Wolcott Remembrance – Students Approve Vietnam Effort

A few days ago, one of my WHS classmates from the class of ‘66, Ron Bertothy, passed away at the age of 70. Besides the impact that comes from having someone who is the same age as myself pass away, I thought back to what at the time was a very significant event at WHS in which Ron played a key part.

The Players

Myself – In the 1965-66 school year I was a high school senior and in my final year of 12 years in the Wolcott public school system. I was then, even as now, somewhat of a “nerd”, with a focus on the academics. I was in the college prep track at WHS, taking world literature, calculus, physics, and a 4^th year of Latin. It was also my 3^rd time of taking a class from Mr. Robert Carroll – this time it was Contemporary Issues (CI). For extra-curricular activities I had many, including the coin and stamp club and the yearbook staff. I was also the president of the National Honor Society and the vice-president of the band. But despite my participation in prior years in the inaugural year of being on the WHS track team, I was not very athletic.

Ron Bertothy – Like me, Ron was a tall, 6’2” lanky guy. He and I were both in the college prep track and we were both in the band for 4 years, so we saw a lot of each other. However, unlike me, Ron was athletic and was on the soccer team. That gave him a level of popularity as then, like now, athletes are known throughout the school. But he was also a pretty nice guy and we got along well. Being in the college prep track, we were both in the same section of Mr. Carroll’s CI class.

Robert Carroll – As I noted in an earlier blog about my favorite teachers (*1), this was my third encounter of Mr. Carroll. I had had him as a 7^th grade teacher as well as for 9^th grade civics. In CI he had a unique approach. He would start each class with the appropriate topic for the day, but then let the class begin discussing it and if they got side-tracked, he would let us continue but with one caveat. That caveat was that he could stop us at any time, point to any person in the class, and if they could tell him what the original topic was and how we had gotten from that topic to what we were then discussing that we could continue. Thus it was that at some point in the early part of the year that we were discussing the Vietnam War.

The Situation

The US had been involved in SE Asia since 1950 as advisors to the French in the French Indochina wars. By 1964, the number of US troops in the area numbered around 23,000. Following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August of 1964, Congress gave President Johnson the authority to increase our involvement. By the end of 1965, US troop strength had increased to 185,000. This number continue to grow so that by the end of 1968 they numbered over 500,000.

During the initial part of this period there were conflicting views of whether the US should be involved. This was partly fueled by the Johnson administration following a policy of “minimum candor” to manage the media coverage (*2). As our CI class discussed this topic, most of us (and possibly because Mr. Carroll was a very staunch Democrat), came to the conclusion that we were generally in support of the US involvement.

The Project

I don’t recall who first brought up the topic, but we made the decision that we should show our support for President Johnson in some sort of concrete way. And rather than just do so with just our small class of 20-30 students, or even going school-wide, why not think BIG and get high schools across the country to join us in this support. But how to go about such a large endeavor?

With the support of Mr. Carroll, we organized into a multi-tiered group. This was going to be a project of the combined CI classes. Each of the five classes elected two representatives to the steering committee. These ten students, plus our class president, were responsible for the project. The two representatives from our class were Ron Bertothy and Jackie Mulholland. The chair of that group, which was called Project SAVE (Students Approve Vietnam Effort), was Ron Bertothy. Below this steering committee we had other subcommittees who were responsible for things like getting corporate sponsors to donate materials (paper, ink, envelopes, etc.), and a group who would type up the address labels (remember that this was in an era long before computers and printers – the school had only upgraded from manual typewriters to IBM Selectric Typewriters two years earlier. We were able to locate a company who could provide a list of all the high schools in the country (this was long before things like the Internet existed). We got rolling pretty quickly, and by early March mailed out over 16,000 letters, each with five pages of a petition attached. We also had a group who would handle the mail received from around the country – one student for each state. I was in this latter group and was assigned (by drawing names) the state of New Mexico. All incoming mail was sorted by state and I had to open each one from “my” state, count the number of signatures on any included petition pages, and put them into a rapidly growing pile of responses.

It was estimated that the project would have cost about $7,000 if the students had to pay for all the bills (*3). However, paper companies donated paper, envelopes, ink and other supplies. A local printed donated about $900 of free work and a list of high schools and addresses was provided by a company who printed such a list for a federal agency. None of these donors wished to be identified.

The Results

About two months later, a status report of the project was submitted to Senator Dodd from CT. He prepared a long article which was published in the Congressional Record of May 12, 1966 (*4). A few excerpts of this were:

“In a letter which I received from Robert F. Carroll, a faculty member at the school, the project initiated by Wolcott students was described in these terms:

“The students in my Contemporary Issues classes organized project SAVE (Students Approve Vietnam Effort) as a direct result of people throughout the country to shout and make their views heard on Vietnam * * *. These students mailed out 16,433 letters and five times as many petition sheets to every public high school in the country on March 8^th * * *. I am pleased to announce that returns are just beginning to come in and as of today 500 schools have made returns with a total of over 100,000 signatures.”

Mr. Carroll also noted:

“Many religious and fraternal organizations have made plans to make awards to the students involved and one man from upstate New York suggested that someone submit the project for a Valley Forge award.

“The students hope to deliver the results to President Johnson personally when the country-wide project is completed.”

By the end of the school year a month or so after this article was printed in the Congressional Record, we had received responses from over 1000 schools with a total of over 350,000 signatures. The WHS yearbook that year, like most years, was prepared and sent of to the printer earlier in the year and so did not have the results in it. But we had a supplement that was printed later that contained the final information on Project SAVE. In it was a picture of Ron in Washington, D.C. in July 1966 meeting with our US Representative, John Monagan, and Vice-President Humphrey (President Johnson was not available that day). The article also noted that our project was discussed on Radio Saigon between Rep. Monagan and General William Westmoreland, commander of the US forces in Vietnam. Senator Dodd did nominate us for the Four Freedoms medal from the Valley Forge Foundation and that was also received later that year.

In retrospect, this was a pretty massive project for the senior class from our little high school from Wolcott, CT. Our graduating class was only about 160 students, but we managed to receive national recognition for our efforts.

Mr. Carroll passed away in 2006 at the age of just 71. And now Ron Bertothy has passed away at the age of just 70. Sadly, the number of my classmates who are passing away increases each year. But there are many of us still around and we all fondly remember not only WHS and our class of 1966, but things like the Vietnam War and Project SAVE that helped to define our generation.

Notes:

*1 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/03/wolcott-remembrances-my-favorite.html

*2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

*3 – Associated Press article distributed country-wide, 15 March 1966 – see example at https://www.newspapers.com/image/11726639/

*4 - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1966-pt8/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1966-pt8-7-1.pdf