MY MEMORY OF CHICAGO 1968

I remember August 26, 1968, very well. It was the first day of the Democratic Convention in Chicago that year.

It was also the day I got arrested in Killeen Texas, for being in a car in which marijuana was being transported.

We were on our way over to open up the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse at the corner of 4th Street and Avenue D, then the main street in Killeen, a collection of businesses that preyed on the GIs from Fort Hood, and us. (Interestingly, the storefont we used has been for the past 20 years the headquarters of the Democratic Party in Bell County)

We turned right onto 4th from Avenue C, the street our house was on, and all of sudden there was a KPD cruiser behind us with the lights flashing. Josh Gould, who was driving, said “Keep your hands visible at all times, folks.” When the officer came up to the driver’s side, Josh asked what the problem was; the officer replied “We have information you are transporting an illegal substance. Please get out of the car.”

Oops.

We did. The officer went through the car with a thorough search, getting progressively more pissed off as he found nothing.

Then he looked under the driver’s seat.

Aha! He stood up with smile that wasn’t very funny, holding up half a roach.

Big oops.

“Y’all are under arrest.”

Major big oops.

A second patrol car showed up, and the four of us - Josh and Jay, myself and Linda, then my girlfriend and future first wife. They put Josh and me in one car and the two women in the other, and drove us the halfblock to the Killeen PD.

They weren’t too happy at the answers Josh and I gave to the question, “Place of birth?” as they filled out the arrest forms. He said “San Antonio” and I said “Houston” (Both of us being Native Texans by accident of the US Armed Forces, with our fathers stationed in Texas during the war). Heavens! Native Texan white boys, doing such things! Didn’t we know any better? They also got upset when Linda answered “Parris Island, South Carolina.” The daughter of a Marine! How could you? Jay fit their expectations when she said “Boston.” “Here I thought y’all were from California,” the arresting officer complained. “California” like it was some foreign, terrible place (which it was, to him).

And then we were each given a cell of our own to await transport to the county jail over in Temple, 29 miles away.

The two hours spent in that cell were the longest two hours of my life. What was happening was a Very Big Deal Indeed.

The Friday before, a SNCC organizer in Houston had been sentenced to 20 years in Huntsville Prison for allegedly giving a joint to an undercover narcotics officer. We’d been talking about that with comrades from Austin just the day before.

This was a real threat.

And then Josh started singing “We Shall Overcome,” only it wasn’t the version everybody knows. It went “We shall overcome (ditty bop bop) we shall overcome “dooby doo wah). We all sang a Doo Wop version there, all the verses. The fact that one of the officers came in and asked “What the hey-all y’all doin? Y’all gone crazy?” lightened the atmosphere some.

As it turned out Josh was who they wanted, since he was perceived as our leader. At the end of the two hours, the rest of us were cut loose. The late afternoon Texas sun felt damned good when I stepped out of the station.

We walked over and got the car and drove the half block to the shop. Where a crowd of very worried soldiers waited for us with News.

We had just jumped out the frying pan, into the fire.

The news was that 43 black GIs had refused to get on the airplane taking them to Chicago for riot control duty. Nobody had known they were going to do this. Each of them was a decorated combat veteran. It’s still the bravest act I know of from the war,. since each of them knew they weren’t going to get back down off that hill, and they did it anyway.

Also, all the white troops who were being sent had been searched that morning, and the little 2" x 2" yellow stickers with a white hand flashing the peace sign backed by a black fist, had been confiscated. “But they didn’t get all of them.”

So now the Army was flying 5,000 Vietnam Veterans recently returned from the war to Chicago, the overwhelming majority of whom were solidly against the war, for riot control duty at the Democratic Convention.

Linda expressed dismay that the stickers had been grabbed.

“Not to worry!” Mike - one of the most reliable active guys on base - replied. “The Army don’t know which of those soldiers they can depend on to crack heads if they were ordered to. They can’t use any of them! They don’t know who’s still got a sticker. What do you think would happen if the soldiers join the demonstrators? On TV??”

And history records that they didn’t get called into the streets. They sat on the Great Lakes Naval Training Center until the following Saturday, when they were flown back to Fort Hood.

The backup the Chicago PD had for the convention was the draft dodgers in the Illinois National Guard who were so untrained in such duty that one of them nearly gave a nice suburban lady a heart attack on national TV when he stuck a “Blooper” - an M-79 40mm grenade launcher that looked like a cannon on a rifle stock (the nickname came from the sound it made when a grenade was launched) - in her face when he stopped her car at a check point. The poor lady began shrieking till the idiot was pulled away.

We went on and opened up the coffeehouse. Over the course of the six weeks we’d been open, Josh had made sure that we each knew how to do everything necessary to keep things running. They thought they’d disrupted us when they took the leader away, but it turned out we didn’t have one.

Josh sat in the Bell County Jail for five weeks until the charges were dropped under the “De Minimus” rule, after the County Grand Jury no-billed the arrest.

You can’t get charged with possessing drugs if you don’t possess enough of the drug to get high with. Our attorney, legendary Texas Civil Rights lawyer Davis Bragg, was right when he told us the KPD was too stupid to even plant drugs correctly. “They should at least have left a whole joint.”

But I haven’t forgotten two hours spent contemplating 20 years in Huntsville Prison.

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