The irony grows with time. A North Dakota sheriff, after surveying the mess left by college students in Zap, commented in a Mohall newspaper: "If those folks are really going to take things over one of these days, may the Lord have pity on us."

That was 1969.

Thirty years later, those folks - who fought in and demonstrated against the Vietnam War, brought change to broad swaths of society and, in the case of the Zip to Zap, weren’t above getting drunk and rowdy - have long since taken things over.

And the wheels haven’t fallen off the cart of public life because of it. Regardless of what they were thought of then, the generation that came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s sowed seeds that changed America.

Gender equity is no longer seen as a radical idea. Equal civil rights have been long accepted, in theory if not always in practice. And youth culture, while no longer inclusive of a complete political and social stance as it was in the 1960s, remains a force.

"All of these things on a national scale were sort of Chinese water torture ... the cumulative effect of all of this slowly, very slowly, glacially slowly changed people’s views on a lot of things," says Kevin Carvell, who graduated from North Dakota State University in 1971.

But for Carvell and some others who were on local campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period that changed the country didn’t necessarily change them personally.

Carvell, Sen. Byron Dorgan’s district director, went to NDSU from 1963 to 1965, when he volunteered for the draft and served two years in the Army, stationed in Europe.

He returned to NDSU in 1967 and served as editor of the Spectrum, the student newspaper. In that post, he tried to raise issues he thought were important, usually taking a liberal position.

His columns attracted the attention of Alice Olson, a Fargo woman who recruited him to work on Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination for president.

Carvell remembers the campaign as a time when local students, many of whom were below what was then the voting age of 21, worked within established politics to see change.

Volunteers "knocked on every single door in this city," inviting people to a meeting for McCarthy’s antiwar campaign, he says.

"To our great surprise and delight, we filled a room to overflowing," he says. "People just came out of the woodwork."

With their numbers, the students were able to dominate the Democratic Party in Fargo, which sent 76 supporters of McCarthy and his antiwar platform among its 80 delegates to the state party convention.

A member of the NDSU veterans club, he remembers demonstrations on campus in protest of the war’s expansion.

Before he went into the service, Carvell was a member of Friends of SNCC, which supported the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s civil-rights work in the South.

"The difference between now and then is there were really then great issues," he says.

Carvell went on to report for The Forum until 1981, when he left to work for Dorgan, then serving in the U.S. House of Representatives.

"I don’t think the times changed me," Carvell says. "I was molded by my family and community back in Mott, N.D., and probably wouldn’t be much different."

But the nature of the times presented him with opportunities to be involved. "All of these things fed into what were my inclinations and interests anyway."

Bonnie Johnson, who attended Moorhead State from 1972 to 1976, agrees.

Now Cass County coordinator, Johnson chose Moorhead State in part because of its tolerance of protest. "When we got there the university was beginning to open up to the changes needed at the time," she says.

At Fergus Falls High School, she remembers teachers who were willing to take different approaches. One allowed her to study the song "American Pie" in English class; another allowed her to bring a gay activist from the University of Minnesota to speak at the school as a social studies project.

Administrators didn’t approve and canceled the talk, she says.

So she tried to book a room at the public library, only to be turned down. Finally, in a meeting room at the Fergus Falls state hospital, 100 to 150 people turned out for "what started as a class assignment."

"I learned a lot about government and I learned a lot about how to be constructive in change," she says. "... Whenever people ask me if something can be done I say, ‘Hey, this is America, if you want it to happen make it happen.’ "

Sept. 25, 1969: Members of the radical Students for a Democratic Society present a four-point "plan of attack" to North Dakota State University’s Vets Club, which invited them to talk at a meeting. The plan called for minority student recruitment, abolition of the Reserve Officers Training Corps, "more relevant curriculum" on campus and an end of "authoritarian" policies governing student life.

May 10, 1969: The Zip to Zap. Between 2,000 and 3,000 revelers, prompted by a NDSU Spectrum article that was carried across the country by The Associated Press, descend on Zap, a town of 300 in western North Dakota. The revelry gets out of hand and the National Guard clears out the town.

May 1970: Moorhead State students vote to strike in a show of sympathy for students killed at Ohio’s Kent State University. MSC president Roland Dille calls an official day of mourning at the school.

Later, Dille allows students to leave school before the end of the term, allowing them to take their accumulated grade without penalty. About 400 of 4,500 students do so. Others can stay and take part in "liberation classes," student-organized discussions on current topics and events.

The event was announced in Fargo by Alice Olson, described in The Forum as a "Fargo housewife," and Kevin Carvell, an NDSU student. Chicago Seven members John Froines and Dave Dellinger, accused of inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, spoke to the crowd.

Protesters sow wheat seed in the excavated hole for the site. "Simply, they came to say: We object to the end of the world," The Forum wrote of the protest.

Despite its stately subtitle, the Zip to Zap didn’t aim to make a political statement and wasn’t a demonstration.

It was a college lark - a lark that went awry, bringing thousands of revelers to a western North Dakota coal town of 250.

"Like most legends, there are several versions of this, depending on who you talk to," says Kevin Carvell, who was editor of the Spectrum, North Dakota State University’s student newspaper, at the time.

The version most favored by history:

The Zip to Zap started with a string of cryptic classified ads in the Spectrum, inviting people to a gathering in Zap - chosen because of its name. The newspaper’s staff had decided Zap would be a good place for a staff picnic.