Background
The Zip to Zap was an idea of Chuck Stroup, a student at North Dakota State University in Fargo. Stroup could not afford to attend the more traditional spring break festivities held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Therefore he came up with the idea of what was to become known as the "Zip to Zap a Grand Festival of Light and Love". Stroup placed an advertisement in the student newspaper at NDSU, The Spectrum. His idea was soon embraced by college students throughout the upper midwest of the United States and states as far away as Texas and Florida, thanks to extensive publicity in various college newspapers and in newspapers throughout the nation over the Associated Press wires.
College campuses throughout the United States in 1969 were described as being in chaos as many students rebelled against authority and protested the actions of the U.S. in the Vietnam War and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The local and national media portrayed this escalation in student protest and resulting violence in a way that may have led some readers and viewers to believe that a cultural, racial and generational "civil war" was taking place. The National Guard had been called to intervene in over 200 civil disorders relating to the war, racial tensions and other controversial subjects by late 1969 (this would include the Zip to Zap).
North Dakota was far away from the centers of the hippie movement on the coasts of the United States, but this did not mean that the local students did not know what was going on with their peers at schools such as UC-Berkeley. The combination of tension between the students and the established powers, and the local and state governments' lack of experience in dealing with large gatherings of angry and drunk protestors led to the riot that would put Zap, North Dakota across the headlines of the U.S. newspapers and make it the lead story on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. What started out as a lark turned into a riot that resulted in thousands of dollars of damage.
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