In My Chicago Summer of '68 The Whole World Was Watching--Part IX of a Murfin Memoir

  

The crowd swelled around the Poor People's Campaign wagons heading south on Michigan Ave. late Wednesday afternoon.  Ralph Abernathy and the SCLC folks did not seem all that delighted with our company as they inched up the Avenue  from Jackson to the police blockade at Balbo.

Note—In Today’s episode I hook up with the Poor People’s Campaign Mule Train, Amy and I reunite at Michigan and Balbo, a short cab ride with “Thomas Jefferson,” and the Battle of Michigan Avenue.

Late Wednesday afternoon I was accidentally near the head of two or three hundred folks trying to find our way out of Grant Park when we finally found an open bridge over the rail tracks.  To our astonishment the Poor People’s Campaign Mule Train was coming down Michigan Avenue heading south.

If things had worked out differently in Memphis that April, Dr. King himself might have been in the lead wagon.  The Poor People’s Campaign was his dream to unite the poor of all races into a new movement for economic justice.  But he was dead and Ralph Abernathy was left to carry on.  He was on the seat of the lead wagon dressed in overalls.  The mule train was meant to recall the promise of 20 acres and a mule free and clear to Freedmen after the Civil War.  Their presence in Chicago was really just to publicize a planned encampment in Washington to pressure Congress for a whole new economic deal for the poor. 

Most importantly, the Poor People’s Campaign had secured what almost no one else had—a permit to drive their wagons right up to the doorstep of the International Amphitheater.

We surged over the bridge and joined the procession.  Others were already with them.  More joined as we inched north filtering in from the Park or coming from elsewhere in the city. 

To tell the truth Abernathy and his people did not look exactly thrilled to find their wagons suddenly engulfed by disheveled youth, many of us still reeking of tear gas or nursing wounds.  They had good reason to believe that their permit would not be honored if we were with them.  And these folks who had themselves endured so much police violence in the South, worried that we would draw the same response down upon them again.

It is only a few blocks south from Jackson to Balbo.  But at the methodical, plodding pace of the mule drawn wagons and as we clogged the street with swelling numbers it seemed like an hour, or so to reach it as the Chicago Police scrambled to get a large force in front of us and redeploy the forces from Grant Park and other sites in the city.

When we finally reached Balbo, the cops had enough massed force to block the march further south.  The marchers pushed up tightly, filling Michigan Ave and spilling into the edge of Grant Park.  It looked, as best as I could tell in the press and confusion, that the crowd stretched back a block or more, but there were probably no more than a couple of thousand folks.  It was a standoff.

As the crowd went into a chant after chant, Abernathy and his people negotiated with the police.  Eventually, they were allowed to pass, but the cordon of cops quickly closed and blocked the rest of us. 

I was getting uncomfortable in the crowd. I noticed that the sidewalk was clear right around the corner on Balbo across from the Conrad Hilton.  I stepped over there to get my bearings. 

The light was fading to dusk when I heard my friend Amy Kesselman’s voice.  She found me again after we were separated earlier at the Band Shell.  At six foot two and wearing the only cowboy hat around, it was a lot easier for her to find me.  I would never have picked all five foot nothing of her out the crowd. 

We tried to decide what to do.  Amy wanted to try and find other staffers from the Movement Center.  She thought that they were well back on Michigan.  Since there was no way to push through the crowd on Michigan, we decided to head north on Wabash then cut back to the Avenue.

There were some cops forming on Wabash, so we went on to State.  It was amazing.  Life seemed to be going on as normal.  The sidewalks bustled with ordinary folk going about their evening as if nothing at all extraordinary was occurring two blocks over.  We cut back to Michigan and sure enough found ourselves to the rear of the crowd.  But a glance made it clear that it would be unlikely that we would connect with the others.  Now Amy wanted to go back where we started because she was sure things were going to get interesting.

She spotted a cab coming down Michigan.  She grabbed my hand and said, “come on!”  We hopped in the cab.  Amy asked to go to State and Balbo.  The driver looked disgusted, whether at the short fare or our appearance.  But just as he was getting ready to pull away from the curb, the door of the cab flew open and two guys tumbled in, both looking the worst for wear.

Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and Jerry Rubin--almost half of the eventual Chicago 7.  By Wednesday night Davis's busted head was swathed in bandages, and Hayden popped into a cab convinced he was Thomas Jefferson.  I don't know where the hell Rubin was.

One of them was Tom Hayden.  He was babbling a non-stop monologue that didn’t seem to make much sense.  “He thinks he’s Thomas Jefferson,” the other guy explained.  I’m not sure if he had gotten bopped in the head at the Band Shell like Rennie Davis or if maybe Abbie Hoffman had shared some dope with him.  Anyway, the second guy said, “We gotta get him to safety.”  He mentioned the name of a hotel. 

After delivering Hayden and his pal to safety, we took the cab back to Balbo.  Amy must have paid, because by this time in the week I was down to pocket change.

It was full dark by the time we got back to where we started, on the Balbo sidewalk directly across from the entrance to the Hilton’s Haymarket restaurant.  Bright TV lights shined down from the upper floors of the Hilton, the official convention headquarters hotel where the media and many delegates were encamped.  We could barely make out a line of blue helmets across Michigan.  Protestors surged against them from time to time.

Suddenly, a large phalanx of cops appeared from Wabash and massed on Balbo.  They had their batons out and looked like they meant business.  They marched in military formation right down the street sweeping passed us on the sidewalk and plowed into the mass of demonstrators, clubs flaying.  The cops along Michigan joined the fray.  I am told that another unit hit the crowd on Michigan from the rear.

Chicago's Finest slam into the crowd of demonstrators at Michigan and Balbo.

If you were alive and sentiment in the ‘60s you probably remember the scene, which was broadcast live on network television shooting the action from Hilton windows.  The police violence that had largely been hidden from public view all week was there for the nation to see in all of its savagery.

It was like we were invisible on our side of the street, still in the shadows not illuminated by those lights.  Folks right across from us in front of the Haymarket were not so lucky.  Several of them looked to be delegates, staffers, and others associated with the convention, not protestors.  But a handful of cops waded into them with gusto.  They pushed some through the plate glass windows of the restaurant.

Batons were still flaying as demonstrators began waving and pointing at the TV lights chanting over and over “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”

Some of the wounded began to straggle up our side of the street hugging the building for safety.  We guided a couple of them back up the street toward Wabash where I set up a kind of rough aid station using the firstaid kit on my utility belt and more of my dad’s handkerchiefs.  Amy ferried more to me as I dabbed blood and washed tear gas from eyes until my canteen was dry.  I was soon out of what meager supplies I had.

The National Guard taking up position on Michigan Ave.  At first many demonstrators welcomed them as a relief from the Chicago Police rampage.

Amy and I and our patients were still in danger.  Squads of cops were now breaking off chasing demonstrators.  We told our charges to scatter as they were able.  We helped some get to State Street.  We clamored down the stairs to the subway and headed north.

We evidently were just ahead of adrenalin pumped squads of cops who swept up Wabash and State beating any one they could find, including folks emerging from theaters.

We got off at Diversey and stumbled into the church Movement Center exhausted. Amazingly it was not yet 11 o’clock.  We huddled around the radio trying to find out what was happening.

After we left the National Guard relieved the Chicago Police on Michigan Ave. and began pushing the crowd north.  Greeted at first as practically saviors from the cop rampage.  Bayonets were sheathed and apparently not used.  Swinging rifle butts, however were.

The Battle of Michigan Avenue waned, but cops kept sweeping for stragglers all night.  In the morning they even charged into the hotel where they raided McCarthy headquarters, which had taken in several wounded demonstrators.  They beat everyone in the room.

Next—Winding down, winding up, and getting on with my life.

In My Chicago Summer of '68 A Commotion in Grant Park--Part IIX of a Murfin Memoir

An aerial view of the crowd assembled at the Petrillo Band Shell in Grant Park for the Mobilization rally Wednesday Afternoon.  Amy Kesselman and I were standing near the front out of this shot just to the right.  We were lucky not to get trapped in the seats.

Note—In today’s episode Amy and I make it Grant Park, where a certain literary lion makes an appearance and the Cops go ape, again.

Everyone knew that Wednesday of Convention Week was going to be the Big Day.  That’s when the Democrats down at the International Amphitheater were supposed to select their Presidential candidate.  The press and cameras of the nation were on hand for the event. 

For the first time I had a running buddy when I left the church Movement Center that morning.  My friend Amy Kesselman came with me.  Amy stood a good 5 foot nothing.  She had short black hair, deep brown eyes, and a little mole on her upper lip.  Cute as a bug’s ear.  Hey, I was 19 and noticed such things.  But I would never dream of putting a move on her. She was so intensely serious, in her 20’s and a dedicated SDSer of the community organizing stripe.  Out of my league, for sure.

I met Amy when she was working with 49th Ward Citizens for Independent Political Action (CIPA), in Rogers Park in the spring of ’67.  She gave what would now be called technical advice and support to our high school organization—the fighting Liberal Youth of Niles Township (LYNT) when we put on a program called Up Tight About the Draft? That summer she helped get me credentialed as the youngest voting delegate to the New Politics Convention held at the Palmer House where I met—or at least shook hands with—Rev. Martin Luther King and assorted other movement leaders and/or heroes.  And it was Amy who got me my glamorous slot as babysitter, cook, and dishwasher to the high school kids back at the Movement Center.

We took the train downtown.  It was a very pleasant day, the warmest of the week, but still cool enough for me to wear my denim jacket.  Tuesday the city was under a high haze or light clouds, but that day there was a glorious clear blue sky.  Most of the seating in front of the Band Shell in Grant Park was taken when we got there.  Speechifying had already begun.  The park swarmed with cops in their baby blue helmets, but they seemed to be keeping their distance.

We found a spot just to the right of the seats but within ten feet or so of the stage.  We had a very good vantage point for the program.  Phil Ochs was there to sing again, but this program was more about the speeches.  Boy was there a parade of them.  All of the by now usual suspects—Dellinger, Gregory, Ginsberg, Rubin, and Hayden made appearances.  

Norman Mailer harangued the crowd.   A furious Tom Hayden is on the right with his back turned.

Then Norman Mailer was introduced.  He was the only man in the park in a three-piece suit.  He looked just like the crumpled photo that had been shown to me at that party back at Eileen Claire’s earlier in the summer.  Maybe his mop of curly hair was a little longer, a little hipper.  Mailer had a lot to say.  At least it was stuff we hadn’t heard a couple of times already.  But he was full of himself and droned on.  Tom Haden prowled the edge of the stage not far from me, growing angrier and angrier.  He wanted to move the program along, but Mailer was too into his moment.

While we were listening to speeches in the Park, delegates in the Convention Hall were debating a “Peace Plank” to the Platform proposed by Eugene McCarthy’s forces.  Word got to the rally that it had been soundly defeated.  As the crowd booed and jeered someone started to haul down the flag from a pole on the left of the stage, just across the crowd from us.  I couldn’t get a good view, but evidently a gaggle of cops surged forward to arrest him starting a small melee around the flag.  After he was dragged off others succeed in bringing the flag down and hoisting a shirt smeared with real or fake blood.  It later turned out one of the hoisters was an undercover cop.

The police charge the Bandshell crowd pinning many against the seats.

Realizing that this would bring a full-scale assault the word went out for Mobe marshals to deploy around the crowd.  I never heard the call, which undoubtedly saved my ass.  Most of those in the seats still watching the stage were unaware as the cops closed in from three sides, swinging their clubs.  The line of marshals was pinned against the seats, many beaten senseless, including Rennie Davis.

The crowd stampeded many falling and stumbling amid the seats.  The cops beat them unmercifully where they fell.  Amy and I had room to maneuver and stayed out of harm’s way.  We could see a few objects being thrown back into the police lines, but the battle was one sided.

If you ever saw the movie Medium Cool, you may remember a blurred shot of the red-headed leading lady streaking across the screen in terror.  Haskell Wexler was filming with his cast on the scene, and they were caught up in the attack.

After a few heart pounding minutes, the police retreated dragging their prisoners with them.  People began to attend the wounded.  I dabbed blood from a few broken heads from the collection of my father’s old handkerchiefs that I carried in the old ammo pouch on my utility belt. 

From the stage Dellinger and Hayden tried to regain control of the crowd.  Except that they couldn’t agree on what we should do.  Dellinger wanted to go ahead with the announced big march from the rally to the Amphitheater.  Hayden, recalling the tactics of Lincoln Park, wanted people to break up into small groups to try and infiltrate the city then join up on Michigan Avenue for a march.

Like most of the crowd, I decided to stay with the March.  I figured there was safety in numbers.  The far more adventuresome Amy, I believe, opted to go with the small groups.  Anyway, we got separated.

 

Cops block the attempt to march from the Band Shell to the Amphitheater.  As we waited in the sun for more than an hour top brass and Red Squad dicks prowled the line identifying individuals.   I was surprised when I was pointed out and a Red Squad guy said, "We know who this is."

We lined up on a sidewalk alongside the Band Shell, but headed north, probably to get to the nearest bridge over the Illinois Central tracks.  But we were unable to move.  The police blocked the march for lack of a permit.  Dellinger and others tried to negotiate a deal to let us pass.  We stood in that long line for at least an hour.

After while a small knot of cops, a couple of brass in uniform and hulking Red Squad cops in mufti came down the line.  They had a young guy with them—either a stool pigeon or an undercover agent.  He was picking out people in the line and identifying them as one of the Red Squad goons scribbled furiously.  When they got to me one of says, “Oh we know who this guy is.” I didn’t recognize the guy from either of my two earlier personal encounters with Chicago’s finest. Now I admit with my cowboy hat I stood out, but I was astonished that any one as insignificant as me would even be noticed.  Later I figured that because of the SDS folks, our Movement Center was probably under much more intense surveillance than other places.

After it became apparent that the March was going nowhere, the crowd began to break up to try and find a way out of the park.  This was not easy as most paths were quickly blocked.  A large group of us headed into the park in search of a route.  We were hemmed in at a distance on either side by cops. 

We came on a set of tennis courts each surrounded by 10-foot-high chain link fences.  But there were narrow open doorways and on the far side an opening to what looked like an open road to the north.  Those in the lead plunged into the courts. I dutifully followed but was sure that once a two or three hundred of us were inside the cops would shut the gates and we would be trapped.  I will never know why we weren’t, but it was an immense relief to get out of those cages.

Our first glimpse of the National Guard defending bridges over the railroad tracks from the park to Michigan Ave.  We finally found an open bridge at Jackson.

We finally headed north on Columbus Drive.  We tried to get across the tracks at Congress.  But the first Illinois National Guard troops we had yet seen were blocking the way.  The same was true at Jackson.  A suburban mom type in a respectable sedan drove past us up to the roadblock.  Where she came from or how she got there I don’t know, but she didn’t seem to be a demonstrator.  She had picked up an injured kid who was in the back seat.  She argued with a Guardsman that she just wanted to get the kid to a hospital.  The trooper had none of it.  She tried to inch forward, which is when another Guardsman punctured her front tire with a bayonet.

We kept moving north through the park until we found a bridge unattended.  Somehow, I was near the head of the column, which probably happened when we reversed directions.  We could see something moving south on Michigan Ave.  We surged out of the park, across the bridge, and into what we could not expect.

Next—That evening the whole world was watching.

  

In My Chicago Summer of '68 A Foggy Night--Part VII of a Murfin Memoir

 

Allen Ginsberg chanting in Lincoln Park.  A night session in the fog would be interrupted.

Note—I encountered Alan Ginsberg in a fog and other people get their heads cracked again.

It was a chilly, damp night and pitch dark by the time I made the Lincoln Park after a long walk from the Coliseum and Grant Park with a pit stop at the Mark Twain Hotel.  A thick fog rolled in off the Lake.  The later it got, the thicker it got.  There was no program, no performances, or speech making, at least where I circulated.  The crowd grew, milled around, and tried occasional chants.  The enemy—the police—were invisible behind those fog banks.   Some folks began to build barricades of park benches, picnic tables and trash cans.  That made me nervous.  I moved away from them.

Not long before 11 o’clock, my attention was drawn to drumming and a flickering fire away from the main crowd.  It was further south, close to where La Salle Street turned east-west and formed the edge of the park.  My guess is that we were not far from Cardinal Cody’s mansion.  It was hard to tell.  And my memory might be faulty.

As I got close enough to see what was going on, I found a knot of maybe a couple of hundred people.  At the center, sitting cross legged and looking serene, was Allen Ginsberg chanting “Om, Om, Om, Om, Om Mani Padme Om.”  As he droned, the tension seemed to drain a bit among those surrounding him even as the moments to a sure assault ticked by.

Esquire's "special correspondents" convention week--William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, Gene Genet, and Alan Ginsberg.  Southern drank, Ginsberg tried to bring peaceful vibes by meditation, and the fierce Genet hoped for bloody revolution.

Ginsberg was there with a posse of writers, supposedly as observers and journalists, not demonstrators.  With him that night were the Beat novelist and junkie William Burroughs, the French playwright and novelist Jean Genet—always described in the press as the “hoodlum poet”—and the American satirist Terry Southern.  Of course, I could not have picked any of them out of a line up.  But Ginsberg was easy to recognize.

I learned later from a story that Southern published in Esquire that the band had arrived in the park not long before me after a day of drinking.

I almost forgot about the militants building those barricades behind the banks of fog.  But tension rose as 11 PM passed without apparent police action. 

I’m not sure how much time passed, but eventually I decided to head back to the Movement Center thinking that maybe the cops had decided to pass up a battle in the fog.

Once again, I was wrong. Not long after I was out of the area, teargas mixed with the fog and formations of police attacked the makeshift barricades, clubs swinging.  Ginsberg and company evidently eluded the police, but under cover of that fog some of the worst beatings of the week were administered that night.  Press members, especially photographers, were singled out and attacked so successfully that I know of no pictures taken in the park that night after the attack began.  Eventually the cops once again pushed demonstrators out of the park and into the streets of Old Town.  They continued to fire tear gas in the neighborhood.  When local residents began to offer shelter to fleeing protestors, cops stormed front porches and beat them senseless on their own doorsteps. 

For the second night in a row, I missed the main battle.  When the kids straggled into the Movement Center with fresh horror stories, I began to feel like a deserter under fire. 

Next—Wednesday afternoon at the Band Shell and searching for a breakout from Grant Park.

 

In My Chicago Summer of '68 Out of Lincoln Park at Last --Part VI of a Murfin Memoir

 

Irony of ironies, the Chicago Coliseum was a sports arena and exhibition hall built inside a war trophy--the castle like walls of infamous Libby Prison.  It had hosted political conventions including the 1896 Democratic Convention where William Jennings Bryan delivered his Cross of Gold Speech.  It had housed massive rallies by the German American Bund before World War II and rallies led by both Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Honorable Elijah Mohamed.  Not to mention hockey matches, wrestling, eight-day bicycle races, roller derby, and the Rolling Stones.  Now on its crumbling last legs Abbie Hoffman rented it for his LBJ Unbirthday Party.

Note--Yesterday was my labor day--meeting the Wobbles and walking a wild cat picket line.  Today out of the Park and into the streets for an old-style peace march and rally in a relic.

I woke up sore as hell on Tuesday morning in the Church basement. Even when you are 19, days of fitful sleep on a cold, hard floor will get to you. Not that anyone slept a lot.

Coffee by the gallon in big white enamel pots boiling on the stove was the order of the day. Sugar was in short supply. So was milk that wasn’t powdered. Kids who had never had a cuppa joe black hung on to heavy mugs with both hands.

The big event of the day was LBJ’s Unbirthday Party. This was an Abbie Hoffman extravaganza to be held that afternoon at the old Chicago Coliseum. Big name musicians and speakers were advertised. And since the event was held in a rented and paid for hall, even the most jaded of us expected that it would come off.

The kids scattered either to head for the Coliseum or Lincoln Park. After cleanup, I headed out, too. I jumped on the L at the Diversey Station right across the street from the Church. The trains were still running despite the wildcat CTA strike. I had no sense then that I was scabbing on the strike by hopping on board.

By the time I got to the Coliseum on Wabash south of the Loop and only a block west and a couple south of Police Headquarters at 11th and State, it was already pretty full.

The castle-like stone exterior of the Coliseum had been the facade of the infamous Libby Prison in Virginia where thousands of Northern prisoners of war perished in harsh conditions. After the Civil War, the victorious Yankees  dismantled it stone by stone and re-assembled it after the Chicago Fire on burnt out ground south of the Loop. Inside the walls promoters built a sports arena, which also doubled, ironically enough as a convention hall. Democrats assembled there in 1896 to hear William Jennings Bryan declaim his famous Cross of Gold speech.

But by this time the Coliseum was pretty rundown and only a couple of years away from demolition. It was still used for occasional wrestling matches and as a rock concert venue and rented out on the cheap to outfits who could not afford better digs for their events. Which, of course, fit the Yippies to a tee.

In Hoffman’s view it also had the advantage of putting a large crowd closer to the Convention site at the International Amphitheater at 43rd and Halstead than any permitted demonstration was able to get. That is except for a bunch of old-time pacifists led by the Quakers who did get a permit and staged the only picketing near the Convention Hall all week with nearly 1000 participants on that very day. Neither the Yippies nor the media paid the slightest attention to those pacifists and their demonstration has vanished from memory.

I was last been in the building in April of ’67 when it was the site of a rally following one of the biggest of Chicago’s anti-war marches. I saw Dr. King that day giving one of his early anti-war speeches.

The place was pretty much as I remembered it. Except because it was a cloudy day the sun shining through holes in the roof did not dapple the crowd.

Country Joe McDonald was nearly as ubiquitous that week as Phil Ochs.  He led us in the Fish Cheer at Abbie Hoffman's LBJ Unbirthday Party.

My main memory of the program was Country Joe McDonald and the Fish Cheer:

 

For it’s one, two, three

What are we fighting for?

Don’t ask me I don’t give a Damn!

Next stop is Vietnam

And it’s 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates

Well there ain’t no time to wonder why

Yippie! we’re all gonna die.

 Phil Ochs was there, of course, and the literati, supposedly journalists for Esquire—Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and Terry Southern. How they were going to justify their press credentials after this was anyone’s guess. Hoffman, and Dave Dellinger and Rennie Davis of the Mobe provided the oratory. At the end comedian Dick Gregory took the stage and invited everyone over to his house on the South Side, which would take them by or near the Amphitheater.

                                   

                                 With typical Yippie cheek, a mock Convention was part of LBJ's Unbirthday Party at the Coliseum.

We surged out of the Coliseum and headed south. The vanguard of the 2000 people or so got no more than a couple of blocks before it was turned back by police. Reversing course, the cry was now “Grant Park! Grant Park.!”

We made it to the park and took up the space across from the Convention Headquarters Hotel, the Conrad Hilton on Michigan Ave.  The Hilton also housed the offices of Gene McCarthy’s campaign.  We mingled and chanted on the expanse of lawn in front of the General Logan equestrian statue.  For the first time, some climbed the statue, the site of a later bloody melee.  There were more speeches.  Because TV cameras were set up in the upper windows of the Hilton, for the first time national viewers got a good look at the protests, most of which had been held virtually out of sight of the bulky cameras.

We gathered in Grant Park across from the Conrad Hilton.  Convention Delegates and McCarthy staffers drifted over from the hotel and mingled with the growing crowd.

Curious or supportive McCarthy staffers and volunteers and even some Convention delegates crossed the street to mingle with us.  Other than some tussles at the edges, there was no major confrontation between police and demonstrators.  In fact, the police allowed some demonstrators to remain in Grant Park all night unmolested.

As evening approached, I decided it was time to get back to the Movement Center.

I cut over to State Street and began walking north from there. Pretty soon I was alone. Across the river somewhere I moved over to Clark St. It is a very long hike from the south end of Downtown to the North side. By the time I got to Division I was tired and thirsty. I ducked into the bar of the old Mark Twain Hotel for a beer. Unknown to me, it was a hangout for the remnant of the old Bug House Square radicals, several of whom had gathered from the cheap rooming houses nearby to watch coverage of the convention on the saloon TV. When they saw me, it was not hard to for them to tell I was a demonstrator.

 The Mark Twain Hotel and its bar had seen better days when I stumbled on a nest of old Bug House Square radicals who plied me with Malort.

Three or four of them, yammering in various European accents, surrounded and peppered me with eager questions. They were also glad to stand me for a round or three or four. Beer, brandy, even Malort, once described as “incredibly bitter, with notes of earwax, fire, poison, and decaying flesh” offered to me out of respect for my supposedly manly willingness to face “the damn bulls.” I gagged down the Malort, although I think I would rather have been tear gassed. After an hour or so I stumbled out of the saloon and resumed my journey,

I passed through Lincoln Park that night, although my memory of it is hazy—damn that Malort. That was the evening the Black Panther Bobby Seals showed up just long enough to give a little speech about “resisting the pigs by any means necessary.” That little episode, the only thing he did all week in conjunction with the convention, was enough to get him indicted and eventually tied and gagged in Julius Hoffman’s courtroom.

It was also the evening that 200 clergymen raised a giant cross and prayed, for which the police were more than happy to crack their skulls.  Some witnesses called the attack on the clergy the most brutal of the whole week.

Tomorow--A foggy night in Lincoln Park.

In My Chicago Summer of '68 La Lucha Continu --Part V of a Murfin Memoir

This photo of the IWW General Headquarters on Halstead Street in Chicago was taken in the early 1950's, but it had changed very little when I first saw it in 1968.  Maybe a little more run down.  The two men seated across from each other at the front of the desk Walter Westmann and Fred W. Thompson were there on my visit, a little grayer.

Note—On Monday morning I got a surprise invitation and step into history then join the SDSers on a Transit Workers picket line.

Back at the Movement Center Church on Diversey, the kids stirred on Monday morning.  Some of them, the ones with bumps and bruises and clothes reeking of tear gas, assumed the demeanor of grizzled veterans adopting an air of weary superiority to the uninitiated.  Even the ones who threw up after getting in late from the Battle of Lincoln Park/Old Town the night before were hungry.  Maybe even hungrier than the rest. 

Staffers like me rustled grub.  It was running low and we weren’t sure how to re-stock the larder.  Someone suggested dumpster diving the bakeries and grocery stores.  Maybe a couple of folks went out and tried it.  I can’t remember.

Back at the dumpsters behind the church again that morning, I had another visitor.  This one was quite different from the cops the day before.  She rode up on a battered girl’s Schwinn painted baby blue—almost the exact color of Chicago cop shirts—and festooned with oversize wire baskets on the handlebars and hanging over the rear fenders like saddle bags.  She was old.  The oldest person I may have ever seen back then on a bicycle.  Which in retrospect means that she was somewhere north of 50, but probably not too far.  Her grey hair was cut in a short pixie style and wore turquoise pedal pushers and white canvas shoes. She had a wide smile and bad teeth.

When she spoke, she had a lisp. “Do you guys need any food?” she asked.  “We just had our big annual picnic and there is plenty left over at the Hall.”  I readily acknowledged that she was a godsend.  She invited me to walk her bike back to the Hall to fill the baskets and my arms with the aforementioned food.

Her name was Ruth Sheridan.  I learned later that she came from a big, sprawling family of Irish radicals.  Her two older brothers Jimmie and Jack, tiny men in tweed caps who were former hobos and sometimes jockeys, were two of the last of legendary orators at Chicago’s Bug House Square.  All three of them were Wobblies, members of the storied labor union the Industrial Workers of the World.  We were headed to the IWW General Headquarters on the second floor of a run-down building on Halsted Street near Fullerton over the Assyrian American Restaurant.

We trudged up the stairs and entered a large room with a slightly musty smell.  Up front by three large windows overlooking the street was an island of five mammoth old wooden desks pushed together.  A long clerk’s desk with high stools hugged one wall and file cabinets and old safes the other.  Toward the rear were some antique office machines—an open drum, hand cranked Mimeograph; an Addressograph plate maker operated with a spinning wheel to select letter and a cast iron treadle to punch them into plates, and a machine to stamp the plate through thick ribbons onto envelopes or sheets of paper.  I learned that all had been purchased by Big Bill Haywood himself and were reluctantly returned to the union by the Feds after busting up the offices in the 1919 Red Scare Raids.  There was a large table where the Industrial Worker was laid out and later wrapped in manila sheets stamped with addresses and pasted for mailing.

A row of glass fronted books shelf units partitioned the front of the Hall from the rear, where there was a kitchen, a table, a cot for visiting Wobs, and a barely functioning bathroom.

Three men sat at the desks.  All of them well on in years.  One practically leapt from his desk to come and greet me.  “Welcome, Fellow Worker!” he said as he pumped my hand vigorously as if he expected to see me.  In retrospect, it is clear that he did.  He was a small man with a gleaming bald head and fringe of gray hair.  He introduced himself as Carl Keller—seemed to be a lot of Carl’s that week—the General Secretary-Treasurer of the international union. 

Sitting opposite to him was a large man with rumpled shirt and a shock of gray hair. He had a cigarette hand rolled in yellow wheat paper dangling from his lips.  When he smiled he displayed a snaggle of bad, yellow teeth.  He did not get up.  It turned out he lost a leg at the thigh hopping a freight in Omaha about 1929 and had come to Chicago to work at General Headquarters.  His name was Walter Westmann and he had served as General Secretary or his current position as Bookkeeper and Office Manager most of the years since.  I learned that he kept his spare wooden leg and a broken Lugar locked up in the smaller of the two safes.

This photo taken in the mid-70's shows Mike Hargis, Lesslie Fish and Fred Thompson at a Chicago Branch social.  By then Fred was a mentor and close friend, a man with a huge impact on my life.

At the smallest desk, nearest the window was a youthful looking man with an impressive high salt and pepper flat top haircut and bushy eyebrows.  He had a soft, high voice and the mien of a scholar.  That was Fred W. Thompson, editor of the Industrial Worker, a man destined to play a huge role in my life.

When the three old men discovered that not only was I a demonstrator and a student, but a genuine industrial worker myself, they got truly excited.  For the next two hours they spun tales of the fighting union.  They pointed at the oil portrait of Joe Hill staring down at us from a wall above the clerk’s desk and filled my hands with red pamphlets with covers by Ralph Chaplin and back issues of the Industrial Worker, then an eight-page broadsheet monthly newspaper.

All I knew about the IWW was from a paragraph or so in a high school history text that pictured Wobblies as dangerous radicals and virtual terrorists and what I had gleaned from studying Clarence Darrow to prep for a high school production of Inherit the Wind.  I was intrigued at first and after an hour or two enchanted.  This seemed like just the kind of organization I was looking for.  Too bad, I thought, that it was just a remnant of these old men.

After a while Ruth reminded me of the errand.  We went to the kitchen and began packing up.  There was a good deal left from that picnic—or perhaps they had run out to buy it just to lure a prospect like me into their lair.  There were strings of butcher shop hot dogs, pounds of ground beef wrapped in white paper and tied with string, packages of bologna and salami, two big bricks of cheese, bags of buns and sandwich bread, paper cartons of potato salad and cold slaw from the deli, industrial sized cans of Amour’s Pork and Beans, and a huge jar of pickled eggs—a delicacy I was fairly sure had never been sampled by any of the kids back at the church.  We filled paper grocery bags and then filled the baskets of Ruth’s bicycle with them.  I was given a paper carton full of stuff to carry.  Carl and Fred waved us goodbye at the front door as we made our way the few blocks back to Diversey.

Black CTA bus drivers were on a wildcat strike during convention week.  Here picketers try to convince a driver not to take his bus out.

Back at the church unpacking the food, I discovered that I was not the only one with labor on his mind.  The SDSers were planning a field trip.

Most people forget that there was a CTA strike going on during Convention Week.  Actually, it was a wildcat strike.  Most Black bus drivers and some motormen had walked out as much to protest the failure of their union, Amalgamated Transit Union, to strongly represent them in grievance procedures against the CTA as against the agency itself.  An organization called the Concerned Transport Workers called the strike after 143 of their members were suspended for a job action and had received no support from their union.  The strike shut down most bus routes, particularly on the South and West Sides, but also on the North Side.  Most rail service was only spottily affected.

The strike was a resumption of an earlier 5 day protest walk-out and started on August 25, coincidental with the Convention.  There was some thought that despite the inconvenience to city residents and the embarrassment that a strike in “The City That Works” would mean during a period of national attention, that Mayor Daley might not have been totally displeased.  The disruption of bus service made it much more difficult for protestors to move freely around the city.  It also might have been a deterrent to Daley’s greatest fear—that Blacks, who had rioted the summer before and again when Martin Luther King was assassinated, would pour out of the ghettos and join the protestors in a virtual insurrection.

At any rate, the SDSers were eager to forge ties with both the Black community and with left wing labor.  Word went out that the strikers were having a hard time maintaining picket lines on the North and Northwest side due to mass arrests of strikers.  Given the morning I had just experienced, I was happy to go with the SDS folk to the picket line.

We piled into somebody’s VW Bus.  I didn’t know the city well enough then to tell where we were going, except that it was somewhere north and west.  We piled out at a bus barn somewhere within sight of an expressway, don’t ask me where.  There were a dozen nervous picketers on the line and signs stacked against a chain link fence.  We took up our signs and joined the line.  Other SDS members from other sites joined.

The picketers were glad for the support, but more than a little bewildered by the sudden appearance of a bunch of White kids.  And more than a little reluctant to join in chants like “2,4,6,8 Organize and Smash the State!”  I was a little squeamish about that one myself. 

A Chicago Police Department Squadrol or Paddy Wagon typical of the time on a colder day.

Our presence attracted extra police attention.  Squadrols and lots of baby blue helmets began to line the street across the street from us.

Push came to shove at shift change.  The cops warned us to keep moving.  The strikers wanted us to mass at the gate to prevent mostly white drivers from breaking the strike.  This is where arrests were common.  That day there was a good deal of pushing and shoving.  A line of cars pushed slowly through the crowd and into the welcome of a mass of CTA security at the gate.

But before things came to a head, the squadrols began to pack-up and leave.  They evidently were needed elsewhere, probably along the Lake Front for another round of battle there.  There were no arrests that afternoon at our gate and after most of the police left, cars began to turn back rather than run the gauntlet of pickets.

After it was over there were high fives and hugs all around.  We felt great.  We piled back into the VW bus.  On the ride back to the Church, the SDSers were scornful of the Yippies and the Mobe.  By making common cause with labor, they said, we were making the real revolution.

Next—A foggy night with Alan Ginsberg.