14 Months as VISTA Volunteers
(September 1967 - November 1968)

by Jack Hoeschler, March 2019

Because Linda and I were married during my last year at NYU law school, we decided to do something adventuresome together before I settled down to practice law.  At first we signed up for what looked like an exciting Peace Corps program in the US Trust Islands of Micronesia in the Pacific.  But those plans were scuttled when Congress found out that the Peace Corps had one volunteer for every 68 natives in Micronesia.  It seems that the climate was popular—too popular.

Since I didn’t want to teach birth control in India (the Peace Corps’ alternative), we decided to join an ABA-sponsored VISTA demonstration project in Chicago.  VISTA stands for “Volunteers In Service To America,” the domestic version of the Peace Corps.  Our legal aid project was called Community Legal Council (CLC), manned (no women at that time) by recent law graduates, many wishing to avoid the draft for one more year before turning 26 (and too old to be drafted). 

Our CLC project was designed to test whether full time legal help given to neighborhood groups/organizations could foster serious systemic change and improvement (versus the work of regular legal aid lawyers, swamped by caseloads of consumer claims, evictions, domestic relations problems etc.)

The highlight of our four weeks of training was community organizing lectures by the famous Saul Alinsky.   The rest of the training was perfunctory, much of it led by Lee Weiner (one of the future Chicago Seven). By the way, VISTA was unaccustomed to and challenged by our older and more self-directed cohort, since most of Vista’s volunteers were college dropouts who weren’t sure where they were going or why.

We were divided into teams of two and assigned to specific neighborhoods. My partner, Bill Schwartz (Harvard, ’67), and I were assigned to the Near South Side centered around State Street and Cermak Road. Clients included community groups from multiple public housing projects such Robert Taylor Homes, a dreadful public housing high-rise. Linda, not part of the CLC project, was assigned to run a Hull House outpost (Jane Addams Settlement House) in the Dearborn Homes public housing project on 26th east of State Street.

Through a somewhat typical VISTA screw-up, we were initially assigned to work in the Near North Side. Because we were supposed to live where we worked, we thereupon found a wonderful apartment at Sedgwick and Division Streets (1200 North), two blocks west of the elevated line that marked the boundary of the “Gold Coast” to the east and the ghetto to the west.  The infamous “Cooley High” was kitty-corner from our apartment, and just west of us was the infamous Cabrini-Green public housing project.

After we moved into our new abode, Vista reassigned us to the Near South Side, and informed us we “could now move.” But we refused and the Vista bureaucracy finally gave up.

Our landlords were a delightful older couple, Manny and Evelyn Elson.  The Elson building had a former butcher shop on the first floor, a double apartment on the second floor (ours), with a similar layout on the third floor where the Elsons lived.  The apartments were double-sized because Manny refused to bribe the building inspector to authorize four rather than two living units. The Elsons had bought the building in the 30’s thinking that the neighborhood would improve and the value of the building rise.  Not in their lifetimes.

Manny was a retired Nabisco salesman and Evelyn, a retired bookkeeper. Manny’s family were Russian Jews who had emigrated to Chicago after the 1905 revolution and pogroms.  Their father, Jacob, was a fallen away rabbi who worked as a cigar maker in the Windy City. The children all went to Chicago public schools but spent after-school time at Jane Addams’ famous Hull House.  There they learned to play string instruments, sing and act in various theatrical endeavors.

The Elsons were a marvel of achievement coupled with modesty. Charles Elson graduated Yale, taught at Hunter College, and was a famous lighting and set designer. (Rudolph Bing of the Metropolitan Opera referred to “Elsonizing” old sets to save money.) Elizabeth was the first woman to join the Yale School of Drama faculty. Joe played viola in the Philadelphia Orchestra and another brother became undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury and made cellos as a hobby when he retired.  Alex Elson was a famous labor lawyer in Chicago and a early proponent of alternative dispute resolution at the ABA.

Manny was less successful, economically, than his siblings, partially because he would always speak his mind, including at his workplace. But he was a wonderfully inventive artist, a sculptor and a painter, who had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago; he used the first floor of our building for his myriad of art projects.

Linda and I would drive together to the South Side each day and do our thing with the locals.  Where we worked, we were relatively safe because people, especially the kids, knew us. The danger came when we ventured out of our assigned area, even around our home on the North Side since we were not known there.

Linda was the sole teacher and manager of her Hull House outpost.  She led after school activities for the kids, taught crafts to all comers, and reading to the adults.  Her best reading student was a sharecropper’s daughter from Mississippi, Vennie Lee Carroll, who had three children. Vennie, at 27, wanted to learn to read before her son graduated from high school.

She was a remarkable woman, determined that her children should understand that there was more to life than the ghetto. Accordingly, she would take them on bus trips on the weekends to see other parts of town, visit various museums and attend public activities.  Her son, Jacob, was very bright and an avid reader of anything and everything he could find – including porno books that Linda did not like.

(By the way, Vennie got her GED degree shortly after Jacob graduated high school, about 4 years after we left Chicago. She soon got a job as a saleswoman at Bonwit Teller in the Loop.) 

Three events stand out in my memories of Chicago. First was the rioting that occurred after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot. The second was my getting mugged in late June, and the third was the Democratic Convention in August.

MLK Riots (April 1968)

Martin Luther King was assassinated at 6:05PM in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.  As the news broke, things were initially quiet since everyone was in a state of shock. The next day things got hot.

It so happened that Linda’s mother, Hildur Lovas, was visiting us that week and was scheduled to fly home on the 5th.  Because I had a court hearing downtown, Linda and her mother were to drive down late morning, pick me up, and then together we’d go to the airport.  As Linda and Hildur were leaving our apartment, a phalanx of kids from another North Side high school was marching down Sedgwick to meet up with the kids at Cooley High.  Linda’s mother wisely suggested that they not stay around to watch what might happen.

After they picked me up and we proceeded on the Stevenson Expressway to Midway, we saw smoke rising on the West Side. After dropping Linda’s mother at the airport, we drove back toward the Near South Side. Based on the increased smoke and radio reports, we decided not to venture off the freeway, and, instead, went downtown to the CLC office.  There we met other VISTA lawyers who were straggling in, some with broken windshields, all unnerved by the riots in their work neighborhoods.

We called Manny and Evelyn and learned that they intended to move to brother Alex’s place in Hyde Park.  We agreed it would not be wise for us to stay in the apartment, with the risk of being burned out.

I next called an NYU law school friend, George Moelenhof, who volunteered his Gold Coast apartment since he had just been called up by the National Guard to patrol our neighborhood.  He told us where to find the keys and we wished each other well.

Later in the afternoon we drove up Lake Shore Drive to our new temporary abode at Division and State, got the key, looked around, and then drove west on Division toward our apartment.  We met a police line near Wells Street and explained that we needed to drive to our apartment to get our stuff so we could return to the State Street apartment.

The police let us proceed but warned us to be careful.  Division, a usually busy retail and commercial street, was deserted as we drove west. Soon we saw what looked like nude bodies lying in the gutters and on the sidewalks.  As we got closer, we realized that these were window mannequins that had been stripped of their clothes and discarded by looters.  For the most part, the looters, by then, had moved elsewhere.

We continued westward to Division and Sedgwick where we saw police crouching behind their squad cars, aiming rifles up at a nearby public housing high rise.  We could hear what sounded like gunshots coming from the project.  Since the police were not shooting, we drove slowly by and heard them say that they thought kids were throwing firecrackers off the project balconies.  The streets were otherwise eerily quiet and deserted.

We turned right at Cooley High onto Sedgwick and drove the one block to the Elson building. We quickly got our stuff, confirmed that the doors, windows and the building itself were intact and then retreated quickly back east on Division to the Gold Coast where we lived for the next five days.

The city was in virtual lockdown everywhere except the downtown loop.  There was a curfew for anyone under 21. To reestablish order 10,500 police, 6,700 National Guard, and 5,000 army troops were called in. Mayor Daley gave shoot-to-kill orders for any arsonists or those in possession of Molotov cocktails, and shoot-to-maim or cripple looters.  Eleven people were killed, 48 were wounded by police gunfire, 90 policemen were injured, and 2,150 people were arrested.

Most of the rioting and burning was on the West side with lesser damage on the North and South sides. Movement was possible north and south on Lake Shore Drive, but it was definitely not advisable on the Interstate, particularly those South Side sections lined by public housing high-rises.

I worked each day in the CLC downtown office, but each evening, before leaving for home, I’d go to a building-top bar on North Wacker with good views overlooking the North and the West sides.  My objective was to see where the fires were and whether the Elson building had been torched.  Luckily, the building survived without significant damage – possibly because it was nondescript and easy to ignore.  After 5 days, both we and Elsons returned, but the atmosphere remained tense.

Linda was pregnant with Kristen and left VISTA in June to return to NYC to complete her master’s degree in political science at the New School.  While she was gone I became a staff lawyer for CLC when my year of Vista service ended.

Getting the Shaft in Green Homes (June 1968)

The second big event for me in Chicago happened close to our apartment, but where I was a stranger. In late June I helped Clotee McInnis, a community leader, move out of Cabrini-Green and into a middle-income apartment further north.  She had hired two black movers and a truck and I was helping them carry boxes and furniture down to the truck from her apartment.

During trips down the exterior elevator and through the open lobby we passed a group of 7-9 teenagers, hanging around the lobby making jive talk and generally screwing around.  On one trip to the truck I was rolling Clotee’s TV set on some cheap and rickety wheels across the sidewalk when one of the kids walked up to me and asked for 50 cents.  I had my head down trying to steady the TV and told him I didn’t have anything. I kept moving until he punched me in the face.  The TV tipped over. I fended off a few more blows and the kid went back to his buddies.  I picked up the TV and took it to the truck.  The two movers asked me what that was all about. I told them what had happened and said I did not want to let those punks scare me or us away since none of them was bigger than I. I got what I thought was agreement by the movers that together we would walk past the kids, into the building, and keep and with our work.

With that the three of us proceeded. On this hot afternoon I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. As we walked by, the boys pulled in behind us, this time flashing some straight razors and knives.

As we approached the elevators they surrounded me. I told the leader that I was helping a woman move out, that I worked for Legal Aid, and that they shouldn’t be roughing me up.  I also noticed that the two movers were slinking away at the sight of the straight razors. I was pretty much on my own.

As I continued to talk it appeared that I might be winning over one or two of the followers in the back (one had a court hearing he wanted help with), but it was also clear that I was not winning with the leaders in the front.  Indeed, without any warning, one of them took another punch at me and the fight resumed in the elevator lobby.  I was trying to do three things:  (1) keep my fists and arms up defensively to protect my face; (2) keep my mouth locked shut so I didn’t lose any teeth; and (3) punch back as well as I could against them since each was smaller than I.

The fight progressed from the lobby to a sidewalk adjoining some ground floor units.  There were about 15-20 people, mostly kids, watching all of this.  The attackers now had me surrounded and one was trying to climb on my back.  At the same time my foot slipped off the sidewalk and my pants got tangled in the twisted wires at the bottom of the 40” cyclone fence that bordered the sidewalk.

I became afraid they might get me down and kick me to death. I started yelling, “Help! Help!  Somebody help me!”  With that they pulled away, fearing, I believe, that the movers might come to my aid (even though they were now at least 100 feet away).  At the same time I became aware of a Puerto Rican woman who was calling me from her nearby, ground floor apartment to come into her place.  Somehow I managed to get my pants extracted from the fence and ran to her door about 12 feet away.  When the punks saw that I was able to get into her apartment, they ran away. She slammed the door behind me and motioned to her kitchen table where she had a couple of guns.  We were prepared to hold them off for a fair time.

After I caught my breath and thanked her for her help (she had taken a substantial risk because there was no love lost between the Blacks and Puerto Ricans in Chicago), we called the police.  Chicago police were all in cars with a sophisticated radio dispatch system and they quickly arrived.  The punks, of course, were long gone. Because the police were always in cars and afraid to enter the superblock high rise public housing projects because of the danger, they knew little about the place or possible thugs.  Indeed, on the way to the hospital they drove me around the area to see if I could spot anyone that looked like my guys – because I have a lousy memory for names and faces, it was of no avail. And since Chicago police never walked the beat, but stayed in their cars, these big high rise public housing projects were effectively run by the gangs.

The police took me to Henrotin Hospital, the local medical center with a marginal reputation, where a friendly resident proposed to stitch up my facial cuts.  Because I thought it was not a good idea to have him practice his needlepoint on my face, I told him I would prefer to have my regular doctor do the sewing.  When he agreed but asked who my doctor was, I had to tell him that I did not know (because I had none and our only doctor was Linda’s OB-Gyn) but I would soon find out.

Linda’s doctor put me in the hands of the Chief of Surgery at Michael Reese Hospital on the South Side.   The surgeon was very solicitous and quite outraged that I should have been beaten up by Black folks I was trying to help.  He put in 9 stitches, assisted by a Black orderly whom, I could tell, was not at all sympathetic to me. Just another honky learning about life in the projects.

It's very ironic that the very morning of the day I helped Clotee, I was at a meeting on the South Side of White and Black residents to talk about their various concerns.  The Whites, mostly elderly, were afraid of Blacks moving into their neighborhoods because they were afraid of violence.  The Blacks downplayed those fears, saying they were unfounded and actually masked prejudice.  I was one of the mediators at the meeting.  It would have been interesting had I been able to return to the meeting later in the day to provide an existential example of those fears not being unfounded.

Indeed, at the CLC office, a number of lawyers, especially those smaller than I, were upset because they realized if this could happen to me, it could happen to them.

That night Linda called me from New York because I was planning to fly out over the 4th of July long weekend to visit her.  She guessed that something was wrong but I denied all and said all was fine, that I would be out in a few days and I looked forward to seeing her and her parents.

Actually, my face looked rather puffy and my right eye was blood soaked and blood shot. Indeed, the doctor was concerned that blood was floating inside my eyeball and might cause vision problems.

In the end, no problem arose. But a few days later when I deplaned at LaGuardia wearing dark glasses at 9 pm,  Linda took one look and insisted that I keep the glasses on so as not to scare the children.

The Democratic Convention (August 1968)

The third big event for us in Chicago that year was the Democratic National Convention in August.  For anyone alive in 1968, this was the “big event.” Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated two months after the King riots and it seemed that the country might be breaking apart.

The Convention summed up all the anti-Vietnam war tensions, and pitted Hubert Humphrey as Johnson’s successor against Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern as the anti-war candidates.  Both Humphrey and McCarthy were from Minnesota and McGovern was from South Dakota.  Ten thousand demonstrators (yuppies; SDS; and anti-war activists) came from all over the country. They held tactical drills in various Chicago parks to develop techniques to run and pierce police lines and other governmental control efforts.  Mayor Daley had 23,000 police and National Guardsmen at the ready.  

The center of the demonstrations was Grant Park across the street from the Chicago Hilton Hotel where the Democrats were meeting.  Thousands of demonstrators surrounded a large equestrian statute of Civil War General Logan. 

At one of the peak rallies on the evening of August 28, a young college student from Birmingham, Alabama, Lee Edmundson, climbed up and sat on the shoulders of the statue. Someone handed him a Viet Cong flag which he waved to sustained cheers. Then the police surrounded the statue and, beating on it with their batons, demanded that he come down.  He started to do so and was about to slide off the horse’s rump and down the tail when he saw a policeman swing up beneath the horse’s legs with a baton, apparently ready to beat Lee’s hands as he descended.  Lee paused and climbed back up onto the rump of the horse to the sustained cheers of the crowd.  Those cheers became louder when he reclimbed the figure and flashed the peace sign to everyone.

Now the police were very mad. It appeared they might climb the statue and throw Lee off and onto the pavement 15 feet below. So, Lee climbed down, this time sliding down the left leg of the figure while holding on to the inside of the general’s sword hilt and the large basket guard. As he stepped onto the figure’s left boot, two policemen grabbed his two legs and attempted to pull him off the statue.  At that point his arm slipped and got pinned between the hilt and the guard and did not let loose until the yanking broke his arm and he fell free.

Lee had a newspaper rolled up in his back pocket and the police charged him with assaulting a police officer – a standard defensive charge if there is a risk of a police brutality claim – a felony that can be traded away as part of a plea bargain.

I was one of a group of civilian lawyers who had volunteered to help defend people arrested in what was later officially called a “police riot” and Lee Edmundson got assigned to me – or I to him.  I interviewed him at the Cook County jail* and learned that he was a college student working in Eugene McCarthy’s election office in Birmingham, AL. He had come to Chicago to support McCarthy and got caught up with the demonstrations. 

When he climbed up on the Logan statue with about 6 other kids, he climbed highest and was sitting astride the statue’s shoulders when someone passed him a flag he did not recognize, but started to wave to the frenzied approval of the crowd. 

The rest is as I have described, but I had to gather evidence that a) he was not armed; b) that he was afraid of the police considering their aggressive attitudes; and c) that he was merely trying to come down when his arm got stuck until the police broke it by pulling it.

In the end, I was able to get some good outtakes from local TV stations showing the whole episode and confirming Lee’s story.  The prosecutor and the judge let him out on bail but also insisted that he come back for multiple status hearings even though they knew he lived in Alabama. That was just the way they played the game in Chicago. Because I moved to St. Paul November 1, someone else represented him and, I believe, eventually got the charges against him dropped, (but likely in return for the police dropping the felony charge against him.)  His situation came up in the trial of the Chicago 7 as an example of police brutality in handling some demonstrators.

The most noteworthy trial that came out of these convention demonstrations was a conspiracy trial against the leaders of the various participating groups in the form of the Chicago Seven.  One of the Seven was Lee Weiner who happened to be our initial trainer at CLC.  The more famous members of the seven were:  Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and John Froines.  Their convictions were reversed on appeal and there was no further prosecution. 

*In 2021 and in preparation for this essay, Jack and Linda located Lee Edmundson in Mendocino, CA; we called him to get his recollections about his arrest and subsequent (legal) work with Jack. Lee said how grateful he was to meet Jack in Cook County Hospital where he lay with a broken arm (courtesy of the police), no painkiller and shackled to the bed. “I will always recall my utter relief when Jack, whom I did not know, showed up at my hospital bed. He told me he was my lawyer and that he was first going to get me unshackled from the foot of the bed. That was Jack.”