My Chicago Summer of ’68 Part V—La Lucha Continua

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 cops’ shirts—and festooned with oversize wire baskets on the handle bars 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 good bye 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.

 
 

The Seed and I a Murfin Memoir —1972 A Wobbly Officer

 A Wobbly in action--protesting a CTA rate hike to satisfy bond holders.  The fare jumped to 35 cents and a 10 cent transfer.  I'm on the left of the picket line outside the First National Bank of Chicago, a major bond holder which pushed the CTA board.    I was Branch Secretary.  It was 1971  Note the full hippy look including a fringed sash and vest.  A photo of this demo ended up on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times.

In January of 1972  I backed into the job of General Secretary Treasurer of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  After my predecessor, Lionel Bottari, declined to run for another term, no one with the required 3 years membership in good standing filed to run in the election of officers the previous fall.  Old timers like Walter Westmann and my mentor Fred Thompson who had passed the office between them for nearly 30 years were adamant that it was time for a younger generation to take leadership in the union which was growing and more active than it had been in years.  But the pay was lousy—$75 a week—which made it difficult for anyone with family responsibilities to take the job or those from outside Chicago to uproot their lives. 

I was then Chicago Branch Secretary and supporting myself at various odd jobs including offset pressman, custodian, and cook.  I actually spent most of my time at the office and hall on Lincoln Avenue that the Branch shared with General Headquarters.  I lived right around the corner on Montana Street with Cecelia Joseph, who I had met during the Three Penny Cinema Strike a year before.  I thought I could do the job, but had joined in the summer of 1969 and was not eligible to run at the time of the election.  Instead, I ran for the General Executive Board with the understanding that the GEB under the by-laws would fill the vacancy by appointment. 

So at age 22 I settled in behind Big Bill Haywood’s enormous old desk with an oil portrait of Wobbly bard and martyr Joe Hill staring down on me from the wall opposite my chair.  Luckily, I had help.  One-legged, snaggle-toothed Walt Westmann with years of experience and a bemused attitude toward the scraggly whipper-snapper in a cowboy hat who was suddenly his boss stayed on was bookkeeper, sparing me from responsibilities wildly outside my capacity and experience.   Fred Thompson came by almost daily and was willing to share is wisdom and experience and he fielded the many inquiries we got concerning the IWW’s dramatic and colorful history.  Industrial Worker editor Carlos Cortez with whom I worked closely came by every afternoon after his shift “at the bubble factory” loading box cars and semis with cartons of shampoo and soap products.  Other veteran members Charley Velsek and his wife Jenny helped every month with the big jobs of wrapping, sorting, and bundling the Industrial Worker and the General Organization Bulletin for mailing.

Much of my time was spent issueing new membership cards like this one, pasting dues stamps in books sent into the office, and posting the reports of Delegates.  This card was issued in November 1971 by Godard C. Graves--1-GO-71--who completed my term as General Secretary after I resigned.  

But for a union with less than a 1000 members in good standing in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and Guam, the workload was staggering.  In inherited a large cardboard carton of back correspondence to answer.  That included reports from branches and delegates with monthly reports on dues collections, red membership books sent directly to Headquarters to get dues stamps and assessments, literature orders, complaints about poor service, diatribes against us dammed bureaucrats, etc.  I turned over dues records, checks and cash to Fellow Worker Westmann and worked quickly fill literature orders, changes of address and new subs for the IW, and other service requests.  About half of the mail was letters of general inquiry, each specific enough to require an individual reply and with an enclosure of some introductory material and a sample IW.  Most of my day was filled with diving into that box and banging out replies on an old Remington manual typewriter. 

I also had to keep up with the workings of the General Executive Board which met by mail and to which I had to supply answers to questions and a monthly report.  I also had to, as I described it at the time, “piss on fires" ignited by certain contentious and combative GEB members which were always threatening to disrupt the Union with some brouhaha or another.  This required using seven layers onion skin and carbon paper in my typewriter and pounding the keys hard enough so that the last copy was at least faintly visible.  Every month my usually lengthy report to the membership, the summary report by the GEB chair on its activities, reports from branches and delegates, letters from members, and material relating to union elections and referenda had to be typed onto stencils and run off on the pre-World War I open drum, hand cranked Mimeograph machine.

The Industrial Worker masthead during my term and for decades before.  The red color indicates that this was probably from a May Day issue.

I also wrote for the IW and worked on paste-up and the mailing process which required stamping yellow wrappers on the old Addressograph machine, rolling each paper in the wrapper and sealing it with library paste from a pot, gathering them in bundles by Zip Code, and finally finding someone with a car to help me haul the mail bags to the old central Post Office downtown.

In between all of this, there were a steady stream of visitors and the curious, just as I had been when I first visited the former office on Halstead Street during the 1968 Democratic Convention protests.  In memory of that, I always took time with each visitor.

All in all, I was working 10 hour days six days a week and often had Chicago Branch meetings and activities in the evening.  Yet my work style raised some eyebrows.  Instead of coming in at 8 pm when Walt Westmann punctually opened the office, I drifted in between 10 and 11 am but often stayed as long as midnight.  I worked with quarts of Meister Bräu or Blatz on my desk.  I could get either for three quarts for a dollar at Consumer Liquors just down the block.  I could go through all three in a long day.  Once in a while a Fellow Worker would stop by and we would repair to the rear fire escape overlooking the ally and share a joint.  I ate lunch most days at the Woolworth’s Luncheonette also on the block where I flirted with a young waitress.  After work I would blow off steam with shots and beers at Consumers Tap or a couple of blocks south on Lincoln at Johnny Weiss’s Tavern, which explains the late morning arrivals.

I also kept up with Chicago Branch meetings, and other activities, as well as various committees and community events like the weekly Wednesday community meetings that I still facilitated in the Hall.

That was my life for six months until another weekly chore tripped me up.  Every Friday I took all of the week’s receipts—cash and checks, not credit cards accepted then—to the bank for deposit.  Aetna Bank on Halstead just across the street from the former Wobbly Hall was just half a block away and would have been convenient.  But we were loyal to the Amalgamated Bank in the Loop because it had been founded by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and other unions.  Although it had passed into private hands, it was still considered Chicago’s labor bank and handled accounts for almost all unions in town.  That meant taking a thick envelope stuffed with bills and checks downtwn by catching the L the Fullerton stop and walking a couple of blocks from a State Street subway station. 

Most of the time I carried the envelope safely in the inside pocket of a corduroy sport coat I wore regularly and under a thick top coat in cold weather.  But by late June Chicago the city was in the grips of one of its patented, stiffening heat waves.  This particular Friday the thermometer was pushing 100̊ and the humidity wringing wet—more like the Dog Days of August than early summer.  Without a jacket, I put on my straw cowboy hat, and stuffed the receipt envelope into my left rear jeans pocket where it stuck out like a flag.  I waved to Walt Westmann on the way out and headed over to the L.  My plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbow and the red kerchief I wore around my neck were both drenched by the time I got there.

I had to get to the bank by 3 pm.  In those days banks closed for business at that hour and would not reopen until 10 am Monday.

The Amalgamated Bank on South State Street was the labor bank where the IWW kept its accounts and where I made weekly Friday deposits.

In the Loop you could see the heat waves rising from the streets and sidewalks as I made my way to the bank day dreaming about stopping for a nice cold beer at Miller’s Pub when I was done with business.  At the bank I joined a long line, many of the customers, like me, with their union’s receipts.  I finally got up to the teller’s cage about a quarter to 3 and reached for the envelope in my pocket.  It was gone!

I was in an immediate panic.  I didn’t know if the envelope had simply slipped out of the pocket on the street or in the CTA car or if some sharp eyed pickpocket spotted it.  Either way, it was gone.  I rushed out of the bank in a frenzied effort to retrace my steps, hoping against hope to find the envelope lying neglected on the sidewalk.  Of course, it was gone forever.

I arrived, utterly dejected back at the office just as Fellow Worker Westmann was getting ready to go home for the day promptly at 3:30.  I explained what had happened.  He could see how upset I was and was very comforting.  “These things happen, Fellow Worker,” he told me.  But I was guilt ridden.  I felt I had committed malfeasance of office by careless neglect.  I should have held the envelope tightly in my hands the entire trip or carried it in a secure bank bag like most of the other union reps in the teller line had.

Alone in the office that night, I typed out in the necessary multiple copies, my immediate resignation as General Secretary Treasurer.  It was accepted with expressions of regret.  No one ever accused me of taking the money and no charges were drawn up or an investigation launched.  My explanation was taken at face value. 

The following week Goodard Graves, Chairman of the Executive Board, arrived from Champaign, Illinois to finish out the second half of my one year term.

Suddenly, I was at loose ends with no immediate prospects and in immediate need of a job to pay my half of the rent and my bar tabs.  What was I to do?

Next—I walk up the street to the Seed office.

Murfin’s Chicago Summer of ‘68—La Lucha Continua

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:  This is the fifth installment in my series of memoir posts about the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 and my small role in the streets action surrounding it. In this episode on Monday morning I get 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.  May be 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 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 cops’ shirts—and festooned with oversize wire baskets on the handle bars 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 legendary 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 antique 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.  Turns 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 good bye 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 for 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.  

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 had been 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.

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

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.