Thing Called Love

“I ain’t no porcupine

Take off your kid gloves.”

  John Hiatt, “Thing Called Love”

Steve McShane asks visitors to the archives to put on kid gloves when handling sensitive materials.  Recently he retrieved bound volumes of Lake County newspapers dating back to the nineteenth century.  The paper is very fragile, he noted.  I tried to convince him to have lunch outside during Tuesday’s Thrill of the Grill, but he was helping several researchers, including John Trafny, working on a book about Glen Park. 

Nicole Jamrose and Mark Soljacich played two sets of blues, country and pop tunes for a paltry but appreciative audience that included mainly IUN staff members and medical school students on lunch break.  Most students and faculty were in class, given the crazy summer hours.  No wonder enrollment is down.  Seven years ago Nicole finished third in the TV series “Nashville Star” competition.  She and Mark did selections by the likes of John Hiatt, John Prine and Dusty Springfield as well as originals like “Fall Out of Love.”  Between numbers Mark bantered with the audience, referring to the med students as a triage unit, and played a mean Chuck Berry lick on an upbeat number.  Because Omar Farag booked them, I wore a Stand Up for Steel” t-shirt with an “Omar Presents” logo on it from a concert held ten years ago at the SteelYard baseball park in Gary.  Omar was elsewhere, but Terry Ann Defenser from University Relations noticed it.  She worked for Omar back then and had helped with preparations.  Small world.

Uniformed police passed through the courtyard on the way to the Conference Center for the swearing-in ceremony for IUN police chief Patricia Nowak.  I mentioned Sheriff Dominguez’s new book “Valor” to IU Public Safety Director Jerry Minger, who administered the oath, and he remembered Roy from police academy days and hoped he’d attend an upcoming fortieth anniversary event.  Roy was the first Latino state trooper and was selected by his peers as the outstanding cadet in his class.

I got my glasses tightened for free at Vision Point, a nice service considering I never bought anything there.  I did ask if they sold Wedgees or other products to keep glasses from falling off, but the answer was no.

James and I made significant progress on the thousand-piece Rock and Roll jigsaw puzzle.  Where I once had to cajole him to work on it, he is now very gung ho and better at finding pieces than I.  Meanwhile, he is learning about ZZ Top and other rockers.

The Times ran a front-page article by Susan Erler on efforts to transform downtown Miller Beach into a hub for the arts.  A color photo captures Corey Hagelberg standing in front of his art piece at the Marshall J. Gardner Center for the Arts (formerly Miller Drugs) along with friends Josh McGarvey and Seneca Weintraub. A second Jonathan Miano photo shows Karren Lee getting the Center ready for Pop Up Art.

Greg Reising, representing the Chanute Aquatorium Society, sent out a newsletter touting an August event that will feature authors Linda Simon and Jane Anneson of the pictorial book “Miller Beach.”  Steve McShane helped them find material, and Ron Cohen aided with the text, so hopefully they will donate a copy or two to the Archives.

Local papers are reporting all too often about drownings in Lake Michigan.  Authorities finally found the body of 15 year-old Portage resident Corey McFry, who was swimming in choppy waters as the air show was ending Sunday and got caught in a rip tide.  As the Post-Trib’s Jerry Davich wrote, “Lake Michigan isn’t a water park or a public swimming pool.  It’s the real deal – beautiful yet dangerous, incredibly enticing but potentially deadly.”

Exactly 206 years ago, encamped by the Missouri River, Meriwether Lewis recorded this in his journal: “It is now the season at which buffalo begin to copulate, and the bulls keep a tremendous roaring.  We could hear them for many miles, and there are such numbers of them that there is one continuous roar.  Our horses had not been acquainted with the buffalo.  They appear much alarmed at their appearance and bellowing.”

The latest Sports Illustrated “where are they now?” issue has a contribution by 70 year-old veteran writer Roy Blount, Jr., who claims that his most vigorous activity is doing chest bumps with his cat Jimmy reminiscent of Yogi Berra jumping into Don Larson’s arms after the pitcher’s World Series perfect game.  Blount writes: “Seventy is like being an athlete in one way: the aches and pains.  The other day a nurse was about to inoculate me against shingles.  ‘This will hurt,’ she said.  Then a pinprick.  I had to tell that young person, I hurt worse than that all over, all the time’”

Don Terry’s article “Where Work Disappears and Dreams Die” just appeared in “The American Prospect.”  As the title indicates, it is virtually all negative save for some wistful remarks by Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson.  Terry started his investigation looking for poverty, crime, and decay on the fiftieth anniversary of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America,” and he found plenty of it – a closed downtown library, a drive-by shooting, an overcrowded food bank, vacant vandalized schools.  He didn’t use any of the material I told him about viable neighborhoods, resilient people and potential for developing the lakefront and the education corridor between IU Northwest and Ivy Tech.  For historical perspective he quotes S. Paul O’Hara, author of “Gary: The Most American of All American Cities,” who argued that “deindustrialization just doesn’t remove the wages, the jobs, the pride – it removes that foundation that undergirds the churches, the social institutions.  The soul of the city is tied up in industrial work, and now, for most people, that work is gone.”  Terry ends with two homeless shelter residents musing about their downtrodden city.  Levi Gildon says, “It’s almost to the time there should be a eulogy spoken over the city.”  To which Charles Byrom replies, “It’s not dead yet, but it’s definitely on life support.”  The soul of the city, right now and for the future, rests is its mostly non-white residents, who deserve more help from Indianapolis and Washington, but as Brothers Keeper director Mary Edwards noted, “The government has downsized the role it plays in the lives of poor people.”