I lost my virginity, so to speak, in 1968.
I was 12 years old that year, that very unique, dramatic, traumatic year.
Before ’68, I was a typical knuckleheaded kid, blissfully unaffected — or so I thought — by the happenings of the outside world. Vietnam? Who knew where that was? The Haight-Ashbury? San Francisco might as well have been on another planet. Campus protests and riots in the streets of America’s big cities? Well, that kind of stuff wasn’t happening on my block so, as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t happening, period.
Then came that crazy year. The Tet Offensive took place in February and March and the ensuing news reports hit me in the gut. America, I learned, was in danger of losing its first war. Then Martin Luther King was killed, more than 100 American cities burned, Bobby Kennedy was shot, and the Democratic National Convention came to Chicago.
My town. My home. The world was coming to my front door and I was old enough to answers its knock.
World events suddenly became important to me. In the hours after King was gunned down, WCIU, Ch. 26, preempted all its evening programming and just broadcast a head shot of him accompanied by somber music. I sat and stared at the screen and, before I knew it, tears flooded my eyes. Here I was, an almost-teenager, actually moved by something other than the number of pimples on my face.
I looked forward to the convention coming to town, eager for the whole world to see what a fabulous city I lived in. The John Hancock Center, the 2nd tallest building on Earth, was being built. O’Hare Airport was the world’s busiest. McCormick Place was being rebuilt after a devastating 1967 fire as the world’s biggest convention hall. Even my Cubs had been resurrected, finally becoming a winning team after 20 years of lousiness.
Then I started hearing about the hippies and Yippies and anti-war protesters and civil rights activists who promised to come to Chicago in August to raise cain about the shittiness that existed in too much of American life. I was torn. The likes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the Black Panthers all seemed very cool to me. Their long hair, their freewheeling lives, their rebelliousness, their refusal to knuckle under to The Man all appealed to me.
Very cool.
At the same time, what they promised for August would mar what I’d hoped would be a glowing advertisement for my hometown and, by extension, for me. Were they really going to dump truck-loads of LSD into the city’s water supply? Would crazies bump off more candidates or elected officials? Would terror or just silly hijinks take world’s attention away from the Hancock Center, from the Cubs, from me?
Hoffman pledged to let loose an army of hot hippie chicks and well-endowed studs to seduce convention delegates and their wives and daughters. “We are dirty, smelly, grimy, and foul,” Hoffman announced. “We will piss and shit and fuck in public. We will be constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man.”
He was, of course, blowing Yippie smoke, hoping only to shock Mom and Pop America. And he sure as hell did. Chicago’s daddy-o, Mayor Richard J. Daley, quaked in his boots after Hoffman et al’s every outlandish pronouncement. Chicago’s cops licked their chops in anticipation of breaking heads.
The weekend before the convention was gaveled to order, I ate up all the reports of the Yippies gathering in the Civic Center, nominating a squealing pig for president, of the protesters beginning to amass in Lincoln Park on Saturday and Sunday, led in the om chant by Allen Ginsburg, and then getting the hell beat out of them by the cops, and of the dire predictions by news anchors that the coming week looked to be a disaster in the making. On Sunday night, the sound of policemen’s nightsticks cracking the skulls of protesters, passersby, and innocent bystanders seemed to reverberate in my very living room as I watched bulletins and regular news reports.
And then the convention began and all those dire predictions came true. It was held in the rickety International Amphitheater on the South Side, hard by the old Union Stockyards, the putrid odor of slaughtered pigs and bovines casting an appropriate funk over the proceedings.
I watched almost every minute of the Democratic Convention that year. I watched as images flashed on my TV screen of cops chasing protesters through the streets, swinging their clubs, spraying their Mace, shooting teargas canisters. They’d removed their badges and name tags so as to dispense their brand of “justice” without fear of being fingered for it. I watched as CBS News reporter Mike Wallace was punched in the belly by security goons on the convention hall floor. I watched as Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut decried from the podium, “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” I watched as Mayor Daley and his entourage on the convention floor, enraged, attempted to outshout him. I didn’t need to be an lipreader to know Daley’s gang was calling Ribicoff a motherfucker. Professional lipreaders did tell reporters they called Ribicoff a Jew bastard and a kike.
The convention devolved into chaos. Cops beat the hell out of protesters at the statue of General Logan in Grant Park. They beat the hell out of protesters at the Band Shell in the park. Fistfights broke out on the convention floor. And then Wednesday night happened — the whole world was watching. The rioting cops beat people mercilessly and gleefully, including hapless passing pedestrians. Delegates occupying Conrad Hilton Hotel rooms facing Michigan Avenue had to shut their windows on that steamy night as clouds of teargas wafted upward from the street below.
Mom and Pop America watched — me too — as the police rioted. Mom and Pop America — me excluded — concluded that the violence, the mayhem, meant their beloved country was being torn apart. Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign seemed just the tonic for that sickness. Nixon went on to win the election by a hair.
Now the Democrats are returning to Chicago for a second time since 1968. In 1996, they nominated Bill Clinton for second successful run the following November. There were few, if any disruptions during the convention that year.
This year? Who knows? We’re living in a post-January 6th world. The sitting president four years ago sicced a mob on the US Capitol to subvert a free and fair election. Is it possible that the same man, running to regain the presidency, and his cohorts might orchestrate a reprise of the ’68 chaos in the hope that Mom and Pop America would again embrace their “law and order” rhetoric?
I doubt it. Then again, I never thought Donald J. Trump could win the 2016 election. Nor that a mob could take over the US Capitol. Maybe I’m naive, even after losing my virginity in 1968.