Arnold the Bulldog: Politics at the Doorstep

In Kenosha, at the door of a new white house in a new white neighborhood with curvy streets, low trees and developer-landscaped gardens, I knocked on the storm door, bang, ba-bang, bang. A huge white old English bulldog slid around the corner from the kitchen to me, the stranger, barking as hard as his docile voice would allow. His owner appeared looking as if she could barely hold him back.

I shouted through the door, “I love dogs! It’s ok. Can I pet him?” We all smiled, dog included, and he came out to greet me with a gentle push of his massive short body against my legs.

“Hi, I’m with the Kenosha Democrats. Have you voted yet?”

“No, we’re voting tomorrow.”

“What’s his name?”

“Arnold.”

“Arnold? Like Schwarzenegger?”

“Yes.” We both cracked up as Arnold dutifully looked one to the other, pleased to hear his name.

“You know, Schwarzenegger just endorsed Kamala Harris.”

Thus, I established my purpose in knocking on her door on a bright white Saturday afternoon.

“I know!” she said. Then she mouthed the words, “I’m voting for her.”

“Oh great,” I said, “”Thank you.”

Canvassers use a handy cell phone app, Minivan, to record voters’ responses. The drop down menu lists Strong Democrat, Lean Democrat, Undecided, Lean Republican and Strong Republican. Since my voter didn’t give it her all, I decided she was a Lean Democrat, punched it in and moved on to the house across the street.

As I came back to the sidewalk, all of a sudden a white SUV sped out of Arnold’s driveway and stopped in front of me. She rolled down the window and shouted, “I’m for Kamala! Going to vote right now! Good luck!”

I thought back to her open door and realized someone else had been rattling around in the kitchen. A husband? She couldn’t let her husband know she was voting for Kamala Harris?

This gave me hope. I changed her in Minivan to Strong Democrat. Voting Harris.

Perhaps she represented a political ad where Julia Roberts voiced, “in the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know,” suggesting women can lie to their husbands about their vote. Apparently Fox News went berserk over this ad, as if spouses never lie to each other.

Today, the day before election day, it hit me how different life will soon be. No matter who wins, I’ll have no more reason to hope — for the vote, for my candidates, that the country will be at peace, or that democracy survives. It-is-what-it-is acceptance will necessarily move in to care for me.

Saturday afternoon trips from Chicago to Kenosha, stopping in the bustling Democratic headquarters then out to canvass voters will halt. My calves will never forget the two-step entrances to every house in Kenosha County. But memories of coffee and sandwiches at The Buzz Cafe on Sixth Avenue will fade.

I do have something to hope for.

Incoming texts and emails will be reduced to a trickle.

Me & Pete Buttigieg

Never have I felt so valued at church as I did last Sunday. Presbyterians I hardly knew tugged at my sleeve or grabbed my elbow or those less buttoned-up screeched in my face — all congratulating me on getting to meet Pete Buttigieg. I’d posted a photo of Pete and me on FaceBook that week. A well-heeled Democratic couple in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood scrambled a party together that raised $700,000 for the Presidential campaign of candidate Kamala Harris six days after she chose Governor Tim Walz as her Vice Presidential running mate. A friend bought two tickets he couldn’t use and asked if I’d like to have them.

Gulp. Yes. Yes. Yes. I said. Pete Buttigieg is the most poplar Democrat in the United States. He’s the youngest person ever to serve as US Secretary of Transportation, was the mayor of South Bend, ran for president in 2020, is married with two children and oh, he’s gay. When he kicked off his campaign for President in 2019, I traveled to South Bend with Amy, Peter and Mark in the pouring rain to be at his announcement in the leaky old Studebaker factory. Pete was on Kamala’s short list for Veep, but, well, he’s gay. The US electorate can stretch its collective imagination to accept only one major cultural shift at a time. I guess. Democrats like me are giddy over the historic candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, a black woman, running at the top of the ticket. We would have been rapturous if she’d chosen Pete, but honestly, we’re not far from that in her choice of Tim Walz, a funny smart former high school football coach who loves state fairs, teaching, sitting on Congressional committees, governing Minnesota, serving in the National Guard and traveling to China.

I just love campaigns. I love candidates, campaign organizers, campaign volunteers, campaign consultants, campaign buttons, campaign events and campaign offices. My high school held a student-led Democrat-Republican combined mock convention in 1964. I was assigned to be Republican candidate Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign manager. I wrote to Rockefeller’s campaign office in New York requesting his platform in order to write my nominating speech for the mock convention. The campaign responded by sending me free stuff: crates full of campaign buttons, posters, leaflets, scarves, ties, cufflinks, bracelets, position papers, and even a suggested stump speech. I plastered the school with Rockefeller posters and made sure every student had some sort of paraphernalia with “Nelson” on it. The students chanted “Nelson! Nelson!”, I delivered my nominating speech and Rockefeller won the student endorsement by a wide margin.

I had already been steeped in soda-shop debates rebutting a freshman classmate’s anti-government racist diatribes. I read the boy’s constant companion, the 1958 publication The Blue Book of the John Birch Society ( a precursor to Trumpism and Project 2025) in order to prove him wrong point by point.

In the eighth grade my class was bussed to the airport and given hand-held American flags to wave and cheer as President Dwight Eisenhower deplaned from Air Force One.

Sixty-five years later, I’m still at it.

The Veterans

At a memorial service in downtown Chicago on Veterans Day eve, campaign veteran David Axelrod eulogized Adlai Stevenson III. In 1986 Adlai had reluctantly enlisted Axelrod as a consultant to steer the ship of his campaign for Illinois governor. Adlai had nothing against Axelrod. He just didn’t understand why he needed a consultant to do what he thought the campaign staff should do. Axelrod recounted how Adlai fought, like the Marine he had once been, for higher principles—“utterly immune to pressures of organized money, politicians and public opinion”.

He reminded us of how the press derided Adlai as “professorial” and out of touch with voters. But Nancy Stevenson could light any room with grace and warmth, insulating her husband from criticisms of being cold and aloof. They both always appreciated the sacrifices of campaign staffers. On that night, at a party to mark her husband’s death, she offered us one final salute from her and her “Ad”.

Nancy was the last to speak. With a cavalcade of children and grandchildren surrounding her, she chronicled each of the Stevenson campaigns. Treasurer. Senator. Governor. I looked around the room full of campaign veterans and wondered how she deployed so many of us so fast.

Small units clustered together after the formalities, telling favorite Adlai yarns, as if he was the childhood uncle. There’s a familial coziness in campaign storytelling. I gravitated toward the governor-campaign crew, some of the funniest people I’ve ever known.There’s no doubt we all respected him for the valor conveyed by Axelrod. But as a candidate, Adlai gave us a lot of stand-up comedy material.

In 1985 the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl. At a campaign event, an enthusiastic supporter yelled out, “Hey Adlai, you’re the Mike Ditka of politics!”

“Who’s Mike Ditka?” Adlai asked a campaign staffer in the car afterwards. The staffer explained that the ’85 Chicago Bears was being touted as the greatest NFL team of all time. Adlai said, “Oh, I thought NFL stood for some new terrorist group.”

In the early days of the 1986 campaign, I was the driver waiting for Adlai and the press secretary outside the Chicago Tribune. When the two got in the car, we headed down the Dan Ryan to a campaign event on the far south side. The press secretary and I were looking forward to the drive time to review the long-term schedule with Adlai. But Adlai, always prepared, hopped in the front seat, tuned in WFMT and pulled sheet music out of his briefcase. We were mum as he followed along to the tinny car radio ringing out Bach’s Mass in B Minor all the way to Calumet City.

Adlai once accused his opponent, incumbent Governor Jim Thompson, of implying he was “some kind of wimp.″ Thompson sounded off, “I never called Adlai a wimp”. The label stuck and at the conclusion of every one of Nancy Stevenson’s speeches after that, she smiled, winked, and affirmed, “Ad…is no wimp.”

RIP. Adlai Stevenson III. October 10, 1930 – September 6, 2021

1968 Democratic Convention, or How I Became an Alcoholic

When my first husband, labeled Madman Murphy by his Princeton colleagues, came to the end of his Sociology degree in 1968, the campus uncharacteristically fire-cracked with small anti-war rallies, civil rights demonstrations and teach-ins on avoiding the draft. I spent all my free time campaigning for the Democratic Presidential peace candidate, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, in nearby Trenton with our toddler Joe hanging in an Army surplus knapsack on my back. Campus memorial services for Martin Luther King, Jr. ignited nascent embers in the Ivy League gentleman conscience. Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train passed by Princeton Junction on the weekend Madman Murphy graduated. We partied through the summer at the Jersey Shore. Murphy lifeguarded, Baby Joe and I frolicked on the beach, and we delighted in the safety of the light of day.

At night Murphy and I took turns babysitting and joining friends at our favorite watering holes. I started smoking pot and argued with everyone over the Viet Nam war. Jersey Shore barflies had nothing on me, after all, I’d been schooled by Princeton peace activists and Ramparts Magazine.

President Lyndon Johnson did not seek reelection. After Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June, Eugene McCarthy, the intellectual standard-bearer of peace and justice, was left to shepherd the world toward a Democratic victory in his frenzied campaign for President.

In the summer, I tutored a young cousin in elementary arithmetic and sentence structure. I used my cash to buy stationery and postage stamps and took to writing letters to Bobby Kennedy delegates asking them to vote for McCarthy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago that August. I’d pontificate daily to friends and strangers on the beach and in the bars to test out new reasons to support McCarthy over the late-arriving establishment candidate Senator Hubert Humphrey. I fully expected my work to pay off at the Convention and longed to be at the youth festival planned in my hometown to celebrate McCarthy’s victory.

By the time I joined friends at a neighborhood Jersey Shore saloon to watch the Convention on TV, news accounts of the protests and riots were interrupting coverage of the political speeches inside the Convention Hall. But that didn’t matter to me. Soon all would be well. McCarthy would clinch the nomination and beat Richard Nixon in November. No doubt about it.

The unthinkable startled me out of innocent political bliss. The TV flashed back and forth between white men bullying peace delegates inside and police beating peace activists outside. Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered the police to shoot to kill. People who looked like me were dripping in blood.

th-6 — Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley at 1968 Democratic National Convention

What was happening? Eighty percent of primary voters were anti-war. We won the battle and I was sure we’d beaten back the war machine. The delegates rejected McCarthy and his peace plank, nominated Hubert Humphrey and iced out Democratic activists.

And me? I added martinis, LSD, mescaline, speed, librium and cocaine to my diet. I could see no future. By the time the next presidential election rolled around in 1972, AA meetings monopolized my time and I did nothing but slap a George McGovern for President bumper sticker on my VW.

First Impressions of Bill Clinton

In August 1991, twelve Democratic leaders and influencers, were seated in leather armchairs at a walnut oval table in a small dining room at one of downtown Chicago’s private clubs. I was the only woman. When Governor Bill Clinton entered the room, his th-2 tall navy-suited body seemed to shift the atmosphere, moving the dust molecules away from him and clearing the air as he moved. He gave a hardy salutation and proceeded to introduce himself to each person while he circumnavigated the room, one-by-one. I was halfway around the table, and when he reached me I stood and looked up to his bemused rosy face, full of laugh lines. He had a big red nose, like Santa Claus. As I tried to introduce myself, he interrupted me by saying he knew who I was— the Executive Director of the state Democratic Party. He asked if I knew my name was the same as one of King Lear’s daughters. “Yes,” I said, “My name came from her.” He leaned over and whispered let’s keep that between us since she wasn’t such a great character. And just like that we had a best-buddies pact.

He finished working the room, told us why he was thinking of running for president, and asked us to support him. He never sat down.

A few weeks later, Bill and Hillary entered a crowded 2nd-floor meeting room in a Chicago hotel with about 50 curious political activists who gathered to meet them for the first time. He neither ushered her in ahead of him as a well-mannered (albeit chauvinistic) gentleman nor did he make her walk behind him as an ill-mannered boor. Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton (L)
Side-by-side they came to us. We all jumped to our feet and cheered before he even said hello, before he shook one hand. It was two months before he announced his candidacy for President. His nascent message stressing personal responsibility for welfare recipients echoed what I’d learned in Alcoholics Anonymous — to acknowledge that I am responsible for the choices I make in my own life. Later in his presidency I despised his welfare reform policy but for now this seemingly spiritual insight vaulted my commitment to a new height. This was my guy.

The first week in October, one of Clinton’s many Chicago friends asked me to join him in driving Bill Clinton to Midway Airport. We’d been at a 100-person meet-and-greet where Clinton learned I was moving to Little Rock to work on his campaign. He looked back at me in the car and asked what my boss said when I told him I was quitting my job. My boss hoped I’d change my mind, so I told Clinton he wasn’t happy. Clinton picked up the car phone, called my boss, thanked him for letting me have this opportunity of a lifetime and said he was happy to have me on board. He ended the call by inviting my boss to bring his family down to the Governor’s mansion for a weekend. In the back seat I imagined throwing my arms around his neck and kissing the top of his ever-loving head.

I was in Little Rock by the end of the week.

Screaming at Hillary Clinton in Soldier Field

Llani O’Connor and I were rabid Hillary Clinton fans during the 2008 Presidential Primary election. We exchanged did-you-hear-what-she-said exclamations all through the summer and fall of 2007 after she announced her candidacy.

This photo from August 7, 2007 shows us with sunny smiles, blouses opened to our bra-lines, red-faced, droopy-haired and sweaty at an outdoor Presidential Forum in Chicago’s Soldier Field. All seven Democratic candidates are on stage in the background: Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It was a full 15 months before the election, and Hillary was way ahead in the polls.

I had worked as Hillary’s advance person on a few trips when I was working in the Bill Clinton Administration in the 1990s and was completely starstruck by her brilliance, kindness and sense of humor. Llani and I were ecstatic to be voting in the Primary Election that would result in the first woman presidential candidate. We knew she was going to win.

I obtained three tickets to the Soldier Field event after shamelessly begging an old friend who was an aide to Senator Joe Biden. Our third companion, Ann, drove us there, dodging and weaving down South State Street to 31st, ignoring stop signs and red lights, crossing under South Lake Shore Drive then barreling back north 17 blocks to the south parking lot of Soldier Field. We recovered quickly from the tilt-a-whirl ride and rushed into the stadium onto the field to get to the closest seats possible.

The stage was set at the fifty-yard line. Long red,white and blue panels draped behind it, and dark blue curtains hung behind the panels, blocking the back and sides of the stage. Folding chairs filled up the rest of the field.

It was 95 degrees that day – so hot that the moderator, Keith Olbermann cracked that if the candidates didn’t behave he’d cut off their air conditioning. The stadium walls offered no shade and we thumbed our noses at the heat along with the other 15,000 people, all of us dancing around and singing songs for three hours waiting for the 90-minute event to start.

We were disappointed that little-known populist Dennis Kucinich received the most applause, but Hillary’s star power exploded next to the six men. We waited for the candidates to leave the stage before heading to the car for the treacherous ride home with Ann.

“Llani! Look! Hillary’s out in the audience shaking hands. Let’s go!” We plowed through hot bodies and upturned chairs to get as close to our hero as possible. Suddenly, Llani, in her baggy pink shorts, flimsy sandals and turquoise tank top climbed onto a folding chair and took off, hopping from one chair seat to another, camera in hand, shoulder bag swinging wildly and screaming at Hillary to look her way.

Traveling home the wrong way down one-way streets with Ann behind the wheel evoked little excitement after that.

Are We Getting Dragged Into Their Holy War?

Hal Lindsey’s end-times prophecies in The Late, Great Planet Earth, permeated the born-again, religious cult I joined in the early 1970’s in Toms River, New Jersey. There were about fifty of us—disparate spiritual seekers who accepted Jesus Christ as our personal the_late_great_planet_earth_cover savior, a requirement for inclusion in the exclusive Fellowship. One of the elders had broken away from a local Plymouth Brethren Church and opened the basement of his family’s large, wooded, colonial home for Bible study and Sunday services for us blue-jeaned recovering addicts and alcoholics. As a newly sobered-up ex-hippie, full of self-loathing, all I wanted was to be accepted in that Fellowship.

Based on his interpretations of the Book of Revelations, Lindsey’s book sensationalized end-of-the-world Biblical prophecies connecting them to current events as proof of the coming Rapture where Christians would be taken up to heaven and avoid Armageddon. Satan’s plans to form a one-world government and religion, as prophesied, were triggered by the establishment of the state of Israel and the World Council of Churches—both in 1948. Everywhere I looked in those days I saw Lindsey’s signs of the end times: increase in the divorce rate, recreational drugs, new technology, the gasoline shortage, religious ecumenism, and the birth of the European Union.

Church elders directed every aspect of our lives. Men were the head of the household, women submitted to them and didn’t work. We lived in separate homes but were discouraged from socializing outside the Fellowship, lest we be influenced by secular humanist ideas, like having credit cards, one of Satan’s tools to create a global economy. We didn’t put our money in The Bank of America because the bank was seeking to legalize interstate branch banking, thereby centralizing all the country’s money into a single entity, another Satanic plan.

When my son joined Little League in the first grade, I sat away from the other parents in the bleachers fearing the wrath of God if I talked to anyone outside of the Fellowship. Church members scorned me for volunteering for Jimmy Carter for President in 1976, even though he was born-again.

After four years, I extricated myself from the Fellowship, left my abusive husband in New Jersey and drove my nine-year-old son 800 miles west to Chicago for a new life. A group of Christians at LaSalle Street Church who had experienced similar religious cults nursed me back to spiritual and emotional health. The ideas of Hal Lindsey dissipated into the ether of bad dreams and gradually I no longer looked for signs of the end times.

Until now.

President Trump in his first speech to the Joint Congress announced he was not the President of the world, rather the President of us Americans.

These words, and words of White House strategist Steve Bannon announcing a nationalistic government free from links to other countries remind me of Hal Lindsey’s warning to resist Satan’s plans for a global economy and one-world government.

Are they fighting a holy war?

signs28_title — http://1timothy4-13.com/files/prophecy/signs28.html

Continue reading “Are We Getting Dragged Into Their Holy War?” →

What Is My Work, You Ask?

1962. My work is to stop laughing like a nervous little girl and start smiling like an unflappable young lady in the coffee shop on the Asbury Park boardwalk. To turn away from the seagulls fighting over dead fish on the beach and write “pancakes” and “bacon” on my notepad. To pay attention to the old telling the story of the 1934 wreck of the cruise ship SS Morro Castle on the beach. To save money for tickets to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the Asbury Park Convention Hall.

1967. My work is to read Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care and apply its commandments to week-old smiles, cries in the night, a nine-month old sprinter and a child who eats only chicken. My work is to stand my ground in the whirlwind advice from mothers, aunts and grandmothers. To learn to ride a baby on the back of my bicycle. To animate words as I point to clouds, trees and cars as if I’ve never seen these things before in my life.

1976. My work is to bypass the door to the secluded basement with its graveyard of empty vodka bottles. To surrender to my new single-motherness. To trust my untrustworthy father and move from a sandy Jersey Shore cottage to a downtown Chicago highrise. My work is to know this is the best plan for a nine-year-old boy’s future happiness.

1982. My work is to dress up in business clothes, act smarter than I am, eavesdrop on everyone’s conversations in a boiler room full of political operatives, ask stupid questions and digest enough information to schedule Nancy Stevenson in places that help win votes for her husband’s campaign for governor.

1990. My work is to be a motherless child. To lament the loss of my uterus and ovaries, and, my boyfriend. To escape to Paris and London with my twelve-year old niece. To atone for all my past sins.To feign self-confidence while running the Illinois Democratic Party.

1993. My work is to take Prozac on the way to Washington to join the management class of the Clinton Administration. To imagine I have power and to hide humiliation when I’m exposed. My work is to honor the ruling class. To recognize they are human. To protect myself from evil-doers and self-promoters. My work is to mourn the loss of naiveté.

2006. My work is to shield myself and others from Cook County Government officials who believe if you are happy at your job you’re not working hard enough. To cherish those I lead for what they are today and not for what they will be tomorrow. To protect them from those who refuse to know their names.

2017. My work is to record how far my shadow falls behind me. To tell the truth about myself and trust God with where the words go and what they do when they get there. My work is to proclaim the US Constitution guarantees me the freedom to assemble publicly and express myself openly without retribution. My work is to say I love America and when the saints go marching in, oh! how I want to be in that number.

Inspired by “An Address to My Fellow Faculty,” by A. Papatya Bucak, from brevitymag.com

On Winning: The Cubs and Cleveland

Susan Keegan and I hopped in her shiny new red Cadillac Crossover in Chicago and booked out of town to Ohio.

Our mission: canvass voters for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Ohio was a battleground state where we had friends to accommodate us for the five days leading up
to election day. Our canvassing territory was Ohio City, a quaint restored section of Cleveland. Thirty-eight hours before we left town the Chicago Cubs won the World Series against the Cleveland Indians. The final game had taken place in Cleveland, and conscious of the seriousness of our mission to win over Cleveland voters, we vowed to keep our Cubs hats at home. I even told someone I was from Toledo to curb anticipated antagonism.

We met old and new friends – Keith from Sonoma, Carol from Washington DC, Jamie from Oakland, Dennis from Virginia and even Vivienne who flew in from Ireland for the effort to nail the Trump coffin shut in a small patch of the American body politic.

News from my iPhone said Chicago’s parade for the Cubs win would be held the next day beginning at Wrigley Field, rolling down Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue to Grant Park, right past my condo building. “Oh Noooo,” I groaned in the car, “I’m going to miss it.” “Do you want to go back?” Sox fan Susan asked half-jokingly. No, we were off to do God’s work. No turning back.

I texted my 19-year old grandson, C.J, and told him to go to my place to watch the parade. He’d already been planning to bring his brother, 10-year-old John into town from their suburban home to spend the night and get a good position on the parade route. “Thanks for letting us stay,” C.J. texted, “John borrowed your Cubs hat – I hope you don’t mind.”

By the time Susan and I arrived at Cathy and Marc Dann’s vintage Tudor outside Cleveland we were exhausted from talking the entire seven-hour drive about Hillary’s winning campaign. All the polls said she was going to win. The betting community said she was going to win. Astrologers said she was going to win. The last time the Cubs won the World Series, the incumbent party won. Since Hillary was the incumbent party’s candidate, we took that as one more sign we were about to have our first woman president. Women were prohibited from voting for twelve more years after the Cubs last won the World Series in 1908. Women had won the pennant in 2016. This election was our World Series.

From my third floor balcony, C.J. and John each took iPhotos and videos of the Chicago Cubs open air buses with the players, their families, friends, team managers, coaches and owners as they crept down Lake Shore Drive onto Michigan Avenue. Cubs first baseman and cancer-survivor Anthony Rizzo lifted the trophy above his head as fans shouted, “We Never Quit.”

Fourteen hours after the polls closed in Ohio, Susan and I drove home. We had no trophy, no win. But we vowed, like the Cubs, to never quit.

Another Mother for Peace

anothermothersunflowerlogo — Another Mother for Peace poster

In 1968, Jim Kelly and I moved to Lansing, Michigan with our toddler son. While Kelly studied for his Masters of Social Work at Michigan State, one-year-old Joe and I marched with the national anti-war organization “Another Mother for Peace” to protest cereal companies that advertised during violent cartoons on Saturday morning TV.

We returned to Belmar, New Jersey, at the end of the school year and moved into an old Victorian beach house where Kelly painted the exterior in lieu of rent. At the end of the summer, we moved in with Kelly’s parents while he sought employment. Built-in babysitters allowed us to frequent our favorite saloon, McCann’s Tavern. In autumn, 1969, I got word that the Vietnam Moratorium Committee was planning what would be the largest antiwar protest in United States history.

I set about convincing our drinking group at McCann’s to drive the four hours to the March on Washington. Ramparts Magazine had taught me everything I needed to know about the War. This publication gave birth to my congenital anti-war condition with stories such as an expose about a Michigan State University group that worked in Vietnam as a front for the CIA.

In McCann’s we debated off and on about driving to the nation’s capital in the dead of night. Even though everyone just wanted to drink and have a few laughs, I kept it up. “Forty-five thousand American troops have died in the past two years. If we don’t end the war your military deferments will be rescinded and you’ll all get drafted into the Army.”

That did it.

Two carloads of us drove off at McCann’s last call. Since I had lived in Washington as a teenager for a few months with my father, I drove the lead car, pretending I knew the directions.

When we arrived, yellow school buses were parking bumper to bumper around the White House so President Nixon wouldn’t see the protesters. We headed to a Jersey Shore friend’s place near DuPont Circle to sober up and eat. Reeking of coffee and cigarettes, our speed-freak friend had been up all night working in a restaurant but he hitched on to our party and created an all-out breakfast banquet. They all fell asleep. I dropped a diet pill and took off for the Lincoln Memorial.

Peter, Paul and Mary and Arlo Guthrie belted out tunes between speeches from anti-war Senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. Peace hero Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose book on baby care taught me how to be an engaged mother, told us half million idealists that we were all noble. Pete Seeger led the crowd in the singing of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” I have loved sing-alongs ever since.

Back at the crash pad I hustled my friends outside to join the protesters marching toward DuPont Circle. We all got tear-gassed, screamed for mercy, helped each other to our cars and tore out of town.

The war ended six years later.

No one got drafted.

Regan Burke

Author "In That Number" from local booksellers or Amazon

Tag: Democrats