Larry Nagengast has been a reporter and editor in Delaware since 1972, including 28 years with The News Journal and 24 years freelancing. He has also written two books on state topics and edited three others for Delaware writers and photographers. He was the only independent journalist among the initial partners of the Delaware Journalism Collaborative.
1968. 2024.
Sometimes, years can be like bookends or quotation marks — similar, but not quite identical, at either end, with an abundance of importance packed in between.
The similarities start with the calendar — New Year’s Day was a Monday in both ’68 and ’24. Election Day was Nov. 5 then and again this year. And so many parallels occurred in between.
In 1968 and this year, an incumbent Democratic president unexpectedly abandoned a reelection campaign. In 1968 and this year, a presidential candidate became an assassin’s target. In 1968, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia; this year, Russia’s war with Ukraine drags on. In 1968, protests over the war in Vietnam roiled college campuses across the nation; this year, Israel’s military action in Gaza did the same.
Fortunately for Delaware, one of 1968’s tragedies — the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the subsequent nine-month National Guard occupation of Wilmington — has not been replicated in 2024.
Shortly after the end of this year, three prominent Delaware leaders will exit the political stage, ending careers whose trajectories were rooted in 1968. My career parallels theirs; more on that in a few paragraphs.
In summer 1968, Joe Biden was fresh out of law school, serving a clerkship with Prickett, Ward, Burt & Sanders, a prominent Wilmington law firm, and applying for a part-time job as an assistant public defender. The rest of his story should be familiar to us all.
In summer 1968, Tom Carper had yet to discover Delaware. A recent graduate of The Ohio State University, he was preparing to fly Navy surveillance aircraft in Vietnam. When his active duty was complete, he enrolled at the University of Delaware, earned a master’s degree and began winning election after election — state treasurer, U.S. congressman, governor, U.S. senator.
In summer 1968, Mike Purzycki had ended his brief pro football career and started learning the ins and outs of real estate in New Castle County. After earning a law degree, he entered politics, won a seat on New Castle County Council, became the first executive director of the Riverfront Development Corp. and, finally, mayor of Wilmington.
In summer 1968, my knowledge of Delaware was limited to it being a strip of highway traversed on occasional drives between New York and Washington, D.C.
On a Sunday morning, Aug. 25, I was riding an elevated train from Evanston, Illinois, to downtown Chicago. On my lap was The New York Times, its front page filled with news of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. My destination that day was the hotel hosting the New York state delegation for an event that later would become quite familiar to Biden, Carper and Purzycki — the Democratic National Convention.
My purpose that week was twofold: As the final assignment for the summer master’s degree program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, I had to report on the activities of the New York delegation; also, I was pulling double duty (for minimal pay) as a copyboy, a euphemism for glorified messenger, for Newsday, a major Long Island, New York, newspaper.
That week in Chicago moved at a breakneck pace. I have no recollection of what I wrote for my school assignments, let alone where or when I turned them in. (Remember, we used typewriters, and there was no internet.) I remember a smoke bomb exploding in a crowded hotel lobby and antiwar demonstrators chanting in the streets. I was thankful that, for the most part, my time was spent in the lower level of the International Amphitheater, across from the notoriously odiferous stockyards but probably the safest venue in a city wracked by what would later be termed a “police riot.”
The disorder on the streets made it unwise for me to head back to Evanston to sleep. I was fortunate enough to be offered space on the floor of some Newsday reporters’ hotel rooms. When I needed a change of clothes, Bob Greene, a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for Newsday, graciously tossed me the keys to “Yellow Bird,” a hulking old Chrysler that Greene, a late arrival to the paper’s convention team, had somehow “rented” through his Chicago mob connections. There I was, 4 a.m. and half-asleep, a 21-year-old student driving in riot-torn Chicago for the first time, wary of police and behind the wheel of an unfamiliar vehicle whose ownership I’d be unable to explain if I had had the misfortune of being pulled over. I somehow made it back to the frat house on campus where I was spending my summer, took a nap, changed clothes and got back downtown, parked “Yellow Bird” on the street somewhere and got the keys back to Greene. I have no idea whether he ever found the car.
Years later, I would learn that at least three people who I would encounter in my Delaware journalism career were also in Chicago that week.
One was George Wolkind, the leader of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society chapter on the University of Delaware campus, who was among the thousands of young protesters battling police in Grant Park. These days, Wolkind speaks little of his time in Chicago. His current passion is his role as the founder and leader of the Delaware Rock & Roll Society.
Among the members of the Delaware delegation to the convention was the late Frank Biondi, then the Wilmington city solicitor and later an adviser to Gov. Sherman W. Tribbitt and the architect of the landmark Financial Center Development Act, which brought the credit card banking industry to the state.
Biondi was influential in rallying support for New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy for the nomination; after Kennedy was assassinated in early June, Biondi helped unify the Delaware delegation behind Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, the eventual Democratic presidential candidate.
For Biondi and his wife, Anita Biondi, their most vivid memories of the convention were the events in their hotel and on the streets. When I was collaborating with Frank on his memoir several years ago, Anita mentioned the stink bomb that was set off in their hotel, the Palmer House, and the intensive security Chicago officials attempted to provide for convention delegates and their families. And Frank recalled what a man in the hotel lobby told Anita soon after they arrived: “Lady, you can go anywhere you want. Every other person you see out there is a Chicago cop.”
That convention week in Chicago solidified my desire for a career in journalism. Like Carper, however, Vietnam-era U.S. Navy service (safely behind a desk in Washington, D.C.) delayed my arrival in Delaware until 1972.
As this year’s Democratic National Convention approached — in Chicago, of course — the prospects for tumult seemed less likely than in ’68. The party has quickly unified behind Vice President Kamala Harris as its nominee, but protests in the Windy City’s streets and parks over the Democrats’ stance on the Gaza conflict were not out of the question.
No matter what the outcome, from this vantage point, it appears that the elections in November will serve as a fitting bookend, or end quote, to all that began in 1968.
Back in Delaware, over the past half-century-plus, I’ve followed the careers of Joe Biden, Tom Carper and Mike Purzycki, and I’ve also paid special attention to education issues, politics and the news media.
Like those bookends and quotation marks, much has been packed into the state’s history in those areas.
In 1968 — everything seemed to happen then, didn’t it? — the General Assembly passed a law called the Educational Advancement Act, whose provisions on school district boundaries led to the lawsuit that resulted in the desegregation of northern New Castle County’s public schools. Subsequent legislative actions promoted the resegregation of Wilmington schools, and now, in 2024, yet another redistricting process is about to begin.
In the early 1970s, I wrote about some of the flaws in Delaware’s school funding system. Last year, after more than a decade of discussions, a new report recommended massive reforms to modernize a system that has remained in place for generations. Lawmakers will soon begin studying how much to change and how to accomplish it.
Since 1968, the state’s political colors have changed, from purple-red to a centrist blue. Wilmington hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1968. Brandywine Hundred, once reliably red, is solidly blue.
Our news media have undergone significant change, too. Fifty years ago, The News Journal had a.m. and p.m. editions, with combined circulation of about 140,000. Now, it has just one edition, and circulation is about one-tenth its former peak. Two upstate radio stations had competitive news staffs. Now, there’s just one news team, and it’s smaller than it was a decade ago. On the plus side, there’s a relatively new National Public Radio affiliate, Delaware Public Media, with a growing online presence. This year, the new Delaware Journalism Collaborative arrived, with its participating outlets sharing content and its Spotlight Delaware affiliate rapidly adding staff. This reordering of the state’s media hierarchy offers at least the hope of returning the Fourth Estate to prominence.
With the departure of Biden, Carper and Purzycki from Delaware’s political scene, and yet another cycle of change in the education and political arenas underway, 2025 may well mark the open quote or a new bookend for another era — for the nation and for Delaware, as well.
May that new era begin. I’m looking forward to watching it.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org .
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