I had a few girlfriends in my time at Madison. But my seriousness was reserved almost totally for “the movement”. When I was a member of the Green Lateran Eating Co-op, I remember flirting with one of the cutest hippy chicks. Once she asked me out. I told her that I had to go to an SDS meeting. How many times did I regret that over the years?
Impatient to get on with organizing in the working class, I left Madison at the beginning of the second semester of my senior year. I never attended one class and yet was given academic credit by sympathetic teaching assistants. Despite my resolve, moving to Milwaukee was a hard thing to do. I wound up rooming in a flat on Meineke Street with a scatter brained guy named John Fuerst. He later became a leader of the Weathermen faction of SDS.
One night I was back in Madison to pick up some more of my belongings. Not knowing that Kenny Mate, another movement guy, had already claimed dibs on my old bed, I was resting comfortably. He rousted me out, “Get out of my bed, Bill. I’m tired. I’ve got dust on my boots and I need to lie down“. Taking an opportunity to salve my anxieties, I called up an old girlfriend and asked if she had any room for me.
Should we do it? Was she on the pill? Her response was the DuPont advertising slogan, “Better Living through Chemistry.” In Madison, girls didn’t take literally Joan Baez’s anti-draft slogan: “Girls say ‘Yes’ to guys who say ‘No’.” But, as I was always shy with girls, being a movement honcho gave me a little more courage. Now I would have to leave this experimental Aquarian environment. I would have to make my way in a cold, unfamiliar factory town 90 miles to the east on Lake Michigan.
Milwaukee in those days was an industrial marvel. At its heart were breweries, sprawling machine shops and bays for fabrication of heavy machinery. Sons and grandsons of German metal workers grew up playing with dad’s micrometer like another toy. It was not like Chicago with a significant population of executives working in towering headquarters. Our research told us that the proportion of workers was higher than any other major city. Even the political culture was somewhat aberrant. Milwaukee had elected Socialist mayors all the way through the 1950s.
It would not be so easy to bring an anti-war message to this population. I can remember vividly an incident at Marc’s Big Boy, a South Side teen hang out. Without realizing it, some of us showed up with anti-draft leaflets on the very day after the Weathermen had been there. At that time the Weathermen’s delusional line was “fight the people” – so outraged were they about the failure of the masses to head their call for national liberation in Vietnam.
My friend, Mike Coffman, was surrounded by a crowd of hostile greasers. I was barely able to voice one syllable about how none of us should want to get drafted. “My brother is in Vietnam”, was the response. It was reinforced with punches and kicks. I lost a front tooth in that encounter. I did get the satisfaction of working over the one attacker who couldn’t run when the cops arrived. Fight the people – another irony.
The south side was filled with youth who were bound for setting up and tending metal cutting machines for the war effort – in Steelworker and Machinist locals. They were greasers, bikers, and every day kids.
