Patrick Murfin: How I Became an all-Expenses Paid Guest of Uncle Sam — Reporting as Ordered

In part one, I explain a lot of stuff….

Life was pretty good for me in late 1972 despite the election of Richard Nixon that November.

After leaving the staff of the Chicago Seed, I had gotten a fairly good paying factory job, my first fulltime real pay check in years.

I was on the second shift welding line at Schwinn Bicycle’s frame plant.  There was a bicycle boom back then and the market wasn’t flooded by imports.  Schwinn had three plants in Chicago working around the clock.

I was living in a spacious first floor apartment of a two flat on Fremont Street just south of Addison and a couple of blocks from Wrigley Field.  The neighborhood wasn’t gentrified yet, so the rent was reasonable.

I shared the place with my girl friend Cecelia.  She was several steps above me on hotness scale.  We had met on an IWW picket line at the Three Penny Cinema on Lincoln Ave.  She was one of the strikers.  God only knows why she took up with me.  We also had an extra room and various friends rotated in and out kicking in a share of the rent.

I had even gone out and bought stuff, after years of living out of a duffle bag.  We bought real furniture—a nice used couch that featured a floral embroidered upholstery we referred to as Puerto Rican chic, some of those heavy carved end tables and matching coffee table you could get on time from Nelson Brothers, a brand new dinette table with a bright yellow lemon design on top, and a little component stereo system from the discount electronic store across from Wrigley.

Cecelia looked liked sort of like this….

 

I spent my weekends at the IWW hall working on the Industrial Worker.  And every Saturday night I partied hard with my Wobbly friends or hit my favorite Saloons on Lincoln Ave.    Weed was plentiful and cheep. Life was good.

Naturally this uncommon state of bliss could not continue.  The gods had other plans.  Or at least the Selective Service System did.  In late November, out of the blue, I got a letter ordering me to report for induction in December.

It was a dismal, gray rainy Friday afternoon when I climbed on the El platform by the ball park and headed to meet my fate.

The Induction Center was in a non-descript building in the seedy South Loop.  Upon entering precisely at nine o’clock in the morning, as ordered, I was shown to a large room filled with nervous young men of various shapes, sizes, and colors and handed sheaves of forms to fill out.

Because I planned to refuse induction that day, I answered some of the questions rather flippantly and what I thought of as a great deal of witty sarcasm. I highlighted my association with the IWW, which was still then on the official list of Un-American and Subversive Organization.  Some of those bon mots would come back to bite me in the ass later.

Editor’s Note: Patrick‘s last post for The Third City was the aforementioned How I Became an all-Expenses Paid Guest of Uncle Sam….

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