Saturday pinch hitter — Jack Clark: "Chicago 1968 and a few other DNCs"

     Former cabbie and current detective novelist Jack Clark has long been a friend of this blog. With the Democratic National Convention bearing down, he offers up memories of previous conventions. Jack is the author of Hack Writing & Other Stories, a a collection of 17 of his Reader pieces from 1975 to 2001.

     Years later--I’m not sure when this happened--I decided that my father had actually died in 1969. I probably had too many memories in the space reserved for 1968.
     The year starts for me at the very beginning of February with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. I had a hard time turning the page on a photograph of a very large pile of dead U.S. soldiers in the back of an open-bed truck. Many of them looked to be my age—the same age as my friend Phil who was there with the Marines. 2100 U.S. soldiers would die in the attacks, which were a turning point in the war. Before the year was out nearly 17,000 U.S. soldiers would die. It was the worst toll in that long war.
     At the end of March, President Johnson announced that he would not seek a second term. The war was tearing the country apart. From now on, we would have to do it without him. Maybe that would stop the chant: Hey, hey, LBJ how many kids did you kill today?
     Later that same week, my father and I watched Martin Luther King’s last speech. King told the striking sanitation workers in Memphis that he had been to the mountaintop. “I may not get there with you,” he said at the very end of the speech. “But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”
     He was assassinated less than 24-hours later.
     I saw the beginning of the West Side riots the next day in front of Austin High School where I was a student. A police car was overturned in the intersection of Pine and West End Avenue, just south of the school. A police officer fired a shot into the air. Those were the final sparks.
     I was with a few hundred other white students at the north end of the block. We were soon fleeing west. Thousands of black students, who had come on a march from schools all over the West Side, headed east causing havoc as they went, and that night the West Side burned. And that was pretty much the end of the neighborhood I’d known my entire life. After the riots, the question changed from Are you moving or staying? to When are you moving?
     My father was already back in the hospital. We could see the West Side burning from his room.
     In June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
     My father’s 50th birthday was in August, ten days before the Democratic Convention came to town. His friends threw him a big party in one of their downtown offices. Looking back, I realize it was what we now call a living wake.
     My family, like many others, often talked politics around the dinner table. The war in Vietnam and Civil Rights were the big discussions that decade. By 1968, most of us were against the war. I’m pretty sure my father had been against it from the very beginning. My parents were Henry Wallace/Adlai Stevenson liberals. When the first black family moved in around the corner, my mother baked them a cake, carried it over, rang their bell, and introduced herself.
     On the front porch one day, my father told me something prophetic about race relations. “Black people are always going to have a hard time in this country,” he said. “A bigot might see a man walking down the street and think he looks Jewish. As much as he hates Jews, he has to be careful because he’s not really sure. But when he sees a black man, he doesn’t have to be careful about anything. He knows.”
     My father and his mother came to Chicago from New York when he was 10. He never met his own father. He lived all over Chicago, south, north, and west, and knew it well. He met my mother in night school at Austin High School, and then went all the way through college and law school at night while working full time. He took several years out for Army service during World War II. When he passed the bar in 1951, he already had four children. Three more were yet to come.
     It was his idea that I should volunteer to work at the 1968 convention. His mother had worked at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933, (No. Not as a fan dancer.) and he spent most of the summer he turned 15 there. He had good memories of being in the middle of such an historic affair. He thought being a page would be a good experience for me.
     My friend John and I had wanted to get to the convention center at the
     International Amphitheater but we didn’t have enough clout and got stuck at the Conrad Hilton. The other pages were all college kids. We were still in high school.
     The hippies and war protesters were across the street in Grant Park. The National Guard Troops were on Michigan Avenue and in jeeps covered with barbed wire frames. The Chicago police were everywhere. I was 18 years old. I had no idea what was going on, although I’m sure I could have done a pretty decent impersonation of someone who did. My favorite hippie chant was: Fuck you LBJ. Fuck you LBJ. It would go on and on. You could understand every word blocks away. I’d never heard anything like it—not out there for the entire world to hear. They didn’t like LBJ’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey either, the man who became the nominee that year. Dump the hump, was another chant and I agreed. I was working for the hump but I was rooting for Eugene McCarthy. He was staying across the street at the Blackstone Hotel.
     I remember leading a couple of delegates to their rooms. Other than that, I have no ideas what our duties were. I know John and I spent quite a bit of time a few floors down where Bobby Kennedy’s people were in mourning. We’d hide our Humphrey credentials and try to talk with any college girl we could find. I’m pretty sure we never told them we were in high school. When security got tighter, we were exposed as Humphrey workers and barred from the floor.
     But the Hilton turned out to be the action-filled assignment. We watched parts of the Battle of Michigan Avenue, between war protesters and the Chicago Police, first on live TV and then hanging out the 8th floor windows of the Hilton Hotel. The Walker Report would later characterize the battle as “a police riot.”
     After the last hippie had been beaten, tear-gassed, and dragged away by the police, John and I hurried down eight flights of stairs and went outside to view the battlefield. Michigan Avenue was littered with assorted pieces of clothing, shoes without partners, sleeves torn off shirts. The heavy scent of tear gas was still in the air, and that’s about as far as my memory goes. There must have been blood but, more than 50 years later, I can’t say I actually saw any of it. I know that when we tried to get back into the hotel, we couldn’t. I think they were afraid of a hippie counterattack. Our Humphrey credentials were no longer enough. Now we needed a room key.
     We ended up in a long line for the pay phone across the street in the parking lot of the Essex Hotel. It was mostly kids calling their parents collect to let them know that they’d survived. One of them said his father was the governor or maybe the lieutenant governor of Connecticut, something like that. When our turn came, we called upstairs and had someone come down with a key.
     Ramparts Magazine published a daily wall poster newspaper at the convention. I’d saved every issue. “Up Against the Wall,” it said on the top left, and that’s exactly where I intended to put them in my bedroom at home. When we were getting ready to leave on the last night, I opened the drawer where I’d stashed them, and every single issue was gone. Who would be that low down and dirty? I never figured it out.
     That was the end of August. My father died less than three weeks later. He’d been in and out of the hospital for more than a year.
     I don’t think we ever talked about the convention. By the time it was over, the relatives were coming in from out of town.
     I must have gone to the hospital once or twice in those final weeks. I hope I did. But the truth is, I went as little as possible. I told myself it was too painful to see him in that condition. I have long since realized it’s not your pain you should be worrying about when someone close is dying.
     I sometimes think 1968 must have been a particularly bad year to die. The country and Chicago were both in turmoil. It was a troublesome time. And he would never know how it all turned out, how the country and the city got through it, or if they ever did.
     On the other hand, he was spared the Nixon years.
     My father attended the 1952 and the 1956 Democratic conventions, which were also held at the International Amphitheater. Adlai Stevenson was nominated at each, and went on to lose to the Eisenhower/Nixon ticket both times.
     In 1956, my father Vincent Clark and his law school friend Patrick Nee were at the convention on the final night. They stayed to the very end and then grabbed one of the decorations on the way out the door. It was a sturdy five-point, canvas-covered star, about six feet by six feet, built with two by fours. They tied it on top of Pat’s old Packard and started for the West Side.
     The Congress Expressway (now the Eisenhower) wouldn’t open for years. But sections of it were already completed. Signs said: Drive At Your Own Risk. They probably thought this was the perfect route, a couple of young attorneys turned desperados, on the run with a pilfered star. That’s where they ran out of gas. Pat got the car off to the side. My father grabbed a gas can and went off in search of a station.
     He found a cop somewhere or, more than likely, the cop found him. He got gas and the cop gave him a ride back to the car. Along the way, my father talked the cop into giving Pat a hard time. The cop turned on his flashing lights, pulled behind the Packard and shined his spotlight in the window. He got out and began to interrogate Pat about what he was doing with a star on top of his car. Where’d you get the star, buddy?
     It was a great joke and anytime someone asked about the star, which moved around our house for years, my father got to tell it all over again. Pat was a good sport, a big guy with a twinkle in his eye. We kids all loved him. He died even younger than my father.
     So all this is a way to say, I’ve got Chicago conventions in my blood. But I’m going to have to miss this one. I’ll be in France visiting the lovely Hélène, the light of my life these last 14 years. I’m sure we’ll catch some of it on TV, especially if it’s anything like 1968. The French love that kind of stuff.
     Have fun without me. And if you happen to see a loose memento lying about don’t be afraid to grab it. But don’t steal someone else’s. Those Up Against the Wall Posters would have been in tatters long ago, if I’d managed to get them home. But I would have had a lot of fun with them through the years, moving them from one apartment to the next, from one wall to another. If people happened to ask about them, it would have given me a chance to tell some stories. Who knows? Maybe if I had, I would remember more today.
     There are those who say that when history is being made it’s best to be somewhere far away. On the other hand, if you manage to survive, you’ll always be able to look back and say, “I was there,” even after you’ve forgotten almost all of it.