just before the shit hit the fan

I read a little past Chapter Three.  What seems to be happening mostly is the blacks and their white sympathizers are forming committees which meet with the white establishment who generally agree with them but then do nothing.  The black schools were overcrowded and the white schools had empty room, but the, what does the guy call it, the civic credo, just sat there and said no, everything was perfectly normal, there was no segregation going on.  Apparently if there were no laws specifically for segregation, then it was not happening.  I remember that phrase, de facto segregation being thrown around.  Boy was that guy Willis a bastard or what?

But I don't remember much of this happening while I was in high school.  Well it was happening east of Western which might as well have been the far side of the moon.  It was an area we passed through on the 55th street bus on the way to downtown.  At some point going east on 55th we would enter the colored neighborhood and suddenly black people would be getting on the bus, mentally we would be rolling up our windows.  What if the bus broke down right here in the middle of the ghetto?  Would the neighborhood people rush in and kill us all?  Well probably not, still we squinched up a little in our seats.

But Gage Park High School remained lily white (I wonder when it got its first black students), and further south in Marquette Park the locals were vowing THEY will never get this park, because as soon as a black person dipped his fishing pole into the lagoon it would no longer be fit for white people. 

Anyway that whole storm seemed far away in June of 1963 when you flew off to Alaska and I had a summer of ushering at the State Lake showing Cleopatra before being driven down to my dorm in Champaign.  I was only dimly aware of it and don't remember even having an opinion.

Those first couple years at College were years of isolation for me.  In Chicago my parents got the Tribune and sometimes I would buy the Daily News or the Sun-Times, I guess just to get a little more news.  I have always loved newspapers.  But I wasn't reading any of them in Champaign. 

I came back to Chicago in the summer of 64 and took some courses at a junior college in Bogan High School.  I remember the Gulf of Tonkin took place then and my attitude was let's get those rotten commies.  In the summer of 1965 I came back to a job packing bibles by Archer and Canal, ate my lunch of olive loaf sandwiches on Wonder Bread wrapped in that tangy wax paper singing Dylan songs to myself, on the cusp of hippiedom.

The summer of 1966 I stayed in Champaign, ostensibly to take a course I had flunked the semester before, but actually to hang out with my new beer drinking dope smoking hippie buddies, but I did make a couple trips up to Chicago that summer, and as you say, the shit had hit the fan.