1 Riots & Rockets Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE Riots & Rockets - Army Days (1968-1971) Riots & Rockets Army Days Map (1968-1971) Family in the Military The Vietnam War Heats Up The Decision to Enlist Fort Holabird and Intelligence Training CIAD in the CD of [...]
Remembering Jean-Gwinn Riboud (1950-2025)
Remembering Jean-Gwinn Riboud (1950-2025) Editor's Note: It was with great regret that I was unable to personally attend the June 12, 2025 Benediction in Paris that memorialized the [...]
Aristotle, Mortimer Adler, Charles Van Doren & Bill Bowe on Happiness
Aristotle, Mortimer Adler, Charles Van Doren, & Bill Bowe on Happiness Editor's Note: Recently at The Cliff Dwellers family, friends, and a number of Club members helped me celebrate the publication on Amazon of my memoir Riots [...]
The Riots & Rockets Book Launch At The Cliff Dwellers
On March 22, 2024, family and friends, and a host of Members of The Cliff Dwellers, gathered at the Club to celebrate the publication on Amazon of Riots & Rockets, William J. Bowe's memoir of his Army days during the riotous 1960s and '70s, Chicago politics in the 1970s, and his lawyering life dealing with collectors' plates and foundations, the newswire service United Press International, and Encyclopaedia Britannica in the Digital Age.
Introduction
The month after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, I enlisted in the Army’s Intelligence Branch for three years. President Lyndon Johnson had just sent the Regular Army simultaneously to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Chicago to help control the ensuing violence and riots that had overwhelmed police and National Guard. This was a very strange and violent time. We’ve been lucky the country has largely been free of this kind of large-scale mayhem and destruction until the recent looting and riots we saw during the pandemic in the summer of 2020.
