By Kevin S. Giles
Ever heard of Zip to Zap? I hadn’t either until my chance discovery of black and white photographs revealed possibly one of the oddest National Guard deployments during our country’s legendary student unrest of 1969.
I was a Montanan working at the Bismarck Tribune in North Dakota when I found a fat brown envelope marked “Zip to Zap” in the newsroom library. (I had traded the Rocky Mountains for a prairie state where tourism billboards crowed, “Mountain removal project complete.”) The envelope contained two or three dozen print images, taken by Tribune photographers, of a rowdy beer bust involving as many as 3,000 college students. Zap, you see, was a farming village, hardly a blip on the North Dakota map, chosen for the marketing value of its name.