Social Upheaval, the Chicago Cubs, and the Spring of 1968

In the spring of 1968, I was 13-years-old. A milestone year by anyone’s account, it marks the transition from child to teenager, from elementary school to high school. 1968 was a year of cultural and political turmoil, and as a young girl, I experienced it in my own way. My older brother was in the Army (luckily for him, not in Vietnam), drafted two months after his wedding and on the brink of a promising musical career. I was an anti-war activist even then, and my cohorts and I gave new meaning to Gene McCarthy’s kiddie corps - and I became a Cubs fan.

Forty years ago, on March 31, I was ironing something (I think it was my dad’s work shirt) in the downstairs recreation room when I heard raucous laughter from upstairs in the kitchen - and dancing, and whooping, and it was coming from my mother. Lyndon Johnson had just announced his decision not to run for president in 1968. For someone who had been elected by a landslide three and half years earlier, it was quite a moment, and one met by much glee by so many who had voted for him, including my parents.

The week was far from over, and joy turned to grief as, several days later when I was dressing for a dance recital (obligatory for any self-respecting teenage girl), I learned that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. All hell broke loose.

From my upper middle-class home in an affluent suburb of Chicago, I only knew something terrible and sad had happened to a great man, someone my Rabbi had walked with, and someone my older brother and parents held in great esteem. I knew it was a horrible and tragic thing. How could dance recitals go on in a world torn apart by such tragedy? I wondered.

I recall that night of the recital, merely going through the motions, presenting a dance I had choreographed myself in a preoccupied haze, responding to my less-informed classmates’ quizzical and haughty expressions of “Why’s she so upset?” Try to explain to these girls, whose most pressing concern was what to wear to next Saturday’s bar mitzvah party, that an entire people’s greatest advocate and hope had just been extinguished by a sniper’s bullet.

King’s assassination was followed two months later by Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. It was the day of my eighth grade field trip to Cantingny War Museum, followed by an afternoon fashion show put on by the Home Economics class. We teen radicals protested, claiming that to visit a war museum and participate in the frivolousness of a fashion parade was inappropriate. Needless to say, we didn’t win our argument with the principal. It was a terrible spring, the spring of 1968.

Article Author: Barbara Barnett

Barbara Barnett grew up on politics and pop culture. Her professional life has been eclectic, because her left brain doesn't know what her right brain really wants. Her real passions are writing, music, reading--and House.Follow her on Twitter.

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