Early Spring, 1972, was pretty much like all early springs in Wisconsin; on the calendar only. It was cold and damp and cloudy and not much fun. The trees hadn't budded yet. The dirty snow had very recently melted.
So when a frat brother called me and said he was flying into Milwaukee instead of Appleton (where we attended college) and wanted to know if I wanted to hang out for a while before he took a bus north, I jumped at the opportunity.
He took a bus from the airport to the station downtown. That was exciting enough for me, a guy from Grafton, living about half an hour north. Going downtown was a special deal. There had to be a good reason. Mom let me borrow the car, as worn out and unexciting though it was.
In those days, downtown Milwaukee was still pretty attractive. There were department stores and plenty of good restaurants. It was fun just to walk around in the middle of the day.
As I recall, there wasn't a whole lot of traffic. After I picked up Bill at the bus station, we parked somewhere near Wisconsin Avenue. We got out and started walking eastward, toward Lake Michigan.
He was a good buddy. From Massachusetts, he had a great personality and was a good-looking guy. The women normally flocked nearby. His angst was normally picking one out of several who were interested. Otherwise, he was a leader in my fraternity, too, and a member of the track team. His humor was pixieish and he laughed easily. To me, he was more of a friend than just a frat brother. I was pleased he had called and looked forward to the day. We were about the enter the third of three tri-mesters in our junior years.
We walked up "the ave," as we called it here, looking for crossing traffic but not particularly worried whether we were crossing when "Walk" flashed. Someone was watching, though.
It might have been 6th or 5th; somewhere in there. Suddenly, just as we crossed over, we heard "Hey!"
Crossing the street, heading right for us, was a big, black cop (his color would otherwise be absolutely irrelevant, but see below) with a deep baritone voice that could probably be heard in Cudahy. He approached us quickly. "Didn't you notice the 'Don't Walk' light at the corner?" he fairly shouted.
Bill, quick on his feet, offered that he was from Massachusetts (as if they lacked stoplights there). "Uh, I'm from out of town, too," I offered. There were no stoplights in Grafton at the time, so it wasn't exactly a lie. Neither excuse rang genuine. "We didn't know it was that big of a deal," I said.
"We have a jaywalking ordinance which is very strictly enforced," he said. "I could take you both to the station right now."
I remember thinking, Really? Is this that serious? But wisely decided not to get into that kind of lose-only philosophical discussion. Technically, he was right. Technically, at least, we were screwed. Getting arrested and being booked wouldn't make our day much fun.
We apologized humbly and promised to obey the signals from now on. He let us off. We breathed again. I remember thinking, Thank God. Nice way to treat a buddy: Get him thrown in the slammer. I looked back a block onward; he was still watching us. We were being good boys.
Maybe he was having a bad day. Maybe he was frustrated about watching a lot of jaywalking. Maybe he'd had it up to here with it. Maybe he just wanted to scare us. He seemed pretty touchy. That's something that it didn't seem smart to dicker with: a touchy cop.
It was a time of many protests like today, and leftist groups were the darlings of the ultra-liberal media back then, so he might have been thinking that we were radicals (though neither of us had very long hair) who found it chic to defy authority. I, for one, had marched down the main street of Appleton two years before, protesting the invasion of Cambodia. But this wasn't the time to make some kind of fairly irrelevant, purposeful stand. Besides, I didn't know any lawyers. And he meant business. Defiance wasn't wise.
That incident came back to me as I watched a guy--a black guy--in Orange County, California, approached by two policemen--both white--in another jaywalking incident. A phone camera showed the situation quickly deteriorating, a scuffle ensuing, and the poor guy getting shot to death. Over jaywalking.
And I thought, again: Really? Is this that serious? Before approaching, one of the policemen was heard mentioning that it wasn't that big of a deal, that maybe something should be said and that should be it. But the other insisted upon stopping the guy and confronting him.
Seemed to me that the black guy got touchy with the white cop who leaned on him a little too hard, in which case it escalated to issues about manhood and/or race--probably not expressed as such, but hot buttons are never far away in such situations--and the white cop got pretty touchy, too. Then the other white cop who really just wanted to move on got pulled in because he needed to back up his partner--the cops' code. They ended up sprawled on the sidewalk. Suddenly, the black fellow apparently but unsuccessfully reached for one of their guns and--Blam! Blam!
Forty-nine years after my jaywalking incident, the world has intensified considerably. If Bill and I had been black and the policeman who stopped us had been white, things might have turned out differently. It's not as if police killings of blacks hadn't taken place back then, either.
This is not to say that all police in Milwaukee, where I live, have been or would have been unfair in their treatments of young people, whether people of color or not, but such incidents were reported. The death of Daniel Bell, a young black man, highly suspicious, took place in 1957, On the other hand, my late godfather spent his career as a Milwaukee policeman. He wasn't involved in that, but I never asked him for any details about any of his work, either.
Neither do I think the specific place or city matters. Defund the police? No. Absurd, especially now with all the guns around. Redirect the funding? That might work. Something has to change.
Bill and I joked about the incident for a couple of months. Then he took his sometime, sort of girl friend, Maura, out on Lake Winnebago after a party thrown by a couple of other frat brothers. They had apparently broken up but she was with him that night. He was crazy about her, and she was gorgeous. Whenever she saw me on campus, she would sing my name as if to open an opera. It was both embarrassing and fun. I always laughed.
I'm sure he wanted to get back together again. They went out in a canoe, though, and never returned. Their bodies were recovered a few days later. It stunned the otherwise small, idyllic campus; for many, it was the first time that kind of early death had touched them. I missed him for a long time. But the memory of jaywalking in Milwaukee brings a smile now.
Like Joe Biden says, the smile eventually comes before the tears. It just takes time. That's all that's left for the family of the poor guy in Orange County, too. How unnecessary.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. Seven days until a second vaccine shot. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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