Before most students graduate from the University of Wisconsin, they will run into numerous references to the Sterling Hall bombing. This event has become a legend of the University and is almost surreal, but for those on campus in the late summer of 1970, the event was very real. Four young men known as the New Years Gang, plotted and carried out the bombing of the Army Mathematics Research Center, which was located in Sterling Hall, as a protest to the Vietnam War. Karl Armstrong came up with the idea and convinced his younger brother, Dwight Armstrong, as well as David Fine and Leo Burt to participate in the bombing.
In the early morning hours of August 24, 1970, the New Years Gang loaded about 2,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate soaked in aviation fuel into a stolen Ford. The group parked the van below the Army Mathematics Research Center, in a driveway of Sterling Hall. At 3:42 A.M. the bomb exploded. It was powerful enough to knock out windows six blocks away, and police found pieces of the Ford van on top of an eight-story building nearby. Residents of Belleville, thirty miles from Madison, reported hearing echoes from the explosion. In all, the bomb caused approximately six million dollars in damages but it did surprisingly little harm to the Army Mathematics Research Center. The greatest causality of the bombing, however, was not the physical damage, but the death of Robert Fassnacht. The New Years Gang did not intend on killing anyone and thought the surrounding buildings would be empty on a Sunday night. Fassnacht, a physics post doc student, however, was working late that evening to finish an experiment. His death left the campus shaken with grief and three children without a father.
The Sterling Hall Bombing was not the first attack by the New Years Gang to protest to Vietnam War. The name of the group originated from a failed bombing of the Badger Ordinance Works outside Baraboo, Wisconsin on December 31, 1969 by Karl and his brother Dwight. The Armory Gymnasium (a.k.a. the Red Gym) and the UW Primate Research Center were cites attacked by Karl Armstrong as well, but the Sterling Hall bombing was his last assault.
The entire New Years Gang fled to Canada the evening of the explosion. Over the next several years, the police eventually found and arrested three of the four members; only Leo Burt has never been found. After Karl Armstrong was released from prison in 1980, he returned to Madison and opened the Loose Juice cart that serves fruit drinks during the summer on Library Mall.
Though the Sterling Hall bombing becomes ever more distant with the passage of each year, it will always have an impact on Madison. Some local video stores still rent the documentary, The War at Home, which discusses the Sterling Hall bombing. Additionally, at least two books have been written on the Sterling Hall bombing: The Madison Bombing by Michael Morris and Rads by Tom Bates. The anti-war protests of the 1960s and early 1970s have ended in Madison, but their impact lives on in movies, books, and Sterling Hall.
Thanks for your post. In taking a trip down memory lane via the internet tonite, I saw that Armstrong now runs Radical Rye, a sandwich shop/smoothie bar.
David Sylvan Fine signed the "Not in Our Name" petition recently. He has a law degree, but I am not sure that he has been admitted to the bar anywhere because of questions about his moral character, and changing story regarding the bombing. I know that he was turned down by the Oregon Bar when he applied. I read somewhere else that he works at UMW which I would find shocking, if true.
I would not have been making this trip down memory lane if not for John Kerry.
I would not vote for someone whose vain-glory and total lack of common sense has re-opened (at least for me) a wound on my soul, and (IMHO) a wound on the soul of America.
That's interesting. I was only 15 years old when this happened, but I kinda remember hearing about it, livin' in Chicago and all. Karl Armstong only got 10 years. Wonder how long the other 2 scumbags got. They killed a man. They all shoulda got life imho.
My brother-in-law was working at the Badger Ordinance Works the night they tried to bomb the place--with a small plane, if my memory serves me right. The terror is something he'll never forget.
IIRC, Fassnacht left a wife and very young twins.
I was at UW-Madison from 74 to 77 - when memories of the
bombing were still fresh but most of the protests and
the violence had been replaced by a focus on football,
beer and girls.
My memory is that the Armstrongs were more reviled than
idolized in that 74-77 timeframe. Has revisionist history
taken hold and now they are portrayed as some sort of
anarchist heroes?