Those big stories I missed

THE event of 1967 was the January blizzard that buried Chicago under three feet of snow. It was the show-stopper of all show-stoppers. The city didn’t move—couldn’t move—for days. Tell me about it, please, because I wasn’t there. I spent the Blizzard of ’67 hundreds of miles away, in Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., being miserably cold all the same as a basic trainee.

About one week into the job in Chicago, in June of 1966, I had a Monday off. Maggie said not to bother coming home without getting enlisted into the Illinois National Guard. I needed no convincing. The buildup of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was in full swing, and my years of student deferment from the draft were over. But getting that enlistment was no quick and easy feat. I wasn’t the only one trying to avoid the draft. I found an artillery battalion stationed in the Chicago Avenue Armory with openings. But such was the bureaucracy of the Illinois National Guard that it took about three months for me to be sworn in. On Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend I boarded a chartered Greyhound bus for the trip to Missouri and a leave of absence that would last through March 1967.

I was forever grateful not to become cannon fodder. And the fact of the matter is that I had plenty of subsequent opportunities to serve my country in uniform. Every time a major event occurred in Chicagoland—killer tornadoes, riots, political conventions—I found myself ordered to active duty in the Guard rather than writing about the events as a Sun-Times reporter.

Let’s go back to that blizzard. I found a YouTube segment that is worth watching. WFLD was the new Field Enterprises television station in Chicago, and it worked closely with the two Field newspapers, the afternoon Daily News and morning Sun-Times. Cameras were permanently placed below the ceilings inside both fourth floor newsrooms. When important news broke, WFLD switched to either or both city rooms for the latest news. So in this clip we first see a dour Daily News reporter, Harlan Draeger giving a summary of the storm’s impact. He all but puts me to sleep. Then we switch to the Sun-Times, and there’s our Dick Foster, shirt collar unbuttoned, smoking a cigarette. Dick removes the smoke, turns around to face the camera and says, “Well, it’s just about over.” Then he stands up and the camera recedes to reveal an almost empty newsroom. Unlike Harlan, who worked from a script, Dick speaks extemporaneously. He remarks that his own newspaper published only two of its five editions—“circulation trucks couldn’t get to the newsstands.” This was vintage Dick Foster—cherubic, happy-go-lucky, a damn good communicator. The other day, I emailed Dick a link to the YouTube clips—he was unaware of it.

On April 21, 1967, days after my return to the newspaper from basic training, our windows at the Mount Prospect office were pelted by heavy afternoon rain. Then the phone rang. It was Cecil Neth downtown. “Fred, a tornado just tore through Belvidere. Get out there and start phoning stuff in.” Belvidere is a town of 13,000, 50 miles northwest of Mount Prospect, and I got there at last light to see utter devastation. I took careful notes of the damage I saw, including a roofless high school (classes had just dismissed when the tornado came through). On the floor of the high school gym a morgue was established so 21 bodies could be identified. I interviewed dozens of people and phoned all of this to two other Sun-Times reporters in Chicago, one writing the main story and another a sidebar. Some time after midnight I said good night to the city desk and found a motel in nearby Rockford.

By 8 the next morning, a Saturday, I was back in Belvidere, but not for long. From a pay phone I called the city desk, which said the National Guard was looking for me—my unit had been activated by the governor to aid in disaster relief in Belvidere. So back to Chicago I went, to change into my olive uniform and combat boots and report to the armory, so that by mid afternoon I could be back in Belvidere, in a vastly different role. The active duty lasted only that one day. Sunday found me again in Belvidere to report and write a follow-up about the grieving, and believe me, there was plenty of it.

On April 5, 1968, the morning after Martin Luther King’s assassination, Chicago was as tense as a piano wire. Jim Casey, normally stationed at police headquarters for the Sun-Times, was touring the West Side in a patrol car. I was called in from Mount Prospect to stand in for him downtown. I had never been to Chicago police headquarters or its press room, and knew not the first thing to do about reporting what police knew about the rapidly decaying state of safety in the city. Reporters from the other newspapers and broadcast stations were too busy to help me, too. Do you ever have dreams in which you try to accomplish something and can’t seem to get it done? That was me. At 4 o’clock, just after the first edition deadline, Jim Peneff phoned from the city desk to say the governor had activated the National Guard. That night found me in a truck, patrolling the streets of the South Side in company with Chicago police cruisers. That was Friday.

This time, active duty lasted a week. On Saturday, Peneff called to ask that I write about my experiences for the newspaper. I sought permission from the National Guard and was told no—not permitted. Then someone in the guard had an idea. Why not write Maggie a letter? And if the letter read like a newspaper feature story and she just happened to give it to the Chicago Sun-Times, why, that would be permissible.

So that’s what I did. “Dear Margaret,” it began, and it told of my experiences in uniform the past two days. It consumed all of page 40 in Monday’s paper, with me pictured in helmet and an M16 slung over my shoulder. It was hokey, I admit, but served the purpose of telling readers what it was like to be a soldier in a riotous city. And it calmed my frustration at not being able to practice my writer’s craft.

Rereading the piece, I am impressed I wrote as well as I did then, scribbling in longhand in a room of the Washington Park Armory while my fellow guardsmen slept off a night on patrol along South Halsted Street.  An excerpt:

We sat in the trucks and were soon surrounded by small children. Most of them acted friendly. But a few had the discomforting habit of cursing viciously at us with wide, happy smiles on their faces. What the heck, I thought. I guess I’d be hacked off too if troops were stationed in my neighborhood.

One boy–maybe he was 8 years old–came up to the cab of my truck, looked at the “U.S. Army” insignia on my field jacket and said: “When I’m 18 I’m goin’ to join the Army, too . . . be on your side then.”

To the friendly voices as well as the angry ones, we replied not a word. Our orders were keep our mouths zippered. We were there to do a job, the officers told us, and not to make friends or enemies.

Only a few months later, again I was in uniform, this time “federalized” by President Johnson to protect the city during the Democratic National Convention. My job during the convention was  to drive the Jeep of the guard’s chief intelligence officer, Captain George Halas Jr., son of the owner of the Chicago Bears.

Halas, short and bald and very fit, had a flair for the dramatic. His task was to smoke out the action on the streets, to find the places where we thousands of guardsmen could be deployed to tamp down the tempers of both political protesters and Chicago policemen. On Monday evening of convention week he instructed me to take him to a location on the near South Side, where comedian Dick Gregory was trying to lead a “poor people’s procession” to the convention center several miles away.

Police blocked the procession of hundreds of people. Halas told me to park the Jeep and follow him. He went right to where Gregory and the police stood face to face. I was beside him, ducking down in my uniform to be inconspicuous. A police commander said to disperse or face arrest. Gregory replied that his group was nonviolent but would not stand down. So the commander reached for Gregory to place him under arrest. A big commotion began as policemen moved to begin mass arrests. Gregory yelled for people to stay calm. Halas turned to me and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

The next night we were cruising from Hyde Park toward downtown when we were stunned by a stray cloud of tear gas. Halas yelled to me to stop the Jeep until we had our gas masks on. That accomplished, we got on South Michigan Avenue to within a block of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, a massive structure of some 3,000 rooms that was headquarters hotel for the convention. We stopped in the middle of the intersection of Michigan and Van Buren—traffic on both streets was blocked. Stay here, Halas said, and disappeared into a big crowd of people standing in front of the hotel.

He was gone half an hour. In the interim, I could hear the crowd at the hotel roar and wondered what I was missing. Halas returned and told me. Cops had pushed protesters through the plate glass windows of the Conrad Hilton’s first floor in what was later called a “police riot.”

Several hours later, my battalion stood in front of the hotel, unloaded weapons at our sides, as things quieted down. The police had all but withdrawn from the area, leaving the National Guard in charge. Standing there, I could see political reporters returning to the hotel from the convention center, their evening’s work accomplished. Several of them I knew. At least they were doing something useful, I thought. All we were doing was protecting people from their own police force.

The post-midnight postings in front of the hotel went on three nights. Friday we were de-federalized and became civilians again. Saturday morning I boarded a train to Kansas for a vacation with my wife’s family. I had been through a tumultuous week, one that my Sun-Times colleagues would talk about as long as I remained at the newspaper. John Adam Moreau would later remark to me: “I can say without fear of being wrong that the S-T beat the entire world in coverage, not because we were on home turf but because our guys and gals worked harder and smarter than any other news people.  We just beat the hell out of the Times and the Washington Post.”  Amen to that, John Adam. What hurts is that I couldn’t be a part of that moment. Until I penned this blog 49 years after the fact, I wrote not a syllable about what I had seen and done.