As the Democratic National Convention opens today in Denver, a number of Carbondale residents recall the chaos that unfolded 40 years ago, when Chicago police and anti-war protesters clashed during the 1968 convention. All the scenes of violence were delivered to the nation via television.

Frank Bleyer of Carbondale was in the middle of the action during the 1968 convention.

"I was an alternate delegate," said Bleyer, a former teacher, coach and retail merchant and longtime executive of the Bank of Carbondale. "I had the opportunity to meet Mayor Daley. I was sitting just a couple of seats away from him."

Daley 'hero' to delegates

The late Richard J. Daley, Chicago's mayor and father of the city's current mayor, was reviled by many for the heavy security that was imposed over the city and the bloody confrontations between police and protesters, which some news reports called "police riots."

But Bleyer said he felt the mayor was just trying to protect him and the other delegates. "To the delegates, he was a hero, but not to the media," he said.

"It was right there in the streets," Bleyer said of the protesters. "You couldn't walk down the sidewalk without being accosted by someone." Although he wasn't touched by any of the demonstrators, he saw some confrontations, "and the police action to maintain order," Bleyer added.

"I felt sorry for Mayor Daley," Bleyer said. "He was trying hard to maintain order in the city, but the newsmen constantly had a microphone in his face," even on the convention floor.

"I remember some people put up posters the next night reading 'Mayor Daley for President,' and some of the mayor's supporters were marching with the posters outside the convention headquarters," Bleyer said.

Bleyer's brief foray into politics began in 1966, when he won the Democratic primary, then faced his old friend, Republican incumbent State Sen. John Gilbert, in the general election. Gilbert won.

"It's a period of time I'm trying to forget," Bleyer said jokingly. If he had it to do over, he said, he wouldn't have run against Gilbert. But he wouldn't have missed the convention, which he called both "educational" and "exciting."

Although the streets outside teemed with conflict, the convention itself was orderly, Bleyer recalled. "There was no coercion for my vote," either in the Illinois caucus or on the convention floor, he said.

Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota received the presidential nomination, which many demonstrators saw as an extension of Lyndon B. Johnson's war policies.

Convention security "was tremendous - armed guards, metal detectors, searches, guards with machine guns, armed guards on the roof," Bleyer recalled. But he also recalled that there were "threats of terrorism, like poisoning the Chicago water supply," made before the delegates arrived.

"Now, people expect the need for security, but in those days it seemed excessive," Bleyer said.

Cops smack 'hippies like mosquitoes'

While Bleyer was inside the convention headquarters, Mike Chylewski and his friend, Tim Irons, were outside on the streets. "It was bizarre," Chylewski said. The two high school friends from the suburbs heard about the demonstrations, so they went downtown to see what was happening.

They found "an eeriness and a tension in the air," Chylewski said. "You just knew something was going to happen.

"We came across a long line of Chicago cops and a long line of hippies facing off. The hippies were taunting the cops and calling them names like 'pigs,' which was a popular term back then," Chylewski said.

"The cops were standing in a line tapping their nightsticks on their legs saying nothing. Tim and I got closer to see what was up. We were right behind all the hippies when all heck broke loose.

"All of a sudden, the Chicago police commander said, 'Go,' and the cops started swinging those billy clubs, smacking hippies like mosquitoes. Tim and I freaked out and ran all the way back to the suburbs. We were fine after an underwear change."

The moral of the story, Chylewski added, is, "Stay home and watch it on TV."

Chylewski and Irons later attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale together, married cousins and still are in Southern Illinois. Chylewski is now senior vice president of Care Trak International, Inc., in Murphysboro and Irons lives in De Soto.

'A crazy, surreal situation'

John S. Jackson, visiting professor at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIUC, was in graduate school in Tennessee in 1968 and saw the convention on TV.

When he began teaching the next year at SIUC, his students expressed their outrage over the confrontation in Chicago. He later saw SIUC student demonstrations escalate into actions similar to what they'd seen on TV from Chicago in 1968.

"It was a crazy, surreal situation," he said.

And, Jackson said, there was a "clear correlation, even straight-line progression" of the anti-war and civil rights movements that led from the violence in Chicago to the closing of the SIUC campus in 1970.

"People today forget the intensity of the opposition to the war," Jackson said. "It's a totally different deal" now, because there is a volunteer army and there is no military draft hanging over the heads of young men.

After the May 4 incident in which Ohio National Guardsmen fired on a crowd of student demonstrators at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine, "I saw (the violence) in person," Jackson said. Students poured into the streets of Carbondale, as did students on campuses nationwide.

State police and National Guard troops were called in to patrol the streets of Carbondale.

"I was only three years out of the Army myself. I saw those young people with rifles and wondered if it would happen here," Jackson recalled.

Jackson County Treasurer Shirley Dillinger Booker of Carbondale said she could recall no local incidents in protest of the convention violence. Her father, the late Ray Dillinger, was sheriff at the time, "and he would have known about any incidents," Booker said. Most law enforcement agencies were on alert, though, because of protests in other communities. Her late husband, Wayne Booker, was a Carbondale policeman who saw duty during the uprisings in 1969 and 1970.

1969 heats up

But later, as the war in Vietnam continued to escalate, local anti-war protests became more visible and more damaging. Black activists, too, increased their demands for civil rights. In 1969, a fire of suspicious origin destroyed Old Main, the oldest building on the SIUC campus. The growing campus tensions could not be ignored.

In 1968, Bill Kilquist of Murphysboro was an SIUC student, living in Wright Hall at University Park, majoring in physical education. He saw little or no reaction to the Democratic convention. Instead, he believes "the Vietnamese Studies Center on Campus was the main catalyst" for campus protests.

The center, funded by a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development, outraged some students, who said AID was a front for the CIA and the center probably was assisting in the Vietnam war effort.

In a design class, Kilquist met a student policeman who told him it was a great campus job. Kilquist went to the security office, got a job and changed his major to administration of justice.

"Southern Illinois was a better place to live" than his native upstate New York, Kilquist said. He was a Saluki patrolman from 1969 to 1971, then joined the Carbondale Police Department. He also served as a Jackson County deputy and later was elected Jackson County sheriff. He recently retired from the Illinois Department of Corrections.

As a Saluki Patrol member, Kilquist sometimes was assigned to guard campus buildings during periods of turmoil.

"I also worked undercover, marching in protests - right in the middle of everything," he recalled. Police were taking photos, trying to learn "who were the ringleaders," he said.

He recalls that Carbondale's squad cars had their windows all broken out by the crowds.

1970 campus shutdown

When the campus was shut down by violence in 1970, instructors gave pass-fail grades to students.

"It was my best semester at SIU," Kilquist joked.

Retired SIU policeman Steve Rishel of De Soto knows exactly where he was in 1968 - Vietnam. When he returned from service, Rishel went to work for the SIUC food service. Among his duties was catering events at the home of SIU President Delyte Morris and his wife, Dorothy.

When he applied for a job as a university policeman in 1970, he said, "I used Dorothy Morris as a reference." He got the job.

Rishel's duties were interesting, to say the least. "We took turns protecting the Vietnamese Studies Center" night after night, he said. "The first month after I was hired, my paycheck was doubled because of all the overtime I worked. We used to stay all night in the design building barracks, too."

Some of the troops were billeted in the SIU Student Center as well. Clarence G. "Doc" Dougherty, longtime director of the Student Center, who is now retired, said the troops would come in and sleep there, then leave before students arrived each morning.

When a brick was thrown through a Student Center window, one of Dougherty's student workers made a paperweight out of it. "I still have it," Dougherty said.

From 'Nam to Carbondale

Larry D. Hill of Makanda was another Vietnam veteran, a Marine medic who returned to SIUC hoping to become a teacher. He also worked with his brother as a carpenter.

"One night I was at the Moose Club with my brother and met Jack Hazel, the Carbondale police chief," he said. Hazel urged him to apply for a police job.

"He said it paid $100 a week," Hill recalled. "That was a lot more than I made in Vietnam. I took the tests and got hired and switched my classes from education to AJ (administration of justice).

Hill recalls the violence after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the anti-war marches that increased in frequency and intensity. The Democratic convention and nomination of Humphrey, who was considered a "war" candidate because he had served with Lyndon B. Johnson, further angered the protesters.

"We had 13 police officers shot in Carbondale in two years, between 1968 and 1970," Hill said. "And there were only about 50 men on the force. Nobody was killed."

Snipers also targeted squad cars, shooting out windows and slicing tires on parked vehicles. Later, during the violence of 1970, city police rode patrols with the National Guard troops and state police. "We knew the city," Hill explained.

He took the police job initially, he said, "because the pay was good and I wouldn't be getting shot at all the time like I was in Vietnam." Within two years, though, Larry Hill and his fellow officers were getting shot at in the streets of Carbondale.

linda.rush@thesouthern.com / 351-5079