to spend my junior year abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris where we would get married, I began thinking less and less of Jean Pierre. I eventually stopped writing him letters and took off his engagement ring. The sweet and tender memories of the past summer seemed to belong to someone else. I was undergoing some very drastic changes.

Antioch was a pioneer in creating a work-study program called co-operative education, shortened to “co-op,” as part of its five-year curriculum. Half of the year, students worked at their co-op jobs off campus. The individualistic students that Antioch attracted liked the opportunity to have real-world job experiences while they were still in college—the combination of liberal idealism and down-to-earth practicality was appealing. Students could also use that time off campus to enlist in political causes or take courses that weren’t offered at the college. Around the time I entered the freshman class, a busload of Antioch students traveled to southern states to help register black voters during their off-campus co-op requirement.

My first co-op job during winter quarter of my freshman year was in New York City at the Art Student’s League where I worked and studied art and modeled for art classes to make a little spending money. Living in the Big Apple in a small, shared apartment in Greenwich Village was another kind of culture shock to which I adapted readily.

In second semester geology, I spotted Jeff Elliott once again in my class. After a few days of his disarming stares across the aisle, he introduced himself and asked if I wanted to go for a ride on his motorcycle. We drove all over Yellow Springs on his Triumph.

Jeff lived off campus, having earned that privilege by being in his second year of college. There was nothing familiar about Jeff, giving him an air of mystery. He spoke cryptically, injecting quotes from Bob Dylan songs into his speech. “Oh, Mama, can this really be the end. To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.”

Jeff revealed to me that he had been an alcoholic in high school and had used hallucinogens heavily in his first year of college and experienced disturbing flashbacks from his LSD trips.

When I told Jeff about the difficulty with my roommate’s nocturnal sexual activities in the dorm, he invited me to live with him in his apartment off campus. After that, we became truly inseparable. We walked everywhere arm in arm, hand in hand. When one of my sisters saw us together, she commented that we looked like two children lost in the woods together.

We fell madly in love. I had never experienced so much intoxicating attention and adoration. Life on a pedestal felt irresistible.

Jeff took me to his family’s home in Illinois to meet his parents, Edith and Oz Elliott, who embraced me into their family with warmth and enthusiasm. A few months later Jeff asked me to marry him. On December 27, 1967, I became Jeff’s wife. I was nineteen.