Protest: Memories of Diana

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During her year in Germany, Diana made the turn away from affluence that so often marks the contemporary young. She preferred a Pension to a luxury hotel, a bicycle to a taxicab. On a trip with her father, she carried a Michelin guidebook because, he recalled, she "didn't want to go to any of those places, she wanted to go to places unknown."

After graduating, Diana signed on with the American Friends Service Committee, took a crash course in Spanish and was sent to Guatemala. Stationed in Chichicastenango, she taught Spanish to the local Indians, who were mostly limited to their native dialect. Her eyes widened at the vast poverty and the class hatred between the wealthy few and the impoverished many. She was particularly troubled that a regime she viewed as oppressive was so strongly supported by the U.S. But she was still willing to give the U.S. Establishment a chance.

Diana went on to the University of Michigan to earn a teaching certificate. This was the critical year of 1966, when U.S. students were being radicalized by the Viet Nam War. While at Ann Arbor, Diana joined the Children's Community School, an unstructured, permissive experiment in education for children from four to eight. There, she worked with Bill Ayers, son of the board chairman of Chicago's Commonwealth Edison Co., and with Eric Mann —who later became luminaries of the Students for a Democratic Society. The school, operating on Great Society money, folded in 1968, when its funds were cut off.

Stormy Days. "It was about this time," said Jim Oughton, "that there was less and less communication between Diana and any of us. She'd call and we'd call. She'd be home briefly from time to time." Diana joined S.D.S., and she was in Chicago for the stormy days and nights of the Democratic Convention. Sometimes she would stop in Dwight. She brought Bill Ayers and other radicals, and she would talk politics with her father, defending the revolutionary's approach to social ills.

"That was one of the tense things we did. I was so eager to find out the rationale of her thinking and activities that I probably pressed her harder than I should have. It was a complete stalemate, and she would just change the subject. I deeply loved Diana, and I certainly didn't want to break the communication for the future. I felt that sooner or later there'd be a maturity of thinking, a change of thinking."