In January of 1970, the state legislature implemented big cuts in welfare payments.  Milwaukee’s chapter of the National Welfare Rights Organization responded with an unusual protest.  Marching down Wisconsin Avenue, they suddenly invaded the Boston Store.  They protested by a grabbing as much merchandise from the first floor as they could.  The plan was to pile up winter clothing at the cash registers.  It was bedlam.  It was evidence that militancy was not an isolated phenomenon in those days.  The women were largely African American.  But there were whites and Latinas as well.

When a Milwaukee cop was pinning down one of the mothers, I made the mistake of getting in his face as I led the chant, “Let her go”.  He did.  He gave me a gash in the head with his club and arrested me for battery to a police officer.  I never touched him.  In the holding cell, I was united with two other arrestees, Ernesto Chacon and Jose Puente – two leaders of the emerging Mexican population on the near south side.

Out on bail for a felony, I should have gone into a low key mode.  The Vietnam draft lottery had given me a very safe number.  My birthday was assigned sequence number 190, meaning that half of draft age guys would have to be called up before I would be taken.  But passion and sacrifice overruled reason.  I was out of control.

My downfall came on February 19, 1970.  That was the day after the Conspiracy Seven were convicted for their role in the protests at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.  Sympathy marches were held in dozens of cities.  In Milwaukee, the Yippees took the lead.  Around 300 of us assembled to march down Wisconsin Avenue.  Plain clothes cops were conspicuous in the crowd acting like unruly protesters.  The provocation worked.  They began making mass arrests.

I spied a police lieutenant holding a teenager in a choke hold.  I surged into the fray.  My arm came down and the butt end of a 2 by 2 picket stick struck the lieutenant on the cheek bone.  Down he went and free went the teenager.  I tried to run but was tackled by a burly German cop less than a block away.  Tossed into the paddy wagon, I realized I was in the company of another son of a mick.  Mike McDermott sat shackled and grinning at me.  He would later become the doctor, who was the real life inspiration for Dr. Mark Green in the hit show, ER.

Now facing 2 felonies, I really had to tone things down.  For a short time, protest was muted.  The draft lottery and beginnings of some troop withdrawals had been calming protest.  Then the killing of 4 students at Kent State in May of 1970 re-activated the anti-war movement.   The invasion of Cambodia produced huge marches at Marquette and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  Most of the colleges and universities in the country were on strike or shut down for the rest of the semester.  The voices of thousands, not the heroics of one rowdy 22 year old, were being heard in the corridors of power.

When I finally went to trial in December, I was without much defense or support.   My dad had convinced me to drop Sandy Karp and Mel Greenberg, the movement lawyers.  Dad had a friend from his days in law school at Marquette.  Maybe an insider could get a good deal for me?

My defense was that I didn’t hit the officer.  The prosecution produced cops who said I was the guy.  In sentencing arguments, much to the great consternation of my mom, my lawyer said, “I do not doubt, your honor, that a period of incarceration would be good for my client, but … “.  When the judge pronounced the term of two years, my mind couldn’t process it.  I thought he was saying that I could get two years – the max for that charge.  He justified the maximum sentence, “lest our civilization dissolve into the steam and vapor of anarchy”.

I asked my dad to see if he could talk to the draft board to get me inducted into the army.  I said, “I can always go AWOL from the army.  It won’t be that easy from jail.”  I traveled to Killeen, Texas and met with David Cline and Terry Davis.  They were helping Fort Hood GIs at an anti-war coffee house called the Oleo Strut.  The GIs were friendly as hell.  We talked and smoked joints late into the night.   When I got back to Wisconsin, Dad told me that the army didn’t want me.  But I always suspected that he had never made that offer.