Few people remember that the anti-war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention actually ended for some in a whimper beneath the soft maple trees on a bucolic DuPage County farm.
But then history’s footnotes have always harbored fascinating tales.
The accidental host for the “happening” was Herbert Nadelhoffer, who still enjoys recounting the events that led to about 300 young people from the Grant Park demonstrations descending on his family’s 170-acre farm, now part of Woodridge but then one of the last remnants of rural DuPage.
Tramping around the 71st Street site west of Woodridge Drive, where the Nadelhoffer family still owns the 4.7 wooded acres that once held the farmhouse and barns, he described his unexpected guests, one of whom hoisted the black flag of anarchy from the family barn while Nadelhoffer put up the American flag outside the kitchen and spent his time in the basement rodding out the overused toilet.
“Those were pretty tough times,” remembered Nadelhoffer, then 38, a former Downers Grove teacher who at the time was studying for a master’s degree in theater at Northwestern University.
“A lot of families were being torn apart,” he said, with sons being sent to Vietnam although they were deeply opposed to the war.
Nadelhoffer saw the demonstrators as kids with a different point of view, many of whom stumbled into a situation they didn’t expect. “These weren’t the so-called radicals. Many were kids who were just caught up for the first time in their lives. Some had fallen when they were running, and some were tear gassed,” he said. Many were tired and hungry and looking for a ride home.
“Come on out,” he had told a former student who called the night of the most serious confrontation with the police.
“We only found out later that the invitation was given out in Grant Park on the microphone, saying everybody go out and regroup at the Nadelhoffer farm,” he said, bemused by the memory of the aftermath.
“The next morning all these cars started rolling in.” Among the first several dozen, many local students, at least 15 or 20 were “beaten up and bruised.” His physician mother-in-law, Stella Boyd, visiting from Evansville, Ind., set up shop in the dining room in her “great big pink muumuu” to dress the wounds and regale the students with her back-to-the-land philosophy.
The crowd quickly soared to 300, leaving Nadelhoffer almost as stunned as his neighbors in Winston Hills, then a new subdivision northwest of the fifth-generation Nadelhoffer farm. But he met his young guests with typical farm-bred hospitality as they arrived along the dusty country road that ran in front of the house. (His father, Carlton Sr., who owned the farm, was visiting in Colorado at the time.)
The guests played football and baseball in the cow pasture across the road, rode horses and climbed the silo. “I remember sitting up all night with a kid from Massachusetts with a great big head of hair who liked to play the oboe,” Nadelhoffer said. Periodically, they checked the barn to be sure no one was smoking. “He didn’t want my grandfather’s barn burning down any more than I did,” Nadelhoffer said.
Kathryn Harvey of Downers Grove is a long-time family friend whose late husband, Bob , was a member of the Downers Grove Human Relations Council at the time. Bob was one of the first people Nadelhoffer called for assistance, and Kathryn remembered taking out “many, many loaves of Pepperidge Farm bread.”
“I think we saw these kids . . . as the future of our country, nice young kids who needed some help at the time,” Harvey recalled. “What we did was call up all our friends and say these kids needed money and they mostly needed food. It was a nice neighborly thing to do. They all behaved well.”
DuPage Circuit Court Clerk Joel Kagann, who was chief of police in Woodridge in 1968, agreed. He remembered his first “inkling that something was up” was a call from the Chicago office of the FBI inquiring if he knew anything about the Nadelhoffers. But the young visitors “were a peaceful group,” he said, although “some of their free-love tactics were a little offensive to the people in the area.”
To allay the fears of the young families of Winston Hills, where the new residents could not get their telephones installed because of a phone company strike, Kagann assigned a police car to patrol the four blocks west of the Nadelhoffer farm 24 hours a day, but “we had no real problems.”
Neither Kagann nor Nadelhoffer remembered meeting the demonstration leaders who later earned notoriety during the Chicago Seven trial, although newspaper accounts reported that Tom Hayden, David Dellinger and Rennie Davis were briefly at the farm. As to how long the visitors stayed, memories differ. Only about 30 spent the night, Nadelhoffer said, and he recalled they were gone the next day. Kagann remembered the event lasting three or four days.
The Nadelhoffer family sold most of their farm the next year when Carlton Sr. died. A large inheritance tax as well as a dramatic spike in property taxes precipitated the sale.
Herbert’s brother Carlton, a Naperville lawyer and a candidate for chairman of the Republican Party at the time, lost his 1968 election by a slim margin. Backlash from Herbert’s post-convention conclave no doubt contributed to his brother’s defeat, Herbert acknowledged, but the brothers remain the best of friends.
In the months after the convention, Nadelhoffer received a number of hostile but anonymous telephone calls. The next summer at a picnic for Nadelhoffer friends and their families, Kathryn Harvey remembered “a sheriff’s car kept driving up and down the road,” afraid of a replay perhaps, although Harvey characterized the family group as “a really staid bunch of people.”
The memories eventually faded, however. Nadelhoffer, who now lives in Naperville, today owns Nadelhoffer Energy Works, a construction firm that builds timber frame homes.
How about the 1996 Democratic convention, which is drawing another crop of demonstrators? Nadelhoffer hasn’t considered putting out the welcome mat this time around. On the other hand, he added with a mischievous grin, “Just say hospitality is always in.”
