My Mere View Of The Year 1968
http://www.swans.com/library/art14/carenc37.html
by Carol Warner Christen
June 2, 2008
(Swans - June 2, 2008) In 1968, I was twenty-nine years old. My now
ex-husband and I moved to Illinois from Ohio at the end of 1967
because he had graduated from college as an engineer and was offered
a job at Bell Labs in Naperville. The sale of our small house in Ohio
purchased with a small inheritance allowed us to buy a very large,
very old house in Hinsdale, Illinois. We needed a large house because
we had five young children, each one year apart, thanks to the rhythm
method approved by the Roman Catholic Church.
When we took over the Hinsdale house, the children were 6, 8, 9, 10,
and 11 years old. The house cost $25,000. Unfortunately, we sold it
for a mere $40,000 (1975) after our divorce but that is not part of
1968 events. (This year, 2008, it resold for $800,000, according to
my youngest daughter, the 6-year-old mentioned above. Oh, well.)
I never graduated from high school because of my first pregnancy, but
in Illinois in September 1967, I applied to go to a new college being
built. I was tested to see if I qualified. The test awarded me
fifty-four college credits, bypassing my need to get a high school
diploma, which I never have bothered to pursue. The children were
registered in the local grade school four blocks away, each in a
grade from one through six.
That is the background for the beginning of 1968. On January 3,
school began and four days later postage stamps were raised to six
cents apiece. On the 9th, I had a conference with one teacher at the
grade school. On the 26th, we had five people from Bell Labs over for
the evening. On March 6th, I registered again for college. My diary
says that I went to a rummage sale at the Unitarian Church, saw the
dentist, and had my period the day before my ex got a speeding ticket.
In April, I saw the dentist again, had the trash picked up, and gave
our youngest a birthday party. She went to two more birthday parties.
Since I had periods each and every month, I won't mention them
anymore, nor will I mention the dentist again, whom I saw every month
until September. In May, there were teacher conferences and doctor
exams of the children, and an estimate on a new driveway.
My college German 101 began in June. I had a complete course in
German when I was five from my great-grandmother, who was over 90 in
1944. She fled Germany after the Kaiser kicked her out. My second
husband and I visited German relatives in the Saar Valley in 1990 but
that's another story. I just wanted more formality to my use of the
language. By mid-July, we could park on the new driveway and later
that month visited Ohio. August 1968 was filled with visiting friends
and relatives.
In September, of course, school began again. I went to an Art League
meeting with a friend and registered, again, for college the next
day. A day later, I scraped our old three-story house to ready it for
paint. We had a picnic and college classes began on the 24th. We also
joined the Family Service Counseling group for family counseling.
October of 1968 brought art shows, a Du Page County Art League
meeting, and we saw "Ulysses" with friends. I wrote my brother an
apologetic letter but the purpose was not marked in my diary.
November contained a party with friends from New York, another art
league meeting, two grade school conferences, and a trip to the
Lazzardo Museum with the children. We purchased a freezer.
December brought my mother and my ex left for New Jersey for a
three-day conference. I baked a fruitcake and made plum pudding with
the whole family hyperirritable until I went to buy phyllo with my
friend Gretchen in a Greek Chicago neighborhood. My son got chicken
pox two days before Christmas and my in-laws came by the day after
Christmas. Nineteen sixty-nine brought several more case of chicken
pox but this is not the year we were focusing upon, is it? Our
esteemed editor mentioned to me that the subject for this issue was
to be "1968" rather than that of the essay I originally submitted.
The year 1968 was the first time I drove to a demonstration at a post
office in the next town, La Grange. I chickened out and turned the
car around halfway there when I saw a girl hitchhiking with an
antiwar sign. I turned around and asked her if she wanted a ride to
the post office. (Nothing was happening in Du Page County anywhere
else right then.) She got in and we both got out at the post office
where several people were demonstrating and shouting. I stood there,
as if I were with them, barely able to comprehend my role or anyone else's.
I was born in Ohio to Republicans of the old school and thought
Democrats were aliens. It took me three or more years of going to
college part-time to begin to argue, to change my politics, and to
understand any of it. During the 1968 Convention in Chicago, my
father and I got into a huge argument about Mayor Daley beating up
demonstrators. He was all for Daley's tactics although they were in
different parties!
A year or so later in the early 1970s, I had become a draft counselor
for MCDC (Midwest Council for Draft Counseling), an arm of the AFSC
(American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group), to find out if
young draft age men were conscientious objectors or not. Our local
newspaper interviewed me. My current husband sought the service from me.
Around the same time, I was elected president of Women For Peace and
went to a demonstration to protest President Nixon's policies in
Chicago. It was a tiny demonstration blocked by buses so Nixon
wouldn't see us. The blue-suited Secret Service kept chasing us
around to take our pictures as we walked; I kept turning away. Prior
to that though, on the street corner waiting to cross, Nixon's car
passed by me. I was able to give him the finger and I'm still happy
about it all these years later.
It is unfortunate that my diaries are so stark and devoid of neat
information. Five children in grade school take up most of one's time
and, then, I was also a college student. In 1968, I invented
democratic dishwashing, which worked extremely well. I filled the
sink with hot, soapy water and another for hot rinse water before we
began to eat. I mentally counted all the dishes in play, divided them
up equally for the kids, me, and my ex. That was the number of dishes
each had to wash, rinse, and place on a rack to drip dry. No drying
as the towel could become a source of contamination by dirty hands,
by dropping it, etc. I put the dishes away later. Each child did an
equal number of silverware. It was so popular that my ex and I had
little to do and could linger at the table over coffee; the kids were
free to go play.
I was given a book on time study by my grandfather when I was eight.
I read it and memorized it during my childhood. In that big old house
of three full floors, I once donned a white jacket, pinned a duty to
my lapel, went through the house to check the timing of each and
every possible bit of work we needed to do to keep the house neat and
clean with as little effort as possible. I wrote it out and, years
later, sold it to a Portland, Oregon, housecleaning service. I still
have the sequences; they work. I offered the children a small hourly
sum and gave them a list of duties. If they fulfilled them, I paid
them. If they didn't do them, they could start anytime later and do
them without penalty. They just would get paid later than the others.
Time study is based on ease of work in as little effort and time as
is necessary. That suited me and my children perfectly. My
grandfather was the Chief Draftsman at Cleveland's Browning Crane and
oversaw the drawing of the first backhoe. I still have a photo of it.
My father was a time-study engineer after just one year at Case
Institute of Technology. The job paid well but he was usually hated
by factory workers. He drank a lot, too.
As I mentioned to Gilles when I had nothing to offer him for 1968, I
knew my family's history as Founders (Adams, Allens, and Warners). We
have been here since 1635 or three hundred seventy-three years. This
is why so many of my articles are aimed at undoing the current
fascist trend in American life which only serves capitalists, not the
people. We've always been down to earth humans as we still are. Most
Americans are, too. So many seem to feel they are gods now
rearranging people's lives all over the planet with war and hatred,
using God as their leader.
I left the only church I ever belonged to after fourteen years when
the priest asked me to put more money in the basket than I had with
the coins I would find in the couch cushions. We made $350.00 per
month and fed seven people with that, including all the other
expenses. I had to shop at five or six places to afford enough. I had
to learn before 1968 how to cook correctly for all of us. I still
have that system, too.
In conclusion, the experiences I had in 1968 served me well all my
life. Those experiences led to the School of the Art Museum of
Chicago, to school bus driving, to a drafting job which led to
mechanical designer to hypnotherapist to neuro-linguistic programming
to computer technology to bookkeeping to a farm full of goats unto
today when I am 69 years old and writing for all of you. Thank you.
.
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