1968

That’s me with writers from one of my memoir classes.

With all the talk about political conventions in the news lately, I can’t help but think of what happened right here in 1968. Many of the writers in my memoir classes were young adults in Chicago then, but when I assigned “1968” as a topic, few of them chose to write about the Democratic convention that year. Their essays definitely spoke of the times, though.

Judy’s essay opens in the 1950s, when she was lobbying the Yellow Springs, Ohio Board of Education to let her Antioch College classmate Corrie Scott student-teach there. Corrie was barred from working in the Yellow Springs schools, and when she and Judy got together at an Antioch reunion years later, Corrie said that school officials used to tell people she’d left “to marry some preacher.” Judy described the loving smile on Corrie’s face as the two friends shared the irony. Some preacher. The essay ends with a description of what a sad year 1968 was. It’s the year her friend Corrie’s husband, Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered.

***

Maria and her husband had immigrated to America from Italy in the early 1960s. Maria was enjoying a lovely April day in 1968 at a park with her three and four-year-old boys when she heard the news on her transistor radio. “The Dallas drama was repeating itself. This time it was Martin Luther King,” she wrote. “In what kind of country had I come? Were my children going to grow in the midst of this violence?”

***

Sheila returned from a six-week training course in NYC in 1968, accepting a job as a TWA Reservations agent in Chicago along with 19 fellow graduates. “Our triumph was short-lived,” Sheila wrote. “More than half the class was fired the first day in the Chicago office.” All the women who were fired were Hispanic, Black or Jewish. “We Caucasians spoke up about the obvious reason our friends had been fired. TWA told us to shut up, or we’d ALL be out of a job.”

***

Bob grew up on the South Side of Chicago and was raising his boys there, too. His oldest son would be starting high school in 1968, and with tuition so high at the Catholic schools, Bob and his wife opted to move the family to the suburbs.

***

Gwen’s essay came right after Bob’s. Gwen and her husband had decided to move in 1968, too, but that’s where the similarities in their stories end. From Gwen’s essay:

On the day of the closing we took our sons out to see their new home. It was located in the far South Side in the Rosemore area of Chicago. The boys were excited to have a larger home, although they didn’t want to leave their friends. My husband and I were happy that the house had been vacated by the former owners and we had immediate possession.

Gwen’s husband called her at work the next day with disturbing news. Someone had tossed a chemical into their house after they’d left – the chemical simmered throughout the night, eventually burning through the floor. A worker from People’s Gas Company who’d been sent out to take a final reading from the meter the next morning noticed the windows were all black from the smoke. He called the fire department. “The fireman, who knew how to enter a burning house, told us that if we had opened a door the house would have exploded and been completely destroyed,” Gwen wrote. “We were completely unaware that we were the first Black family to move into that block. Had we known we would have skipped that area. I did not want to put my children in danger.” Their three-year-old was afraid to enter the house, so the family moved into her brother’s attic for a few weeks until her husband decided it was time to clean up the house and move in. He checked on the house every evening during the process, hoping the culprits would return.

“But of course they didn’t,” Gwen wrote. “And I was glad. I didn’t want a confrontation.” The family finally moved in a year later, in March of, you guessed it: 1968. Gwen said it took a long, long time before they could relax in the house. “It seemed that every time we started feeling comfortable there, the weather would turn humid and the smoke smell would seep down from The attic.” They lived there for 20 years, and after the kids were grown they moved to the south suburbs. Gwen told me she’d buried this whole ordeal deep inside until I gave the assignment to write about 1968. “It all came back to me then,” she said, still refusing to allow the incident too make her bitter.

Her essay concluded with these words: “We cannot allow the actions of a few to poison our minds and cause us to react in a manner that would be completely contradictory to what Martin Luther King and other Black leaders have preached and marched against.”

Adapting to change

Every Wednesday, the seniors in my memoir-writing class pass a pouch of Scrabble tiles around the table. Whoever picks “A” reads their work aloud first, then “B” and so on. Last week, I threw a wrench into the works. I passed around a Ziploc bag full of loose change instead. “Just pick a coin,” I told them. While the Ziploc bag went around the room, I’d explain next week’s assignment.

That was the plan, at least. One thing I hadn’t anticipated -– but should have–is how averse some older people can be to, ahem, change. One student chose a coin, passed the bag. The next student asked her neighbor why she was passing a bag of coins. “Where are the tiles?” The neighbor didn’t know. The student with the Ziploc shrugged her shoulders, gave in, chose a coin, passed the bag. The next student asked why she was passing a bag of coins. “Where’s the tiles?” “What happened to the tiles?” The neighbor didn’t know. A student across the table tried to explain.

It got worse. Half the students (and not just the ones with diagnosed vision problems like me) couldn’t read the dates on the coins: too small. Wanda to the rescue. “Don’t worry!” she called out, digging in her bag. “I have a magnifying glass!”

Wanda always comes prepared. That’s her, helping me sign books last year at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Once everyone settled down and determined the date on their coin, I said I wanted them to write about something that went on in their lives that year. “I got 1978,” one of them whined. “I can’t remember anything that went on that year!” I suggested that if they got a year that didn’t ring a bell, they could do some research. Find out what happened in the news that year, maybe that would jog their memories.

”Keep in mind, though,” i told them.”I want you to write a memoir, not a report.” I told them that if, let’s say, they chose a coin with the year 2006 on it, I didn’t want them to write something like “The year 2006 was the year a coal mine disaster trapped 13 miners for nearly two days. Only one miner survived” and go on to write how some newspapers got it wrong, announced early that all the miners had been rescued when, really, they hadn’t. That is all very interesting stuff, I told them. But it’s a report, not a memoir. I want a memoir.

“But if you picked a coin with the year 2006 on it, and researching the coal mining disaster jogs your memory, reminds you how sad you were about that tragedy, how it made you think of your grandfather who was a coal miner, or how much the news inspired you to live more fully, then go ahead and mention the coal mine disaster in your essay. Give your readers some background.”

“What if you don’t have any coal miners?” one of them asked. “My people weren’t coal miners.” I told her to see me after class, we needed to get going. Otherwise we’d never have enough time to read this week’s essays, about The Very Best Summer Ever.

At the end of class a gaggle of students gathered with questions about the next assignment. One thought maybe 1986 was the year her husband left her, but she wasn’t absolutely sure. This student had no children, and she never married again. Last Wednesday was the first time she even hinted at writing about how she felt about her husband leaving. “How about you just say 1986 was the year that happened,” I whispered. “Creative non-fiction!” She giggled. Another student never was able to determine if her coin said 1966 or 1968. “how about if I write about 1967?” I said fine.

As Hanni and I got near the door to exit the classroom, a student kindly offered to walk us outside. She’d chosen 1968, the year she’d married her second husband. She and her husband were both very involved in labor unions, and I was thrilled that she, of all the students, had chosen the year 1968. “So much happened that year, I shouted to her above the Michigan Avenue street noise. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated that year. The Tet Offensive. The Democratic Convention here in Chicago. The Riots. “What month did you get married?” I asked. She told me it was May. “Oh,” I said, my voice growing somber.
“The same month Robert Kennedy was killed.”

RFK was killed a few weeks after they got married, she told me. Her husband used to leave the house around 6 in the morning for work each day, and on that morning she got out of bed to come down to kiss him goodbye. “I came down the stairs, and there he was, sitting on the couch, crying,” she’d never seen him cry before. “He’d turned on the morning news, that’s where he heard.”

This student’s husband died a few years ago. I asked if her children (they had a blended family, her husband had children before this second marriage, too) knew their dad cried when he heard about Bobby’s assassination. “No,” she said. “I don’t
think they know that.” I urged her to write about that morning in May, 1968.

I hope she does. I’ll find out tomorrow: We meet at 11:30.