I said I liked covering the northwest suburbs in part because my beat included O’Hare Airport. So many reporters hoofed their way there to interview arriving and departing bigwigs that American Airlines, then the largest user of the airport, kept a public relations office there. I was at O’Hare on July 1, 1967, when John Cardinal Cody returned from Rome, where he was elevated to cardinal by Pope Paul VI. Thousands were there to greet him, including Mayor Richard J. Daley. Nine days later I returned to interview evangelist Billy Graham, who returned from a visit to Yugoslavia. He said of Christians in that then-Communist nation: “They reminded me of early Christians in the New Testament.” Also that summer I found New York Senator Robert Kennedy and his large family at O’Hare, on their way to raft down the Colorado River in its namesake state. I asked whether he might challenge President Lyndon Johnson in 1968. This was months before Senator Eugene McCarthy exposed Johnson’s political weakness in early party primaries, and Kennedy brushed aside my questions. I remember thinking, rafting down the Colorado River? How quaint. I would later do it many times.
Also, one of my tasks was to meet President Johnson’s plane on the military side of O’Hare, whenever he came to town. One such time led to an exhilarating experience. The president landed in early evening, about 8 o’clock. Very quickly his entourage got into limos, which inserted themselves inside the protective cocoon of Secret Service and Chicago police vehicles. Then the mini-parade left the airport at high speed, headed for the nearby Kennedy Expressway. I decided, oh what the hell, and slid in behind the last car. Down the Kennedy we flew at 75 mph. I looked in the rear-view mirror, expecting to see cars with flashing red lights pursuing me. Would they shoot out my tires first? Nothing. The lanes were dark and empty behind me. So I just kept on going, staying about 100 yards behind the procession. And when the president and his guard flew off the Kennedy and onto downtown streets, each intersection blocked by squads of Chicago cops, I flew off, too, and got through the intersections before they could be reopened. In fact, I could see Johnson’s limo pull into a garage entrance of the Conrad Hilton off Michigan Avenue. This was decades before iPhones. I quickly drove to 401 N. Wabash, reported my man safe and sound at the Hilton, left and drove home.
But my most memorable assignment in 1967 took me to Milwaukee at the end of August. Why me? I guess I was available when Jerome Watson, who covered the Chicago suburbs nearest Milwaukee, was not. In any event, racial tensions were bubbling over. A white Catholic priest, the Rev. James Groppi, took up the cause of blacks seeking a fair-housing law in that industrial city, a law Milwaukee’s mayor opposed because it would speed the exodus of whites to suburbs. Freedom House, the headquarters of a coalition of black groups, was burned by arsonists, as was a nearby grocery. When hundreds of mostly young black youths marched through a working class white neighborhood the night of August 30, in defiance of a ban against marches proclaimed by the mayor, police in riot gear arrested about 100 of them.
I went to the offices of the Milwaukee Journal to write a long account, which I phoned to the city desk. The next day, I had company on the streets. Gene Roberts from the Atlanta bureau of the New York Times showed up, as did Nicholas Chriss from the Houston bureau of the Los Angeles Times. Roberts, who would later distinguish himself as editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was an imposing reporter parachuting into big regional stories like this. He tirelessly sought out the principals in the dispute for interviews, as well as whites and blacks who lined up on both sides. I did those same things, of course, but I was a kid and Gene was visiting royalty. I guess I’m trying to say that doors opened easily for the New York Times, but Gene Roberts sure knew how to knock.
We got along great. But immediately we got into an argument. Gene was from the Tarheel State, and insisted there was never a Union Station in Goldsboro, N.C. I was right, of course, because I knew my railroad geography from coast to coast, but who is to argue with Gene Roberts? Anyway, we helped each other the next night, August 31, when the tensions in that city again came close to boiling over. Father Groppi led 400 whites and blacks on a planned 25-block march to City Hall. But the procession only made it seven blocks from a church before vans of police pulled up and arrested 168 marchers. Back we reporters went to the Journal to write and phone in our stories.
The third night, all hell broke loose. Again Father Groppi tried to lead a march. Again the police broke it up. But this time the cops used tear gas and clubs, and the marchers hurled rocks and bottles at the police. At one point, police drove marchers into a church basement and then flooded it with tear gas. Each side blamed the other for the melee. I was in the middle, literally, hit by flying missiles and blinded a couple of times by tear gas. Yes, I found it all terribly exciting.
A couple of thoughts: Milwaukee adopted a fair housing law the following spring. James Groppi would lead more than 200 protest marches involving racial equality, the Vietnam war, treatment of American Indians and goodness knows what else, breaking with the Catholic church and marrying before his death at age 54 of brain cancer. Love him or hate him, he had moral clarity. And Fred Frailey, then age 23, didn’t forget watching Gene Roberts and Nick Chriss ply their craft with confidence. I got it into my head that becoming a national correspondent for a news organization was a goal worth pursuing, eventually. The opportunity would arise far sooner than I thought.