Redlined

by Linda Gartz

  Alone in my dorm, in between final exams, I slid down the wall of my room onto the floor, pressed my head against my scrunched-up knees, and sobbed for a fraying, incomprehensible world of brutality and murder. King’s death, riots, takeovers, protests, bombings, war, and now this. Life was the opposite of all my brothers and I had been taught to believe: that we—and all people—were in charge of our lives, our fate. That outlook now seemed like a fantasy.

  More violence was just two months away. The 1968 Democratic National Convention was scheduled to be held in downtown Chicago. Hippies, Yippies, and protestors were planning huge antiwar demonstrations to disrupt the convention and take advantage of the media spotlight. I was back at home for summer break, working downtown at First Federal Savings & Loan. When the news hit that Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman threatened to spike Chicago’s water supply with LSD, panic flamed through the city. It sounded wacky to me, but nothing seemed too far-fetched that year. Why would anyone consider poisoning an entire city? Dad said, “They’re anarchists. They want to destroy everything. They’re just sick people and should be put away.” I had to agree.

  Mayor Daley was leaving nothing to chance. I later learned that he had dispatched nearly 12,000 police officers on twelve-hour shifts, ordered 5,649 Illinois National Guardsmen with 5,000 more on alert, and up to 1,000 FBI and military intelligence officers at the ready. The 101st Airborne Division and 6,000 army troops, equipped with bazookas and flamethrowers, were waiting as backup in the suburbs.52

  By August 23, thousands of young people settled into Lincoln Park, a few miles north of the convention site on Michigan Avenue. I had zero interest in taking part. The nightly news turned into a kind of bizarre theatre. Mayor Daley was determined to clear out all protestors by eleven o’clock, the park’s official closing time. Ordered to disperse, the crowd defied baton-wielding police officers, who shot tear gas into the throngs. The protestors took to the streets, chanting antiwar slogans and marching south toward the convention center.

  With this backdrop, Grandma Gartz called Mom to chide her and Dad for not keeping the fence at the six-flat properly painted. Grandpa had driven by his former building and said if we didn’t paint it, he’d go there himself to do it.

  In her lifelong attempt to mollify her impossible motherin-law, Mom said to Dad and Billy, “Well, if it will make her happy, why don’t we go and paint the fence?” Dad refused, but Mom found a willing accomplice in Billy. They spent three days painting that fence while mayhem unfolded five miles to the east.

  Between August 23 and 28, confrontations escalated between twenty thousand Chicago police officers and as many as ten thousand protestors—and television again brought it all home. Police roughed up reporters, innocent bicyclists, residents in their doorways, and a young man who stripped a flag from its pole. Demonstrators responded by throwing food, rocks, and concrete at the officers, as crowds of young people shouted to the cameras: “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”

  In the fall of 1968, there were no open slots in campus housing, so I was living at home again. But I did have the sorority. I met Katy from North Carolina during fall rush. At her first visit to our Tri Delta open house, Katy’s huge blue eyes fixed on mine, her lilting North Carolinian accent sweetly unique among the throngs of girls coming through. We hit it off immediately, discovering we were both German majors. She was voted in and became my pledge daughter. With her advanced-placement credits and an extra load of courses, Katy’s plan was to achieve junior status in one year—and join the Junior Year in Munich program. My commuter status had again left me uninformed. I had never heard of any year abroad program. After making some inquiries, I discovered that I could still participate in the program the following school year as a senior.

  To live in Europe someday had been only an inchoate dream, one I couldn’t name or grasp. Perhaps it was the pride with which Dad always spoke of his German heritage, which had influenced me in choosing my major. Now the dream turned real, from a misty thought to a tangible brochure and application—a goal I could actually pursue.

  Persuading my parents was the next step. The sponsoring university, Michigan’s Wayne State, had cheaper tuition than Northwestern, and the German government subsidized University of Munich dorm rooms, which cost students only twenty dollars a month. All my credits would transfer to NU, but because the Munich semester ended in July, after NU’s graduation ceremonies, my diploma would be mailed to me. A year studying in Europe or dressing up in a cap and gown? No contest. My mother’s biggest concern was that her daughter would live away from home without a chaperone. Dad, of course, was all for it.

  I had lived amicably with my roommates in the Northwestern Apartments, but we hadn’t become close friends. We parted ways after the quarter ended. In Katy, I had a real pal on campus. We hung out in her freshman dorm, drinking Constant Comment tea and smoking Marlboro Lights. Bill often rode up to Evanston on his newly purchased cherry-apple-red-and-white Honda 350, which Katy thought was the ultimate in cool. She’d hop on the back for a fast ride up Sheridan Road and back to the NU campus, her red hair flying behind her. Sometimes I’d ride back home with him from Katy’s dorm, roaring up to my parents’ house.

  Even Dad showed his displeasure. “It doesn’t look right for a young lady to be on the back of a motorcycle,” he said.

  Mom was more direct. “You’re embarrassing us! You look like hoodlums on that motorcycle.”

  As finals week approached at the end of the fall quarter, my despair over the traumatic events of the previous year was fading, but an ongoing war was still being waged on the West Side. Victims were residents like my parents’ tenants. When burned-out businesses left, the West Side’s economic base was destroyed. Anyone who could afford it moved to safer areas; they were replaced by an increasingly impoverished population, followed by escalating crime. Mom and Dad were on the front lines of coping with the results. In Mom’s diaries, I discovered details neither Mom nor Dad had shared with me. Reading those entries decades later induces admiration for their fearless devotion, but raises questions about their choices.

  In early December, a crook jimmied open the six-flat outer-door lock. He unscrewed the light bulb in the vestibule—and waited. When a tenant, Mr. Murry, entered the darkened foyer, the assailant beat him to the ground and stole his wallet. In the one day it took for my parents to get the lock repaired, a thief walked into the building, broke into the Murrys’ apartment, and stole their television.

  Mom recorded that event and more in her diary:

  Our tenants all have the jitters with these robberies and purse snatchings going on. Headd has had the tires stolen off his car, which was in a garage down the alley before he moved into ours. Then his car was stolen out of a repair shop recently. Darden had been robbed in the alley right by his garage about a year ago, and he just begged Fred to install a lock on the front outer door because he said teenage gangs are roving the streets and stealing light bulbs out of front halls and then later breaking in.

  I find that the situation has become much, much worse since the April riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination. Mrs. McKinney said she’s so tired of hearing women scream when their purses are stolen. Darden said “I’d rather die than be fenced in,” meaning fear is forcing everyone to stay in the house. The neighborhood is starting to go.

  I’ll say we’re awfully patient.

  Starting to go? Mom had been noting problems in the neighborhood that could affect their property values since 1953, when she had written about the “trashy” appearance of a nearby building and the racial change in a border community, North Lawndale. Now after two riots, its infrastructure destroyed, and the middle class in frenzied flight, West Garfield Park’s slide had accelerated into a plunge. The nation as a whole had been traumatized by assassinations and riots throughout the year. We all said a grateful farewell to 1968 and hoped for a better 1969.

  But for the tenants in West Garfield Park, 1969 held the same horror
s as the previous year. In May, thieves broke into Lonnie and Annette Branch’s apartment at the six-flat. “Annette’s a nervous wreck,” Lonnie told my mother. “She’s worried those crooks will come back here, and she’s too scared to even take the bus from work anymore. I have to pick her up at her job.”

  1969 was a turning point for Mom. Incessant West Side lawlessness and the added work of maintaining our North Keeler home accelerated her stress. Dad seemed to take the crime and craziness in stride, even though he labored for hours after work and weekends to repair the damages. Dad’s work was tangible. He did extensive on-site physical work, but Mom bore the brunt of coordinating repairs and tenant communication.

  And another major change in her life was imminent. The gaggle of young people who’d filled the North Keeler house and pitched in with major projects during the past three years would soon be moving on. The previous year, Paul had earned a full scholarship from Bell Laboratories to pursue a master’s degree at Stanford University in electrical engineering. The research and development subsidiary of AT&T at the time, Bell Labs was considered the most innovative scientific organization in the world. After his first year at Stanford, Paul headed east to New Jersey for his summer job at Bell Labs before returning to the university in the fall.

  His work on military contracts shielded him from induction, but the Vietnam War still hung like the sword of Damocles over Bill’s head, more menacing than ever. In 1968, at least sixteen thousand American troops had been killed in action—more than in any previous year of the war. All young men, and the people who loved them, were scared.

  In the summer of 1969, Bill had two years of law school behind him, but pursuing a degree no longer guaranteed a deferment. Talk of a lottery to choose draftees was gaining traction, and no draft-age men would be exempt—unless they were in another branch of the armed forces.

  Bill applied to the Army Reserves. His application included his recently earned commercial pilot’s license (the lessons were a college-graduation gift), which impressed the Reserves’ aviation unit. He was invited to join. At the end of July, he boarded a plane bound for Fort Benning, Georgia, to complete basic training for the next five months. A month later, I would leave to study in Munich for a year.

  Mom threw a farewell party for me, replete with a bon voyage cake, decorated with a confectionary ship. But Grandma Gartz didn’t come. “She hasn’t earned the right to go to Europe!” she told Mom and Dad. “She should stay home and help her mother!”

  Linda with Bon Voyage cake at farewell party, August 1969.

  Shortly after my farewell party, Peggy and I flew to visit New York for a week before my ship departed. We stayed with Paul in Newark, New Jersey, near his Bell Labs’ offices. Seven days later, Katy and I boarded the ocean liner SS Rotterdam for the nine-day overseas voyage to the ship’s eponymous city.

  I was the last to leave of the older kids who had brought so much verve and fun into my parents’ home, and to Mom’s life in particular. Only Billy, sixteen, remained behind. For Mom, the trauma of being overworked was soon augmented by the desolate emotions of a woman whose home, once vibrant with youth and laughter, had become quiet and nearly empty.

  CHAPTER 35: News from the Front

  Katy and Linda prepare to cross the Atlantic, August 1969.

  While I was in New York, I was unaware that flames had ravaged an apartment in the six-flat. A swift fire-department response contained the blaze to the one unit, but for my parents, the night dragged on. After rushing to the scene, comforting their tenants, filing police reports, and calling a board-up service, it was after three in the morning when they wearily tramped up the steps to their North Side home.

  Instead of reaching a peaceful haven, they were greeted by angry phone calls from neighbors. Our dog, Buttons, had run away again and was shrieking at the back door. The confluence of aggravations triggered Mom’s fury toward Dad and our hapless pet. “If you can’t contain that dog, then put him to sleep!” Buttons had been the family’s faithful companion for thirteen years, but now Dad was acquiring animals at an astounding rate.

  Dad had always brought a steady stream of animals into our lives, from orphaned ducklings and baby hawks to a raccoon he’d rescued from an illegal steel-jaw trap. Now he had Hermann, the flying squirrel; two ferrets; three adult rabbits; five baby rabbits; an orange cat, Marmalade; and the four kittens she had birthed in the summer of 1969. Dad considered neutering animals to be “cruel.”

  In one of his “I’m just looking” forays into a pet store, my father bought a baby boa constrictor, the size of a common garter snake, but it would eventually grow to more than six feet in length and eleven inches in circumference. To provide a steady food supply for the snake, which he named Lucifer, Dad began raising rats in the basement. “The snake has to eat,” he insisted when Mom complained.

  The animals were amusing for us kids and Dad’s friends (“That Fred! What an eccentric!”), but they wore on Mom, especially after huge water beetles joined the pet party in the basement, undoubtedly drawn by the odiferous rat cages. Whenever we flipped on the basement lights, scores of shiny black bugs scurried for corners and crevices, their little legs tap-tap-tapping along the concrete floor. “I’ve had it with all these animals!” Mom shouted. Dad shrugged his shoulders, and his face lit up with a scampish grin.

  Mom’s letters to me in Munich were mostly cheerful, newsy pieces about—what else? Work on the West Side. “I have a new title now,” she wrote in the fall. “I’m the contractor for the burned-out apartment remodel. I have to say, I’m pretty good at it.”

  When her October 29 letter arrived, it brought a more somber tone and disturbing news. Mom started with the backstory. Her tenant, Mrs. McKinney, told Mom her phone and electricity had been cut off for lack of payment. Mrs. McKinney had “hit rock bottom” and had to give up the apartment. When she broke down in sobs over her predicament, Mom cried with her.

  The following Tuesday morning, Mom drove to the West Side to oversee Mrs. McKinney’s move. After parking on Keeler, just north of the six-flat’s alley, she walked south toward Washington. She saw two men eyeing her on the west side of Keeler. Her heart jumped when they crossed toward her, but before she could react, one yanked at the strap of her purse. “Help! Help!” she cried out. She struggled to hold on. “Please don’t take my purse! Please don’t take my purse!” It held the huge sum of fifty dollars in cash (about $325 today), all her credit cards, the new keys to the McKinneys’ apartment, as well as keys to another apartment. When one thug drew back his fist to punch her in the face, Mom ducked and let go. The men dashed off down the alley.

  Panting in fear and exhaustion, she ran toward Washington Boulevard and hailed a passing cop car. They cruised around for several blocks, looking for the thieves, but had no luck. “My tenants had warned me,” she wrote. “Somehow I wasn’t prepared for a purse-snatcher at 11:00 a.m., but what do I expect? Special hours?”

  Her next letter, dated December 9, had a more frightening story. David Nelson, the pastor of our former church, told Mom and Dad about an attack on his sister, Mary. Pastor Nelson and Mary had been working side by side to bring relief and hope to the increasingly impoverished West Side community ever since their arrival during the August 1965 riots.

  Mary was working late in her office at the Christian Action Ministry, CAM, founded after those riots. At ten thirty, she finally left to drive home, but her car wouldn’t start. She returned to the office, unaware of the man skulking behind her. She dialed her roommate for a ride, but before she connected, the man leaped from the shadows and brutally assaulted her, kicking her repeatedly in the head and damaging her eye.

  Frightened by the abrupt end to the phone call, Mary’s roommate drove to the office, burst in, and scared off the attacker. She called for an ambulance and the police. For twenty-four hours, Mary lay unconscious in the hospital, and several more days passed before she recuperated enough to return home. After her recovery, she went right back to work at CAM.
“I’d have to live in terror if I didn’t get back to my mission,” she later told my mother.

  The dangers were real, yet Mom’s letter contained no sense of fear—just the quip after the purse-snatching anecdote, “What do I expect? Special hours?” My entire life, Mom and Dad’s West Side work had always been integrated into our lives, and I accepted it, even after the neighborhood changed. Now I was 4,500 miles away from home, and all communication was via letters, which took five to ten business days to reach their destination. To really discuss anything would require a fifty-dollar phone call for a twenty-minute conversation. I was focused on schoolwork and negotiating a foreign country. Besides, Mom was not about to take advice from me.

  Their friends implored them to sell, but Dad wouldn’t discuss it. Mom had no real say in the matter, even though she managed the whole enterprise. My grandparents had gifted the six-flat in Dad’s name only. Despite this blatant slight, Mom exhorted me, in this most recent letter, not to be “vindictive” toward my grandmother. “Grandma really has almost never offended me,” she wrote.

  It was as if she were on an emotional motherin-law pendulum, swinging between hate and praise. “Don’t forget,” she continued, “she’s had a very hard life. Who are we to judge?” Mom ended the letter with a sentence that tipped me off to the underlying motivation behind her inexplicable change of heart: “Always be open to criticism and advice. Someone else always knows something you don’t know.” I got it. She was hoping to soften me up to accept her advice and criticism, especially on the subjects of sex and marriage, points of increasing tension between us in the age of the sexual revolution.