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Photographs of Boulder City Council members.

Photographs of Boulder City Council members over the years.

Tim Fuller, who served on the Boulder City Council from 1972 through 1974, discusses this tumultuous and formative time in Boulder politics. As student protests against the Vietnam War sometimes spilled over into riots in the streets and eighteen-year-olds were able to vote for the first time, the people of Boulder broke with a history of conservative politics and elected a majority of council members who pursued a socially liberal agenda. This agenda included the creation of a Human Rights Commission and the passage of a controversial ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, which was overturned by a vote of the people and led to a recall effort. Fuller discusses these events in detail and with the perspective of thirty-plus intervening years.

The "Morning Magazine" show on radio station KGNU featured Maria Rogers Oral History Program manager Susan Becker, talking about oral history in general and the Boulder Public Library's oral history program in particular. Topics include the value of oral history to both the community and individuals, how oral histories can illuminate and even change history, thematic collections that are part of the library's oral history archive, and ways in which the oral histories are used. The interview also includes excerpts from and discussion of interviews about Rocky Flats, the Fourmile Canyon Fire, the 1918 flu epidemic, famed climber Albert Ellingwood, musician Pete Wernick, the resettlement of Soviet Jewish refugees, and Boulder's social unrest in the 1970s.

This interview is part of a series that focuses on football games, collectively known as the Hairy Bacon Bowl, that were played during the first half of the 1970s at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The teams were made up of university students - many of whom identified with hippie culture and/or anti-war beliefs - versus campus and City of Boulder police officers. The goal was to ameliorate tensions between the two groups. Phil Battany played in the 1972 Hairy Bacon Bowl game on the police team as a member of the City of Boulder police. He says that, while the games were cordial, the students involved were not the hardcore hippies that were responsible for most of the police/hippie tensions. He talks extensively about policing in that era and about dealing with the small subset of counterculture young people who were entrenched in a drug and sometimes violence-based culture, such as the STP Family. He discusses the difference between the small-town, personal and flexible policing atmosphere that he experienced in pre-1970s Boulder and contrasts that to the stricter, "us versus them," policing that came into play in the 1970s and beyond. He expresses support for anti-Vietnam War sentiments, but not for some of the protest tactics. He delves into racial politics and police and sheriff department politics of the 1970s and 1980s.