Michael James : Like a Bruegel Painting, 1966

The JOIN Community Union was our effort in Uptown, Chicago, to build solidarity and create an organized force for change, especially among poor people of Southern origin.

SNCC’s Curtis Hayes (Muhammad) and SDS’s Susan Lum in Uptown, Chicago, 1966. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

By Michael James | The Rag Blog | January 6, 2014

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

UPTOWN, Chicago in 1966. I called it “Hillbilly Harlem.” Uptown was the regional capital of poor Southern white migrants moving to the North. The migration of Southern whites began when they came north in the 1940’s for war industry work, and accelerated after WWII when factories flourished in and around Chicago.People arrived from rural and urban areas throughout the South, with the majority coming from Appalachia.

I had lived in Uptown in the summer of 1964 when I worked as a participant observer for a Notre Dame study of Southern white migrants. Daytime had found me hanging out with older guys, often drinking, rolling cigarettes, and playing the guitar under the El tracks next to Graceland Cemetery. Now I was working with others in JOIN Community Union, a community organizing project initiated by SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and its Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP).

When it first started, as a project to organize the unemployed, JOIN stood for Jobs or Income Now. But when organizing the unemployed didn’t pan out, JOIN evolved into a “community union,” uniting folks to fight around issues that affected their lives, like housing, welfare, and police brutality.

Young radicals like myself went into cities around the country trying to organize “to build an interracial movement of the poor.” JOIN was our effort to build solidarity and create an organized force for change among poor people of Southern origin and others who lived in this community on Chicago’s North Side. We intended to help our nation live up to its stated vision of equal opportunity for all.

Virginia Bowers and Little Dovie.

In Uptown, we met a lot of folks while leafleting in front of the Unemployment Compensation Office on Lawrence Avenue. The backbone of JOIN was welfare women. The leadership included Dovie Coleman and Dovie Thurman, aka Big Dovie and Little Dovie -- confident and forceful black women.

Southern white women on welfare were aware of the goings-on in the civil rights movement and looked to these black women for leadership. One was Virginia Bowers from Arkansas, who became the JOIN office manager. Key organizers included Harriet Stulman, Alice Keller, and Vivien and Richie Rothstein.

Vivien and I had worked together what had been the West Oakland Community Union Project. In future years she became an organizer in Los Angeles of Vietnamese immigrants. Richie forged links to unions and set up a JOIN School to help community people learn about the power structure, welfare, police, and housing matters.

Post-JOIN he wrote about education for The New York Times and worked on education policy at the Economic Policy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. In his Uptown work he was serious, smart, dedicated and, as I now realize, inspirational. He didn’t always appreciate my rebellious youthful behavior.

The government’s new War on Poverty was active in Uptown, headquartered on Montrose (now a gym in the increasingly gentrified neighborhood). We believed the War on Poverty didn’t encourage community people to take action or make decisions on the big issues of jobs, housing, education, and welfare. It too often focused on superficial, harmless programs like where to plant trees.

JOIN held weekly meetings that featured speakers, theatrical skits, and singing. The group-sing was enthusiastic, if sometimes off key, and included mountain tunes, spirituals, and traditional union songs. Sometimes we altered the lyrics to reflect current conditions.

We showed films we got from UE’s (United Electrical Workers') treasure-trove of labor documentary and training films. We rented films from a distribution house, including the previously banned Salt of the Earth about striking mine workers in Silver City, New Mexico — though The Hank Williams Story turned out a larger crowd.

Regular attendees were a unique, interesting, somewhat motley crew of Uptown residents.

Regular attendees were a unique, interesting, somewhat motley crew of Uptown residents. We had our share of wino attendees, including a Greek fellow named John. Once I carried a drunk John into Cook County Hospital, when his frostbitten feet prevented him from walking.

Each week there was an increasing number of young guys from the neighborhood, hanging in the back of the room. One Southern kid named James Osborne had a job with the War on Poverty and also hung around JOIN. At a meeting in Washington, D.C., he spoke up and asked Sargent Shriver, the War on Poverty’s head man, a question that was apparently too challenging. James lost his job -- and distanced himself from JOIN.

A short time later he married a nun who worked in the neighborhood and they opened the Book Box on Lawrence (now Shake Rattle and Read) by the Green Mill. Later, in 1968, we held training sessions in its basement for a short-lived outfit called the National Organizing Committee (NOC), which recruited college students to be community organizers.

Goodfellows and girl in a car.

While I liked to joke that the meetings reminded me of a Bruegel painting, a mass of tortured and rough-edged peasants, there were of course plenty of sharp and effective people among the ranks, including Sarah, a Russian who had participated in the Russian Revolution and by 1966 was selling papers on Argyle.

Carl, a physically challenged welfare activist, came, as did Eugene Feldman, a retired teacher and former Communist. Feldman had organized sharecroppers in the South during the 1930s and shared pamphlets from those times. We knew we were part of an ongoing, long tradition of organizing and fighting for peoples’ rights.

A highlight of many meetings was a JOIN Theater agitprop skit that focused on the likes of Mayor Daley, urban renewal (poor people removal), landlords, and welfare and police brutality. My younger sister Melody James founded this project. Melody studied drama at Carnegie Institute and San Francisco State, so I asked her to come to Uptown to organize a peoples’ theater. After her JOIN work she returned to San Francisco and became a member of the legendary San Francisco Mime Troupe.

For JOIN Melody put together a lively mix of community people and student organizer types. JOIN Theater performed on various stages around town and in an empty lot on Clifton Street. Following the City’s massive urban removal of people in that part of the neighborhood, they performed before a large crowd, calling on the city to build a Hank Williams Memorial Playground in the space where Truman College stands today.

Over the spring and summer of ‘66 young guys began coming around JOIN. Near the old Wilson Avenue pool hall where Al Capone was said to have played, Reverend Maury ran a program for young guys. As we were less concerned with life after death than a better life in this lifetime, the Reverend’s hall became fertile ground for recruiting and we quickly made inroads.

We got to know these young guys, many of whom readily shared their accounts of police harassment and brutality. By the fall of 1966 Rev. Maury closed his operation. In its stead Bob Lawson, a JOIN organizer who had played football at Berkeley, gathered a group of young Southern guys that included Ralph Thurman, Hi Thurman, Bobby Joe McGinnis, and Jack (Junebug) Boykin.

They started a new group, which was friendly to but officially independent of JOIN. They called themselves The Uptown Goodfellows and opened a hangout-clubhouse space on Wilson at Kenmore.

When the police killed a young man named Ronnie Williams, who had moved to Uptown from Kentucky, it set off activity protesting police harassment and brutality.

When the police killed a young man named Ronnie Williams, who had moved to Uptown from Kentucky, it set off activity protesting police harassment and brutality. The Goodfellows and JOIN together organized a march on the infamous Summerdale 20th District Police Station. Over 300 people marched, mostly but not only, white Southerners.

Summerdale had been implicated earlier in a stolen-goods ring. The “Summerdale Scandal” led to the hiring (and brief tenure) of a forward-thinking criminology professor from Berkeley named O. W. Wilson as Police Superintendent. Our march called for an end to all police brutality but singled out a particularly hard-ass cop named Sam Joseph.

My own interaction with Joseph was limited to a short exchange of wise-ass remarks after he shined a flashlight into my car. I was parked down at Montrose Beach with Susan Ring, who was from a progressive home in the Swedish neighborhood of Andersonville. Her mom worked for the AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) and her dad was a butcher I jokingly referred to as the “Marxist butcher.”

Susan and I were making out when Joseph and his sidekick shined the light into the car and knocked on the window. Later Susan ended up marrying Junebug Boykin, who was my main street mentor.

The Summerdale march gave people a sense of unity, direction, and power. What followed from JOIN and the community was the founding of a program called Citizens’ Alert. This was an earlier version of the Oakland Black Panther Party’s practice of following the police and observing their activities. Citizens’ Alert is still active in Chicago, calling attention to police misbehavior. Activist Mary Powers has long been its leader.

The police response to the march was more hard-hitting on young guys in the neighborhood and an attack on JOIN. My college roommate Patrix Sturgis and my sister Melody were at the JOIN office when the 20th District Chicago Police burst in, ransacked the office and arrested them, claiming to have found a small amount of pot. Though it received less media coverage, they were later acquitted, after the police were found to have lied and planted the marijuana.

Housing was another major concern of folks in the hood. Buildings had mice, rats, and roaches, repairs weren’t made, and people were locked out when rent was late. We held rent strikes and demonstrations around housing issues. A group of lawyers who helped JOIN included Irv Birnbaum and Ted Stein. They worked with organizers and tenants, often going to housing court with them.

We tried to stop evictions. I made my way into a number of basements, turning on gas or electricity after landlords or their managers had turned the utilities off, and was once arrested when I informed an officer of the tenant’s rights and the law. Tenants at a large building on Broadway near Irving Park went up against a slumlord named Gutman. On a Sunday morning Rennie Davis and I went to his apartment building on the northwest side and hung a leaflet inside his vestibule: “Your Neighbor is a Slumlord!” We also put one on every car on the street.

In short order Gutman settled with the tenants, and that particular building became part of an improved housing initative by the Kate Maremont Foundation. A prolonged rent strike with marches at the “Sampson Building” on the 4100 N. Kenmore block led to an agreement and the formation of a tenant’s council.

JOIN did welfare advocacy, demonstrated at the welfare office, and called for fair treatment by the Illinois Department of Welfare.

JOIN did welfare advocacy, demonstrated at the welfare office, and called for fair treatment by the Illinois Department of Welfare. We worked closely with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) and the Latin American Defense Organization. These demonstrations and marches exemplified the potential for building an interracial movement of the poor. Actions involving primarily black, brown, and white organizations helped lay the early groundwork for rainbow coalitions to come.

Mechanic and Steelworker Eric Gil.

 One spring afternoon the photographer Danny Lyon gave me a ride on his Triumph motorcycle to Molly Hagen’s apartment on Hyde Park Blvd. on the South Side. Molly’s crib became a regular destination. I would head there to hang out, smoke weed, and eat. I met Curtis Hayes (now Muhammad), who had worked with Molly in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Eric Gill, from Belize, who worked on cars and had a job in the steel mill, and an assortment other characters, including a salesman for Duncan Yo Yo.

That summer I bought a 1963 Triumph 650 TR6 motorcycle from Clay Highland, who I knew from Lake Forest College. On the bike, sometimes with Molly on board, I explored Chicago and its far-flung neighborhoods, communities, and off-the-beaten-path treasures. I loved late night cruising up and down Lake Shore Drive, the green tunnel of Lower Wacker Drive, the smell of chocolate production on Kinzie, and the blast furnace at Finkl & Sons Steel on Armitage.

In addition to country music joints in Uptown, I went to hear Paul Butterfield, first in Old Town at Big John’s (where I had first seen Steve Miller), and then at the Blue Flame on Drexel Blvd at 39th Street, where he played with Howlin’ Wolf’s old band. At a meeting of activists from various projects around town I met a law student named Bernardine Dohrn.

Days later Bob Lawson and I took an exhilarating ride on my Triumph to the SDS Convention held in Clear Lake, Iowa, the place where Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper had gone down in an airplane. While there we got word that both the JOIN office and the new Movement for A Democratic Society office in Rogers Park had been busted. People were out of sorts.

Wearing a cowboy hat, I stood up and quoted Joe Hill: “Don’t mourn, organize.” This moment was my introduction to the assembled SDSers, and I left Clear Lake as part of SDS’s leadership, a member of the National Interim Committee. Before heading back to Chicago I reintroduced myself to Bernardine by sending her a post card: “Nice meeting you; how about we take a ride together on my motorcycle?”

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Marilyn Katz : A Different Path for Syria, and Hopefully for Chicago

Child at funeral in Chicago. Image from The Old Black Church.

And for Chicago?
A different path for Syria

Will U.S. diplomacy in Syria carve a new path towards peace at home and abroad?

By Marilyn Katz / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2013

CHICAGO -- The example of our leaders cannot help but guide the thinking of our youth: Might makes right and those who are "wrong" -- who disagree with our worldview -- are The Other, ever-more-easily transformed into an enemy to be dealt with by whatever means necessary.

I am more than pleased today. For the first time that I can remember, well at least since the Cuban missile crisis, the United States has chosen diplomacy over force to resolve an international conflict. We have taken a breath, stopped the worst of the bellicose rhetoric, put the guns away, and found a peaceful solution to what only a week ago seemed an irreversible march to war.

On a personal level I am relieved because I head to the Middle East a few weeks from now and didn’t relish the idea of adding a gas mask to my luggage.

As one, like many, whose support of President Obama is partially premised on his ability to discern the difference between a necessary and unnecessary war, I am relieved to see that leadership in action -- however late it was in coming.

But I also have another reason -- one closer to home. I live in Chicago, a city sadly now synonymous with gun violence. Much of my work is in communities where virtually every family has a family member, friend, or acquaintance who has been a victim (either as the shooter or the shot) of gun violence.

A few weeks ago I spoke at Stateville Correctional Center, an Illinois Maximum Security Prison, to a group of 40 men, ranging from about 25 to 70 -- virtually all of whom had been convicted of murder. We talked and they explained why they had killed. While some were at the scene of a robbery most said they killed to “protect the threads, wheels, corner, or women” they saw as within their defensible space, their world.

These sentiments and reasons were echoed in a discussion I was in recently with women from the South Side, who talked about the challenge they faced in keeping their remaining children, brothers, husbands -- and now even their girls -- out of harm’s way.

Unwilling to wait for and dubious about the prospects or effectiveness of congressional action, they spoke about their attempts to shield their young from a culture of violence -- on television, in the movies and on video games -- and their efforts to define manhood as something other than having the biggest gun.

As I drove home (ironically having to stop for 20 police cars racing to the latest shooting around the corner from the church where we had been meeting), I thought about what they had said and also about Syria, about Iraq, about Iran, about Grenada, about Vietnam.

As parents we try to model good behavior; through our actions we try to provide examples of how to deal with the hand that life has dealt. Yet we are not the only -- let alone the strongest -- influences in our children’s lives.

Our children, be they 10, 20, 30, or 40, have grown up in a context of non-stop war. They have watched not only “the axis of evil” but also their ultimate role models -- their presidents, from Kennedy to Johnson to Carter to Reagan to Clinton to Bush -- turn to weaponry to resolve disputes large (Iraq) or small (Grenada).

They have watched the creation of the “Other” whose instant demonization once they become the enemy somehow justifies and lessens the horror of the death and destruction they endure. They have watched government-sponsored assassinations, once considered shocking, become a topic for public conversation, with the details of who orders the “hit” and under what circumstances -- rather than the validity of the fundamental action -- the only question discussed.

And they’ve learned a new term, “collateral damage,” for the non-combatants -- the women and children killed. You know, those like the scores of Hadiyas hit by a misfired or stray bullet.

Youth might also notice how quickly our former allies (some would say puppets) -- from the Taliban to Saddam Hussein, from Noriega to Assad -- are transformed into dangerous monsters who threaten our very existence and must be eliminated (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally).

And while the territories and resources that the United States fought over are larger than the corner or possessions for which the young kill, the example of our leaders cannot help but guide the thinking of our youth: Might makes right and those who are “wrong” -- who disagree with our world view -- are The Other, ever-more-easily transformed into an enemy to be dealt with by whatever means necessary.

Urban youth might well (and do) argue in their defense that the threat they face each day is far greater and more imminent than those faced by the nation during the recent wars we’ve chosen to fight.

I no more than anyone else know if the diplomatic solution which our president and the nation have "fallen into" will work. The seeds of the conflicts in the Middle East were planted long ago when, with American complicity, France, England, and Russia redrew the map of the region to meet their own imperial needs.

That said, those who are tired of war abroad and on the streets of our cities should hope diplomacy carries the day. We must be openly supportive of the process, both for what it could mean for a resolution of conflict in Syria, but more importantly, for the lesson it offers those who will guide the future.

This article was cross-posted by the author to In These Times.

[An anti-war and civil rights organizer during the Vietnam War, Marilyn Katz helped organize security during the August 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention. Katz has founded and led groups like the Chicago Women’s Union, Reproductive Rights National Network, and Chicago Women Organized for Reproductive Choice in the 1960s and 1970s, and Chicagoans Against War in Iraq in 2002. The founder and president of Chicago-based MK Communications, Katz can be contacted at mkatz@mkcpr.com. Read more articles by Marilyn Katz on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : Heart of Illinois in the Summer of '64

Boys in a pickup truck in front of the Fulton Democrat in Lewistown, Illinois, in the summer of 1964. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Heart of Illinois in the Summer of '64

Hanging with this band of old dudes I learned to roll smokes. I played guitar and sang with them, and in the process acquired some finger-picking guitar riffs and a staple of country tunes. I chipped in change and took regular slugs from half-pint bottles of Jim Beam.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / September 17, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

The March on Washington was so positive. Good feelings flowed. The assassination of President Kennedy in the fall brings grief and sadness. Things are different now, often a world away from those feelings of hope, optimism, and belief in the future we shared after The March in August 1963.

At Christmas I leave school early for a job delivering the mail in Weston, Connecticut. I drive beside the Bridgeport Hydraulic Reservoir; I love the snow and the pines, and watch a snow goose fly over the ice-covered lake. The big bird reminds me of a B52 Bomber. One day I get out of the little Morris Minor I use to deliver the mail and knock on a door. The great jazz pianist Dave Brubeck greets me, then thanks me when I hand him his package.

Hotel Spoon River in Peoria, Illinois, 1964.

That holiday season I also saw a Broadway production of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology at the Belasco Theater. I fell in love with Spoon River. Discovering Masters -- and other authors, radicals, and muckraking journalists -- gave me a more realistic view of America. Masters’ portrayal of small town life countered the popular images of “the good old days” and an unblemished American flag.

My dad and mom had known Masters when he was an older man. I heard about him all of my life. I hadn’t paid much attention to it. And I was not an enthused listener when my dad, standing in his underwear, would pull Spoon River Anthology off the bookshelf and read the poems, the stories from the grave.

At the University of Chicago Dad had the lead in a theatrical production of Masters’ Andrew Jackson. Masters’ wife saw it and told him to look up Edgar Lee in New York City. As he was a young actor then in Morris Carnovsky’s Group Theater, he did and was treated kindly. He also met Sherwood Anderson while hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel. Later both my parents worked on the radio show Against the Storm, and Dad gave Masters the part of the “old Professor.”

Each weekday during the spring of 1964 I got up before dawn and drove out Route 22 to Half Day, Illinois. I climbed up into my bus at the Ritzenthaler bus barn and drove two school bus routes. I saw cows heading to pasture, picked up kids from as far north as Antioch on the Wisconsin border, and dropped them off at school.

I would return to my apartment and spend several hours writing before going back out on the roads. Then I would pick up the school kids and drop them at their homes. I loved that job.

The writing was academic: sociology. I was working on my senior thesis and the topic was “The American Business Elite: Route of Entrance and Field of Success for Those Possessing Low Status Attributes.” Got it? Basically the well-heeled -- the old-line bluebloods -- made it big in established fields like banking, while Catholics and Jews, possessing “low status attributes,” made it via newer, riskier routes, like the railroad and entertainment industries.

That spring some of the Lake Forest College fraternities brought Bo Diddley to campus. I reconnected with Jerome, the maraca player, and reminded him of the time in 1957 when we shared hard cider at St. Anthony’s Hall in Saugatuck, Connecticut. Then I told him about when my boyhood pal Doug Fenton and I -- with two young well-to-do New York girls -- went to the Apollo to see Bo and waited after the show at the backstage door.

Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner at Heart of Illinois Fair in Peoria, 1964.

We wanted to say Hi and talk with “my friend Jerome.” Eventually he had come out -- blasted, wearing a doo rag and a leather coat -- and given us a mumbled hello before he split. This time, Jerome laughed. We talked and drank beer.

Who would have thought? I graduated from Lake Forest College -- with honors. I was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and accepted for graduate study at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Brandeis, and the University of California, Berkeley. My plan was to become a sociologist. I thought the most radical sociologists were at Berkeley. So Berkeley was my choice.

But first, I had a summer ahead of me.

I got a job as a “participant observer” working with an anthropologist named Mel Diamond on a Notre Dame study of Southern white migrants in Chicago’s Uptown. I moved into the Villa Sarata, an SRO (single room occupancy) on the 4100 block of Kenmore. It was the first time I had lived in a city since I was a baby in New York. And it was my first -- though not last -- move into Chicago’s legendary and notorious Uptown.

I began learning about Appalachia: its people and the conditions that moved them North.

A good amount of my time was spent under the El tracks in the alley between Kenmore and the Graceland Cemetery -- resting place of the boxing champ Jack Johnson. By day I hung out with a group of older hillbillies -- or Southern guys -- and wrote up notes at night. One of the “subjects” was Penny Menser from Kentucky, a one-armed guy who was an ace cigarette roller.

Hanging with this band of old dudes I learned to roll smokes. I played guitar and sang with them, and in the process acquired some finger-picking guitar riffs and a staple of country tunes. I chipped in change and took regular slugs from half-pint bottles of Jim Beam.

The manager’s wife at the Villa Sarata taught me to make biscuits and gravy. Sometimes at night I walked up to Montrose Avenue to the Jubilee, a bar with a great C&W band and one amazing -- and near-naked -- shake dancer in a cage. One of the musicians, Louie Bautista, later emerged as Luis, a conscious Chicano and body worker; I received my first massage from him, in 1976.

My girlfriend from Lake Forest, Lucia, and her family had moved back to Peoria. I took the Illinois Central Railroad down to visit. Waiting to be picked up at the station on what turned out to be a very hot day, I enjoyed an ice-cold beer at the Coney Island Tap. The next day we visited Spoon River country, starting in Lewistown, where farmers in overalls gathered for an auction. I spotted the Hotel Spoon River and a Ford pickup truck with two boys in it, parked in front of The Fulton Democrat.

Next we went to Petersburg to visit Masters’ boyhood home and the cemetery where he is buried. Also buried there is Ann Rutledge -- who may have been Abe Lincoln’s first love and the subject of a poem in Spoon River Anthology.

Our final stop was the Heart of Illinois Fair in Peoria, where we attended a Democratic Party rally featuring Governor Otto Kerner. Kerner was a liberal, two-term Governor best known as the head of Lyndon Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. That Commission issued The Kerner Report after the summer of ‘67’s urban black rebellions, a report critical of the government’s failings in the issues of poverty and the inner city. It warned the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal.”

Kerner was also known for allegedly arranging favorable dates for some Illinois racetracks. The racetrack scandal made him the first of four Illinois Governors to do prison time, though to this day his conviction remains suspect. Big Jim Thompson prosecuted Kerner. Thompson was the U.S. Attorney General for Northern Illinois, appointed by President Nixon. A Republican, he would go on to four reigns as Illinois Governor, supporting the flat-tax idea responsible for the pension crisis crippling Illinois today.

Mike's 1957 Ford "ragtop" convertible.

 The summer over, I rode solo in the white ‘57 Ford convertible I got from Dick Simon. Simon, from Manhattan, was one of Lake Forest College’s beatniks. I took the “ragtop” through Indiana, driving through the night down the old Route 20.

The convertible’s top was ripped-up and coming apart, so I kept it down. It was August, but the night was unseasonably cold. I was bundled up and wearing my foul weather rain gear. Both the heater and the radio were blasting away. I sped under stars and a waxing moon through mile after mile of cornfields, slowing at irregular intervals when cruising through the dimly lit and very still small towns.

Again, I headed home to visit my family at the old farmhouse on Westport’s Wilton Road. I’d stay a few days, soak in the people and the vibes once again, then roll west, back across the continent to sunny California. UC Berkeley, here I come. I’m about to take another step into America, and the exciting, fun-filled, dynamic, and tragic days of the 1960’s.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Chicago's Mike Klonsky Fights for Public Education, 'Small Schools'

Chicago education activist Mike Klonsky in the studios of KOOP Radio, Austin, Texas, Friday, August 20, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Former SDS leader Mike Klonsky is fighter
for 'Small Schools' and democratic education

A veteran of the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle against the War in Vietnam, Mike has been involved in community and labor organizing as well as the fight for democratic education.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / September 4, 2013

Former SDS leader Mike Klonsky, now a Chicago-based public education activist and advocate for "Small Schools," joined us on Rag Radio, Friday, August 30, 2013.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our August 24 interview with Mike Klonsky here:


Mike Klonsky is an educator, an education theorist, a public schools activist, and a “Small Schools” advocate.

A veteran of the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle against the War in Vietnam, Klonsky was a leader in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), serving as SDS National Secretary in 1968, and has been involved in community and labor organizing as well as the fight for democratic education. A "red diaper baby," his father was a life-long activist and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War.

Mike Klonsky teaches in the College of Education at DePaul University. One of the founders of the Small Schools Workshop, Mike serves as its national director. He also coaches basketball at a Chicago high school. Klonsky is the author of Small Schools: The Numbers Tell a Story (University of Illinois Small Schools Workshop) and co-author, along with Bill Ayers and Gabe Lyon, of A Simple Justice: The Challenge for Teachers in Small Schools (Teachers College Press).

Mike Klonsky on Rag Radio. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Mike served as a member of the National Advisory Council on Youth Violence and is past president of the editorial board of Catalyst, Chicago’s school-reform journal. He has also written extensively on the history and progress of Chicago’s dynamic struggles to save and transform public schools. His SmallTalk Blog is read by thousands of educators and activists.

Read Mike Klonsky's August 27, 2013, article, "Drive-By Teachers and the Great Charter School Scam," on The Rag Blog.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, September 6, 2013: Award-winning novelist and screenwriter Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo and Challenger Park.
Friday, September 13, 2013: Populist author and commentator Jim Hightower.
Friday, September 20, 2013: Long-time activist Michael James, founder of Rising Up Angry and Chicago's Heartland Cafe.

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Michael James : Sunrise on Lake Michigan, 1961

Sunrise on Lake Michigan, 1961. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Sunrise on Lake Michigan,
Lake Forest, Illinois, 1961

In Chicago I am introduced to Polish sausages at a hot dog stand on North Avenue by Bill "Notso" Smart, who also took me to a strip club in Calumet City. I visit the Art Institute and I start going to jazz and blues clubs on the South Side.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

There I was 33 miles outside Chicago, learning, meeting, hearing, and seeing so many new things. Yet the most dominant theme-issue-memory of my first year at Lake Forest College is of being 948 miles away from my girlfriend Susan who was at U Conn -- not Siberia, but seemingly so.

I too wanted to go to U Conn, but my dad encouraged (forced) me to go to "away to school," away from my Connecticut homeland. His influence is why I had driven to California in the summer of 60, instead of staying home close to my team dream girlfriend.

We called each other regularly; we wrote each other almost daily, and to this day I have a giant envelope of letters Sue returned many moons back. Someday I may read them.

The Phi Deltas got me a job washing dishes at Lake Forest Academy, a private school for bourgeois lads. This was where influential trumpeter and jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke had been sent off to school from Davenport back in the 1920's, and from where he snuck out of to go to Chicago to make music.

And on another musical note, the Academy was not far from a bar out on Illinois Route176 that older guys on the football team took me to. A Black woman performer sang a song with the unforgettable line "who put the sand in the petroleum jelly?"

Later I took a job as an assistant counselor at Arden Shore, a home for gifted boys with behavioral and emotional problems. My dormmate was David George, an ex-Marine from a pottery making family in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. He helps me get over my dislike of cheese, and we make many a grilled cheese sandwiche late at night in the cafeteria. And he teaches me to drink my coffee black.

In search of a gym off campus I make my way north, past the Great Lakes Navel Training Center (years later I'll help organize a demonstration at a park nearby, SOS -- Stop our Ships, Save Our Sailors!). I go past Abbott Labs in North Chicago (an incubator for high drug prices) ending up at the Waukegan YMCA.

 I am a product of YMCA activities. I have a letter of introduction from the Director of my hometown Y. I will do a sociology paper at LFC on the YMCA as and Occupational Institution.

Ahh, but the Waukegan YMCA is segregated. I check out and then get a part time job instructing weight lifting and working with little kids at the all-Black (except now for me) Genesee Street Branch YMCA in North Chicago.

Venturing further off campus I go to the Friday afternoon cattle auctions further west out on Route 176, and join others on a run to Madison where we drink beers in the Student Union. I head to Grinnell, Iowa, and visit my hometown friend and writer Ken Schiff during a folk fest at Grinnell College. I remember the legendary "Blind" Reverend Gary Davis pinching a coed's ass.

In Chicago I am introduced to Polish sausages at a hot dog stand on North Avenue by Bill "Notso" Smart, who also took me to a strip club in Calumet City. I visit the Art Institute and I start going to jazz and blues clubs on the South Side.

There was the Wonder Inn where wordsmith Ken Nordine performed his "word jazz," and the Sutherland Lounge where I am thrilled by the likes of Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, and the amazing Roland Kirk who played multiple instruments at once, including strange saxophones, the stritch, and the manzello.

Reading Downbeat Magazine I learn of "Crow Jim," reverse segregation in jazz circles. The article says that the phenomenal Ira Sullivan, who played with Charlie Parker, cannot get a gig. I start working on a sociology paper: "The Socialization of the Negro Jazz Musician."

On a Saturday on Chicago's Near North Side I talk with Sullivan at his home. I am still in a time in my life where you dress up and I am wearing a sport jacket and tie. Sullivan seemed preoccupied, and he and others were probably high. I asked questions; he did not bad mouth any Black brothers, basically dismissing the issue.

At McKey Fitzhugh's Disc Jockey Show lounge on Cottage Grove I try and talk with drummer Chico Hamilton, who basically laughed me off. (I still play his music.) At another club I met Johnny Hartman who would later sing beautiful vocals with John Coltrane.

The U.S. Marine recruiters show up on campus. I wanted to be a Marine, years earlier practicing crawling around on my stomach in kid war games, and learned to play "From the Halls of Montezuma" on the piano. I signed up for their Platoon Leader's Corp, the plan being that I would spend summers training at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and then serve two years as an officer in that fighting force.

However, an event on campus began to move me in another direction. There was something going on in the World called the San Francisco to Moscow Peace March. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an outfit that I was being introduced to while checking out religion (Unitarians, Bahia, Quakers, etc.), sponsored a two-day peace walk in March of 1961.

A scraggly band of beatnik types showed up on campus, and I talked with them about peace and atomic testing. I credit this encounter with encouraging me to move in a new direction. I never did follow through and become a member of the Marine Corps and I am grateful for that.

I was still missing Susan and began trying to transfer to a school back East. She came to visit and I was happy. I photographed her smoking a cigar on the same morning we attended an Easter morning sunrise service at the Lake Forest beach.

Yet when I visited her a short time later in Storrs, Connecticut, that was not fun. She was becoming friendly with my childhood pal Doug Fenton's roommate. I took solace in following my 4H club instincts, visiting the campus's dairy barns.

Another major and transformational shift-event in my life was about to take place.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : Kids at Chicago's New True Vine Church, 1961

Kids at the New True Vine MB Church, Chicago, 1961. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Kids at the New True Vine Church  
in 1961 Chicago

I take their pictures, and I realize now that things are beginning to come together: people of different colors, poverty, photography, Chicago, and change. I am in the early stages of my own new true vine.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / July 2, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

Early September 1960 and I'm out on the highway again, heading across Pennsylvania-Ohio-Indiana and into Chicago, then the "hog butcher to the World." This time I'm in a yellow and black 1957 Desoto convertible with my folks, Hal and Florence James.

Day breaks and we pull up to the Executive House on Wacker Drive. At noon we wind our way up Sheridan Road and I begin going through the final steps to be a college student; I'm a brand new freshman at the small Presbyterian-affiliated Lake Forest College just outside Chicago.

Incoming Foresters are given a red and black beanie with class of 1964 stitching. I was already partial to red and black, they being the colors of my earlier teen years passion, the Downshifters Hot Rod Club. Later I'll learn red and black are anarchist colors, a political stripe I have affinity with, though I end up being closer to democratic centralism in my street fighting and community organizing days.

Later I will reluctantly return to my early Democratic Party political roots; thanks Mom and Dad, and Go, Adlai Stevenson. These days I see involvement in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party as analogous to Mao working with Chiang Kai-shek to hold back the Japanese. There's a lot (!!!) to be desired about the Democratic Party, but stopping right wing Republicans and the rise of fascism is high priority.

I'm not about to wear a beanie, even when Dad says he doesn't think things have changed since his days at the University of Chicago. And I'm certainly not going to wear it after a guy from the Kappa Sig fraternity tells me to put it on. I'm all about school spirit but was voted "coolest" in my Staples senior class and I'm not about to compromise on this headwear.

After a goodbye to the folks it's on to meeting people and checking out the new scene. I have my first Commons aka cafeteria experience. On Monday I'm a walk-on and become a member of the Foresters football team. I'll develop good relations with the cafeteria workers. I have fond memories of running wind sprints in crisp fall weather at dusk, then words from the coaches, loving the hot shower, and loving even more extra plates of food in the Commons.

The football games and their bus rides take me to new places, playing schools previously unknown to me. We're talking Augustana, Carthage, Millikan, North Central, Illinois Wesleyan, Monmouth, Elmhurst, and Hamline. I will break four bones in my right hand when hitting a tree, on an angry spree, after returning from a game in Rock Island by bus and my girlfriend Lucia hadn't signed out for an overnight (with me).

In the fall of 1963 the University of Chicago is bringing back football, and we play their club team. My dad  played a year there under the legendary coach Alonzo Stagg. Wasylik, Hanke, and Triptow are my coaches. This game would be my last, following a halftime challenging-authority altercation with coach Nick Wasylik, who actually was a fine guy.

The world continues to open up for me. I discover sociology (or sociology discovers me); I thought that was how one became a social worker. A professor encourages me to think about the big picture and the social-economic-political forces and conditions that shape peoples' lives. I'll head off to University of California Berkeley on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1964 and on a return visit to LFC my professor-sociologist-hero Dr. Don Roos and I argue over the Vietnam War. I was so disappointed!

History professor Carl Perrini, who studied with UW Madison's William Appleman Williams (a founder of Studies on the Left), shows me the Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood; I read my first book about radicals, learning about the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

From Haywood I pick up a tip. When Rockefeller's Pinkertons and the FBI were after Big Bill it was the local cops who tipped him off. I've been friendly with local cops even during wild rebellious times. One was the late Maurie Daley of Chicago's infamous Red Squad. He harassed, spied-on and chased many a radical, but was certainly a more likeable Red Squad pig than the Eastern European dudes.

Maurie's kid also played football at LFC, a fact I learn while talking to Daley when I spot him sitting in a van on a drug stakeout. Earlier he had made contact after being transferred to the 24th District, leaving a message for me at the Heartland Café saying he was "Che Guevara's nephew!"

I develop admiration for many teachers at LFC. Gerry Gerasimo turns me on to issues of social class, status, and conflict; George Tomashevich introduces me to Africa's depth, the Ashanti, and African independence movements. Sculptor Helmut Van Flein transfers my hot rod welding skills into making sculpture.

Sam Pasiencier, mathematician turned spiritual guy, helps me develop my Mexico 1962 photos after I drive my Triumph motorcycle to Mexico. And Alan Bates tells me I need to rewrite, that my words aren't golden the first time out. He also turns me on to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his way-cool Coney Island of the Mind.

Dr. Smucker is the College Chaplin and teaches a Christian Ethics class. He initiates my interest in Christian communal sects like the Amana Colonies and New Harmony, Indiana. A Mennonite and a wonderful guy, he returns a paper I had written on Gandhi that ended with an upbeat paragraph about truth and goodness triumphing in the end.

Donovan Smucker says: "not necessarily," and gives examples of unfortunate endings to human struggles. He calls me a "meliorist" and I confess that to this day I still believe conditions for people can and should improve. It's up to us to make it happen.

The class takes a field trip. We visit various housing sights in Chicago. We look at Lake Meadows and its' three large "integrated" buildings; the lower income building is 70% black, while the highest-rent abode building is 70% white. The midrange-rent building is 50% white and 50% black. And we visit the Cabrini Green Projects.

Now I had been in situations where I was one of a handful of whites among blacks -- on visits to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, going to see Mahalia Jackson, the Swan Silvertones, and the Dixie Hummingbirds et al at Madison Square Garden, Ray Charles at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in San Jose, and a high school graduation party in Norwalk, Connecticut.

However, being a white guy with a busload of white students, I find myself wandering behind the class. That's when I run into the kids outside the New True Vine MB Church. I take their pictures, and I realize now that things are beginning to come together: people of different colors, poverty, photography, Chicago, and change. I am in the early stages of my own new true vine.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : Late Summer Sundown on the Karma Farm

Late summer sundown on the Karma Farm, New Lisbon, Wisconsin 1981. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Late summer sundown on the Karma Farm

To other people who talked of 'moving to the country' I would say 'stay in the city but spend some time in the country: think, nourish yourself, and come back to the city to fight the imperialist ogre from within the belly of the beast.'

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / May 29, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

Old man Burtchie had been a Seabee during World War II, a member of the U.S. Navy's construction battalion. When I knew him he was a plumber and small farmer.

His son Vic went off to Korea and when he returned in 1951 I was a nine-your-old living up the Red Coat Road in my Connecticut hometown. The name of the road is derived from the British Red Coats who marched nearby on their way to burning the hat factories in Danbury during the Revolutionary War. We played "fight the British"! Victor had a Harley and I had the pleasure of getting to ride with him around hilly and curvy Berkshire foothills, on Connecticut back roads. I was the kid on the back, the third rider on occasion.

Victor give me a winged-wheel Harley hat and also instructed me not to let on to the current woman on the machine between him and me that there had been another woman in that very position cruising with the group of riders earlier in the day.

Besides motorcycles, my close proximity to the farm gave me an early hit of agricultural life. I hung around the barn and did what I was told. I remember a lot of commotion when a Ford pickup truck showed up with a bull with a ring in his nose that was released into a pasture of about six cows. And I helped out when the old man butchered chickens, pigs, and heifers.

Back up the road I helped my dad plant our first garden. The corn grew high as an elephant's eye, or at least twice as high as I stood back in 1949. My younger brother Beau and I both had the farm vibe and became members of the Green Farmers, a 4H club in the Greensfarms part of Westport.

I loved the 4H club and still spout its "head, heart, hand and health." We went to the Grange fair in Easton and took in the livestock exhibits at the Danbury State Fair and the Eastern States Exposition. We took it all in -- the food, the rides, the carnie strip and all its sideshows. Mostly we loved the animals,

In 1952 we moved a half-­mile away to a pre-­revolutionary war onion farm on the Wilton Road. Over the years our stock included Harvey the rabbit, King pigeons, Muscovy ducks, African Tumbler pigeons, and Bantam chickens. In 1962 Beau upped the ante and brought in a couple of sheep. Years later my step dad Shookie planted a sizable garden. When visiting I picked the oh-­so-­fresh tomatoes and ate them with a dose of salt.

Beau was a tractor freak with a collection of John Deer toy tractors. He got our mom to drive him to a tractor dealer and lot where he could look over and learn about these groundbreaking machines. He married and moved to Vermont for a time, starting a sod farm and raising kids and some animals. I visited once and went to the Bondville Fair where I recall watching drunk rural dudes climbing out of an old Plymouth -- deer antlers mounted on the hood, with beer cans in hand.

After moving to and taking various stands in Chicago, I cherish my short-­term escapes to the Karma Farm up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. To other people who talked of "moving to the country" I would say "stay in the city but spend some time in the country: think, nourish yourself, and come back to the city to fight the imperialist ogre from within the belly of the beast." I am glad I knew the hippie families that tried to make a go of rural life there.

I would haul myself up north, visit and make plans with my friend Lester Doré. Lester, the agriculturally knowledgeable son of an oil field worker family, came out of New Iberia, Louisiana (think Tabasco) and grew up in Tulsa. He ended up in Chicago where he did artwork for The Seed, designed Rising Up Angry's logo, did the original artwork for the Heartland Café, and was the art director of the Heartland Journal.

He also did an artwork stint on the old San Francisco Oracle, designed rolling paper logos, and did a famed piece of design work picturing a marijuana leaf and a peace symbol. He did a series of great jazz t-shirts under the label Bird Lives that were printed at the Farm's little t-shirt factory.

My sojourns to the Karma Farm in beater trucks and cars were peaceful, enlightening, comforting, educational, and fun. These small adventures to the Karma Farm and beyond often found me returning to Chicago with "the goods" for the Heartland Cafe -- t-shirts, firewood, an old wood burning stove, food and maple syrup. I am grateful for those times.

Thank you oh great Mother Earth for the good things you give and the good times you bring.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : Bill at Chester's Hamburger King

Bill at Chester's Hamburger King, Chicago, Fall 1977. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Bill at Chester's Hamburger King

A classic Chicago cross-over place, you would find cops, workers, healers and dealers, martial artists, radicals, hot rod mechanics, Cubs coaches and Cub fans, gangbangers and community organizers.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

CHICAGO -- When I tell people about my second favorite restaurant, Hamburger King or Chester's Hamburger King, I affectionately refer to it as a "Japanese greasy spoon." It should be a Chicago landmark.

I started going there in the early 70's, figuring my next moves after Rising Up Angry, the radical organization and newspaper I helped found, came to a close in 1975. The Hamburger King was a major inspiration for me in deciding to open my favorite restaurant, the Heartland Cafe.

Everyone was welcome at Chester's and made to feel good. It was a place to drink coffee, read the paper, eat inexpensive and tasty grub, and run into people. A classic Chicago cross-over place, you would find cops, workers, healers and dealers, martial artists, radicals, hot rod mechanics, Cubs coaches and Cub fans, gangbangers and community organizers -- white people, Latinos, Blacks, Japanese, and Native Americans.

There was Betty the server who always smiled and seemed on top of the needs of a lot of folks at the very same time. And there were Chester, Roland, and Bill, all Japanese guys who had been in the internment camps in California.

Bill was one of the first people I remember telling me about the camps that put another scar on America's face during World War II. He would set me up at a back table where I would eat, read the Chicago papers, write notes, drink coffee, think, and hold court. Bill 's daughter was out west working on PhD's. In November of 1977 he joined the crew for Thanksgiving dinner at the Heartland Cafe.

Hamburger King is located on Sheffield at Clark and Newport, next door to the Nisei Tap. Plates of food --  egg foo yung, yat ka mein, chili mac, and burgers -- would find their way through a back door by the kitchen into the Tap for the drinkers and pool shooters. You had to go through the small kitchen to get to the bathroom. Going back there gave me a good look at the workings of a restaurant kitchen.

The same building also housed the Chicago Women's Health Center and was home to all kinds of body workers -- naprapaths, chiropractors, and massage therapists. There was another bar downstairs, a drugstore, and a resale shop on Newport where a woman sold me four folding chairs from the bleachers at Wrigley Field.

I met many people at Chester's, including the Moors family. One of the brothers had a band that played at the Rising Up Angry "Peoples' Dances." His brother Trooper, now passed, got sent to Sandstone Federal Prison in Minnesota on a drug beef. I took a trip to the North Country through snow and pine trees to visit him.

The big thing for me coming out of Hamburger King was when I told Jack Bornoff that I wanted to open a restaurant, a hangout and community center kind of place. A building we had looked at on Belmont was too expensive. Jack said: "I know a place: Lackey's Steak House in Rogers Park."

Gene Lackey bought steaks and lobster at the old Jewell on Morse Avenue and sold them out of a little kitchen while bluegrass emanated from a small stage in what is now the Heartland's west dining room. Katy Hogan, Stormy Brown, and I went to check it out. Katy -- being a Mundel-­bundle as the girls of Mundelein College were called, knew Lackey's.

The sun came out. A rainbow appeared, as if a message from the Gods. And we were standing on a big cement slab, perfect for an outdoor café, of which there were virtually none in Chicago at the time.

And the Red Line trains -- both A and B -- all stopped at the Morse-­Lunt El stop. The three of us agreed to do it! Lackeys became the home of the Heartland Café. On May 1, 1976, we skipped attending any May Day events, opting instead to work on our new joint.

And wouldn't you know it. Our new neighbor next door in what is now the Heartland Building was Roy Kawaguchi who owned and ran Roy's Bar. Roy had also been in the internment camps, as had his brother who owned Gabby's, a bar two blocks south on Glenwood next to the old electrical station that is now Life Line Theater.

I've tracked Roy's bar back to the 1930's when it was the Rogers Park Yacht Club, then the 7006 Club, Hamm's Tap, Roy's, and now the Heartland's Red Line Tap. The music booker for the RLT is Brettly Kawaguchi, son of Roy, just a little squirt when we showed up.

Over the past 36 years I've returned to Hamburger King a few times a year. Last fall I took a Russian journalist, who did a Chicago travel piece for MIR Magazine on "my Chicago." While driving around and telling stories I took her and the photographer to places I go -- in Rogers Park, the Paradise bathhouse, and shooting locations of movies I've been in (e.g. Stony Island, Code of Silence, The Package, The Fugitive, etc). And we went to Chester's, run for years now by a Korean woman named Sue.

More recently, when on a dropping-off-a-guitar-for-repair errand with my son Cadien, we headed over to Sheffield, Newport and Clark. I about had a heart attack. The place was closed, the windows covered. I acted out: "No, no, oh no." But on closer inspection I was revived, finding a sign that said: "Closed for Remodeling."

A couple of weeks later we went to pick up the guitar and swung by again. This time Hamburger King was open. But it was different: crisper with fresh paint and other "improvements". There was a Mexican grill man I recognized, but no Sue and the waitress was new. In mid-­afternoon the place was pretty empty. The waitress introduced me to the new owner, a Korean fellow.

The egg foo young with rice and gravy was still cheap, humongous, and very good. I talked with the new owner and told him of the inspirational role the place played for me in starting the Heartland.

I asked him where he lived. He said "Northbrook." I said "Northbrook?" and suggested he move to the neighborhood, be close to his place, feel the beat of the city 24-7. I don't think he got that. But I wished him well and thanked him for being open.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : Doing the Whirlpool at the Paradise

Whirlpool at the Paradise, Chicago, 2003. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
When the water was flowing at
Chicago's Paradise bathhouse

I've been in lots of whirlpools, steams, saunas, and mineral baths: a palatial bath house in Leningrad, a funkier setup in Donetsk, a treasure of a place in Oaxaca, hot tubs in California and Utah, and a hot sea water and seaweed bath in Ireland.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / May 14, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

I like water in all its forms -- liquid, steam, and ice. I'm sure my affinity for the H20 began for me in my mom's womb, and developed over the years in bathtubs, showers, Long Island Sound, the pool at my hometown Westport YMCA, the Saugatuck River at the Y's Camp Mahackeno, more pools, more rivers, more oceans, and certainly the Great Lake Michigan.

I am a big fan of aqua therapy. That started in the sauna and whirlpool at Chicago's Lincoln Belmont YMCA. What a discovery back in the early 70's when I started checking out -- sneaking into -- the Y's Men's Club that was off-limits to the regular low-rent-paying-members like myself. A whirlpool. A sauna. Forceful showers.

This developing affinity for water and heat has taken me many places, or going many places has led me to take the waters. There have been fun times in rushing rivers, waterfalls, warm and cold pools at hotels, motels, and aqua joints throughout the world: hot springs at Harbin in California, by the side of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and up in the mountains of Oregon, as well as a hot mineral bath at the Stroppel Hotel in Midland, South Dakota, and an intense sweat lodge on the Menominee Reservation in Keshena, Wisconsin.

I've been in lots of whirlpools, steams, saunas, and mineral baths: a palatial bath house in Leningrad, a funkier setup in Donetsk, a treasure of a place in Oaxaca, hot tubs in California and Utah, and a hot sea water and seaweed bath in Ireland. I've enjoyed New York's 12th Street Bath House where my friend Phil Shinnick (Olympic long jumper) took me, and the elaborate Queen's Spa Castel that my son Jesse turned me on to, now a must-go when visiting family in New York.

Home here in Chicago, I was there before they were gone -- the Finish and Luxor bath houses, and the old Division Street Russian Baths. The McGaw YMCA in Evanston has a fine steam: it let's you control the steam and heat. I've yet to check out the Sweat Lodge or newly reopened Division Street Baths now called Red Square.

In days gone by there were times I hit the Paradise (aka the Korean Bathhouse) at Montrose and Richmond on an almost daily basis. It has long been my home base aqua facility, especially so when I get there before 7 a.m. to be first in before the jets, steam, showers, and heat erupt and the water begins to flow.

On early mornings you might find guys of all races, ethnicities, and nationalities, including cops, lawyers, dealers, businessmen, roofers, barbers, radicals, old guys, and young guys. And later in the day, over the last few years, there are more gay guys too.

The owner was Mr. Cho, a former martial arts hot shot, and a fine man. A falling out with his brother-in-law led him in his 80s to move to Arizona, where he opened a new place, but died shortly thereafter. Before he left there were rumors of the bathhouse closing, of new owners or new management coming in. We clientes have long been in limbo as to when the ceiling (and its leaks during torrential downpours) would be fixed, the tiles repaired, and various surfaces adorned with new paint.

The Paradise has always had the strongest jets of any whirlpool in my searching out of such facilities. It has been a number of years now since I drove my son Cadien to Bell School, which is close to the Paradise, making daily visits easy. Now I don't go as often, but do tend to go on Sunday mornings or on days when I really need a soak.

On a recent Sunday I headed over early in the morning. The parking lot was empty. The doors were locked. The garbage dumpsters were full. And signs on both doors read: "Under new management. We apologize for any inconvenience, but there will be 'REMODELING.'"

There was a phone number on the sign. I just called it and talked briefly with a Korean woman, telling her I've been going to the Paradise for years and that I hoped it would be open soon. She said, "I hope so." We will see. My sense is that aqua therapy in many forms is on the rise. There will be many new and varied versions of such special places. I hope that along with them that the Paradise will endure.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : Hope Springs Eternal

Comiskey Park, Chicago, 1990. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Hope springs eternal on
opening day at Comiskey Park

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / May 1, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

Today is opening day. Yea!

This is opening day 1990, the last year of the wonderful old White Sox park, aka Comiskey Park. Was there for this final opening, and, more sadly, the last day of that season when police on horseback kept the masses from going on the field. Ahh, and again at the new park in 1991. My dislike of the new park has diminished, but I would have preferred keeping the old park and fixing it up.

Having grown up loving the Brooklyn Dodgers, I went to my first White Sox game in the summer of 1966 with Paul Booth. By 1976, the year we opened the Heartland Cafe, I was a dedicated Sox fan.

I loved Bill Veeck (who not only wanted to integrate baseball, but wanted to incorporate the old Negro Leagues into the Majors), the shower in the outfield stands, Harry Caray when he was the Sox announcer, the food, the Southside Hitmen motorcycle club, the activity on 35th street, and... that summer of 1976 that saw both the Sox and the Cubs in first place, for awhile.

Ahh, and let's not forget the White Sox were the World Champions in 2005.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Marilyn Katz : Hathaway's Nipples and a Congressional Primary

Anne Hathaway at the Academy Awards. Image from HaveUHeard.

Signs of the times?
Hathaway’s nipples and
a Congressional primary

Has the liberal media switched sides in the war against women?

By Marilyn Katz / The Rag Blog / March 27, 2013

CHICAGO -- I generally have ignored the growing number of articles raising alarm about a widespread war against women, comfortable in my confidence that women have long exercised power in this nation -- perhaps not as much as we should -- but increasingly at the ballot box, in the workplace and in the home.

I have had little interest in the debates about “leaning in or out” or whether the White House has a sufficiency of women. (Anyone who doesn't believe that Valerie Jarrett is among, if not the most powerful person in Washington should have their head examined.)

That said, comments not from the misogynist Right but from the liberal media about two successful women have made me reconsider my dismissive attitude.

The first -- while seemingly trivial -- is Anne Hathaway’s supposed nipple problem at the Academy Awards. Personally I neither noticed, nor would I have cared about being able to see the outline of her nipples -- I just thought it was a great dress worn by a woman with a really good back.

What I found disturbing was the ensuing media storm. Why were men looking at her nipples rather than listening to what she had to say? Why is this a topic for discussion? Provocative? Improper? According to whom?

The criticism was silly, but it also reminded me of my recent experiences in the Middle East. In the once-modern Egypt, where today women no longer venture onto the streets at night, and among even young college students are pressured to hide their hair under a head scarf, while others wear the hijab and gloves, in the name of modesty or because it makes them feel more secure and less likely to be verbally or physically attacked as a temptress.

And in Israel where, when I was there last year, I was shocked to find that in Jerusalem, women’s images had been forbidden on billboards, women’s voices banned on some radio stations and in certain neighborhoods women were literally relegated to the back of the bus -- all in the name of ensuring appropriate modesty.

The second instance, which would also be laughable in another era, concerns Robin Kelly, who won the Illinois’ 2nd Congressional District Democratic primary on February 26. News coverage in Chicago and across the country, and mostly written by progressive journalists with comments from progressive “reformers,” has asserted that her win was really not her own.

Usually spot-on writers like James Warren credit Michael Bloomberg’s $2.4 million expenditure on attack ads aimed at one opponent’s ties to the NRA. Well-respected election activist Cindy Canary agreed, telling Warren that Bloomberg’s money suppressed voter activity and turnout.

Yet the facts suggest otherwise. In the last Illinois special election, in 2009, when Rahm Emanuel resigned from Congress to join President Obama in the White House, there were 54,856 votes cast for the 12 candidates in the Democratic primary. Now-Rep. Mike Quigley won the primary with 12,100 votes -- or 22.1 percent of the total cast. In contrast, 59,593 votes were cast in the 16-person 2nd Congressional District Democratic primary this year, with Kelly garnering 30,872 or 51.8 percent of the vote, and Debbie Halverson coming in a distant second with 14,533 votes.

Looking through the archives, no one thought that a 50,000-person turnout in the 5th Congressional District was unusual. Why then did scores of reporters, along with such usually thoughtful people such as Warren, legal scholar Geoff Stone, and Canary, founder of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, parrot the line that participation was depressed?

Further, while we need look no further back than the November elections when Sheldon Adelson’s and the Koch brothers’ millions could not salvage a Romney victory, there are plenty of other examples, the most striking being the 1989 New York City mayoral contest in which Estee Lauder heir Ronald Lauder spent $14 million in his attempt to win the Republican primary. Despite the money, he garnered only 38,000 votes, at a cost of $363 each, and lost to Rudy Giuliani.

Anne Hathaway and all women have a right to dress as we like, for ourselves, knowing that we have good sense, and most of us good taste. If men are distracted, by the outline of a breast or excited by the shape of a hand, that’s their problem -- and perhaps they should try blinders.

Robin Kelly, like all women who take that treacherous path of running for public office, is a study in courage -- and most of all, a hard worker. There are no shortcuts to raising funds, learning the issues, building the organization necessary to get out the vote. Ask any woman legislator out there and she’ll tell you the same.

Women have to work harder, run faster, and make more calls than do their male counterparts for every dollar raised and every vote garnered. To ascribe her win to the largesse of a rich man or a depressed vote is an insult both to her and the voters of the 2nd District.

Are these aberrations or do they indicate a growing attempt to undermine the strides that women have made?

While many may have found Seth MacFarlane’s “boob song” amusing, seen nothing untoward in engaging in the Twitter frenzy about Hathaway’s dress, or felt all right about dismissing Robin Kelly, they are mistaken.

These incidents, while seemingly trivial, belittle women, their judgment, and their independent agency. Each incident echoes, in its own way, the more serious assaults women have endured this year -- from the congressional committee that had the chutzpah to disallow a woman to speak about restricting access to birth control -- saying she lacked expertise on the issue -- to the 19 states that voted last year to severely restrict women’s rights to make their own reproductive health decisions.

Last week the male-dominated state legislature in North Dakota authorized the use of vaginal probes to ensure that most pregnancies cannot be terminated after six weeks. To those who would without question object to the right wing’s intrusive mandates, I’d suggest perhaps it’s time to stop looking under our skirts to see if we’re wearing underwear or being held up by someone else’s strings.

This article was cross-posted to In These Times, where it also appears.

[An anti-war and civil rights organizer during the Vietnam War, Marilyn Katz helped organize security during the August 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention. Katz has founded and led groups like the Chicago Women’s Union, Reproductive Rights National Network, and Chicago Women Organized for Reproductive Choice in the 1960s and 1970s, and Chicagoans Against War in Iraq in 2002. The founder and president of Chicago-based MK Communications, Katz can be contacted at mkatz@mkcpr.com. Read more articles by Marilyn Katz on The Rag Blog.]

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