Reply #5: Article from Long Island Press

[Oreo]

Had you use Google's cache to view it
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:yIZOy-nBClQJ:www.longislandpress.com/v01/i18030515/news_07.asp+%22Hofstra+Student+Mobilization+Committee%22&hl=en

he Prodigal Peacenik: Commencement Speaker Returns to Hofstra a Changed Man
By Paul Perillie

(L)November 19, 1970 Hofstra Chronicle Archives (R) Norm Coleman today


HEMPSTEAD—What do a right-wing United States senator and a rabble-rousing college antiwar activist have in common? In the case of Senator Norman Coleman (R-Minnesota) they are one and the same.

Sunday, Coleman returns to his alma mater, Hofstra University, to give this year's commencement speech and receive an honorary degree. Those who remember him from his days as a left-leaning longhair might not recognize the closely cropped conservative at the podium. That's because Coleman has undergone a physical and political metamorphosis that makes Dr. Jekyll's transformation into Mr. Hyde look like a TV talk-show makeover, although Coleman himself doesn't see it that way. "I still believe in fighting for change," the novice Republican senator tells the Long Island Press. "I became a Republican to fulfill the ideals I had as a Democrat."

Coleman's early years were full of everything you would expect of a Brooklyn-born liberal. He tagged along after his grandfather on literature drops for Adlai Stevenson's 1952 presidential bid. He was a roadie for the one-hit-wonder band Ten Years After and joined the groovy masses at Max Yasgur's upstate NY farm for three days in August 1969. In a 1971 Hofstra Chronicle column, Coleman wrote: "I look at the Woodstock Generation versus Hofstra's Young Republicans and I say choose Woodstock."

In the early '70s, while Lieutenant George W. Bush was avoiding the draft with his stealth missions in the Texas Air National Guard, Coleman led 125 members of Hofstra's Student Mobilization Committee (SMC) in storming the administration building at Weller Hall. They began an 11-hour sit-down strike in protest against the IRS, outraged that 69 percent of federal taxes was being spent on defense. "I was a devoted non-follower of his," says Coleman's former political science professor, Herb Rosenbaum. "He was a rebel leader with a lot of social skills."