It was 12 years ago when Nathan Stucky first heard the tales of Old Main leaping off the SIU tapestry, and it wasn’t a story he soon forgot. He was new at the University, hearing the saga of the building burning down recounted by a professor who was put on a University building watch during those tense days of 1969.

The event itself was almost 20 years past. Not exactly the most pertinent story on campus. Regardless, it lead Stucky to one conclusion into which he has spent the intervening decade digging deeper and deeper.

People all across the SIU campus tell these stories in their offices and classrooms. It’s become part of the collective history. And in many ways, Old Main continues to burn.

Many people had very sentimental attachments to Old Main and its symbolism to the University, said Stucky, now the chair of the Speech Communication Department, whose self-written and directed play, Burning Old Main, runs tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Kleinau Theater in the Communications Building. It felt like the passing of something very important to people. It was the oldest building on campus, and when it burned, people felt a sense of loss.

True, that day in June 1969 when the Old Main administration building burned to the ground has continued to mystify the SIU community as the ultimate symbol of the times. Arson goes down in history as the common cause, although other theories have been speculated on. But despite that debate, the end result of the incident has symbolically wedged itself into the University’s psyche and cast an uneasy shadow ever since, perhaps even affecting the institution to this day.

Beforehand, SIU was living in the glow of its golden years, growing exponentially under the creative hand of President Delyte Morris. A 1968 bombing of the Agriculture Building spelled trouble, though, and increasing anti-Vietnam tensions throughout the nation were manifesting into a sleeping giant on the Carbondale campus. In 1969, the giant awoke and left Old Main in ashes.

The following May, students rioted throughout Carbondale for almost a week in protest of the shootings at Kent State and the presence of a Vietnamese research center on campus, causing more than $75,000 in damage and necessitating the arrival of the National Guard. That fall, Morris was forced to resign over the issue of construction costs for the Stone Center, and SIU began its great decline.

One might expect the impact of this to have significantly faded over the following three decades, but Stucky’s research begs to differ. Conducting interviews with almost two dozen students, faculty members and administrators who witnessed this social explosion, he found that these images remained stuck in his sources’ minds like razors. The play that results from his work incorporates the work of 16 different actors, a smattering of photographs, period music and actual pieces of Old Main.

What actual effects these events from 1968-1970 had on the University remains a source of historical debate, but one simple truth cannot be denied:SIU has never again risen to that perch on which it sat before fire and riots tore it down. Instead, we’ve seen a deluge of drunken Halloween celebrations and ever-shrinking enrollment numbers, budget cuts and increasing tensions between the faculty and administration. For most of these issues, the relation to Old Main is a stretch. However, they are part of the same unresolved saga that began on that day in 1969.

Does it all come back to the same image problem that constantly haunts the Saluki consciousness? Not at all. The concept of an image problem is illusional, meant to address this college’s complicated issues like they were an honest fallacy in marketing. In reality this is an issue of self-perception, of an entire University grappling for a shared identity.

As for marketing, it’s difficult for us to sell a product when we’re not quite sure what we’re selling.

One things for sure, though:those burn marks aren’t helping us any.

Geoffrey Ritter can be reached at [email protected]