Frank Scarpace: Escaping the Blast

On Aug. 24, 1970, a physics graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Frank Scarpace, was working late into the night, assisting colleague and friend Robert Fassnacht with a research experiment at Sterling Hall: A very precise and time-consuming attempting to reach absolute zero.

“I was helping my friend Bob Fassnacht with an experiment. I came down to the lab and worked alongside him,” Scarpace recalls. “At about midnight, my wife called and wanted me home. Bob packed up his stuff and went home, too.”

Scarpace, well aware and educated on the anti-war efforts that were surrounding the campus, understood the tension people felt every day and empathized with the activists’ efforts. “The Vietnam war was extremely unpopular on campus; no one was for the war,” he says. “We thought the war needed to end. I was probably very fortunate I didn’t get drafted.”

Around 3:42 a.m., nearly 2,000 pounds of explosives detonated at the base of Sterling Hall. “We heard about the bombing at about 6 a.m., and I would later find out later Bob went back to the lab around 1:00 a.m.,” he says today.

“I wasn’t there to be killed, which I probably would have been.”

He was deeply affected by the Fassnacht’s death.

“We were very close to the Fassnachts, maybe one of the closest of their friends,” Scarpace said. “The first thing we did was go over to Mrs. Fassnacht’s house to console her and help her take care of her three kids. We were very shaken by that. I thought about that night for many, many, many years.”

The rippling effects of the domestic bombing had extended its reach continuously down the line. “His wife, who was pursuing a degree in physics, after the bombing was so traumatized she ultimately dropped out of school,” Scarpace says. “I don’t think Bob’s professor had fully recovered from his death. He never did any more research afterward.”

Scarpace told Media Milwaukee about Fassnacht and what he was like. “He was older than I was; he had been a graduate student for a fair amount of time,” he said. “One of the things he did in his spare time he built a harpsichord in the lab after hours. He was very much a man of all seasons. Very gifted with many respects.”

“He was a very warm person, and really was a pacifist. It was unreasonable for him to think about people being killed,” Scarpace recounts. “He was probably more sympathetic to the people doing the bombing, even though he wouldn’t ever do anything violent.”

Even after many years since the bombing, Scarpace still feels the pain from the actions of the New Year’s Gang. “I have a lot of resentment. That wasn’t the reasonable response,” he states. “We were all against the war, but that was not the thing to do.”

According to Scarpace, the bombers’ actions were misplaced.

“They picked a building that had nothing to do with the war. The people inside were very much against the war,” Scarpace goes on to point out the misconstrued perceptions on the bombers. “They were fighting the wrong people. The AMRC building wasn’t doing anything for the pro-war affection for the government. No one in physics was doing any classified research, and Madison never accepted classified research,” he states.

“We were always apolitical doing things that, in general, we thought were helping people,” he pauses. “I understand people want to make statements because they don’t think the world is fair, but I think if you think it out a little bit better then you don’t need to hurt people who agree with you more than disagree with you.”

Scarpace continues, “Things have to be really, really bad before you’d want a revolution. Kent State happened soon before, which probably got lots of people’s attention since the people were shot in front of them with guns. Sterling Hall was just a terror tactic, that’s all that is,” he says. “That’s not the people making the decisions, that’s the physics department. Physicists aren’t politicians; they’re researchers.”

In the time after the bombing, Scarpace still had another year and a half left of school and stayed on Madison campus, this time as a professor. He recalls that one of the Fassnacht children, Karin, would go on to be one of his graduate students. She and the other two Fassnacht children “had brilliant minds” and became “very successful,” he said with pride.

In a statement from bomber Karleton Armstrong, he admits the killing of Robert Fassnacht, claiming it was “a tactical error that he had to live with and he no longer felt any guilt for it and that all it did is tend to make his actions counter revolutionary rather than revolutionary,” he says.

“I thought that all the strength that I ever had was used in the bombing of army mathematics research center. And I felt that any chance of getting that strength back was destroyed when my mind was literally devastated by Mr. Fassnacht’s death. I don’t believe Mr. Fassnacht’s death can ever be justified.”

Many years later, Scarpace actually had an encounter with one of the bombers, Karleton Armstrong. “I saw Armstrong on campus selling stuff at the campus mall. I didn’t say anything to him,” he says. “I was just kind of disgusted. I wouldn’t talk to him, but what can you do; you can’t change the past.”

Reporting done by Brandon Storlie, filmmakers Glen Silber and Barry Alexander Brown, Sian de Beer, and Jackson Minshall