Philip LaChapelle and I were already married when 1968
began, but had not yet moved to New York, where he was to resume his studies at
Columbia University. They’d been interrupted by his tour of duty in Vietnam,
from which he’d returned less than a year earlier.
While in Chicago, Philip had been hired by City News
Bureau, a local wire service that groomed its reporters to work in one of the
four Chicago daily newspapers that existed at the time. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1733.html
Meanwhile, I was professionally adrift, having finished two years of college, but without any goals beyond that. To accommodate
myself to Philip’s late night work schedule, I took a job as an admitting clerk
at Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital just west of the Loop. Philip would get off
work, then swing by and pick me up, and home we’d go to our basement apartment
at North Avenue & Austin Blvd.
I was a news junkie before meeting and marrying Philip; the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 had kept the entire
nation—and my family—glued to the TV screen for days. Then in 1965, the Vietnam
war became “[t]he first ‘living-room war’,” with Americans watching reports from
the front nightly on their TVs. http://www.museum.tv/eotv/vietnamonte.htm
Three years later, the anti-war movement was also big TV
news, especially during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in
Chicago. Protestors from all over the
country gathered in Grant Park during August 23 – 28 of that year. Philip and I
were among them, though not, fortunately, on the last night, during the “Battle
of Michigan Avenue,” when the terrible violence erupted.
All of these images—and many more—came to mind when I read
the article by David Waters, “Forces of chaos, seeds of change,” in Monday’s USA Today. A collection of facts, events,
quotes, and names from 1968, the piece includes the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin
Luther King, Jr.
Immediately following King's murder, rioting erupted on Chicago's west side. The next morning, Philip and I drove the almost-empty streets, seeing the devastation, though never leaving the car. At one
point, we were wedged between two slow-moving National Guard vehicles, making me feel somewhat
safer.
That ended though as we later rode past a north side housing
project. Along with a handful of other cars, ours was fired at by a sniper in
one of the buildings. I remember all of us quickly pulling over to the
shoulder, then jumping out of our cars and taking cover behind them.
There was a lot more cultural and political upheaval going on in 1968, the year I turned 25. And though living in Chicago--and being married to an anti-war vet who was also a reporter--may have placed me closer to some of it, all of the "revolutions" that occurred, or began, in a mere 365 days changed my life forever.
To read more about that pivotal year, especially if you also
lived it:
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