Saturdays with Seniors: Janie’s Ride of Passage

I am pleased to feature Janie Isackson as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. A retired educator, Janie is in the “Me, Myself and I” memoir class that used to meet at the Chicago Cultural Center. That class meets via Zoom now and enjoys each others’ company so much that they’ve started their own Zoom movie review group, too. I Zoomed in yesterday to hear them discuss “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” Many there were young adults in 1968 and had great stories to share.
Janie’s is one of them.

by Janie Isackson

Grant Park, 1968.

My father died in August of 1967. Faced with the numbing loss of my wonderful dad, I left my parents’ comfortable home in West Rogers Park in Chicago by the end of the following school year. Abandoning my mother less than a year after my father died filled me with enormous guilt, but not leaving then meant I would have remained there until forever.

My rented corner apartment was just two blocks from Lincoln Park, where Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the colorful demonstrators and protesters were camping out. Our apartment faced both Lincoln Park and Clark Street, so my roommate and I had a birdseye view of everything going on.

Having a naïve understanding of the political and social climate, I would wander over to the park often that August just to gape at the “Be-In” in Lincoln Park. Only four months earlier Martin Luther King was assassinated; then in June, Robert Kennedy. I’d left my parents’ home, my childhood home of 23 years, amidst the turmoil of the spring and summer of 1968. My own psyche mirrored all of the events taking place: trying to figure out how I could be a different kind of school teacher when returning in fall to the high school where I taught, and trying to figure out how I could make learning matter… all the while determined to no longer wear pantyhose. Such lofty goals.

The kid from Rogers Park was on her way to a new life. Leaving home had left me feeling forlorn: The world had suddenly shifted. I had gone from being a teenager to a woman living on my own, pretending to feel liberated. Seeing Minnie Riperton and the Rotary Connection at a small club on Division Street. The Jefferson Airplane at the Kinetic Playground. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the Yippies marching down N. Clark Street.

Then my roommate and I were tear-gassed by the police. Wasn’t this new way of life supposed to be thrilling?

The teargassing happened as we opened our apartment windows to gape at the marchers below: the gas floated up to the 14th floor. My eyes burned and breathing was labored. Is this how it felt to be reviled?

Sandburg Village, where we lived, has enormous open courtyards. The day after the Yippies marched, I found myself sitting on a bench in one of those courtyards, mute and immobile. And the 1968 Democratic Convention hadn’t even started yet.

Until then history and politics had always occurred outside my presumably sheltered existence. But then, on August 28th, 1968, I rode my 1939 blue and white Schwinn bicycle to Grant Park, parking myself and the bike on the west side of the hill with the statue of General John Logan. I listened to anti-war protesters giving speeches in Grant Park and watched the crowd begin to stir. Then violence erupted. It was scary. The police were armed guards with clubs and helmets, beating the protesters. The Schwinn bicycle and I fled, glad even now that I was on my bicycle, not on foot.

I rode my blue and white 1939 Schwinn bicycle to the hill across from the Conrad Hilton that day, yes, to observe. But even then I knew I went there so I might be able to tell my grandchildren that I saw the melee firsthand. This was my introduction. 1968 was a dramatic year for me personally: moving out of my parents’ home. But it took the assassination of two significant national leaders and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to see myself as part of a larger universe.