By Larry Nagengast

Larry Nagengast has been a reporter and editor in Delaware since 1972, including 28 years with the News Journal and 24 years as a freelance contributor. He has also written two books on state issues and edited three others for Delaware writers and photographers. He was the only independent journalist among the founding partners of the Delaware Journalism Collaborative.

1968. 2024.

Sometimes years are like bookends or quotation marks: they are similar at the ends but not quite identical, and there is a wealth of important things in between.

The similarities start with the calendar – New Year’s Day was a Monday in both 1968 and 1924. Election day was November 5th then and this year. And there were so many parallels in between.

In 1968 and this year, an incumbent Democratic president unexpectedly abandoned his re-election campaign. In 1968 and this year, a presidential candidate was the target of an assassination attempt. In 1968, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia; this year, Russia’s war with Ukraine drags on. In 1968, protests against the Vietnam War rocked college campuses across the country; this year, Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip did the same.

Fortunately for Delaware, one of the tragedies of 1968 – the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the subsequent nine-month occupation of Wilmington by the National Guard – has not been repeated in 2024.

Shortly after the end of this year, three prominent Delaware politicians will leave the political scene, ending careers that began in 1968. My career runs parallel to theirs; more on that in a few paragraphs.

In the summer of 1968, Joe Biden was fresh out of law school, completing a clerkship at Prickett, Ward, Burt & Sanders, a prestigious Wilmington law firm, and applying for a part-time job as an assistant public defender. The rest of his story is probably familiar to all of us.

In the summer of 1968, Tom Carper had not yet discovered Delaware. A recent graduate of Ohio State University, he was preparing to fly Navy surveillance planes in Vietnam. After completing active duty, he enrolled at the University of Delaware, earned a master’s degree, and won election after election—state treasurer, U.S. congressman, governor, and U.S. senator.

In the summer of 1968, Mike Purzycki ended his brief career as a professional football player and began learning the ins and outs of the real estate business in New Castle County. After graduating from law school, he entered politics, winning a seat on the New Castle County Council, becoming the first executive director of the Riverfront Development Corp., and eventually becoming mayor of Wilmington.

In the summer of 1968, my knowledge of Delaware was limited to a stretch of highway I drove on occasional trips between New York and Washington, DC.

On a Sunday morning, August 25, I rode an elevated train from Evanston, Illinois, to downtown Chicago, with the New York Times on my lap, its front page covered in news of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. My destination that day was the hotel hosting the New York State delegation for an event that would later become very familiar to Biden, Carper, and Purzycki—the Democratic National Convention.

That week, I had two tasks: reporting on the activities of the New York delegation as the final assignment of my summer master’s program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism; and working a double shift (for minimal pay) as an errand boy—a euphemism for “highly praised news messenger”—for Newsday, a major newspaper on Long Island, New York.

That week in Chicago flew by. I can’t remember 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 protesters chanting in the streets. I was grateful to spend most of my time in the basement of the International Amphitheater, across from the notoriously smelly stockyards but probably the safest place in a city plagued by what was later called a “police riot.”

Because of the unrest in the streets, it was unwise to return to Evanston to sleep. I was fortunate enough to be offered a place on the floor of a hotel room belonging to Newsday reporters. When I needed a change of clothes, Bob Greene, a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for Newsday, kindly tossed me the keys to “Yellow Bird,” a clunky old Chrysler that Greene, a latecomer to the paper’s congressional team, had somehow “rented” through his connections in the Chicago Mafia. There I was, 4 a.m. and still half asleep, a 21-year-old college student driving through riot-torn Chicago for the first time, wary of the police and behind the wheel of an unfamiliar vehicle whose owner I would not be able to identify if I had the misfortune of being stopped. Somehow I made it back to the frat house on campus where I spent my summer, took a nap, changed clothes, drove back downtown, parked “Yellow Bird” somewhere on the street, and gave the keys back to Greene. I have no idea if he ever found the car.

Years later, I learned that at least three people I had met in Delaware during my career as a journalist were also in Chicago that week.

One of them was George Wolkind, the leader of the anti-war group Students for a Democratic Society on the University of Delaware campus, who was among the thousands of young protesters who fought police in Grant Park. Today, Wolkind rarely speaks about his time in Chicago. His current passion is his role as founder and leader of the Delaware Rock & Roll Society.

Among the members of the Delaware delegation to the meeting was the late Frank Biondi, then city attorney of Wilmington and later counsel to Governor Sherman W. Tribbitt, who drafted the groundbreaking Financial Center Development Act that enabled the state to launch the credit card industry.

Biondi was influential in mobilizing support for the nomination of New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy; after Kennedy’s assassination in early June, Biondi helped unite the Delaware delegation behind Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, the eventual Democratic presidential nominee.

For Biondi and his wife, Anita Biondi, the events in their hotel and on the streets were the most vivid memories of the convention. When I worked with Frank on his memoirs several years ago, Anita mentioned the stink bomb set off in their hotel, the Palmer House, and the intense security measures Chicago authorities tried to put in place for the convention delegates and their families. And Frank remembered what a man in the hotel lobby said to Anita shortly after they arrived: “Lady, you can go wherever you want. Every other person you see out there is a Chicago policeman.”

That convention week in Chicago cemented my desire to pursue a career in journalism. However, like Carper, my arrival in Delaware was delayed until 1972 due to my service in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War (safely behind a desk in Washington, DC).

As this year’s Democratic convention approached – in Chicago, of course – the prospect of upheaval seemed less likely than in 1968. The party quickly rallied behind Vice President Kamala Harris as its candidate, but protests in the streets and parks of the Windy City against the Democrats’ stance on the Gaza conflict were not out of the question.

Regardless of the outcome, from this perspective the November elections seem to serve as a worthy conclusion or coda to everything that began in 1968.

Back in Delaware, I have followed the careers of Joe Biden, Tom Carper and Mike Purzycki over the past half century, while also paying close attention to education issues, politics and the news media.

As in these bookends and quotation marks, there is much contained in the history of the state in these areas.

In 1968—it all seemed to be going so far back then, didn’t it?—the General Assembly passed a law called the Educational Advancement Act, whose school district boundary provisions led to the lawsuit that resulted in the desegregation of northern New Castle County public schools. Subsequent legislative action encouraged the re-segregation of Wilmington schools, and now, in 2024, another redistricting process is looming.

In the early 1970s, I wrote about some of the deficiencies in Delaware’s school finance system. Last year, after more than a decade of debate, a new report recommended sweeping reforms to modernize a system that has been in place for generations. Lawmakers will soon begin studying how much needs to change and how to accomplish it.

Since 1968, the state’s political colors have changed, from crimson to a centrist blue. Wilmington has not elected a Republican mayor since 1968. Brandywine Hundred, once reliably red, is now solid blue.

Our news media has also changed significantly. Fifty years ago, the News Journal had a morning and afternoon edition with a combined circulation of about 140,000. Today, there is only one edition, and circulation is one-tenth of its former peak. Two radio stations in the northern part of the state had competing news teams. Today, there is only one news team, and it is smaller than it was 10 years ago. On the positive side, there is a relatively new affiliate of National Public Radio, Delaware Public Media, with a growing online presence. This year, the new Delaware Journalism Collaborative was formed, whose participating stations share content, and whose affiliate, Spotlight Delaware, is rapidly hiring staff. This reshuffle of the state’s media hierarchy offers at least the hope of restoring prominence to the Fourth Estate.

With the departure of Biden, Carper and Purzycki from Delaware politics and another cycle of changes in education and policy, 2025 may well mark the beginning of a new era – for the nation and for Delaware.

May this new era begin. I look forward to seeing it.

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