More than 50 years after he hit me, the scar is still there. Whenever I run my tongue along the inside of my mouth, there it is, a ridge of hard tissue extending from the base of my gums to my lower lip. Even the memory of pain from that blow is long gone, and so, tragically, is my assailant, a tightly wound teenager who provided me with an early lesson in the mutability of human relationships and the limits of love.
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Jeff Konz was a newcomer to Journey House, the Near South Side youth center where I worked my first three years after college. The neighborhood our center served, tucked against the south rim of the Menomonee Valley, was filled with white working-class families at the time, many of them struggling, and there was a growing population of Latinos who would eventually become the majority. Our kids, drawn by a place just for them between home and school, had the usual problems associated with urban poverty. But there was a subgroup of harder cases whose criminal records started in grade school.
Jeff was one of them. On a spring night in 1971, not long after we had banned some of his friends for breaking the center’s front window, Jeff showed up at an evening open house. I have a vivid memory of a slight 16-year-old, lean to the point of scrawny, with short brown hair, dark brown eyes and a narrow chin. He stood before me practically quivering with rage. “Do you mean these guys can’t come in here anymore?” he asked, voice rising ominously. “You mean they’re kicked out?” “That’s right,” I replied, and an instant later he hauled off and hit me as hard as he could.
I must have outweighed Jeff by 50 pounds, perhaps more, and we grappled briefly on the floor, ending up under the center’s pool table. I picked him up, still clinging to me like an upside-down baby monkey, and deposited him outside. He ran off but quickly returned, threatening to come back the next day with all of his friends.
After I got stitched up at the South Side’s emergency hospital, we weighed our options. Jeff Konz, it turned out, didn’t have enough friends to seriously terrorize a kindergarten class, but the Journey House staff wasn’t taking any chances. We enlisted the Eastleys, a formidable family who ran Penny’s Tap on the next block, to aid in our possible defense.
The younger Eastley kids were Journey House regulars, and their older siblings were only too glad to help. Alice, the family’s matriarch, a woman with teased hair and cat-eye glasses, was particularly eager for a confrontation. The whole clan reported for duty as soon as we opened the next day, but the showdown never occurred. The afternoon and evening came and went with no sign of Jeff. Life at Journey House went on as usual.
MY OWN PRESENCE THERE, like so much else in life, was rooted in circumstance.
I had graduated from Boston College in 1969, just weeks before Journey House opened its doors. Many of my aging peers look back on their college years with a fond and fuzzy nostalgia. I’m not one of them. I was an out-of-state scholarship student who spent four years in Boston feeling like a small freshwater fish in a huge saltwater pond.
The city’s music scene was marvelous, and I developed a lasting affection for the sea, but I was decidedly out of step with life on the East Coast: too fast, too dense, too old, too rich and terminally lacking in anything that remotely resembled Midwestern DNA. The only forces that kept me at BC were inertia, my financial aid package and a good English department. Even then, I spent my last year hanging on to a semblance of equilibrium with my fingernails.
The angst was uniquely my own and more broadly my generation’s. For more boomers than would readily admit it, much of the Sixties experience was, to use one of our signature words, a bummer. Adolescence is a difficult passage under the best of circumstances. Poet Theodore Roethke, whose work I came to love in Boston, described it as “an ill-defined dying, an intolerable waiting, a longing for another place and time, another condition.”
When you compound that pervasive uncertainty with the era’s wholesale abandonment of religious traditions, its rapidly shifting sexual mores, the very real prospect of the military draft, and a pharmacopoeia of mind-bending drugs with wildly unpredictable effects, it’s no wonder that life for anyone coming of age in the Sixties and early Seventies could feel like a protracted tumble in a cement mixer. New children of the Age of Aquarius? The songs may have said so, but we were more accurately the Unmoored Generation.
I came home to Milwaukee, as I had always known I would, with a BA in English and not even a rough draft of a career plan. After working as a construction laborer and then a house painter for a few months, I accepted the invitation of a good friend from high school, Frank Miller, to volunteer at Journey House, which had just hired him as its first full-time director. The center’s primary founder was Marc Feldman, a VISTA worker (Volunteer in Service to America) assigned to a nearby church.
Feldman had secured enough federal War on Poverty dollars to open the center in the summer of 1969, when America’s first manned moon landing was at the top of the news. Since “youth empowerment” was one of the agency’s central goals, local kids were asked to name the place. They came up with Happy Moon Journey House, which was soon abridged to Journey House. The center occupied a former drug store on the ground floor of a soot-stained brick commercial building on South 16th and West Washington streets, almost 30 years before 16th Street would be renamed for Latino labor leader Cesar Chavez.
I was taking photography classes at MATC, and so my first responsibility was a surprisingly well-equipped darkroom. From there, my duties expanded to include small group work, staffing open rec nights, leading field trips, begging supplies for the craft and sewing programs, and undertaking what might loosely be termed community organizing. Within a few months I morphed from volunteer to full-time employee, earning the princely sum of $4,500 a year and the title of assistant director.
Genuine transformations are all too rare in life, but that’s precisely what I experienced at Journey House. Just as my college struggles were in part generational, so was their resolution. By the late 1960s, a youthful idealism was rising like yeast all over America. The nation’s problems still seemed solvable, and we baby boomers anointed ourselves the ones to solve them.
Although the impulse was authentic, it was tinged with both an ignorance and an arrogance typical of youth in any age but amplified in our generation. We shared a contempt for the status quo and a scorn for the same villains, including capitalists, cops, generals and, most famously, anyone over 30. Few boomers questioned the wisdom of distrusting a cohort we would soon enter ourselves by the simple fact of staying alive.
“It was in caring that I learned firsthand the truth of that ancient paradox: It is in giving that we receive, in looking out for others that we most surely find ourselves.”
Blind spots notwithstanding, there was a real satisfaction to being part of the solution, a self-righteous certainty that I was on the right side of a growing American divide. But a deeper and more universal dynamic was also at work. Academia, at least as I experienced it, could be pathologically isolating.
My college years had been spent largely in my head, groping for eternal purpose as I analyzed the rhyme schemes of Gerard Manley Hopkins, pondered the negative capability of John Keats, and worried over T.S. Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility. My love of literature had steadily devolved to literary dissection; even the greatest works lay there, in J. Alfred Prufrock’s phrase, “like a patient etherized upon a table.” What I sorely lacked in Boston was a sense of constructive engagement with the larger world around me.
Journey House supplied that engagement in endless abundance. I was suddenly swirling in a crowded constellation of personalities that shone with lights of their own: Jackie’s tender Native grace, Rollie’s cheerful irreverence, Kathy’s brassy indifference, Tito’s quickness to anger, Shelley’s vacillation between pout and smile.
The center’s programs were important, but it was the kids and a cadre of actively involved parents who mattered. Here was reality in all its marvelous human detail: immediate, inescapable and utterly absorbing. Without consciously choosing to, I let myself care, and it was in caring that I learned firsthand the truth of that ancient paradox: It is in giving that we receive, in looking out for others that we most surely find ourselves.
NO ONE AT JOURNEY HOUSE was a more important part of that lesson than Jeffrey Konz. I don’t recall whether he finally turned up at the center or I sought him out, but a few days after our one-punch encounter, my lip still swollen, I was sitting in the living room of the cottage he shared with his father on nearby Madison Street. The room had almost no furniture; Jeff was sitting on a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon and draining one of the bottles.
I learned, over time, that he had been born in Sheboygan, the fourth of 10 kids, and that his family, like so many others on the Near South Side, had moved to Milwaukee in search of jobs; his father was a maintenance worker in a local foundry. Jeff’s parents divorced when he was about 12. His mother remarried and moved to Marinette, where she and her new husband ran the Humdinger, a drive-in restaurant on the south edge of town.
Beyond admitting that he had been high when he hit me, I don’t think Jeff ever apologized, but he was in such aching need of someone to care that I quickly forgot the circumstances of our first meeting. He carried himself with a wounded swagger, as if he had to hold at bay a world that had already proved itself capricious; that belligerent smile was only the flimsiest armor.
His attendance at South Division High School was sporadic at best, and his substance abuse problems were obvious. Jeff’s drug of choice was toluene, an active ingredient in airplane glue. He would squeeze an entire tube into a baggie, pinch it between his thumb and forefinger, and inhale deeply and repeatedly, transporting himself to a dime-store nirvana.
This glue-sniffing ectomorph soon attached himself to me, seeking out my company during Journey House open hours for a game of pool, a conversation or a ride to Mitchell Street, where I later concluded he was shoplifting glue. Jeff typically came into the center alone, and I found myself becoming his reluctant father figure. I have only the sketchiest memory of our conversations, but they were far removed from real therapy.
I was a 23-year-old English major who lacked even the most rudimentary counseling skills, and Jeff showed not the slightest desire to change. He was simply following his impulses, first one and then the next. I fully acknowledge that I was too lenient, a fault I have carried, without serious regret, into old age. All I could do was be his friend.
Our relationship was punctuated by Jeff’s periodic run-ins with the law. The records have long since been purged, but I recall that his most frequent offenses were robbery and breaking and entering. An after-hours visit to Louie Druch’s grocery store, a mom-and-pop business down the street from Journey House, resulted in jail time. I visited Jeff at the Boys School near Wales, whose main building was a forbidding former tuberculosis sanitarium. After another offense, I saw him in the short-term mental health ward of the Milwaukee County Institutions, bringing cigarettes and concern.
Even though I knew more about Romantic poetry than preventing recidivism, it became obvious that Jeff was in an accelerating downward spiral. How better to stop it, I reasoned, than a change of scenery, specifically a move to his mother’s home in wholesome Marinette? Relocating Jeff Konz became my pet project. His mother, thank goodness, was willing to give her wayward son another chance, and before long I was sitting with Jeff and his father in the chambers of Judge Max Raskin, a legendary figure nearing the end of his career.
In the 1930s, long before joining the judiciary, Raskin had served with distinction as Milwaukee’s Socialist city attorney under Socialist mayor Dan Hoan. He had clearly seen plenty of hard cases during his time on the bench. “Why is this one any different?” the judge asked skeptically. “Because he has people who still care about him,” I replied. When Raskin remanded Jeff to his mother’s custody, the room was all smiles. As we departed, his father, who had long since passed the outer limits of exasperation, issued what sounded oddly like a rebuke to his son. “Just remember, there’s one person who made this happen,” he said, and pointed to me.
After more than a year of frequent contact, Jeff Konz passed out of my daily life when he moved to Marinette. I visited him once at the Humdinger, on my way back from a camping trip in Upper Michigan. His new beginning seemed to be going well, but Jeff’s demons eventually caught up with him. He burglarized a gas station, earning him yet another jail stint, this one in the Fox Lake facility.
I saw him there and then one last time in Milwaukee. Jeff was out on a pass for good behavior, and Journey House was among his first stops. When I came to work one afternoon in the summer of 1972, I was told that a surprise was waiting for me in the crafts room. It was Jeff, perched on the couch like a Cheshire cat, with a sly grin on his face and that familiar manic energy. It was a happy reunion, mingled with my concern about what would happen next.
It didn’t take long to find out. Jeff overstayed his pass and went on the run, flitting from one temporary roost to another in the immediate neighborhood. On a bright summer afternoon, we heard multiple sirens a block or two south of Journey House. They were for Jeff, one of our kids told me that evening.
The police had caught up with him, and he resisted so savagely, clawing and kicking like a caged animal, that they had to call for backup. This time he was sent to the Kettle Moraine Boys School near Plymouth. It was there, in a holding cell, on July 7, 1972, that Jeff stripped the cord from around his mattress, tied it to a ventilation duct, and hanged himself. He was 17.
A few days later, I was at his funeral in Sheboygan, the Konz family seat. I was surprised by the number of people who attended, most of them relatives and family friends who hadn’t seen Jeff since he was a child. After some earnest shaking of heads and a platitudinous sermon from the Boys School chaplain, I witnessed a crowning irony. As we drove in procession to the cemetery, uniformed policemen, heads bowed and lights flashing, stopped traffic for Jeff on the last trip he would take in this world.
MORE THAN 50 YEARS after he hit me, much has changed. The entire east half of the Journey House block was demolished in the 1980s for a super-sized McDonald’s; the restaurant’s drive-thru occupies the approximate site of my darkroom. Other landmarks from an older time – Penny’s Tap, Casey’s Gin Mill, Jensen’s Jewelry, Karpek Accordions, the Sanitary Comforter Co. – have also vanished, but Journey House itself is still thriving a few blocks west, in space shared with Longfellow School.
A neighborhood once filled with blue-collar families from rural Wisconsin has become a Latino stronghold, and Cesar Chavez Drive is redolent with smells, signs and sounds you’d be more likely to find in Juárez or Tijuana than the Milwaukee of my youth.
I, too, have moved on. Fundraising became part of my job. In telling Journey House’s story to the potential supporters we so desperately needed, I reconnected with my own story. The center was only 2 miles from my first childhood home on South 34th Street and even closer to my grandparents’ Lincoln Avenue hardware store. Sixteenth Street itself had been a regular destination on the shopping circuit we traveled with my father every Saturday morning; I may well have visited Journey House when the building was still a drug store.
Our center served a neighborhood in transition during my years there, but I came to see its familiar, fraying landscape as only the latest in a long series of incarnations that, to my utter amazement, included me. Proceeding by instinct, I began to reconstruct a sturdy web of connections that linked my story with the South Side’s story, Milwaukee’s story and ultimately the story of America. The countercultural impulse that helped bring me to Journey House glorified the future at the expense of the past. I went in the opposite direction, embracing history instead of rejecting it. It was at Journey House that I started to write about Milwaukee, and the result was a career.
A great deal has changed since I knew Jeff Konz, but the scar is still there, and not just that ridge of hard tissue inside my mouth. His suicide still haunts me. I couldn’t save him, for all I tried. I was able to bind wounds of my own at Journey House, but I couldn’t begin to heal Jeff’s.
My son Nikolai, who has worked with young people for most of his adult life, offered a blunt explanation for the persistence of my grief. “You weren’t in the game long enough to learn to let go,” he said. “Everyone has lost causes.” I know he’s right; I left Journey House for another job a few months after Jeff died and had very limited contact with kids until having my own. But the pain is still there.
My son Nikolai, who has worked with young people for most of his adult life, offered a blunt explanation for the persistence of my grief. “You weren’t in the game long enough to learn to let go,” he said. “Everyone has lost causes.”
My failure was, I know, the world’s failure, not mine alone. How many Jeffs, I wonder, have come and gone in the decades since he took his life? How many thousands of young people have become so lost in the blinding glare of their own darkness that it swallowed them? And how many more are among us today, on the next block, in a nearby neighborhood, born to trouble and languishing like plants cut off from the sun?
The varieties of human suffering are infinite, but so is human hope. What, in the end, sustains us? How do we maintain hope when hope is so frequently disappointed? I know only that every failure, including mine with Jeff, presents a choice between humility and despair. With no small effort, I have chosen humility, a chastened acceptance that some things lie beyond my control or even my understanding.
Perhaps only an old English major would offer a final line from T.S. Eliot: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” Long ago I had the privilege of trying with Jeffrey Konz, and I look back without regret. Like all the lost children, you were gone too soon, Jeff. Stay fast in our memory, and forgive us your going.
