by David DeKok
Politically, Penn State was not nearly as radical as Michigan, at least not overall. It just seemed that way from time to time, as the smaller campus and student body magnified the serious turmoil that did take place. The Happy Valley chapter of the mostly white Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Student Union and the Frederick Douglass Association, comprised of activist black students, had relentlessly targeted the Vietnam War and civil rights issues, especially the shamefully low enrollment of black students. Unlike Michigan, Penn State also had a contingent of conservative students willing to publicly confront the leftist white and radical black students. But the activist students on the left had the upper hand in the fall of 1969, and they made that clear on September 21 at the opening convocation.
The event was held in Rec Hall and attracted an estimated five thousand students. SDS members distributed leaflets outside opposing the Vietnam War and sold copies of the Garfield Thomas Water Tunnel, the SDS underground newspaper that the administration had tried to suppress via obscenity arrests. Inside, the Black Student Union held up a large banner attacking the administration’s failure to increase black enrollment, which stood at somewhere between two hundred and three hundred, about 1 percent of the nearly twenty-six thousand students on campus. President Walker delivered an unintentionally comical speech that could have come straight from Animal House: “In the years ahead, you are going to have to pick up more knowledge than any other generation before you—simply because there is now and will be much more knowledge than ever before,” Walker told the students.
Then he got around to the campus unrest. Addressing the protests and sit-ins of the previous year, Walker didn’t talk about any of the student grievances, didn’t defend the university, but instead called attention to “good” black students who had organized a Black Arts Festival and “a weeklong series of programs and forums known as Colloquy.” Walker noted that while 250 black and white students were carrying out a sit-in at Old Main in 1968, some 25,000 other students were attending classes. And he equated the earnest student protests over low numbers of blacks on campus to students upset about the beginning-of-year housing shortage. It was all the same to him, and not worthy of a serious response. Walker was almost asking for trouble.5
Ted Thompson, the black president of the Undergraduate Student Government, followed Walker to the podium and delivered a blistering rejoinder. “They tell us not to question; they tell us to be patient, not to challenge the established order of things. They tell us that institutional racism no longer exists, but they tell us that higher education must continue to be a privilege and not a right,” Thompson said. “Just who keeps telling us this bullshit? I’ll tell you who. It’s those damn downtown merchants who drain you of every penny you have. It’s those hypocritical members of the faculty who hide behind their cloak of academic freedom so that our education remains stagnant. It’s the money interests tied into this university. It’s our holier-than-thou state legislators who play political football with our education. And it’s those rich bastards of society who give one or two scholarships with instructions in contentment and complacency. This is what we are up against.”6
Thompson’s incendiary words were remembered more than four decades later by Thomas Witt, then an incoming freshman from New Jersey. Witt also recalled that when a student group attempted to present an award to Walker, students in the back of the room shouted, “You’re a goddamn racist.”
Things got no better as the year went on. Black students staged an on-field protest during halftime of the Penn State–Boston College football game on November 1. They had permission from the university to do so, but that didn’t mean anyone in authority was happy about it. The Pennsylvania State Police, in a two-page, single-spaced confidential memo sent out by Lieutenant William Kimmel on October 28, said 130 demonstrators were expected, and that the university was trying to prepare the football public in advance, “to acquaint them with the shock.” The demonstration went off without incident, according to police, but the black students didn’t see it that way. Spectators in the stands at Beaver Stadium, believed to be white students, attempted to drown out the black students’ eight-minute speech on racist American society. The protesters raised their fists in the black power salute before exiting the field. Some students cheered when the Penn State Blue Band came onto the field for the remainder of halftime.
Four days later, the Black Student Union issued a news release accusing the Penn State athletic director, whom they called “Rodent” McCoy (his real name was Ernest), and the state police of allowing them to be harassed in various ways, including stopping a contingent of like-minded white students from joining them on the field. Two letters to the Daily Collegian, apparently from white spectators, decried the attempt to shout down the black speakers.7
Also in the fall, an ex officio member of the Penn State board of trustees, state secretary of Mines and Mineral Industries, H. Beecher Charmbury, a former geology professor at Penn State, delivered a speech to the Bellefonte Kiwanis Club saying that the nation’s “greatest pollution problem is the pollution of Americanism by Communism.” Charmbury, who was the state official most responsible in the early 1960s for allowing an underground mine fire to burn out of control in Centralia, Pennsylvania, eventually destroying the town and scattering its residents, made it clear he thought the Democratic Party and the Communist Party were one and the same, out to subvert the youth of America. “But for the future of our country, we must not respect or even tolerate their disorderly conduct, their disrespect for law and order, their defiance of the draft, their contempt for our flag or their use of drugs, which undermines their morals,” he said of students in general, and Penn State students in particular. His remarks caused an uproar on campus—the Daily Collegian in particular was not amused—but Charmbury refused to apologize, saying he had many supporters.8
The new graduate students in the English Department were thrown together early and often. Betsy, who never had trouble making friends, met and befriended Linda Marsa, a first-year graduate student from Bayside, Queens. Her father was a civil engineer. For ten years before she got married, her mother had been a model in the Garment District in Manhattan. Marsa had done her undergraduate work in English at SUNY Buffalo in Buffalo, New York, where many of the students were fellow New Yorkers. Buffalo was a fairly radical campus, and she had transitioned from Goldwater Girl to left-wing radical in the course of four years. Penn State seemed tame by comparison. She came to Penn State in part because of the reputation of Henry W. Sams, the chairman of the English Department. “It was kind of an up-and-coming department,” she said.9
Marsa, who became a science and medical reporter for the Los Angeles Times and later worked for Discover magazine, took to Betsy almost immediately, despite the difference in their backgrounds. Betsy seemed a small-town girl in the best sense: neat and tidy, smart, funny in a wry way, and generous, but with a level of broad-minded sophistication that belied her roots. “She always seemed like a young Katharine Hepburn,” Marsa said. “You know, with these kind of angular features and this curly reddish hair that she pinned up. Lean and lanky with that same kind of sarcastic, funny, witty attitude. Slightly askew attitude. And that was something I liked. I was pretty radical at the time, and we were all antiwar and really upset with what was going on in the country. She and I united on that.”
They became close and spent a lot of time together, or at least as much as busy graduate students could. Given that they had a heavy load of studying and writing, and could flunk out if their grade point average fell below 3.0, this consisted mostly of a few minutes hanging out after class, grabbing dinner, or going to Pattee Library. On occasion, if Betsy wasn’t going to see David on a weekend, they might go downtown. Linda lived off-campus, in a garden apartment on Wapalani Drive. She wasn’t a drinker, so she didn’t often hit the bars. Her memory of being downtown with Betsy in State College in 1969 was the Old College Diner and their famous gr
illed sticky buns.10
They had two classes together: English 501, Research Materials and Methods, and English 434, Movements in American Literature. The latter was an African-American literature course taught by Charles T. Davis, a pioneer in that field. There was also a third course on Betsy’s plate, English 582, Hawthorne and Melville, but Linda wasn’t in that one. There were sixty students in English 501, which met in the basement of the Willard Building. The class, as previously noted, was aimed at whipping new graduate students into shape as budding scholars. John Swinton, who was a graduate student in the department when Betsy was there, said the course “was really tough and required an awful lot of library work. And sometimes a lot of digging in the library. A lot of work in the Rare Books Room, a lot of photocopy perusal.” The course introduced students to the ways and means of solving literary mysteries, how to do good research.11
The first paper of the term was a bibliographic essay of fifteen to twenty pages. Students were to take a minor English author and identify all the important scholarship about him. “It was very challenging,” said Nicholas Joukovsky, the professor who assigned it. They were instructed to identify the best editions and most scholarly texts available, as well as the best critical writing on the author. Betsy wrote her essay on Dr. John Arbuthnot, an eighteenth-century physician, satirist, and contemporary of Jonathan Swift.
It was the black literature course that may have been Betsy’s favorite. This may seem odd for a young woman raised in Holland, Michigan, then almost entirely white, with a smattering of Mexicans and almost no blacks. There was only one black student in her high school class. Yet it reflected her growing interest in the African-American community and civil rights issues, and perhaps, too, her thwarted dream of going to Africa with the Peace Corps. Davis’s course offered a broad menu of the best in Afro-American (the term he used) literature, which he and fellow Penn State professor Daniel Walden, white and Jewish, were about to edit into an anthology, On Being Black: Writings by Afro-Americans from Frederick Douglass to the Present. It would be published in 1970. Davis was a liberal but seemed moderate compared to the activist black students on campus, and he occasionally was approached by state legislators who thought he might be a useful Uncle Tom. He wasn’t. Davis appears to have liked Betsy and Linda Marsa. A scrap of paper bearing her parents’ address in Holland, and Marsa’s in State College, was in his papers at Yale University, the final destination of his academic journey. There seems little reason for it to be there unless he sent condolences after Betsy was murdered.12
Betsy’s favorite black writer was James Baldwin, who would be represented by “John’s Conversion” from Go Tell It on the Mountain in the Davis and Walden anthology. Baldwin was small, thin, gay, and defiantly black, unwilling to tone down his opinions or his art, either for whites or middle-class blacks made uncomfortable by his rhetoric. As Fern Marja Eckman wrote in her admiring 1966 book, The Furious Passage of James Baldwin, “This slight, dark man is salt rubbed in the wounds of the nation’s conscience. He is the shriek of the lynched. He is an accusing finger thrust in the face of white America. He is a fierce, brilliant light illuminating the unspeakable and the shameful.” You get the idea. Baldwin was as far from the white, conservative sensibilities of Holland, Michigan, as a writer could be, and Betsy Aardsma embraced him.13
Betsy and David settled into a long-distance relationship, if a hundred miles can be considered long distance. She wrote a letter to him nearly every day. Long-distance telephone calls were a luxury then, reserved for special occasions. On many, but not all, of the nine remaining weekends in her life, Betsy went to see him at the medical college in Hershey. David remembered visiting her in State College maybe once, but no more than that, and could not remember the names of her friends. “I knew she had a group of friends; they’re people I didn’t know. I never met them,” Wright said. Marsa, though, remembered that he was “a very nice man.”
Restless as ever, Betsy considered whether she was doing the right thing in jumping on the marriage express with David, Marsa recalled. What may have shaken her confidence was a dinner she attended at David’s house in Hershey on one of the first weekends after they arrived in Pennsylvania. It was her, David, and several other medical students. “The memory I have is of an attractive gal with a nice figure, pretty but not a knockout, who was very casually dressed,” said Ian C. Osborn, David’s medical school friend. “I don’t think she said very much. The talk was pretty much between the medical students.” For a young woman whose Hope College roommate recalled how she liked to hold forth on many subjects, it had to be irritating. In addition, Betsy still wondered if she was cut out to be a doctor’s wife. There was actually a formal Hershey Medical Student Wives Club in 1969. One of the club’s stated goals was to prepare young women like Betsy, married to or dating male medical students (there were females in the class, but not many), “for their role as physicians’ wives.” Meetings of the club were mentioned in the Vital Signs newsletter at the school. Betsy must have taken note.14
Sexism was also pervasive at Penn State’s main campus, not just at the medical school. Some women believed that female applicants to Penn State were required to have higher academic qualifications than male applicants, and that there was a quota for women. As it happened, this was true. Penn State officials acknowledged publicly in January 1970 that two and a half men were admitted for every woman at the main campus. Things had been worse in 1958, when four men were admitted for every woman. The imbalance had gradually lessened but was still a factor. By 1971, Penn State would be facing the threat of litigation over the imbalance and dropped preferential admission for men at the main campus the following year.15
There were movements for many things at Penn State in 1969, and feminism was no exception, although it was in its very nascent stages. A student-faculty group called the Women’s Liberation Front had been organized the previous winter with the goal of making the university community aware of discrimination suffered by women. They didn’t have to wait long for firsthand examples. Penn State officials, disapproving of the group’s nature and purpose, refused to grant them meeting space in the HUB. So for the first six months, which included the time Betsy Aardsma was on campus, they met in a women’s restroom, according to Pam Farley, a member of the group. “It was quite a varied group, and we were all activists,” she said. “Of one sort or another.” They would sit on the restroom floor and share experiences. After about six months, Women’s Liberation Front was granted permission to use actual meeting rooms. Gradually, they began taking their message to a dumbstruck and often-antagonistic outside world.16
None of Betsy’s friends recall her labeling herself as a feminist, but most remember her saying and doing things that supported the idea that she was. Since high school, she had aimed toward a career outside the home—first as a physician, which was bold for a woman of her day, and then as a scholar of English and literature. There was no sense that she wanted to go the traditional route for women, which would have been nursing or K-12 teaching. From all indications, her ambitions went beyond that.
“One of the things she said to me was that she was a little ambivalent about it,” Marsa said of Betsy’s feelings about marriage to David. “This is just as the women’s movement was gathering momentum. And she said, ‘Is this what I want? Do I want the kids and the keys to the Country Squire?’ You know, she loved David, she’d go visit him, but she had a certain ambivalence that I think was very natural.”17
That ambivalence may have led to her decision to go out on casual, “friendly” dates with other men. Pushed out of Michigan by her family, who feared she would become the next victim of the Coed Killer, pulled to Pennsylvania by her medical student boyfriend, who didn’t want her to join the Peace Corps, Betsy was lonely in State College. She had no family here, none closer than five hundred miles away. Even David was a hundred miles from her at the medical school in Hershey. All she had was her graduate work in English an
d one good friend, Linda Marsa. It should come as little surprise that some young men at Penn State saw her as vulnerable and available.
Chapter 19
Dangerous Attraction
One of the two students who pursued a relationship with Betsy Aardsma that fall was Larry Paul Maurer, whom we already know from the aftermath of the murder. He had drawn the attention of the state police for carving here sits death in the guise of man on his Atherton Hall dorm-room desk chair, and later was hooked up to a polygraph and questioned about her murder. He passed the test, never losing his cool, and was not arrested, then or ever. Maurer was twenty-two years old and, like Betsy, a graduate student in English, also in English 501. He came off as a quiet, outdoorsy young man who enjoyed hunting and fishing, albeit one who kept a small hunting knife on campus. He would tell state police investigators that he used it to cut cheese, not stab young women. But as became obvious during the investigation of the Aardsma murder, Maurer had another side. He seemed to enjoy taunting and toying with the detectives who questioned him.
How Maurer ended up as a graduate student in English at Penn State is anyone’s guess. In high school, he was on the industrial track and his stated goal was to become a draftsman. Why he became interested in Betsy is hard to pinpoint beyond the factors that attracted many men to her. There were other pretty girls in the class, but he was drawn to her. Interestingly, his high school nickname was “Aardvark.” Perhaps he fancied Aardvark and Aardsma as a couple. And both were dedicated doodlers. He might well have observed her doodling during class, which was held in the basement of the Willard Building.
