riding high with the new posse

I first met Steve in 1965 when he walked into The Tavern, a real dropout, which impressed me.  He went into the army in the fall of that year.  He got out of the army in the fall of 1967 and that's when we moved into the ranch house, which we left in the spring of 68.  We moved into the house on Healey Avenue in September of 1968 and I left there in the spring of 1969 to do my CO in Herrin and I moved back to Champaign in September of 1971.


When I returned to Champaign in 1971 there was a new posse in town.  This was a gang of Vietnam vets just back and going to Parkland, the junior college just west of town on the GI bill, and from what I hear mildly terrorizing the profs, being a bit older than the high school graduates and having been to war and not taking any shit from some weenie academic.  Steve was kind of a big guy and a bigmouth and he fell right into step with them, maybe a bit of an older brother to them, not that they respected their elders

He was riding high with a beautiful girl friend and talking revolution with his comrades.  When riots rocked the campus in April of 1972 he was out there in the streets with a bandana for a mask hooting and hollering and doing a little looting.  I have a photograph from the newspaper of him and his comrades busting into the campus camera store.  He later told me that all the boxes in the window were empty, though the store later claimed great losses and collected on their insurance.

But he just wasn't as tough as his new comrades and a bigger guy took his girlfriend and even though he still hung with the guys, they'd begun making a bit of fun of him.


He finished his courses at Parkland and went on to the University and got a degree in International Relations I think, but when it got to getting a real job he went back to the grounds crew sometime around the middle 70s.. I remember being shocked at that, the grounds crew started at like seven in the morning so how could he close the bar every night which is what everybody else, including me, seemed to be doing?  He still came out on weekends, but I think he was not so crazy about the bar scene by then and he liked the idea of getting that steady paycheck.


Good stories Dawgs.  I had thought that your idea of a career all along was to be in the army.  I remember now that your first move after Gage Park was to Alaska.  I just don't listen as closely to stories that don't involve me.  I hope you are going to continue.

Old Dog, I'm guessing you had conflicting thoughts about going into the army, but as long as you had to you thought of it as a big adventure.  That haricut thing is like a legend.  It wasn't the main reason we hippies didn't want to go in the army, but it was up there, maybe a little bit of that Samson thing, it was who he were.  Also continue