Finally, our dedicated group of activists in Milwaukee came to the realization that our national leadership was out of touch with reality. They were charting a course that would make it even harder for us to join and build popular resistance.
I remember attending a meeting of editors for “Worker” papers from around the country. The chair asked me, “What is your approach to designing the front page of The Milwaukee Worker?” Automatically I replied that we always featured the major local battles of workers and minorities. Oh, were they ready to jump on me! “No, you are tailing behind the trade union consciousness of the masses. We have to be bold in our calls for revolution and socialism.”
That wasn’t the party that I wanted to be in. We had been hampered by this layer of extra rhetoric throughout the ‘70s. In fact, although we in Milwaukee were some of the most rooted in basic organizing, we went along with the grand role that our national leadership proscribed. It was a real credit to their persistence and charisma that our factory cadre could make progress while carrying this handicap. They were like the proverbial one-armed paper hangers. In later years, more than a few told me that they had simply ignored some of the more extreme party directives.
I remember one evening with some embarrassment. I stood like a bad ass body guard next to Chairman Bob Avakian as he lectured a large crowd in Milwaukee. His speech was probably about how our youthful group was “the vanguard”. The only “security problem” we had that evening was when Father Groppi objected to being patted down.
About half of our national organization split off from the Avakianites in 1979. I couldn’t come soon enough for me. I was an early and persistent agitator for the split. It was liberating. I moved to Chicago to write articles for the breakaway organization. For reasons that defy popular logic, we called the new group, “The Revolutionary Workers Headquarters”.
The 30 days in the House of Correction was a closing bookend to my time in Milwaukee. I had emerged from prison in 1971, ready to take on all challenges. Now I after so many experiences in Milwaukee, it was time to move on. When I got on the bus for Chicago, I felt relief at escaping the reputation I had built up in Beer City.
Like when I moved from Madison to Milwaukee, it was a leap into an abyss, a rupture. I was abandoning friends with whom I had forged strong and loving bonds. So tight had we all become that my leaving was accompanied by some hard feelings almost like in a divorce. My possessions filled one suitcase.
In Chicago, I crashed on a friend’s sofa. One “coulda been, shoulda been” that I left behind was a dear former girlfriend, Mary Mullins, and her sweet daughter, Melanie. “You chose the revolution over me,” she told me. That was the day that she threw me out of the house. The last straw, she told me recently, had been the day I returned from the Indian reservation with my head bandaged.
Now with the cancer, I have re-established a connection with that first love of mine. When I made my first call to her after 30 years, she had already heard about my illness from common friends. She told her husband to say that she wasn’t home. She couldn’t answer because she was crying. Now she is a key part of my expanding network of old supportive friends. She is doing well as a retired parole officer and happily married to a great guy. She was super active in the movement to preserve public sector unions in Wisconsin. Her husband is the warden of the Green Bay State Reformatory. You can’t invent these ironies!
Fortunately my confederates in Chicago gave me a job lead. I was soon working days at the Ford Motor Assembly Plant and helping with our national newspaper, The Workers Voice, at night. I was so glad to have a paycheck after living on next to nothing all those years in Milwaukee. I tested in with good arithmetic skills so I was working quality control on the line. I was checking radios and cigarette lighters in Thunderbirds. Once when the cigarette lighter was hot but not glowing, I pushed in my thumb and pulled it out with a concentric circles burn pattern. At break, I’d nap on cardboard under the stock bins.