My Take on the Panflick Adventure PANIC
There follows the first four of 19 sections that compose this volume of PANIC, available from Kindle as noted below.
PANIC Panflick Adventures $2.99 KU Prime http://tinyurl.com/h3oeytj
Panflick is my memoir-fiction alter-ego. In this adventure he has returned to Chicago, where he edits Renewal Magazine, from a speaking trip in the South following his coverage of the enrollment of James Meredith at Ole Miss.
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PANIC
Panflick Adventures
By
Stephen C. Rose
https://twitter.com/stephencrose
Introduction
Life is a crap shoot in some ways. You cannot parse the future nor can you change the past. All you can do is deal with the moment. None of these insights are operative in the mind of our young hero Adam Panflick as he embarks on a career which combines journalism and immersion in the world of what was then (in the 1960s) robust mainline American Protestantism. Had he known what he later learned, would he have averted the intense panic that turned this period of his life into a minefield, focused on the ever-present prospect of a repetition of the incident that made him feel he was gone and would never come back?
ONE
Chicago, November 1963
While Adam’s health was generally good, he did have a pilonidal cyst removed from the base of his spine, necessitating some hospital time, not long after his speaking trip. A while later, in November, he stayed home one Friday feeling under the weather with a badly spasmed back. He made an appointment to visit his doctor that afternoon.
2
They had a small black and white TV sitting on a Salvation Army bureau in the living room. The day was overcast. The kids were playing quietly and Ganya was deep into her reading. Joseph Campbell’s “Primitive Mythology” was her current source of information.
3
Adam took a picture of Ganya as she lay back on the bed, book in hand. She was as beautiful as ever. Strong as well. There was no hint of an inner weakness. There was no hint that as the decade passed her entire universe would begin to change. It would be so with many women.
4
Click. Snap. The photo was so good that Adam had it mounted, as with all the child photos he took at the request of friends. It should be noted that Adam’s work at this point had utterly no requirement that he be in his office.
5
Adam’s obligation was now to create a magazine of from 16 to 32 pages some ten times a year. His time was his own. He could travel at will. He could, as on a day like this, phone in and stay home.
6
Something was happening on the TV. He walked to the front room. The President has been shot, a voice said. What? Ganya! Kennedy was shot. In Dallas.
7
Adam’s first thought was that the Vice President had his revenge for having been a most ambivalent selection in the first place, and that Texas was inherently unsafe. Was he dead? Yes, now he was dead.
TWO
Adam went off to his appointment with his doctor. His back was no better than when he woke up. Each step was painful. He took the Ravenswood train to the Loop and walked slowly east toward Michigan.
2
The sidewalks were vacant. It was cold, overcast. He walked along blank-minded. Empty. He noticed the spasm was gone. He thought that this was the very power of momentous events. He would have nothing to tell the doctor.
3
He continued on and took the elevator to Dr. Fell’s Michigan Avenue office. He explained that what he thought he had was now gone. He left. There was no mention of the assassination. He retraced his steps and got home.
4
He spent the next weeks thinking about the future of the church. A big story he might write. The post-assassination church.
5
Residence at 1123 West Schubert Street lasted until the early spring of 1964. They needed more kid room. They were paying $85 a month.
6
443 West Webster was hip. Near Old Town. Near the Lincoln Park and the zoo. A snappy English basement.
7
The rent was a high $165 a month. But the place suited Adam and Ganya. Life there would be, with some glitches, a pleasant interlude as Adam’s career became more and more successful.
THREE
This was not Adam living in the inner city. Nor in affluent Manhattan. It was a way of moving along in the brave new world of Chicago.
2
With a family, a career and, if truth be told. no sense of where it was going. Dear reader, I do not rely upon my judgment alone to draw this conclusion. I drink in awareness as I go.
4
As I turn myself to this time, I find Adam so wrapped up in a day-to-day plenitude of events that the notion of stepping back and asking, Did he want this? Is this right? is unthinkable. Still there were warnings. But he could not see them.
5
There was a walled sitting area in front and a way out the back. There was a large bedroom for the kids and a smaller one for Adam and Ganya. The living room was smallish.
6
A day bed couch, a canvas and metal frame “easy chair”, some folding chairs. Mary Waterhouse was still babysitting. Fiona and Adam Mede were walking and starting to read.
7
The kids formed a team at bedtime. For long minutes, they would frustrate all efforts to get them to calm down and go to sleep. It was a game more than a burden.
FOUR
The church the Panflicks attended was a scene of continual conflict. Seeing the writing on the wall, Pastor Roat had gone off to become an Army chaplain. Adam joined other progressive members in an effort to bring in a sympathetic pastor who might help liven things up.
2
Efforts were fruitless in the face of trustees dominated by a woman who had little use for the outreach activities that continued apace in the church basement. For a brief instant, the church had been the scene of lively Saturday nights when young people from all over would show up and applaud spontaneous comedy and open folk music. There was every prospect that the church might move into a position of community leadership, but one person closed the dyke.
3
Adam was writing more and more, and beginning to publish beyond Chicago. He wrote short book called “The Day The Country Mouse Expired” which was circulated nationally. His growing magazine championed the metropolis as the future.
4
Adam began to forge relationships with media folk with reach beyond Chicago, Arlie Schardt with “Newsweek”, Miriam Rumwell and Chris Porterfield with “TIME”, Ron Bailey with “LIFE”. They contributed to Adam’s magazine Renewal. They got word out on the “church in the world” mantra and Adam was often quoted.
5
Adam worked closely with Ron Bailey. Ron did a good deal of writing about Paul Crump, a convicted murderer condemned to die. Crump ultimately spent 30 years in prison with 15 stays of execution. Renewal published what LIFE did not.
6
In the spring of 1963 Adam did major journalism regarding Birmingham, Alabama, in the wake of violence there. He went there a week after the bombing that killed three little girls. His lengthy interview with Martin Luther King, Jr. that weekend appeared in “The Christian Century” and is still widely read.
7
Adam had flown to Birmingham and got a room in a Holiday Inn that looked across vacant land toward the Gaston Motel and the black neighborhood of downtown. On the night of his arrival bomb tore into a house and a motel. Violence broke out among angry Blacks. King led a group through pool halls and streets in the disturbed area, repeating his call for nonviolence. “We’re going to love the hell out of these [white] people!” he said.
