Marvella

I started, “Marvella,” a book Sheriff Dominguez recommended about Evan Bayh’s mother (and the wife of Senator Birch Bayh, my all-time favorite legislator), who died of cancer at the age of 46. By all accounts she was a delightful woman who was born on a hardscrabble farm in Oklahoma during the Depression. I recently finished “Campy,” about Dodger catcher Roy Campanella who was paralyzed in a car crash at age 35. He grew up in a Philadelphia ghetto nicknamed Nicetown. His dad was Italian, something I should have guessed from the name.

Two people in recent days claimed I looked like novelist Stephen King. From his photos I don’t see the resemblance unless it is the hair.

Several people want me to do a Steel Shavings on the history of theater in Gary to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of IUN’s Theater Northwest. I’ll think about it but will need funding to get it in print.

The Post-Trib front-page story by Jerry Davich was a bout a Vietnam vet who claimed the government was screwing him out of his disability pay. Later on Davich’s website he told readers that the guy was at least partially a fraud – that he had never, for instance, been a POW. Somebody was all set to have a fundraiser for him. Sad story, but kudos to Davich for not hiding the truth once he found out about it.

A Chicago grad student from Chicago is supposed to interview me this afternoon about urban planning in Gary. The Archives is bustling with several people who are doing regional pictorial histories for Arcadia Press. I was able to locate a scholar, Richard Santillan, who donated his 1994 dissertation about Latinos in the Midwest, to the Archives. Turns out he just finished an Arcadia Press book about Mexican American baseball in Los Angeles.