It was February 1970, two months before the first Earth Day. San Jose State University was then called San Jose State College.
About 5,000 people stood together on campus in the sweltering heat, where the César Chávez Memorial Arch is now located.
Emotions and tensions were as thick as the smog layer up above. Screaming and shouting echoed from each direction. At the time, there was nothing abnormal about that combination.
Following a two-hour-long debate concerning the ingenuity of the ensuing exercise, a yellow, brand-new, never-driven 1970 Ford Maverick was pushed into a 10-foot-deep trench.
“That car was like a virgin sacrifice,” said Anna Koster, an SJSU alumna who, at the time, helped plan the event and pitched in to purchase the vehicle.
Protestors sacrificed the car in the name of Mother Nature, condemning the internal combustion engine that was polluting the lungs of Earth’s inhabitants.
Students purchased the car for $2,500 from Paul Swanson Ford in Los Gatos using donations and student-bought shares sold for $1 each, according to previous Spartan Daily reporting.
Led by a police escort, eight Kappa Sigma fraternity members pushed the Maverick for part of the 11-mile journey from Los Gatos to campus.
Students refused to ignite the engine out of protest because they were determined to push the car to campus and avoid the release of carbon emissions.
Once they crossed into San Jose, they lost the escort and the car had to be towed within a block of campus.
“It’s in,” humanities professor John Sperling said as it was being lowered. “Thank God, it’s in.”
Sperling, founder of the University of Phoenix, previously assigned his Humanities 160 students to read Paul R. Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” as part of the curriculum for the class. The book, written by a Stanford professor, detailed the risk Earth was enduring with the increasing threat of overpopulation.
Infatuated with the book and the potential catastrophes awaiting humanity, the class planned the “Survival Faire,” a week-long festival conveying the ultimate undoing of the environment by humans.
The festival was capped off by the Maverick’s burial.
“We got all focused [on environmental issues],” said Koster, a former student of Sperling. “Why are we doing anything else except working on this?”
Taking place at the height of the counterculture, protest-heavy hippie movement, the festival was a classic showcase of the rebellion in teenagers and young adults at the time.
“[Social activism] was inescapable if you were a student [at San Jose State] in 1970. Student activism was just part of the atmosphere – and activism on a variety of issues,” said Craig Turner, who reported on the Survival Faire for the Spartan Daily in 1970. “The environment was just then emerging as one of those issues.”
The Survival Faire was a time capsule of the anti-establishment movement full of immersive exhibits; think the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose meets Burning Man.
“The [exhibit] that I remember the most . . . It was a population room,” Koster said. “You open the door and go in, and it was kind of shocking to me because it was jammed full of dolls, baby dolls . . . You barely crack the door open and you’re banging into these dolls.”
Rock bands performed throughout the week.
There were lectures and skits. Art installations took over classrooms, including an exhibit simulating smog, which suffocated patrons with thick smoke as they walked in, forcing them to cover their faces with paper masks.
Koster herself put on an art competition, which accepted submissions in categories like “creative use of waste” from various
college campuses.
Like almost every political event at the time, the Faire was met with controversy.
Members of the Black Student Union picketed and threatened to block the parade to campus, according to previous Spartan Daily reporting.
“As was typical of the day, there were threats to try to bar it,” Turner said. “But the politics of whether it was a good idea to bury the car or not didn’t follow along predictable lines or
traditional lines. You had people on the left and on the right who thought this was a bad idea, a crazy idea . . . and also thought that it was a waste of money.”
The Maverick “virgin sacrifice,” whether intended to or not, was a headline grabber. It earned the attention of The New York Times and all three major television networks at the time.
The Spartan Daily followed suit, detailing both positions of disdain and support for the burial.
“It reveals the instigators as wasteful, hypocritical, insincere persons guilty of trying to exploit a serious problem for self-satisfaction,” wrote Donald F. Sinn, a recreation professor at the time.
Fifty years later, perhaps a little later than those involved had wished, environmental protection is near the top of the list of political issues in America.
“I think it’s evident that while there’s been progress made, and now the state of the environment is pretty much in the forefront of the international conversation of our future, clearly not enough has been done about the deadly – let’s be honest – deadly, issue of climate change,” Turner said. “So while a great deal has been done, we still obviously have a very long way to go.”
Craig Turner is related to senior staff writer Austin Turner.
