re: #455 Dark_Falcon

My father was a decade older and did go out in the mornings (he worked for Amoco and had to go near Grant Park to reach the Amoco Building (now the Aeon Center). His hostility to those hippies is still palpable today when he talks about it. He was definitely on the side of the police at the time and still is today.

They really were a pretty nasty lot. The protesters, or a sizable contingent of them, had spent the whole day provoking the cops in every possible way short of gunfire. They urinated and defecated in the streets; threw bottles, rocks, molotov cocktails and the aforementioned feces at the cops, and subjected them to every form of verbal abuse, including many direct challenges to fight. At nightfall, the cops lost their cool and went berserk. I don’t know how many of the hard core protesters were around to reap the whirlwind they had sown. I suspect most of them saw it coming and hightailed it back to the suburbs, leaving the naive and the hangers-on to take the brunt of the police onslaught. It really was like a cavalry charge, too. The cops broke into a dead run and flailed away at anyone they found within range.