Summer of 68
I was about to turn 16. I lived in a tenement on the north side of Chicago. Magnolia Avenue from Montrose to Wilson was lined with the red brick three and four story buildings. The tiny apartments were barely heated with steam radiators in winter and cooled by nothing in summer. People dragging mattresses out on to fire escapes at night for reprieve from those big brick ovens were common. On some days the local firehouse would open up a hydrant and the neighborhood kids would splash around in the street. With my few friends, we beat the heat spending many days at the Lake Michigan Montrose beach. Whenever I think of my time in Chicago, it is of the north side’s trash strewn streets and concrete. Quite a contrast for one transplanted from West Virginia’s green hills.
I came to be in Chicago because my Dad migrated to the big city that was filled with factories and factory work. I suppose that made us economic immigrants. We were just part of that great big American middle class that could move, if need be, to find work and better our lives while along the way providing the labor force that built a nation. I suppose it is the disappearing middle class these days.
About a year later I would become a 16 year-old high school dropout working full time in one of those Chicago factories. It is certainly not a course I would recommend for any young person, but it worked out well for me and I learned valuable lessons not taught in Chicago’s school system of the day.
In 68, my brother Jerry was finishing up his Army tour with a Vietnam tour. He stood final muster this past year a victim of the ravages of Agent Orange. Jerry finished High School, the first in my family to do so and immediately enlisted into the Army. Just another member of that American middle class doing what he thought he was supposed to do.
A “conservative” writer from National Review believes “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.” His writing is as much of an attack on Donald Trump as it is on the people Trump appeals to. The people who feel no one in snob America gives a rat’s rear end about them and has not for a long time. The people who no longer have a factory to look to for that job that can give a youngster with no path to an expensive college a start in life. So the welfare state moves in and does to these communities what it has done to others – destroys them and their chance with big government, a globalist worldview and corporate centered trade pacts that eliminates the jobs they might have had. If this is conservative thinking, then I suppose I am no conservative. I want no part of National Review’s ivory tower thinking. This thinking has made America ripe for a communist like Bernie Sanders who promises everything except opportunity and work.
But, back to the summer of 68. The democrats had their convention there in 68. The Yippies, Youth International Party, organized demonstrations for the convention. Some called the Yippies radicalized hippies. Hippies the pot smoking, LSD dropping, communal free-love anti-war draft dodgers. These demonstrations morphed into riots. I watched some of it on television and listened to the rioters who were having the crap kicked out of them by the Chicago Police Department chanting ‘The whole world is watching.” And probably rooting for the cops I thought.
Among these hippie yippie commie loving American GI hating miscreants, you could probably find people like Bernie Sanders, Bill and Hill, John Kerry, Obama mentor and terrorist Bill Ayers and a whole list of others who are still trying to destroy our country. They are starting to turn up now at Trump rallies because he is the antithesis of what they have been indoctrinated to believe. It would not surprise me at all if these demonstrations continue until they erupt into full scale riots similar to those in the summer of 68. Maybe Governor Kasich might want the Ohio National Guard to bone up on riot control.
I left Chicago after walking into Staff Sergeant Ball’s Recruiting station a few days shy of my 19th birthday.
© 2016 J. D. Pendry All Rights Reserved
Category: Politics
Good article, J.D.
My take on the National Review garbage, here:
https://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/kevin-williamsons-hit-piece-on-the-white-working-class/
Ahhh, yes, the summer of unrest. Young radicals and terrorists in training, happy to instigate chaos. They are now grown, some wearing suits, serving on corporate boards, but mostly reaching for retirement from academia having successfully dumbed down the education industry while enslaving a couple of generations with their schemes. Using vehicles such as social media, those thugs from yesteryear are passing the baton to the youngsters, but unwilling to completely give over control to them, hence we have the lefties vying for prez on the Dem ticket.
Summer of ’67….. Watts riots, et.al. I turned 17 in July, with the glow of Detroit burning to the south. By mid August, I was passing through Fort Wayne (Detroit) on my way to BCT.
Detroit wasn’t a race riot. It was poor folks looting and landowners suffering “opportunistic arsons”. Then the military showed up and shot up the town.
Tom, the Watts riots were in the summer of 1965. I was in Basic training at Fort Ord at that time. All of us with truck driving experience were alerted to stand by in case we were needed to transport troops down to LA. We were not told if the troops would be National Guard or regulars, but plans were being made for a road trip. Eventually we were told to forget the whole thing and stand down. Pretty exciting for a kid with four weeks of boot training left.
I was still sucking on a bottle and dirtying diapers that year, but it’s very obvious that many a retirement aged college Perfesser is a freeze-dried hippie that has spent its adult years as a tenured member of a college faculty and never had to make it on the outside in the private sector. All these sniveling little thumbsuckers we see on today’s college campuses demanding “safe spaces” and unable to even cope with having a zit are another product of the “Me First” doctrine that the left has been producing for years.
J.D. I saw that Kevin Williamson piece and have been pondering whether to write about it. Like the rest of National Review, Williamson, a film critic, has shown his true elitist colors in this campaign. Williamson likes to note that he’s from West Texas as if it adds some color and toughness to his persona. As someone who married a West Texas girl from an old pioneering family, some truly tough old cowboys and Indian fighters, and someone who has spent many years there working for a blue-collar living and earning multiple degrees from West Texas academic institutions in the process, all I can say is Williamson’s prissy manner of speaking doesn’t sound like any West Texas native I ever heard. He sounds more like an habitue of Greenwich Village (and yes, I once lived there) to this ol’ West Texan. One thing we can all say about Donald Trump, he has exposed the pretentious and pampered elites of the conservative movement and the Republican Party who have so ill-served us common people, us folks that Williamson’s piece clearly demonstrates those pompous highbrows truly despise. The more that these effete elitists attack Trump’s base, the more they expand that base because this country contains one helluva lot more hard-working middle class folks like you and your father and me and mine than it does of patronizing stuffed shirts like those snooty pricks at National Review. The GOP elites have forgotten that it was the Democrat party’s gradual turn to European socialism that drove lifelong Democrats like my wife and me into the welcoming arms of a Republican Party that was happy to represent our working class views. For a while. If I have learned one truth in my three-quarters of a century, it is the veracity of the old truism that power corrupts. And that corruption always seems to take an eventually self-defeating path of separation of those who exercise power from those who elevated them to their exalted positions. This phenomenon extends to the media elites as well and as the National Review has amply shown us, it is… Read more »
I read that liked article, wondering how anyone can justify saying that working class communities deserve to die, the way Detroit and Gary, IN, have been turned into job deserts.
I do not understand, and never will, what it is that makes these people so resentful of those who work for a living. Perhaps someone can explain it to me some day, but the first image that comes up from reading that is a bunch of barefoot hippies sitting around a little fire made of green wood that smokes like a chimney and wouldn’t keep a flea warm. Yet these are the same people who desperately call 911 when they need those emergency services.
Well, little Keving partly got his wish, when Detroit, a once-thriving city, became a ghost of its former self and is now a city of mostly empty lots, one that can’t pay its bills.
That’s real progress for you. And this is truly what Kevin and his ilk want.
Oh, lest I forget – I have not been a full-blown Trumpeter, but I may become one as time goes on.
Was leaving for the Army in September so I flew to Chicago to see my girl. She lived in Glenn Ellyn. Her dad worked in town and we went down town to have lunch with him. There was still tear gas in the air and our eyes were screaming. Sure helped me get through the gas chamber at Jackson. Good article JD, brought back memories good and bad. Got a dear John in boot camp.
“If you want to live, get out of Garbutt.”
As near as I can tell, no one lives in Garbutt any longer. It was once a fine place, with all of the village niceties: a school, a church, stores, and decent homes. The reason for its success was gypsum, at first regarded solely as a fertilizer and, later, found to be a most valuable in the production of wall board. But gypsum was all Garbutt had and when it faded, so did the town. During the Civil War, young men from Garbutt joined various Union units, including 108th NY Volunteers. The unit was at Antietam and Gettysburg and it lost many men. Among them was James Garbutt, a son of the village’s namesake. In fact, he was, as one writer put it, Garbutt’s “first offering upon his country’s altar. He enlisted in Monroe County’s first regiment, the old 13th, and died in his country’s service.” (George E. Slocum 1908)
Heroes lived in Garbutt. I wonder if Williamson is aware of that.
Amazingly, I found a photo of James Garbutt. He was 25 when he died. By the date of his enlistment and the date and place of his death, it strongly appears that he was wounded in the First Battle of Bull Run and died in a DC hospital. The 13th lost 58 men in that battle.
https://dmna.ny.gov/historic/reghist/civil/infantry/13thInf/13thInfPersonGarbutt.htm
Well said, JD and thank you for sharing such an insightful story to the Summer of ’68. I’m sure that a lot of the recent events must be very surreal and bring about a strong sense of deja vu.
One thing that this election has brought out to light is a lot of the biased, bought and paid for, media shilling on the right (everyone already knows about the blatant propaganda from the majority of the left wing media) from Fox News, National Review, and others. If someone besides Cruz or Trump walks away with the GOP nomination, the party will have essentially committed suicide. Many of it’s constituents will start looking for a base elsewhere.
It’s funny what we remember, I was a little younger than you JD but my focus wasn’t on politics and the idiots protesting. I didn’t understand what all the protesting was about. My focus was on President Kennedy’s moon project and Apollo 5,6,7, and 8 all launched in 1968. I was working on a paper for school and was mesmerized by all things NASA at the time. Unaware that my vision would prevent me from being a pilot or stop any dreams of being an astronaut, once I discovered that I became an infantryman…but that’s another story. Apollo 5 and 6 were both unmanned flights testing various components of the lunar module, Saturn 5 launch system and the capsule itself as fit environments for the eventual push to the moon. Apollo 7 had a crew of Schirra, Eisele, and Cunningham and tested the docking procedures that would take place for Apollos that would follow and head to the moon. ‘ And we all know about Apollo 8 and the first orbit of the moon, Jim Lovell’s successful mission to orbit the moon would be followed by his near death experiences aboard Apollo 13 a little less than 2 years later. I never understood the political turmoil, probably because I was younger and probably because I’d already decided my father was right that these protesters were people who didn’t believe in the American dream and were pushing for something that wouldn’t work on any level at any time or at any place. It’s been interesting watching the Trump phenomenon develop. It’s clear the talking heads are as out of touch as ever if not even more out of touch than ever. They’ve no idea why he appeals to so many people so they hypothesize, and when they do the supporters rally around Trump with even more fervent support. Trump may be the chance for the electorate to truly send a message that they are done with the establishment drones and the establishment dictating terms at every convention and getting away with it. Trump’s not even a conservative which is even more… Read more »
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