With his black thick-brimmed reading glasses, gray and white goatee and long hair, Haggerty is third in line. After an older woman finishes reading a poem, Haggerty walks to the podium to address the Bloomington City Council. In his speech, “So how do I hate IU,” he criticizes the “corporate conglomerate.”
After his five-minute speech is done, Haggerty, 66, heads for the double doors and leaves the council chambers. He receives some applause. But the majority of the audience, mostly made up of city officials, has no ?reaction.
“I don’t like to listen to it,” Haggerty said about why he leaves council meetings so early. “It’s just propaganda to me.”
Perhaps the grandfather of Bloomington’s counterculture, Haggerty, a Vietnam War veteran, musician, former trapeze artist and self-described hippie, continues to challenge establishment thinking while championing the weird and different.
Originally from Johnson County, Ind., Haggerty has spent more than four decades living in the thick of Bloomington’s counterculture. His early music life had to take a backseat in 1967 when he was drafted into the United States Marine Corps. At the time, 18-year-old, long-haired Haggerty was in a rock ‘n’ roll cover band, unable to get a draft ?deferment.
“We all knew that if you didn’t register for the draft when you were 18, that they would come and take you out of your home or your classroom or where you work, and they take you out in handcuffs and they would hold you in a prison,” he said.
Haggerty was sent to Vietnam where he stayed for about three months, until both his eardrums were ?ruptured from a rocket ?attack.
“I was bleeding down both ears, so I couldn’t hear anything,” Haggerty said in his soft-toned voice.
He was the sent to hospitals in Khe Sanh, Da Nang Vietnam, then to one in Japan, Alaska and finally Portsmouth, Va., where he stayed for three to four months.
It was while he was in the hospital that Haggerty awoke to anti-war feelings about the war that made him suffer.
He said he talked with fellow veterans and was able to piece together a new narrative about the war, one that Haggerty said was contrary to the “lies” he read in Time Magazine and Newsweek.
Haggerty’s political awakening while in the hospital would get him into more trouble than he could have imagined.
On May 1, 1971, Haggerty, along with more than 200,000 fellow rebels, traveled to Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War.
After participating in a ceremony where Haggerty and his fellow veterans threw their medals away, he was arrested with about 12,000 other protesters in front of President Richard Nixon.
By 1971, getting arrested had become the norm. While attending IU in 1970, Haggerty said he was arrested on the steps of the Indiana Memorial Union for “inciting a riot” according to his attorney and longtime friend David Coleman. Haggerty said police were trying to stop a Girl Scout from selling cookies and was arrested after an IU police officer ?recognized him.
“Marc as a person, is one of the most principled people I know,” Coleman said. “He has a firm set of values, and it has manifested itself in a lot of different issues, and he’s a person of action and a person of principle.”
Coleman, who used to own a law practice in Bloomington, sometimes performing cases pro bono, now owns the Venue Art Gallery located on South Grant Street. Monday night, Coleman let his friend Haggerty and Bloomington folk musician Travis Puntarelli perform a preview in his gallery of their Wednesday night show at the ?Buskirk-Chumley Theater.
A former Ringling Brothers trapeze artist by trade, Haggerty said music is what he does full time now. Last fall, he traveled to northern California with Puntarelli, playing shows as a part of Puntarelli’s band. Meanwhile, he slept out of his own car.
Now retired from the circus and his own school for trapeze artists located in Bloomington, he said he got into the circus act because it was something to do with ?his son.
Though he has not been arrested in a while, Haggerty is still an objecting voice in the community. His hair is still long. He now expresses himself through music.
Monday evening, he sat looking out the window at the Venue Art Gallery with his guitar against his lap and his Marine Corps cap turned backward with a light blue T-shirt as he waited for ?Puntarelli.
“If this music didn’t reach past music and entertainment, then I wouldn’t be involved in it,” Haggerty said. “This music has to do with changing the world, and it has a better chance of changing the world than straight politics.”
