Fifty yrs. ago this wk., during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, I was taken into police custody for the first time. Granted, this didn't take place in Chicago, but in Seattle, & it was a curfew bust. A friend & I had been at a house run by some church ("Hallelujah House", honest!) on Capitol Hill, watching the Chicago P.D. preserving disorder, & when we left to return to our middle-class homes in Madison Park we encountered a prowl car whose occupants decided, it being after 2200, to haul us downtown & make our parents come to pick us up. Believe it or shove it, this reporter had a little baggie o' reefer in his possession, which the police didn't discover until we received a more thorough going-over downtown. (Those were the days. Back of a police car, no 'cuffs, a cursory pat-down, neither screen nor bulletproof glass between the seats ... coulda plugged those coppers if I'd just had a small hand-gun on me. Second time in custody was another story; 20+ arrestees in the back of a Ford Econoline, w/ screens. Anyway ...)
Legal result of the big bust? A visit to the office of Juvenile Control Officer (That's what it said on his business card.)
Yumul, whose first question to me was "Did the arresting officer inform you of your rights?" My response was "I didn't even know I'd been 'arrested'", which took a lot of wind out of Off. Yumul's sails, & about all he could do was give me the standard lecture, the one detail of which I remember was that speed freaks would live on a box of Wheaties for a wk. I of course claimed it was my first time & some hippie on the street I'd never seen before or since had sold it to me.
The MC5's
Wayne Kramer was there.
And
it never stops.
America’s Never-Ending Culture War
The issues that drove protesters to Chicago in 1968 are still motivating our partisan divide, 50 years later.
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