John Kerry arrived on the Oregon State University campus in May 1972 as a 29-year-old Vietnam War veteran rallying people against the conflict and for presidential candidate Sen. George McGovern.

Thirty-two years later, and now himself a presidential candidate, Kerry announced plans last week to return to Oregon as he approaches an election against President George W. Bush in the fall.

Other coincidences link 1972 and 2004, former Corvallis High School teacher Rick Wallace points out.

Wallace, along with an estimated 1,000 others, heard Kerry on May 11, 1972, urging those in the crowd to campaign for McGovern in the two weeks before the primary.

"Everything Richard Nixon does is for votes, so everything we do is aimed at taking those votes away from him," Kerry was quoted in the Gazette-Times.

"This guy in the White House has really, finally, once and for all, become divorced from the real concerns of the American people."

The "real concerns," Kerry said, were starving people, ghettos and drugs.

Photography was a hobby for Wallace at the time, and he took pictures of the OSU event.

Wallace noted the war in both eras, in Vietnam then and the Middle East today. Then as now, anti-war protests took place in some places in Oregon and across the country.

Speaking from the steps of the Memorial Union was common, but there was something different about Kerry, Wallace said: Kerry was a Vietnam War veteran speaking against the war.

"We all know this war is wrong. We don't have to even preach these things anymore," Kerry said that day in Corvallis. "The reason it's still going on is that it's easier to go along than stand up for power.

"Don't think we've exhausted our efforts for a peaceful reaction."

Kerry's words came from his experience as a patrol boat commander and the son of a World War II soldier.

Wallace heard those words and thought to himself that Kerry just might have the stuff to be president someday.

"I remember him as articulate, impressed by his poise, dually impressed by his speaking against the Vietnam War," Wallace said.

Bob Henderson, a former OSU student and staff member, took photographs of the event from just off the steps of the Memorial Union as well as from the second story of the home economics building across the quad. Henderson captured Kerry's expressions and demeanor on that warm May afternoon.

"I remember being impressed with him," said the Corvallis resident, now 90.

Steve Bagwell was a reporter for the Oregon Daily Emerald, the University of Oregon's student newspaper, when Kerry visited Eugene that spring.

Now the managing editor at the News-Register newspaper in McMinnville, Bagwell remembers Kerry as a "preppy guy" with "a lot of polish" and someone who was very Kennedy-esque, a good-looking guy from Massachusetts.

"He had a mission and he was sticking to it," Bagwell recalled last week.

During Kerry's Eugene stop, Bagwell followed the easterner for the day from speech to speech.

"I kind of got interested enough to capture some of the guy's style," he said. "Not a braggart or anything like that, but inner self-confidence... I did get an impression of an ambitious comer."

Bagwell caught up with Kerry in the control room at Eugene television station KVAL.

"It was the utter absurdity and stupidity of young men looking up at me with their guts hanging out asking 'why' that turned me against this insane conflict," Bagwell quoted Kerry.

Bagwell's view of Kerry's Yale University preppy attire and attitude came through in what he wrote at the time:

"Kerry comes through with feeling, but it's hard to visualize dark stains of coagulating blood on the pressed double-knit slacks he wears these days. It's just that Kerry is no longer as much the deeply disillusioned veteran of the Mekong Delta as he is the bright Kennedy-style novice of the American political scene."

At a glance

Who: John Kerry

Home: Boston, Mass.

Born: Dec. 11, 1943, at Fitzsimons Military Hospital in Denver, Colo.

College: Yale University, Boston College Law School graduate

Military: Navy, Swift Boat officer, served on a gunboat in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. Received a Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V and three awards of the Purple Heart for his service in combat.

Activities: Co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America, spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War

Politics: Elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982, to the U.S. Senate in 1984 (re-elected in 1990, 1996 and 2002)

Family: Wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry; daughters Alexandra and Vanessa. Teresa has three sons, John, Andre and Christopher.