RONALD SCHULZ, ON RECORD
THE WITNESS
Ronald Schulz
"I wasn't trying to make history. I was just trying to survive it."
Jail cells. Asylum wards. A runaway at fifteen. A romance the world tried to outlaw. This is the real file on a kid who refused to disappear into the 1960s — and lived to write it all down.
"I wasn't trying to make history. I was just trying to survive it."
Three volumes. Three years that changed a kid into a witness. Pin by pin, this is how the case connects.
Booking number: seventeen. Charge: being alive during the Haymarket riot.
Cook County jail wasn't supposed to teach Ron anything — until he met Pete Fischetti, son of a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, and the two traded ideas a whole generation was starting to whisper. Release only led somewhere stranger: a mental institution built to smooth down kids like him, where he fell for a girl named Marge he could never quite reach. Then came a forgotten graveyard, a Satanist lover, friends swallowed by their own demons, and a draft that wouldn't stop circling. This is where the file truly opens.
Pig City was going down — and Karen had the matches.
Just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., seventeen-year-old Ron is chasing rent money and a place inside the counterculture exploding around him — from Chicago's underground to the streets of New York. An interracial romance tests the world's patience. A runaway named Karen walks into his life with revolution on her mind. By the time the riots catch up to him, freedom and jail are starting to look like the same coin, flipped.
One boy. One backpack. One shot at freedom.
1967. Fifteen-year-old Ron packs a bag, leaves a note on his dresser, and walks out on everything — family, school, the only life he's known. What waits on the open road is rougher and far more alive than anything home could offer: bullies left behind, a broken family dynamic he won't return to, and a world about to test exactly what kind of person he's going to become. This is where it all begins.
Read them in any order — the road at fifteen, the riots at seventeen, the jail cell and asylum ward at the edge of a new decade. Together, they're the closest thing left to a first-hand account of what it actually felt like to come of age inside the 1960s.
Fifty years late and worth every page. Step into Ronald Schulz's 1960s — the road, the riots, and everything that came after.