SOUTHWORDS
May 1971
'Jesus was a sole man'
by Betsy '72
"You are one of about 100,000 people walking in this hike--the largest in the country," the loudspeaker announced. "Keep up the good work."
Lynne and I looked at each other with wry smiles: "Oh, great? That makes all the owies go away."
Much later, when all the owies could go away, the near-700 Hawk Hikers could look proudly on the fact that their share of the pain would be a part of the estimated $1.4 million brought in by Chicago area marches to aid the hungry people of the world.
My three fellow fun-seekers and I, adventurous souls that we are, started out on Golf Road at 8 Sunday morn in a spirit of exuberance. I call it exuberance after I consider the physical, mental and emotional state my body found itself in at 7:30 that evening. We continued onward in this state of mind for several blocks. I then made the discovery that my muscles were making the first of many outraged cries against this exertion in the form of a definite tingling sensation in the lower extremities. "That's fine," I mused. "29 1/2 miles to go and I have to have moody muscles."
[With 9.3 miles left]....a transition had gradually come in our mental and emotional outlook on life....
1. If we heard "Power to the People" one more time, we could not be held responsible for our actions.
2. Conversation was painfully hard to keep going, so we considered appropriate song hits for the day: Knee-anderthal Man, What's the Matter with Keds Today? or By the Time We Get to Skokie.
3. Obviously the walk marshall had managed to make the last ten miles approximately 2.5 times as long as the first ten.
But when the joking is over, we must ask ourselves "Which is worse--a few days of pain or bleak existence in starvation?"