Sitting down to dinner with his family on a quiet, hot Tuesday night on August 22, 1966, was a bit of a luxury for Robert Feightner. As assistant post commander at the Patrol's Marion Post, he was used to calls outside of scheduled working hours.

But he was unaware that, at that very moment, sheer chaos crept its way through the halls of the Marion Correctional Institute (MCI), threatening harm to those who worked and lived around it.

That included the unsuspecting Feightner family, as they lived only two miles from the prison facility. The call from his post commander that night was much more urgent than usual.

"He said, 'Get your uniform on and get over here NOW!' So I went."

There was one small obstacle - the prison gate guard was reluctant to allow Feightner inside the gates with his weapon - state law disallowed anyone to carry guns inside the facility. "We had a brief discussion, and he agreed to let me take in my gun," he said with a chuckle. "And it's a good thing I did. I got in there and all 'h' was breaking loose, prisoners were running around everywhere."

Feightner said that prisoners used sticks to club people, threw debris, destroyed much of the facility, and set fires throughout the complex. "It was strange and such a surprise because (prison officials) never reported any problems at the prison, or any complaints ahead of time."

As he was the second law enforcement officer from the Highway Patrol on the scene, Feightner said he helped his post commander, Lt. Frank Hague, to clear out the people employed by the prison. "He was working on getting out the office help. So I helped him and we got the office help out."

Next on the list was to secure the gates, Feightner said, as prisoners tried to escape the building and flee. At that point, more Patrolmen showed up, as did officers from the Marion Police Department and the Marion County Sheriff's Office. The men succeeded in containing the inmates within the compound.

"We kept the prisoners from getting out through the gate," Feightner said. "It was kind of exciting there for a while."

Feightner said when all 300 Patrolmen summoned from all over Ohio assembled, they emptied the cells and hallways and led inmates to a field near the building. Most of the individually armed Patrolmen surrounded the prisoners in the field and guarded them, as smaller squads secured the inside of the reformatory. Patrolmen also escorted firefighters into MCI to battle the blazes ignited by rioting prisoners.

"It was quite a sight to see, all those prisoners surrounded by all those patrolmen, each with a 12-gauge shotgun," Feightner said.

After the pandemonium died down and the bulk of the Patrolmen went back to their local posts, local officials went about the tasks of cleaning up the prison, maintaining security, and determining the cause of the ruckus.

"The surprising thing was that the biggest destruction was to things used for their leisure and pleasure." Feightner said inmates demolished the arts and crafts facility, which allowed prisoners to create works in leather or other media, burned books in the library, and destroyed the athletic equipment. "The areas that contained items for their work details, they didn't touch them at all."

The whole thing began because of minor complaints - another surprising aspect of the investigation, Feightner said. "It was all very trivial," he said. "One guy I interviewed...said that the spoons in the sugar bowls on the tables weren't big enough. There were other things, but they were extremely minor - things like the movies were outdated and they viewed them on several occasions." Patrolmen spent time after the riot - three days for Feightner - interrogating the prisoners. "We were trying to work out what the problem was."

Feightner, who retired in 1982 as a lieutenant, called the escapade a success, as no one was hurt. "To my knowledge, not a shot was fired," he said. "But it was quite a riot."