The Illini Union was my home away from home during the 1960s. The original building had recently been renovated and greatly expanded, although my favorite hangout remained The Tavern, located in the basement of the original building. The Tavern had a bohemian coffeeshop feel and became a magnet for counterculture types like me. I spent most of my time in those days navigating between Turk’s Head, House of Chin, Union Tavern and Red Herring, all of which were within a block or two of each other.
I loved hanging out at the Union bookstore because they let students sit in chairs and read any book without buying it! I’d spend hours reading paperback novels. One of my favorite moments came when I walked out and just happened to bump into Carl Ellis and Timothy Leary, who had just crossed paths for the first time and instantly recognized themselves as long-lost comrades-in-arms. I think it began with Carl making some Oriental display of respect and offering his hand, but it ended with both of them embraced in a bear-hug. Leary was in town to give a speech later that day in one of the Union ballrooms.
After the Vietnam draft heated up, several anti-war organizations sprouted on campus and draft card burnings became a regular event on the south deck of the Union. Eventually, this deck became officially known as the “free speech area,” and impromptu rallies began manifesting that alternated between folk songs and speeches against the war. At this time, however, most people in the community still supported the war and a local fraternity responded to these anti-war efforts by holding a blood drive for soldiers overseas.
My favorite anti-war event happened when a big muckity-muck of the draft came to one of the ballrooms to deliver a speech on how the new lottery system was going to work. But after he’d been speaking for only a few seconds, a cue was given and a couple dozen people, including me, put on black hoods with skull faces and stood up on our chairs. Meanwhile, the double doors flung open and a casket paraded into the room. As the casket wound around the room, the black skulls lined up behind it in a silent death march. We ended up marching out of the ballroom pretty quick and planned to exit the building in an orderly fashion and go to the Turk’s Head. But as we left the ballroom, we saw campus police rushing towards us, so we quickly veered into a nearby elevator and pushed the “up” button.
Knowing the cops could see which floor we were headed for, we exited the elevator asap and ran down a long hallway to a different set of elevators, got inside and pushed the “down” button, returning to our original floor. Meanwhile, cops were running all over the building, trying to locate the casket while we stayed one floor and one step ahead of them, laughing all the way. It was a scene right out of the Keystone Kops.
Finally, the cops did corner the casket, and a kid from Uni High who was a year younger than me jumped on top and began delivering a passionate anti-war speech. He was standing under a portrait of Red Grange, the galloping ghost himself, and I remember thinking, “I wonder what Red might think of us now?”
I never see any references to this protest online, although it was my favorite action of all the ones I participated in. Later, there’d be a brief riot in the Union after the school tried to do something about the fact that out of 30,000 students at the U of I in 1967, less than 300 of them were black. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., statistics like that were especially revealing of the institutionalized racism that afflicted the state. So the U of I hastily set up a program designed to bring 500 black students into the school for the fall semester in 1968. Unfortunately, many of them quickly decided they were being treated like second-class students and demanded to see Chancellor Jack Peltason immediately, not in his office, but in the Union Art Gallery, where hundreds of them had assembled for a sit-in. Peltason was told the situation was too unruly for such a meeting so he decided to close the building instead. That’s when a few of the students began slashing paintings. I wonder today who those slashers were and what the point of attacking that artwork might have been? Today, that sort of activity seems more like the work of an FBI dirty tricks informant.
We knew the FBI was sending dirty tricks specialists to infiltrate our anti-war scene, as they could often be quickly identified as the guy demanding some crazy violent action, like trampling the Morrow Plots, the country’s oldest continuous agricultural research center, as if the Morrow Plots had something to do with the War in Vietnam. Despite knowing the FBI was orchestrating the violence, we were helpless to stem the tide, as radical actions got increasingly violent, finally erupting in full-scale riots in 1970.
It was strange for me to see these people getting hostile with Jack Peltason. To me, Jack was just a nice guy, a good friend of my family and the father of my brother’s best friend. Many of us had grown up together in Stadium Terrace, a low-cost housing development built as barracks during the war on the west side of the football stadium and later transformed into cheap housing for married graduate students. In the early 1950s, polio swept through the community, and Bugsy’s dad was one of the unfortunates who contracted that terrible disease. Many of the families that went through Stadium Terrace remained close long after the barracks were torn down.
After I graduated with a degree in playwriting, I sent an application to Yale Drama Graduate school, including a copy of my play that had been performed at the National College Theater Festival. Jack Peltason wrote a letter of recommendation for me. I remember going to his office for the first time to ask him for the letter. He was really shocked to hear I was applying to Yale. “Isn’t that the very heart of the establishment?” he asked me with a wink, well aware of my radical activities. As could have been predicted, however, Yale didn’t want me, so I took a year off to travel in Europe and then applied to get a Masters in Science in Journalism from the U of I.
It wasn’t long after I created my underground newspaper The Tin Whistle in 1968, that I decided to become a rock concert promoter to raise money and publicity for the paper, which had become an instant success by selling out at four high schools in Central Illinois, even though it was banned at all of them, except Uni High, our local prep school for the best and brightest.
Donny Perino (center, seated), the leader and keyboard player, had been my predecessor on bass guitar in the Knight Riders. I couldn’t understand why the Knight Riders wanted to get rid of Donny since he was the best musician in the group, however it didn’t take him long to start a new band using a couple of the best high school age blues musicians in town. Unfortunately, a few days before the concert, Blues Weed pulled out, leaving me scrambling to find a substitute band. Naturally, I wanted a Friday or Saturday night at a major venue on campus, but that turned out to be difficult and expensive. I discovered a hall I could rent on Sunday afternoon for cheap, although I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to get people to a concert on a Sunday afternoon. At the last minute I got my former band, the Knight Riders, to agree to perform for around $100. The total budget on the event was probably around $200 and admission was $5, so I only needed 40 paid attendees to break even, and the hall easily held over 300. I set up 40 folding chairs in front of the stage and left the back of the hall open for dancing.
Actually, I was supposed to an artist. That was decided when I was in the third grade in Oxford, England, when I briefly attended St. Philips & St. James, my first and only foray into the Catholic side of life.
Ink and watercolor on fragments of construction paper became my dominant medium. After I met the novelist Paul Tyner, I invited him over to Carole’s, where I’d taken up camp in a spare bedroom while her mother was away. I showed him this watercolor and he offered me a lot of money to buy it on the spot, but I refused to sell. At the time, the thought of parting with any of my creations was just not even considered.
The walls in the basement were all painted with psychedelic faces in battleship grey, a gallon of which I discovered down there. When I look at some of watercolors today, though, they have an almost Jean-Michel color scheme, although I don’t mean to suggest I’ve got anything approaching his style or iconography. When I went to college, I signed up for Painting 101, where it was swiftly discovered I was color blind. The class consisted solely of still-lifes and I was miserable at it. Thus I abandoned my career in art and began concentrating my efforts on theater and journalism.
The Andy Warhol influence is evident in this marker drawing. It should be noted that I never drank Pepsi, and would rather go dry than drink any cola but the old, original sugar Coke in a glass bottle.
I was thinking maybe someone would be interested in hosting a show so people could appreciate this work in person. (Not that I would sell anything!, unless it was serious money, of course.)
When I was growing up in the 1960s, the favorite place to go tripping was Allerton Park in Monticello, Illinois. Situated on 1,500 acres, this estate was built by an heir to Samuel Allerton’s Chicago stockyard fortune named Robert Allerton, who was an avid art collector and one of the leaders of the party scene in Chicago. Robert eventually adopted his young lover to live with him.
The garden closest to the mansion contained 22 beautiful Foo Dogs from China, most of which were vandalized, but have since been restored. Near the Foo Dog garden was a pagoda with a giant gold Buddha inside, probably the largest in the state if not the country. This was a wonderful place to trip because not only could you enjoy miles of hiking through wilderness trails, but you’d constantly be stumbling into these wonderful gardens filled with plants, flowers, ponds, and fantastic sculptures. To give you an idea, there was a Herb Garden, Walled Garden, Triangle Parterre Garden, Peony Garden, Chinese Maze Garden, Hidden Garden, Sunken Garden. There was also an amazing sculpture hidden in the forest titled “Death of the Last Centaur,” a tribute to the demise of paganism. Most of the gardens were designed to be ceremonial sites and one wonders about the nature of some of these gay ceremonies and whether any orgies were involved. One thing for sure, Robert put a wall with guard dogs around the property closest to the road. He was very serious about maintaining his privacy.
Paul Tyner, a math prodigy grad student at the University of Illinois, became a local celebrity upon publishing his first novel, Shoot It in 1968. The first time I became aware of Paul, he appeared at a huge acid party at Allerton driving a VW bug. The car was small enough to fit between the concrete blocks that had been erected to keep vehicles off the trails and out of the gardens. Paul was high on LSD, driving that bug full speed straight at the pagoda. I don’t remember if he crashed or not, probably he did since he was certainly out-of-control that day and drinking heavily.
Did you know the world’s only hippie memorial is located along the Illinois Central train tracks in Arcola, Illinois? The town I grew up in was actually a hotbed of radical activity in the 1960s. The fledgling Students for Democratic Society (SDS) picked Urbana, Illinois, in fact, as the site for their 1965 conference, and hundreds of members arrived from all around the country. Soon, we had the state’s best garage band, The Finchley Boys, as well as the country’s greatest experimental artist, John Cage, both performing in our little community 120 miles south of Chicago. We also had the first landmark performance of a masterpiece called “MacBird!” which theorized JFK had been murdered and President Johnson was an accomplice in the crime.
Jim “Chef Ra” Wilson was my high school senior class president, the first black elected to that position. He organized the first black appreciation celebration in the history of Urbana High. It was held late at night and included free soul food and a series of performances by notable black musicians who were also students at the school.
him at all times, all constantly cracking up at his improv performances. The alpha chick among them was also the girlfriend of the star of the show, who played keyboards and sang, among many other talents. I remember him from the stage suddenly stopping the show to ask his girl what she was doing with her arm around Larry Green’s neck? Somehow, Larry turned that all around into a big belly laugh and the performance went on. I don’t know if any long-term inter-racial relationships were born that night, but it certainly was a wonderfully healing ceremony for all who attended and I hope we left many of our fellow black students with a sense of our appreciation for their culture, despite the institutionalized racism that had afflicted the school up until then and the fact few of us would actually try the chitlins.
In 1968, someone applied for a permit for anti-Vietnam war demonstrators to march in the annual parade and the permit was duly granted on grounds of free speech after a brief court battle even though members of the town councils wanted it denied as un-American and inappropriate. We happened to be driving past Green Street when the protestors were attacked by a gang of men wearing hard-hats, some of whom wielded clubs and chains. Jim Cole, leader of the Finchley Boys, was one of the protestors and would later describe grabbing a fist aimed at his face and then realizing it belonged to someone he knew quite well. I really felt I’d missed out on something exciting, but I wasn’t much of a street fighter anyway. My time, however, was soon coming.
It takes more than a bag of weed to forge a hippie heart. In fact, most of the time, it takes a major ceremony. I spent a long time searching for answers throughout much of the sixties, but I didn’t get truly “zapped” until I attended the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival in the summer of 1969.
Ever wonder why the media has fallen into the ownership of only a handful of corporations? That’s because the media is the key programming tool used to manage our collective archetypes, having replaced religion in that role since the arrival of television.
In this regard, J. Edgar Hoover certainly played a key gatekeeper role throughout most of his professional career. When he was 26 years old, Hoover joined the Washington Lodge of the Scottish-Rite Freemasons and his early career was marked by his clever exploitation of a string of terrorist attacks. Without those terror attacks, Hoover would not have been able to armchair himself into control of that American gestapo known as the FBI.
It all happened 54 years ago, so it’s about time the real facts come out, but don’t hold your breath. In the world of archetypes, icons just don’t get any bigger than Marilyn. She remains the sexiest woman alive and her personality seemed charmingly devoid of evil intent, so why would anyone want to kill Marilyn Monore?
The story starts in 1955. Senator John McClellan’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations nails its number-one target, Teamster boss Dave Beck, thanks to Beck’s assistant Jimmy Hoffa, secretly assisting Robert Kennedy with the incriminating evidence of Beck’s pension diversion schemes. JFK sat on the committee and RFK was the committee’s lawyer. Hoffa became the new leader of the country’s most powerful union. Soon, however, Robert Kennedy starts building a case against Hoffa and this becomes the most intense vendetta of his life. Papa Kennedy had earlier maneuvered his son onto the staff of Communist witch-hunter Joe McCarthy, a man RFK seems to have (strangely enough) held a lot of respect for. It was while working closely with McCarthy and Roy Cohn that RFK cut his political teeth and mastered the art of dirty tricks.
Here’s the crucial backstory: not only was Marilyn allegedly having an affair with Bobby Kennedy (something that supposedly started after Bobby was dispatched by JFK to tell Marilyn to stop calling him), but Marilyn was also having an affair with her analyst, the jet-setting and very well-connected “Romeo” Greenson.
As the greatest goddess of her time, I’d imagine Marilyn held some sway on the astral plane, so the taking of her life is a significant crime against the forces of the universe, and in such cases karmic blow-back is virtually guaranteed.