Wrecking Ball

“We all know that come tomorrow
None of this will be here
So hold tight your anger
And don’t fall to your fear.”
Bruce Springsteen, “Wrecking Ball”

“The Boss” has put out a classic CD that is fun to listen to but heartbreaking at times. “Death to My Hometown” describes a place where the jobs have vanished and hardly anybody visits the downtown any longer. “We Take Care of our Own” has been getting much air play, but most of the other songs are quite pessimistic about families and communities being able to do just that.

Jeopardy had a category called Seconds featuring such trivia as the second captain to circumnavigate the world (Francis Drake), the second wife of Henry VIII (Anne Boleyn), and the second highest mountain peak (K2 between Pakistan and China).

Sheriff Roy Dominguez was very pleased with the “Valor” page proofs. We went over questions I had from reading the first half of the manuscript and will get together next Wednesday to put it to bed, so to speak. If the autobiography weren’t so interesting, proofreading it would be very tiring. Roy brought with him some campaign literature having to do with his running for Lake County commissioner.

With Steve McShane’s help I put together an exhibit of Traces magazine covers and articles. The 11 covers about the Calumet Region include actors (Karl Malden), artists (Frank Dudley), singers (Michael Jackson), aviators (Octave Chanute), war heroes (Alex Vraciu) and sports stars (Tom Harmon). I’m hoping it will be a traveling exhibit and that area libraries will want it, as well as the Lake County Tourist Bureau Welcome Center. Editor Ray Boomhower thinks my article on Alex Karras may go in the Fall issue and wants to see the family photos that Ted and Anna Karras provided.

Marion Merrill left me a sizeable amount of money in her will. She and Sam had no children but basically adopted his Maryland grad students, but still it was quite a surprise. I think it would be appropriate to use the money to put out more Steel Shavings issues.

I made American Airlines and Hertz reservations and RSVPed to Maryland’s Center for Historical Studies that I’d be attending Ray Smock’s Distinguished Alumni Lecture April 5 entitled “I Did It My Way, By Accident: Lessons from an Unconventional Career.” I’m hoping to see Steve and Aaron Pickert and family Saturday, which happens to be Aaron’s birthday.

Rosalie Zak, IUN History department secretary for 25 years, passed away, son Steve informed me. During her last days in a hospice Steve played Chopin music for her benefit. An English war bride with lots of class, she always called me Dr. Lane, never Jim. In the 1970s I’d only get a haircut a couple times a years, but afterward she’d always tell me how nice I looked.

The temperature reached 69 for the second day in a row. WGN’s Tom Skilling, once known as the boy weatherman, had all sorts of graphics to explain the “heat wave.”

At lunch I told Alan Barr I was sorry I couldn’t make it to his film class to see “Last Tango in Paris.” He told me to come see “Body Heat” after spring break. George Bodmer is going to Cincinnati for a family function and hopes to visit the Cincinnati Art Museum, which has an exhibition of Nick Cave’s work (he’s most famous for what he calls Soundsuits). George mentioned that a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition there created great controversy, in contrast to Boston, where a PBS station showed examples of Mapplethorpe’s work on TV. Gaard Logan told me that a controversial Hide/Seek exhibition, subtitled “Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” is opening soon in Tacoma and that some docents quit rather than stay associated with a museum that would put on such a show. It contains Mapplethorpe’s 1975 “Self-Portrait” and artists’ responses to Stonewall and AIDS.

Peggy Roenigk wanted to know more about the Mary Cheever murder case. Cheever was a Gary teacher whose death at the hands of a purse snatcher sparked a mass movement by women to wiper out crime and vice tolerated by the local political establishment during the late 1940s.

“Wanderlust” with Paul Rudd and Jennifer Anniston was so creepy and smarmy in making fun of communal living (Alan Alda should be ashamed of himself for being in such trash) that I moved over to “Project X,” about an out-of-control teen party. While it was rated R for “crude and sexual content throughout, nudity, drugs, drinking, pervasive language, reckless behavior and mayhem,” the only really offensive thing about it was a midget who kept hitting guys in the balls.

The wind was blowing with gale force when I left the movies. With an hour to kill till bowling I ate yogurt and cookies (by mistake I bought Red Hot Cheetos and could only eat one) and read excerpts from the Civil War diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut, a Southerner who called slavery a monstrosity and an iniquity. “Our men,” she wrote, “live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. These, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.”

Engineers took five of seven points from No Weak Link with Dick Maloney rolling a 578 series, 103 pins over his average. I converted three splits, unbelievably, a 5-7, a 3-6-7-10, and a 6-9-10. The latter, a baby split with a sleeper, is almost impossible because if you go between the 6 and 10 you almost always miss the 9. I hit the 6-pin on the left, not on purpose, and it knocked the 10-pin to its left and into the 9-pin. Lucky!