Looking Back — Your Stories of 1968
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1968? I was probably more concerned about getting to second base with Jeanne Fletcher than I was about the geopolitical implications of the Viet Nam war.
I probably remember as much about the war as anything. It was ever present. At 13 and a male I was acutely aware of the draft as I had two brothers who were 17 and 19 years old and at my age, it seemed like the war had gone on forever and would continue forever. Consequently, and as strange as this sounds, even at 13 I was worried about being drafted in five years. My oldest brother avoided the draft by first getting a student deferment while in college and then, when they eliminated that he was in medical school and was given a deferment until he graduated at which time the war was over. My second oldest brother was lucky in that he always got a pretty good number in the draft.
I recall my older brother, quite the hippie, getting into constant arguments with my father about the war and politics and drugs and music, and about anything else that my father chose in which to express an opinion. It seemed like my brother would take the opposite argument regardless of what he really believed. Anyone over 30 was wrong about anything seemed to be the accepted norm.
Music was such a vibrant part of the decade and certainly 1968. Parents hated it and kids loved it. Parents thought it was revolutionary, in the truest sense of the word and we thought it was liberating. While most would remember the big names like The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, Mamas and the Papas, I was more into the Grateful Dead, Hot Tuna, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention because they were groups my older brother dug, which was enough for me.
And of course my father was a huge fan of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, and Les Brown and all the Big Band era groups. I had this very strange fear that the moment I turned 30 I would stop enjoying The Yardbirds and instead crank up Stan Kenton. It was almost like there was an absolute. Rock was for young people. Classical and big bands were for old people. There would be some biological switch in my auditory cortex that would be thrown and BANG, I would be fox trotting to Gene Krupa rather than singing I-Feel-Like-I’m Fixin-To-Die Rag with Country Joe and the Fish.
Civil Rights had a huge presence. This was one thing (and perhaps the only thing) my father and brother agreed on. Today it sounds strange to say this as it is so obvious now but my father was a vocal supporter of civil rights to the point that he expressed the inability to understand how anyone could think differently. I remember the 1968 Olympics when Tommie Smith and John Carlos took the gold and bronze in a track event and when they took to the podium to accept the medals, they were shoeless and wearing black socks. When the national anthem played they each raised one arm in a fist covered with a black glove and bowed their head in protest against racism in America. That made a huge impact and I remember people talking about it for weeks. Some took the racist perspective, “How could they show such disrespect…” ... “See what happens if you let them have some power…”
But even stronger I remember what I called the “closet racists” who said things like “I know we have to make change but there is a time and a place and this was not appropriate.” I remember those comments making me
angrier than the obviously racist ones. I remember Dr Martin Luther King and hearing my folks talk about him being a great man and a great leader. I remember the day he was shot. My folks were shocked and sad. Even at that age I would take the IC (Illinois Central, now Metra) into the city on my own and when the riots started as a result of King’s assassination, I was not allowed to do that for some time.
And when Bobby Kennedy was shot, I remember feeling that no great leader was safe.
On a more personal level I remember school. I really loved the social aspect of it. I remember the invention of slam books. Slam books were hand-made notebooks that had a person’s name on each page. They were passed around and you could anonymously write any comment about that person such as “he is so cool” or “she is the nicest person” or “what a geek.” Some of the comments were extraordinarily mean and I recall that as a popular kid almost everything on my page was positive. I was really horrified about what things were written about the “uncool” kids. But I was not mortified enough not to participate (although I recall writing nothing bad about anyone…well…except this one really mean greaser who was a bully…but he deserved it…right?).
And going steady. ID bracelets. If you liked a girl and through a complicated web of communication processes involving her best friends you found out she liked you, you asked her to go steady and gave her your ID bracelet. I remember going steady with Nellie Liang, whose father owned the only Chinese food restaurant in town. My father was hoping this would continue to marriage so he could enjoy free Chinese take-out forever. Of course it lasted 4 months which was short lived in my father’s mind but at our age, it seemed like a lengthy relationship.
Hair and clothes. A constant source of arguments. The hair could never be long enough and the clothes could never be cooler or wild enough. And patchouli. I never liked it and thought people used it to hide the fact that they didn’t practice appropriate personal hygiene.
The TV shows were memorable and I feel so old saying that I still enjoy many of them today. I loved Laugh-In which was this frenetically paced variety show with “crazy” skits. You always heard friends repeating the lines “Here comes the judge, here comes the judge” and “Care for a walnetto?” which were from repeat skits on the show. The Carol Burnett show was great and I remember watching it with the hope that someone would make Carol or Harvey Korman crack up in the middle of a skit.
— Scott P.
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In 1968, I was 10 years old.
We didn’t have a television but my parents listened to the news every day on WFMT radio. At some point, probably prior to 1968, I remember being very confused about the concept of guerilla warfare. I imagined primates with automatic weapons engaged in hand-to-hand combat with our GIs. I think my first realization that there was a war at all was when my older sister’s Girl Scout troop began to make and send CARE packages for soldiers.
A young man who walked past our house every day on his way to the train downtown “came home with a metal plate in his head.” I thought this was quite terrifying, not really able to imagine how one day you just “came home with a metal plate in your head!” It was a hush hush affair, whispered about behind my back but still terrifying. He must have been fine since he commuted downtown every day in a business suit. Before he came home with that plate in his head, there was a service star in that family’s front window — also quite mysterious and unusual in my very middle-class neighborhood with college-bound young men. I did not know any one who had a brother or other relative in Vietnam.
I did know that my brother, who must have been 24 or 25 in 1968, was estranged from my parents because of his anti-war feelings and vows to move to Canada if he was drafted. It was a serious rift, probably based on more
issues than just the Vietnam war . In retrospect, his committment to draft dodging seems sort of silly, as he was in a PhD program in Biochemistry at Yale at the time and profoundly deaf in one ear since early childhood. He was clearly 4F and in no danger of being drafted.
My parents were strong supporter of the civil rights movement. I remember that, in addition to my three older siblings, they were paying for a young black man to go to college too. This was also somewhat mysterious to me at the time but later I realized they just meant that they contributed to the United Negro College Fund. In 1968, my older sister wrote her college essay “her most admired person” about Martin Luther King. That spring, she was allowed to go to Chicago and see a Jefferson Airplane concert in Grant Park. A very big deal.
My only memory of the 1968 Chicago convention was that a substitute gym teacher told our class that he had been there and that made him seem very exciting and dangerous.
I also remember that we used to drive from the south suburbs to our dentist in Hyde Park during that time and on Stony Island and farther up north about 63rd Street we would see graffiti about the Black Keystone Rangers who later became the Black PAnthers, I think. Also exciting and dangerous and mysterious to a 10 year old.
That makes me remember our favorite substitute gym teacher in the late 60’s at Indiana School. Mrs. Mergler. Don’t call her “Mrs. Burglar.” Her favorite expression was “Keep your haaay-ends to yoursef.” She was a middle-aged white lady from the South.
— Susan P.
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1968. That was quite a year, as it turned out.
For me, though, its beginning was just the
final months of my senior year at Northwestern University in Evanston.
Yes, a lot of things happened that year, but I didn’t know I was going to part of history. It was not until years later that, thanks to hindsight, it became known as such a seminal (pivotal, impactful, overarching—pick your adjective!) year. In 1968, we were just... living it.
ome history is called for, so let me back up:
I grew up in an upper-middle-class community: Grosse Pointe, Mich. A white community. Not gated as we know the term now, but gated nonetheless because of a screening process called the Pointe System, which was used for evaluating who could/could not buy a house there. No Negroes could. Nor any other minority, ethnic or religious. It was said—and it was true—that the only way Negroes came into GP was on the bus in the morning, as maids, and they left the same way at day’s end to go back to their homes in Detroit.
On March 14, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., came and spoke. The Grosse Pointe Human Relations Council invited him—fair housing was one of its concerns.
As it turns out, he gave one of his more famous speeches, “The Other America,” in which he said:
“I use this subject because there are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful for situation. And, in a sense, this America is overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies; and culture and education for their minds; and freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity.
“But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
“In a sense, the greatest tragedy of this other America is what it does to little children. Little children in this other America are forced to grow up with clouds of inferiority forming every day in their little mental skies. And as we look at this other America, we see it as an arena of blasted hopes and shattered dreams. Many people of various backgrounds live in this other America. Some are Mexican-Americans, some are Puerto Ricans, some are Indians, some happen to be from other groups. Millions of them are Appalachian whites. But probably the largest group in this other America in proportion to its size in the population is the American Negro.
“The American Negro finds himself living in a triple
ghetto. A ghetto of race, a ghetto of poverty, a ghetto of human misery. So what we are seeking to do in the Civil Rights Movement is to deal with this problem. To deal with this problem of the two Americas. We are seeking to make America one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
He would be assassinated three weeks later.
I was home from NU on spring break and volunteered to help at the high school, where he was speaking. My parents wanted me to stay home, in case there was trouble. I probably said something to the effect of, “No way! This is historic, and I’m going to see him and hear him!” And I persuaded them to come, too. I remember that my stomach was churning from the tension in the air outside the Grosse Pointe High School auditorium. There were a lot of picketers, and every policeman in the five Grosse Pointe communities probably were there, too.
Yet, in hindsight, even though I knew of King and what he was trying to achieve, and believed in it—for most teens in Grosse Pointe in the early Sixties, it still was an idyllic time. We were sheltered from the storm of the civil-rights’ movement, both by our parents and also because Grosse Pointe was a white community—we didn’t have those tensions in our face; they were downtown, in Detroit, including the horrific riot the summer of 1967. Thanks to location and the Pointe System, many of the movement’s historic moments simply passed us by. We were consumed with the usual teen-age pastimes of talking, dating, hanging out, football and basketball games, and, of course, studying and applying to college.
Even at NU, the civil-rights movement—and the war in Vietnam—was not much in our consciousness: NU at the time also was predominantly white. Being a private college, and expensive, there were few minorities and again, precious few of us concerned ourselves with matters off campus (e.g., Chicago), let alone elsewhere in the country and world—again, the tensions were not in our face. Yes, I was a journalism major, but I still was more focused on my immediate surroundings and typical college activities—yes, more talking, dating, hanging out, football and basketball games, and, of course, studying. I read about the big events in the paper, but little of that “news” touched me directly.
So it was not it was not until spring of our senior year that, for many of us, the outside nation/world finally intruded, and our consciousness was raised, so to speak.
The war:
The draft was now uppermost in our minds. How would it affect our friends now that they no longer would have a student exemption? And then came President Lyndon Johnson’s speech that he would not run for re-election—I can see myself now, sitting in the lounge at the Kappa Delta house, watching him on TV, with my mouth open.
The assassinations:
On April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King was killed and a riot broke out in Chicago. The next day, I had borrowed a friend’s car and was heading into Chicago to see the Bolshoi Ballet at the Opera House. As I was heading south on Lake Shore Drive, I turned on the radio and heard that Mayor Daley had imposed a curfew and closed streets not far from where I was heading. I remember thinking, “I really want to see the ballet, but Chicago is not the place for me to be tonight!” I got off at North Avenue and headed north, back to campus and safety—my stomach was churning the way it did three weeks earlier in Grosse Pointe. To this day, when I see the pedestrian overpass at North Avenue, I often remember what was going though my mind back then: the horror of King’s killing and that it happened in Memphis, where my father is from and a lot of family lived and still live.
Early on the morning of June 6, my roommate awakened me, to tell me Bobby Kennedy had been shot and had died. Sleep-addled (I was up late studying for a final), I kept saying, “No. You’re wrong. It can’t be. I don’t believe you.” I think she showed me the Chicago Tribune. Still, it didn’t seem real: Thoughts were careening around my head, remembering how I learned his brother was assassinated in 1963 and that King had been killed just two months before, almost to the day.
My final was scheduled for 10 that morning. When I got there, the professor said that if we were satisfied with our mid-term grade, that would be our final grade and we didn’t have to take the test. My grade was an A-, so I was satisfied. For those who needed to take the final, he postponed it a day. He wasn’t in the mood for it—he knew Kennedy and was working for him—and he imagined none of us were, either. He was right. I would have voted for Bobby, had he gotten the nomination—1968 was the first time I was eligible to vote in a presidential election.
And so, to end as I started:
1968.
Winter and spring quarter of my senior year. Even with the world wheeling around me with just the little I knew at the time, I still was a typical senior. Taking a light load spring quarter so I could study less and enjoy college more those last halcyon days. Spending as much time as possible with friends. Heading to the beach or down to Howard Street for pizza and beer (Evanston was dry then). And going to see “The Graduate,” over and over and over. I intended to enjoy my last college days because, as we said back then, they were about to “be history.”
Little did I know.
— Karen Callaway
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On the set of WEEKEND there are several photographs of me, Photoshopped in with some prominent figures of the time (a la Forrest Gump).
I glanced at one such photo of me standing next to Dwight D. Eisenhower, and thought there was a nice symmetry to that, seeing how I came into this world the same year Eisenhower started his presidency.
My parents where blue-collar working-class heroes who were also dyed-in-the-wool Demarcates, so when John F. Kennedy arrived on the scene that was the dominant talk in our house. I was only about 7 or 8 years old at that time but the feeling of excitement and that something new and special was approaching was very palpable in our household.
Unlike the age of cable and satellite television, then we had three networks to choose from, NBC, ABC, and CBS. TV was the center piece of our family nights, complete with Swanson’s TV Dinners. Whatever dad wanted to watch (the dictator of our nightly TV viewing), the entire family watched. The evening always started with the CBS nightly news with Walter Cronkite. I vividly remember watching the 1960 Democratic Convention while wearing a Styrofoam “straw hat” with a Kennedy banner around the headband. Three short years later it was Cronkite breaking the news to the world that Kennedy had been assassinated.
The assassination of Kennedy seemed to unleash the hounds and what flowed out of that television screen and right onto the floor of our living room was more blood. The blood of Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy and the Viet Nam war was brought to you in gory living color. Death and dissolution was everywhere and when ever there was the chance of a dream, it seemed to get dashed to the ground in a most violent way. The world was changing very fast.
In 1968 I was 15. The Beatles were singing, “You Say You Want A Revolution” and that’s exactly what it looked like in Chicago. Again from the safety of our living room the images that flickered across our eyes from the ‘68 Chicago convention seemed to me shockingly more violent then any I’d seen before. Plus now trouble was brewing with in our own four walls. The tension between me and my parents was increasing by the day.
I had made up my own mind about what was just, right and fair and they differed greatly from my parents, particularly my dad’s. The generation gap was widening and it seemed like a huge crevasse.
One day President Lyndon Johnson came to our town and spoke at the opening of the new post office. My mother said, “You’re going to see a President live if it kills me.” So she dragged me to see Johnson. I stood in the rain on the outer edge of a huge crowd and saw Lyndon B. Johnson. Then I caught a cold.
The next prominent political figure I saw as Bobby Kennedy speaking at the Youngstown Shopping Center in Jeffersonville Indiana. I got closer this time and I remember being impressed and he seemed very likable. That famous Kennedy accent was working its magic on me and though I was not old enough to vote I had decided then and there that I wanted him as our next president. Two weeks later he was dead.
Over the next several years my dad and I almost stopped talking. There was plenty of yelling, but talking?…no.
We just couldn’t relate any more. Of course as time went on and I struck out on my own, time, age, experience and wisdom brought us closer together then ever. Though we never saw eye to eye on matters of politics I grew to love and admire him. He was indeed a working-class hero who toiled at a job he hated in order to provide for his family. He later died at peace with his family and with himself.
1972 was the first presidential election in which got to vote. I voted for McGovern. We got Nixon and Watergate and the first president to resign in disgrace. After that at the ripe old age of 19 I had become embittered, jaded, cynical and distrustful of politics.
This year 2008 I’m careful to dip my toe into the hope of political change. But I’m no fool. I know how these things can go. But I do continue to hope because without that…
Here’s to those who died for the sake of change and hope and dreams. Long may they live in our hearts.
— Terry Hamilton (plays Senator Charles MacGruder in Weekend)
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In 1968 I was just about to enter
high school and that year brought a
lot of racial unrest to the high school campus.
I heard many stories of fights in the cafeteria and after football games against one of our arch rivals, a predominately black school. Our high school was pretty well integrated but certainly a large white majority with a few who came from a neighboring town which had some Klan activity deeply embedded.
It was all pretty confusing to me as I had gone through grade school with friends of all races. It was especially shocking when things finally erupted into a full-fledged riot one afternoon.
There were some students that had come from another town specifically to create a disturbance and the police arrived in full riot gear — except for the chief who had worked very hard developing a great rapport with the youth in town. Unfortunately one of the students who had come to disrupt took advantage of his goodwill and slammed a baseball bat into his head. (He survived and recovered, was chief for a few more years and then again for several years after a stint as chief in another city.)
Needless to say my excitement to enter high school turned to fear. Our first weeks in fall were filled with trepidation, but due to the shock of the attack on a well-loved man, the community worked very hard between the incident and that next year to heal as a city and get a fresh start.
There were still the occasional fights and strong rivalry with the other school mentioned above, but I do think the violence against the chief, in a strange way, put a real check on any more escalation to that level. Truly a sad episode and yet we were left with a real hope because of the community action which did indeed help mitigate a potentially explosive future.
— Tom McElroy (plays Senator Andrews in Weekend)
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I was in college in St. Louis. I went to Indiana to be "Clean for Gene" — Eugene McCarthy. We were told not to talk about the war but to tell people McCarthy was for 100% farm purity. We all tried to learn about this.
I was really shy so this was hard but the first farm home I went to I gave my little speech. The man looked at me and said, "But will he end this God damn war!"
— Ina Marks, retired attorney
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First some background. I was born in 1946 and raised in Evanston which was completely integrated even then. When I was around 10 I began to hear and read about the school integration issues in Little Rock and became appalled. From high school on I was very involved in the civil rights movement and “marching” and “demonstrating” became part of my life – I was in DC when King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
I went to Boston University and majored in theatre education. Beginning in my sophomore year, I started doing volunteer work in a junior high in Roxbury (inner city) two days a week. I did a lot of creative dramatics with the aim of helping the kids get enthused about history and/or literature. I LOVED it. Not surprisingly I also became a part of the anti- war movement although in hindsight I had absolutely no idea where Vietnam was or what any of the issues were – just thought we should leave. I was right, of course, but could never have articulated why at that time. But while I went to all the anti-war demonstrations including the big one in DC in the fall of 1968, civil rights (which now included women’s rights for me) was still what I was most passionate about.
My junior year (1966/67), two friends and I moved out of the dorm and into an apartment. We didn’t think much of it at the time but we actually personified what the civil rights movement had already achieved. I was an upper middle class Jew, Barbara was a lower middle class WASP whose mother was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and Trish was Black and from the Pittsburgh ghettos. She had never known a white person until she came to BU. We wanted to live in Newton but quickly found out that Black people weren’t allowed. It was the first time bigotry had impacted me personally and believe me it made me even more passionate on the subject of civil rights.
1968: I was trying to decide whether to go to graduate school or teach in some inner city (Harlem was my thought). I remember Trish saying “They don’t want you and your Saks Fifth Ave. wardrobe in Harlem.” Whether because of that or because I was always happiest in a classroom, I opted for graduate school.
1968 was also the year I fell in love with a gorgeous Black man who was getting his Master’s in Directing. I spent a lot of time turning the relationship into Romeo and Juliet – with society rather than parents as the force trying to drive us apart. I often wonder if I would have been nearly as “in love” if he’d been white.
Assassination of MLK – I heard about it coming out of a class. What was my first reaction after the shock and horror? How was I going to face Trish. What was I going to say to her. I remember wanting to delay going home.
Assassination of Robert Kennedy – My college graduation gift was a trip to Europe. Everyone I knew who got the same gift were going to 25 countries in a month. I chose a different trip and went to London for 4 weeks. I went alone. I heard that RFK was shot on the radio. I heard that he had died after a matinee of Dance of Death starring Laurence Olivier. At his solo curtain call he came out and stopped the applause to announce that Robert Kennedy had died. He asked that the audience stand for the American national anthem (there was a tape). I went to some other play that evening (no idea what it was) and afterwards went to the American Embassy to sign a condolence book. I got there at 11PM and finally got to sign it at 2:30AM. Somewhere around midnight the line of people started singing some of the folk songs that defined the civil rights and anti war movement. I remember signing my name and adding the line “When will they ever learn…” It’s 40 years later and I could write the same thing about much that goes on in this country. For the next several days I was embarrassed to be an American as the press and cartoons basically talked about us as cowboys and what could you expect from people who only care about guns and aren’t “civilized.” I particularly remember a cartoon of the Statue of Liberty wearing a cowboy hat instead of a crown with her torch broken.
After London I came back to Evanston just in time for the Democratic Convention. Got arrested there (won’t go into that pathetic story). When Humphrey was nominated I decided not to vote. My father sent me reams of materials about HH’s civil rights record to prove to me that the guy had more to him than just the war and get harping that I HAD to vote for someone – even if I wrote in RFK. Bottom line, I did vote and I did vote for Humphrey but the vast majority of my friends stayed home. That was a close election and I often wonder how different things might have been if my generation had actually gone to the polls.
I ended the year in New York attending graduate school at NYU. John Lindsey, a republican, was Mayor and I LOVED him. In those days the word liberal and republican could coexist.
What did the 60s and specifically 1968 mean to me? I am thrilled that I lived through that era because throughout it I felt that I could change the world – I felt empowered. And what I and so many of my friends fought for in DC and in those southern towns actually came to be – we have a Black nominee for president (whom I desperately hope will win); we have a woman VP candidate (who is totally unqualified and I hope will NOT win); women have choices in their careers and family life; and the war in Vietnam did end. And arrogant as it sounds, I firmly believe that I was part of the reason it all happened. It’s why even after the past 8 years I still believe in change and grassroots activism. I still believe that all of us can, in fact, “change the world.” It’s what appeals to me about the Obama campaign – he is motivating millions of people to come together for a cause for the first time in 40 years. Only when people demand it do systems change. It happened in the 60s. I’m hoping it is about to happen again.
— Gloria Friedman
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