Free Boarded Windows by Dylan Hicks Page A

specific, less euphemistic, and maybe Marleen altered, added, or subtracted some of the particulars along the way, just as I’ve done with the benefit of scattered research.
    Marleen Deskin first met Martha Dickson on February 7, 1969, when they, along with two other Northern Illinois University students and one alumnus, got in a beaten brown Buick and drove from an imperfectly cooperative five-bedroom Victorian in DeKalb to a sit-in at the University of Chicago’s administration building. The sit-in had started after the University announced it wouldn’t rehire Marlene Dixon (again, I apologize for the similarity of all these names), a young, fairly popular assistant sociology professor and Marxist-feminist-activist whose three-year appointment would end the coming September. Dixon’s work, argued the sociology department’s tenured faculty, failed to meet the intellectual standards required for reappointment. The demonstrators attributed the dismissal to sexism and revanchism, said the administration overvalued research and publication, undervalued teaching; they demanded an equal student voice in the hiring and firing of professors. In the first days of the sit-in, about four hundred students occupied the administration building, whose everyday occupants were temporarily relocated. As the sit-in went on, student leadership changed and more demands were added, many of them unrelated to issues of hiring and firing or to Dixon, who visited her supporters a few times but generally kept out of the way. The administration’s response was hard and cool: they didn’t meet with the rebels, they didn’t call the police; they handed out suspensions, they waited for spirits to sink.
    Since mid-January of that year (so for about three weeks), Marleen had been dating an NIU graduate named Barry Morton, a former SDS member and a friend of one of the U of C sit-in’s organizers. Barry was a Marxian, self-described, though others (at least one other) described him as a moneyed liberal who’d learned to use New Left rhetoric with moderate facility but incomplete conviction. Barry wasn’t all talk, though, and in fact he preferred spear-carrying to, say, speaking at demos, writing for underground newspapers, or drawing attention by other means. (Barry and I are now friends on Facebook.) He had delivered sandwiches and some other provisions to the sit-in on its third day, when the administration building was still bustling, triumphant kids talking all night, laughing, swaying, poster-making. “Welcome to the Winter Palace,” read one of the posters, and Barry was among those outside cheering when it was first unfurled, descending like a tingle down a spine, from a second-story window. He’d only planned to stay for a short while, but the mood was so exhilarating, he hung around for ten hours, had to call Marleen to postpone an informal date. Each day, however, the numbers dwindled and spirits indeed sank, so Barry recruited Marleen, Martha, and the two others to offer further support to the flagging protest. Marleen, who would graduate that spring, only had an early morning French class on Fridays and didn’t have to miss any school to make the trip. Martha, an unserious junior, played hooky.
    The car was huge and cold. The men sat in front, Barry in the middle. The driver, whose name my mother had long forgotten by the time she told me the story, wore an unseasonable porkpie hat and smelled in some inexplicably bad way like pancakes. The other young man, his name also forgotten (Barry remembers: John), was possibly hoping to usurp Barry as the co-op’s de facto leader. He was the one who’d accused Barry of being only rhetorically radical. He rarely challenged Barry directly, however, even when given semiformal opportunities. A few miles from the house, Barry, turning around to look at the women, said, “If any reporters try to talk to you, don’t give them your name.”
    “What about a fake name?” Martha said from the