Well, there was the UofI student from Arlington Heights, a utterly committed Weatherman. Likeable. At the August 69 regional conference he described one of my statements as the most stupid thing he'd ever heard (or something like that). But he was trapped in the Weatherman vice: Imperailaism had to be destroyed, and the u.s. working class was hopeless. As the first enthusiasm of Weather faided, he hanged himself. There was this young woman at ISU who I first met taking notes at a meeting of the Bloomington Human Rights Commission. (Dressed in a suit and heels yet. Her father owned a paint store in Bloomington. A really smart and likeable young woman. I recruited ther in the fall of '68 to the SDS temporary front, the Peace & Freedom Party. (It wasn't a secret, but even for thse who knew that P&F was 'really' SDS the name made a difference.) In January she joined SDS and threw herself into organizing. In February she and I were at the house of a physics teacher from U.H., and I remember her sitting on the floor and beginning to muse and in about 30 minutes, George and I saying practically nothing, she decided that it had to be socialism. In March there was a interim SDS confernce in Austen, Texas. I subsidized her going. She rode down with a car full of Weathermen from Chicago. She came back a convinced Weatherman. She got her arm broken in the Days of Rage. She dropped out of school, and joined a collective somewhere, I think Cleveland. The last time I saw her, about a year or two later, she was passing through town (having dropped out of politics) going more or less from nwhere to nowhere, and she was consulting an astrology magazine to determine her bus schedule.
Another student and his wife; both wonderul people. He wanted to go to medical school. Both dropped out of school. I think he ultimately got a degree and is teaching someplace, but I haven't seen him in hears and don't know. Another young student the last I knew was living in a manufacture teepee of some sort in the New Mexico desert. That was actually a pretty good ending for him, considering. The last time Jan & I saw him was when we drove him home to Macomb after he had (after taking lsd) crashed through the plate glass window of a hamburger place to join all the happy people he saw hinside. The leaders (Dohrn, Jones, etc.) came out fine. The rank and file (such as it was, for never have so few done so little and gained so much attention) - well, it just wrung the life out of many of them.
And the Weathermen at work - some of which almost got me, Jan, & several others almost beaten by a mob of very angry high-school students. It was in connection with the October action. Rym2 had its own, separate from Weather's Days of Rage but at the same time. Several of us from B/N went with a Chicago SDS woman (she was Chinese, which may be why she took the hardest blows in wht followeed.) We went to leaflet this high school in North Chicago for the march coming up. I parked up a one-way street from the high school, and we prepared to leaflet at this candy store across the street from the school. A student saw SDS on the leaflet, and all of a suddent it seemed like there were a thousand bearing down on us. We ran toward the car, I got there, and drove back picking up others as we went along. Not too much damage to the car. Jan says I took a hard blow on the back as we were running but I didn't even know it. The cause. Weather people had been playing there little game at that high schools: Are you four or against imperialism? You have 60 seconds to decisede. Then we'll beat you up. And they had beaten a couple kids. We took the the brunt of it a few days later. Great agitational technique.
Carrol