In My Chicago Summer of '68 Preliminary Maneuvers --Part III of a Murfin Memoir

 

Training for the Japanese snake march in Lincoln Park the Saturday before the convention.  The maneuver was never used and may have been intended to psych out the Chicago Police closely watching the proceedings. 

Note—In our second instalment of this memoir series, the Summer led up to the overtures of the street opera to follow.

On Saturday I made my way to the city, just with just an old gas mask bag stuffed with a couple of changes of shirts, socks, and underwear; a bedroll tied up with clothesline; and a little gear to be described later.

First stop was the south end of Lincoln Park, the big open meadow by the softball diamonds and near the path to the pedestrian overpass of Lake Shore Drive to the North Avenue Beach. You know the place.

This contemporary aerial view of the South end of Lincoln Park still shows the general lay out as it was in 1968 the open area below the softball diamonds which is now a soccer field was the open meadow where demonstrators gathered and trained the weekend before the convention. 

According to the flyers the guys at the Seed gave me, there would be intensive training going on there for the week ahead. In fact, some folks had been out there for two or three days already practicing street demonstration maneuvers. There were already a few hundred there that sunny afternoon.

They were all practicing a kind of snake march perfected by Japanese radicals, who were famous the world over for their disciplined and aggressive street tactics. People set up four or five abreast. The front ranks held a bamboo pole tightly at their waists. Rank upon rank followed, each clasping tightly to the waists of the ones in front of them. The stepped heavily in unison shout/chanting “Wasshoi! Wasshoi! Wasshoi!” Long columns moved in swooping lines across the field. I was told that the chant meant something like “Heave Ho! Heave Ho! Heave Ho!”

The object of this maneuver was to build up such compact energy that the marchers could crash through any police line. And I am sure it worked great for the highly disciplined Japanese with their matching white headbands inscribed with radical slogans. It was a lefty Banzai charge.

Even as I watched the spectacle unfold before me, I had my doubts that stoned hippies and nerdy college kids could really pull it off. My guess was that Chicago’s Finest would break that charge with about as much carnage as General Picket’s ill-advised foray at Gettysburg.

But being game for anything, I latched on to the tail of a passing column and gave it my best. Being one of the clumsiest human beings on the planet, I was unable to maintain the rhythmic alternation of feet. I was soon snarling with those in front, to the side, and then behind me as more joined in. Panting and working up an unwelcome sweat, about ten minutes into the exercise I tripped and brought the whole tail of the snake collapsing on top and around me.

Unharmed, but ashamed I slunk away. The line reformed and Wasshoied their way on.

Despite all the attention to this training, during the week that followed I never once saw any one attempt to use the march on the street. Maybe I missed something. Or maybe the whole thing was just to get into the heads of the many plain clothes and uniformed cops who were watching the proceedings.

I did have a more specific training purpose that day. My friend Amy Kesselman, an SDSer who was one of the Rogers Park community organizers who helped out my old high school group, the Liberal Youth of Niles Township (LYNT)—which by the way had to be the wimpiest acronym in radical history—had signed me up to be a demonstration marshal.

In the big anti-war marches organized by the Mobilization Against the War in Viet Nam (the Mobe) and its successor the New Mobe parade marshals like the young man on the right in a dark jacket with an armband made perfect sense to keep the parade orderly, moving, and separated from the police.  I had signed up to be a marshal, but our role in the unconventional demonstrations coming up would be very different.

Marshals were common on all the big peace marches. They generally marched ahead and to the sides of the main bodies. Their jobs were to keep the marchers moving in good order, discourage any break-out of violence, and act as a buffer with the cops. For the Mobilization folks who envisioned that the demonstrations in the upcoming week would pretty much resemble those peaceful marches this made perfect sense.

After wandering around for a bit, I found a knot of people who turned out to be Marshals and their trainers. Our instructions were amazingly simple. On Sunday night, the first night when large numbers of people were likely to be in the park attempt to camp for the night, we were to place ourselves so that when the police tried to close and clear the Park, we would form a skirmish line between them and the protestors. The idea was to safely evacuate the Park onto the streets of Old Town. What would happen then was a matter of some disagreement. The Yippies wanted to “take it to the pigs on the streets.” The Mobilization and SDS people wanted the crowd to disperse safely to re-assemble for planed marches later in the week.

I asked if we were to get arm bands or badges to identify ourselves as marshals. The trainers looked at me as if I had just arrived from Venus. No, we were told, that would just make us targets for the Pigs. But the People would supposedly magically understand who we were by our actions. Well, okay then.

The Methodist Church of the Holy Covenant on Diversey housed the Movement Center for high school students where I was supposed to be a monitor and mentor to the kids sleeping on the basement floor.  It is still an activist church to this day and is now festooned with that bright mural.

By then it was late afternoon. It was time for me to check into my Movement Center. Movement Centers were expected to provide housing and food for demonstrators. There were several scattered across the city, each designated for an interest group or organization. My friend Amy again set me up with one for high school students which was organized by the SDS folk. Since I was just a year out of high school, I was supposed to be a monitor and mentor—as well as a cook and babysitter.

My Movement Center was at the Methodist Church of the Holy Covenant Church at Diversey near Sheffield, a fair hike up Lincoln Avenue from the south end of the Park. When I got there, kids were already unrolling sleeping bags on the basement floor. I found a place to stash my bedroll and was put immediately to work in the kitchen making dinner—opening industrial size cans of pork and beans, boiling weenies, and slapping together peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Someone brought out a portable record player. Simon and Garfunkel were playing.

I got to meet my fellow monitors, pleasant but very hard core SDSers. They were looking for opportunities to educate the youth. The youth were looking for places to smoke dope and sleep with each other. 

Ted Gold, was an SDS volunteer at the movement center who was particularly friendly to me. Later he and two others including Diane Oughton who was also there would become Weathermen and manage to blow themselves up making bombs in a Manhattan brownstone. This photo was taken in New York shortly before he was killed.

I talked the longest to a guy named Ted Gold from Columbia University. He would go on to be a key figure in the Weatherman faction in the breakup of SDS. In March of 1970 Gold and Diana Oughton, a pretty blond girl who was also at the Movement Center, were among four who would blow themselves up making bombs in a New York Brownstone. But they seemed pleasant enough that night and worlds away from making explosives.

About 11 o’clock some kids drifted in from the Park. There had been some scuffling and rock throwing when police closed the Park and tear gas was used on the streets of Old Town.

Things were beginning.

Next—Sunday in the Park with Patrick. The shit hits the fan.

In My Chicago Summer of '68 I Go to a Party--Part I of a Murfin Memoir

Special note--Due to pilot error Part II of my memoir series about Chicago in the Summer of 1969 was posted yesterday.  Here is what should have kicked off the mini-series.  Apologies to all who were confused or who were alert enough to notice that something was amiss.

The Skokie Swift, derided as the Tooterville Trolley, pulls into Howard Street in Chicago where I transferred to the L for my expedition to an exotic party.

Note—It has been 58 years since the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and all the tumult in the streets.  The whole world was watching, briefly, a slice of police mayhem embedded itself in fading tribal memories.  

This seems a good time to resurrect a look back on the events of 1968 by an awfully young and naïve boy with shiny ideals and not much sense.  I have run this series of memory stories before.  These which will run for the next several days, have been somewhat buffed and edited.  

I Go To a Party

It was the summer of 1968.  I was back at the folks’ house in Skokie—for the last time—after my first year at Shimer College and working on the assembly line at Koldwave/Heat Exchangers, an air conditioning plant.   It was a time between times, a time of waiting for that thing that would change—I was sure of it—everything.  That “thing” was the Democratic National Convention in August and the massive street protests that we all knew were coming.

One warm evening I took the Skokie Swift and the L down into the City for a party.  It was my first Chicago party.  People my own age with an apartment of their own in the gritty, mysterious city!  Eileen Claire was quite beautiful and brilliant.  She played cello and read French.  We had gone to different Niles Township Highs Schools—she to East and I to West.  We met in LYNT (Liberal Youth of Niles Township) and worked together on a program about the draft, Uptight About the Draft? which was inscribed on the flyer in San Francisco psychedelic lettering.  She pushed the rest of us to be more militant.

Now she had the second floor of a three flat on Bissell Street, not far from the Armitage El.  The building backed up against the tracks.   Trains roared by at eye level to the back porch.  Ramshackle furniture was scattered around.  Posters—Janis Joplin’s peek-a-boo breast and demonstration calls—were tacked to the grimy walls.  There was a hole in the wall in the bathroom and the toilet rocked when you sat on it.  Beautiful. Bohemian. Dangerous.

A three flat on Bissel like this one would now sell for far more than a million dollars.  In 1968 it was seedy, rundown, cheap, and in a gang-infested neighborhood--perfect for an aspiring revolutionary just starting out.

The apartment was jammed when I got there.  Claire waved at me from across a room, smoking intently and engaged in an animated conversation with a knot of earnest young men. She pointed to a keg in galvanized tub in the kitchen.  I think that was as close to communication with me as she got all evening. 

I couldn’t blame her. Compared to the sophisticates here, I was sure that I must be something of an embarrassing relic from the past, someone casually invited pro-forma without any expectation that he would actually show up.

My appearance was a combination of naiveté, nerdiness, and an ardent yearning for bohemia.  Black Wellington boots.  Western cut jeans from Monkey Wards where I still shopped for huskies   A frayed white short sleeve dress shirt—my uncle had given me a drawer full of them—past prime salesman crispness, pocket stuffed with pens and an address book stuffed with scrap notes of lofty ideas.  A red bandana knotted to the side of the throat.  The first bloom of an orange goatee, sideburns down to the jaw line.  Hair full behind the ears and just a tad over the collar hoping for Byronic heroism.  Thick horn rim glasses fit for a middle aged accountant from Queens.  All topped off by a dingy white Open Road Stetson, front brim snapped down, sides curled. A symphony in incongruity.

The crowd skewed slightly older than I—college juniors and seniors, a smattering of graduate students, even a sprinkling of  hip young junior professors, the kind who mixed high minded idealism with sleeping with adoring students.  Some had dropped out and were now organizing the masses.  The men could be recognized by their uniform—blue chambray work shirts, sleeves rolled up just below the elbow, jeans, and engineer boots, sometimes a Greek fisherman’s or newsboy cap. The girls wore peasant blouses or loose t-shirts, full skirts with bare legs or jeans, hair long or loosely tied behind the ears, scrubbed faces defiant of make-up.

This was not a crowd of hippies or flower children.  Even amid the flowing alcohol and passed joints there was an air of seriousness, of conspiracy, of danger. Eileens’s friends were self-described militants, SDS, and Communists.  Some of them I would later come to recognize as movement heavies.  Eileen herself, in just a couple of years, would ascend to  leadership in a Maoist sect which would briefly hold the official American China franchise, and helped litter radical America with vinyl covered Quotations from Chairman Mao, blue People’s Army caps with red stars, and garish red and gold Mao buttons.

In  a few short years Eileen Claire would rise to co-chair of a Maoist sect that would briefly hold the official China franchise in the U.S. and would help make Mao buttons and plastic-covered Little Red Books ubiquitous.

That night was the first time I heard the word revolution bandied about as if it were the most natural thing in the world, not something to do with Redcoats and embattled farmers in tri-corn hats, not something that erupted in exotic foreign places like St. Petersburg, but something that we were going to do right here, right now, next week at the latest.

I was telling folks that summer that I was a socialist.  But then I would expound on my firm belief that what American needed was a Fabian Movement of intellectuals that could make socialism respectable to the middle classes.  Mention of this theory in these circles drew only eye rolling, dismissive snorts and long, jargon filled lectures on abandoning bourgeois sentimentality, casting my lot with the proletariat, and recognizing the central role of the vanguard party in creating a real revolution.  Evidently they were less impressed by George Bernard Shaw than by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

When they learned that I actually, if only temporarily, worked in a real factory, something that very few, if any, of them had ever actually done, I was sort of patted on the head with an expectation that I would learn about exploitation.  A couple of them asked if I would take red bannered newspapers to work with me and pass them out to my comrades.  I didn’t think that anything with a huge hammer and cycle on it was apt appeal to the hillbillies, Poles, Mexicans and Blacks who sweltered with me on the air conditioning assembly line.

Under the circumstances, I soon drew apart.  I drank scotch, which I believed was the official beverage of the aspiring young writer and caught a hit on whatever joints might come my way.  And I watched.

I was sitting on a sagging couch, squeezed among strangers acutely into my buzz when a large man with a bushy, bright red beard pulled up a milk crate in front of us and fished a crinkled clipping from his pocket.  “Here,” he said thrusting it at a girl sitting on an arm of the sofa, “Can anyone tell me who this is?”

When it was passed down to me, I saw a clipping on glossy paper, the photo image sharp.  Probably from a newsmagazine.  In it a portly middle-aged man in a three piece suit with a receding mop of mildly unruly hair gestured emphatically with one hand and clutching a large mug with the other.  The photo was taken from a low angle, looking up at a platform or stage.

We all studied the picture for a moment, trying to focus our un-focused brains.  A couple of folks thought it might be Alan Ginsberg.  But he had no beard, and no one could imagine Ginsberg in a suit.  One, sensing an air of menace in the man’s scowling expression, was sure it was a Republican Senator.  But in the end, we had to give up.

Red Beard waited a moment.  “It’s Norman Mailer!  With the famous cup of bourbon the night before the March on the Pentagon!”

I searched for years for the photo of Norman Mailer with the cup of bourbon I was shown at the party and have never found it.  The next morning he was at the head of the March on the Pentagon in October 1967 with poet Robert Lowell, labor and anti-war activist Sidney Lens, and Dr. Benjamin Spock at the far right among other notables

Mailer, I was informed, had taken to the stage and launched into a long, incoherent rant.  The next day he was busted on the march and spent an un-Thoreau like night in jail.  All of this had happened the previous October while I was getting used to being stoned every night at Shimer.  It was news to me.

But I did know Mailer.  Who didn’t. He was one of a handful of American writers who were more famous than their books at a time when serious writers had some of the same air of celebrity about them as movie stars.  In fact, these writers seemed to move in the same orbits as movie stars.  Hadn’t Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe?  And didn’t Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and George Plimpton breezily pop up on Johnny Carson’s couch?  And Mailer was bigger than any of them, the most famous American writer since Hemmingway and just as pugnacious.

So, I was impressed that Mailer, drunk or not, had thrown his lot in with war protestors and radicals.  I had been vaguely aware that the writer was anti-establishment.  His journalism appeared not only in glossy mainstream magazines but in hipper journals.  Like a lot of folks my age, I read Why Are We in Vietnam? and was a bit perplexed by the connection of a Texas adolescent’s Alaska hunting trip to the title.  I gathered it was an allegory.

I knew Mailer from my mother’s wide collection of best sellers, mostly in paperback editions.  She prided herself on keeping up with good books.  And in the days when the best seller lists often were dominated by many of the authors destined for admission to the pantheon great American literature, those old, dog-eared Pocket Books and Cardinal Editions provided me with a deeper and better education than I ever received in high school English.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Ferber, Pearl S. Buck (these older writers in cheap book club hard cover editions), Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Robert Penn Warren, Faulkner, James Jones.

My father’s books were another thing entirely.  Slender pulp genre shoot-‘em-ups, heavy on westerns, hard boiled detectives, and war stories. 

But The Naked and the Dead may have been one of the few books both of my folks may have read.  It was serious literature and a rip-snorting yarn, even if it did take more than one night to read.

Of course, I read it, too.  It was one of the books that changed my impression of war from the brutal glory of the old John Wayne movies I saw on TV, to something more personal and ambivalent.  Without The Naked and the Dead, and a handful of other books I might have been swept along by enthusiasm for a good ol’ martial crusade in Vietnam.  Certainly, my earliest impulses had been in that direction.  But these dusty old paperbacks readied me to view things differently.

That early Mailer, not the current radical, had primed my pump.

Tomorrow—Getting ready for the Big Event.

 

 

In My Chicago Summer of '68 The Run Up to the Big Event--Part II of a Murfin Memoir

 

Roosevelt University on Michigan Avenue in the Auditorium Building was home of the Free University where I took a class with Staughton Lynd every Wednesday.

Yesterday—A party in the big city set the stage for a radical adventure.

The party at Eileen Claire’s was not the only time I got into the city that summer. I was weekly visitor. I signed up for a class at something called the Free University at Roosevelt University. Every Wednesday I made the long trip via the Skokie Swift and the L to take a class with Staughton Lynd.

Lynd was a pretty big deal in those days in left wing and academic circles—a prolific writer who lost his job at Yale for his activism and outspoken opposition to the war, leader of a delegation to Hanoi, advisor to SDS, and pal of Tom Hayden. He relocated to Chicago to give community organizing a go.

Activist/scholar Staughton Lynd was my instructor at the Free University.  Seen here in a Vietnam war protest in Chicago with Dave Dellinger of The Progressive (left) and civil rights organizer Robert Moses (right).

To tell the truth, I remember more about those long train rides, reading Ramparts, Evergreen, The Progressive and other lefty magazines than I do about the classes. That is until the one where Lynd suggested that we try to document the demonstrations planned for the upcoming Democratic National Convention as “participant observers.” That got my attention. One after another students volunteered for this or that demonstration, march or program—mostly serious and sober actions by recognized liberal and radical groups or Clean for Gene McCarthy supporters. But no one picked the obvious one.

“Doesn’t anyone want to do the Yippies?” Lynd asked. Immediately my hand shot up. I’m not sure why. I didn’t know much about them except that the press was outraged, City Hall was in a near panic at being invaded by hordes of drug crazed hippies who were probably planning to put LSD in the water supply, and it sounded like fun. Looking back, it is possible that my classmates may have known something I didn’t.

A week or so later on a hot night, I made my way to the one place in Chicago where I knew any Yippies could likely be found—the offices of the underground newspaper the Seed then on LaSalle Street just off of North Avenue within blocks of ground zero for the staging area for the Yippies in Lincoln Park.

                            A pre-convention cover of the the Seed promoting the arrival of the Yippies.

The door was wide open to a dimly lit, cluttered and chaotic office a few steps below street level. Two dudes with suitably long and unkempt hair were sweating over a table. “Hi!” I said, “I’m looking for Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin.” I was greeted with incredulous stares and deep suspicion.

Let’s review how I looked that summer—the frayed white short-sleeve salesman-cast-off shirt, the store brand jeans with the cuffs turned up, the heavy Wellington work boots, the natty red kerchief knotted at the throat, scroungy orange goatee, thick horn rim glasses, topped by a battered white Stetson. I looked like I may have just graduated from the J. Edgar Hoover Academy for Stool Pigeons and Spies.

“They’re not here,” one of the guys said without volunteering any information on their whereabouts or how I could contact them. I could have been staring at both of them that very minute and I wouldn’t have known it.

A brief but cool conversation followed. I was beginning to detect full blown drug induced paranoia from them. But they did give me some handbills and other information about the publicly announced plans for Convention week, all of which relied on free camping in the Park.

Armed with this intelligence, I retreated to Skokie to contemplate my next move.

*** 

The Friday before the Convention was my last day at the air conditioner plant in Skokie. Joe, the Iranian foreman knew that I was not due back at college for two weeks and was put out that I was leaving early. I spent the summer covering for vacationing workers in different parts of the plant and rotated through sub-assembly, polishing and buffing, coil making, and the final assembly line. Despite a few mishaps, I had apparently done well enough to be asked to come back to work over my six-week semester break.

                    Among my duties at the Skokie air conditioning plant when I worked on the final assembly line was snapping this logo onto the nearly completed units.

My co-workers viewed my plans to leave work to participate in what was being advertised in the hysterical press as a planned riot with some amusement. Ralph, the chief inspector, a middle-aged man with a grey brush cut and the only Hitler mustache I ever saw on a live human being, had opinions on the limits of free speech. He considered himself the plant intellectual. Because we both read books at lunch time, he had taken a reluctant shine to me, even though I may have been the cause of more air conditioners being rejected than any other worker.

On the whole I got a warm send off from most of the guys. Buckwheat—I’m not making that nickname up folks—the skinny black dude with the pomade hair, pegged pants and Cab Calloway mustache who ruled the tool room. Mingo, the grinning little Mexican dude and gang banger proud as punch of his club sweater who was always asking me to line him up with hippy chicks. Roy, the young hillbilly who introduced me to the joys of listening to country hits on WJJD as we sweated in sub-assembly. The assorted Pollacks and D.P.s on the assembly line. They were all so cheerful that I suspected there was a pool on the date and time of my demise.

Next—I come to the City the weekend before the Convention starts, become a Marshall, get some training in Lincoln Park, and settle into a church basement Movement Center

The U.S. Finally Paid Reparation to War Time Internees Too Little Too Late.

 

From George Takei's graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy.

On August 10, 1988, more than 45 years after the start of internment, the United States government authorized reparations payments to Japanese-Americans detained during World War II.

President Ronald Reagan signing the bill apologizing for World War II internment of Japanese-Americans and authorizing largely symbolic reparations.

Ten weeks after the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering 120,000 people of Japanese descent—including 75,000 American citizens—into internment camps. The announced purpose was to protect the West Coast from sabotage and collusion with the enemy, but the perceived threat was based more in racial prejudice than military necessity, as the great majority German-American and Italian-American residents were allowed to remain in their homes undisturbed despite the large pre-war German-American Bund with its openly pro-Nazi rallies and proven networks of spies and saboteurs.  

For the length of the war, Americans of Japanese descent and Japanese nationals—many of denied American citizenship based on racially discriminatory quotas—were imprisoned in makeshift internment camps throughout the West and as far east as Arkansas. Interned people were forced to abandon their homes, farms, and businesses, or sell them at rock bottom prices, losing economic stability and generational wealth. The 1944 U.S. Supreme Court decision Korematsu v. U.S., upheld Roosevelt’s executive order.

A member of the Nesei 442nd Regiment on guard in France in 1945. 

Despite the trauma the great majority of the detainees remained loyal to America and thousands of their young men volunteered for service in the Armed Forces.  That included members of the 442nd Infantry Regiment made up of Nisei—second generation American citizens—that became the most decorated unit of it size during the war for its hard-fighting service in Italy and France

After the war, Japanese-Americans returned home to distrust and resentment. Wartime internment traumatized an entire generation of people and continues to impact their descendants.

Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, survivors of internment organized to demand that the United States government address this history.

After the war the detainees were often unwanted back in their home communities. 

In 1980, Congress established a commission to investigate the internment camps and their legacy. The report decried Japanese internment as a “grave injustice” and acknowledged that the internment was fueled by “racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

The decade-long efforts of Japanese American civil rights advocates were realized when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided an apology and compensation of $20,000 to living survivors of Japanese internment. An estimated 50,000 people interned during the war died before the reparation act’s passage.

Although Japanese-Americans were gratified by the acknowledgement of the grave injustice done to them and for the formal apology, the cash settlements were a drop in the bucket compared to actual losses.  

A one-day evacuation sale at a Japanese-American owned business.  Many did not even have the time or opportunity to even attempting to get some value for their abandoned property. 

Hard working and industrious Japanese had some of the finest farms on the West Coast, prosperous businesses in towns and cities as well as high rates of home ownership.  All of that caused resentment and envy by their neighbors, many of whom swooped in to claim their property legally or by winked-at outright theft.  A mere $20,000 came nowhere near making up those losses, especially considering inflation.  And by denying recompense to the tens of thousands who had already died, their heirs were effectively cheated as well.

In the decades after the apology and reparations, a public consensus grew that the internment was one of the blackest episodes in American history.  But new camps—and proposals to actually use former Japanese internment camps—sprang up like mushroomed under the first Cheeto-in-Charge iteration. Trump apologists, right-wing ideologues, and outright White nationalists—not only defend the camps but exulted in them.  And they assailed the birthright citizenship of the Nisei generations.  The Japanese like the millions of Latino American citizens are derided as alien stains on White America.

lways ready to play a xenophobic hand, first term Trump publicly hyped an executive order to end birthright citizenship.  This Voice of America graphic made clear why he couldn't follow through and might be why VOA slashed and muzzled.

Trump redux acted to end birthright citizenship by fiat—executive order—and many MAGA cultists cheered it on.  The Courts have consistently denied that he had the right or power to alter the terms of citizenship laid out in the Constitution. 

All because we are already forgetting the lessons of Manzanar.

A Prayer for Ordinary People Revisited—Murfin Verse from 2012

  

Norm Siegel, The Old Man, Dave Drayer, Andy Cohen, Cheryl Niemo, and Andy Andrick led the audience of Just Plain Folk--Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things in singing Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land. 

Fourteen years ago, it poured rain here in McHenry County.  It came down in buckets in what was a very soggy month.  That put a crimp in plans for an evening folk mini-festival grounds of what was then called the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry and is now known as Tree of Life UU Congregation.  Undeterred, we moved the program into the sanctuary and a little more than 50 folk slogged through the storm anyway.

The program, grandiosely named Just Plain Folk—Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things, was a benefit for our Compassion for Campers (C4C) program for homeless PADS clients and despite the gloomy weather raised enough money to keep it afloat through the rest of the season until the seasonal church-based overnight shelters resumed operations in October.  By the way, that program is now in its seventeenth year of operation and is humming along nicely serving an often abused and neglected unhoused population year-round at the McHenry County Resource Center (MCHC) at the McHenry County Mental Health Board offices, 620 Dakota Street in Crystal Lake.  

 

The program included Appalachian and early country music by The Siblings featuring singer Cheryl Niemo, Dave Drayer on the stand-up bull fiddle, and Andy Andrick on guitar; Chicago folk scene vet Norman “Mad Dwag” Siegel who did a set heavy on singer-songwriter material from the ‘60s, and Memphis based traditional bluesman Andy Cohen who headlined with a tight hour set that was a virtual clinic on great guitar picking and roots blues.

Then with all of the musicians on stage and the audience on their feet we closed with a Centennial birth year salute to Woody Guthrie by singing This Land is Your Land with all of the subversive, seldom sung verses.

At the beginning of the evening, I snuck in one of my poems.  Yeah, I know it wasn’t fair, but I was up there as emcee and had the microphone. The piece was written for the occasion and the theme of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

 

                                                    Caught in the act of committing poetry 

To tell you the truth, I had forgotten I wrote it until I stumbled on an old post about the event.  It struck me, he said immodestly, as not half bad.  And as a challenge.

My Prayer Tonight

A Poem for Just Plain Folk—Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things

August 9, 2012

 

Let me be worthy of those

whose names have been forgotten.

 

Those who stood up,

            stood out

            and stood down.

 

Those whose hands bled,

            brows sweated

            and backs bent.

 

Those who nurtured,

            nursed

            and loved without question.

 

Those who questioned,          

            created

            and cared.

 

Those who offered hands up,

            hand outs,

            and hands on deck when it mattered.

 

Those who saw far,

            saw clearly

            and saw what need be done.

 

Those who sang,

            who danced,

            and laughed despite it all.

 

Those of faith,

            free thought,

            and far horizons.

 

Oh, Greater Mystery,

            make me worthy of them all.

 

—Patrick Murfin