Biography

“There is properly no history; only biography,” Ralph Waldo Emerson

For philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose most famous quotation was “Know thyself,” all history was subjective except what one learned from personal experience.  I have more faith in the historians’ craft.  For me history is the story of people and how they or members of a larger society changed over time.  Three Post-Trib columnists who write about the past are Carrol Vertrees (nostalgic autobiographical accounts of pre-WW II life in rural Indiana), John Mutka (a fount of knowledge about Northwest Indiana sports history), and Jeff Manes (biographical interviews of longtime Region residents).  I deeply respect how they bring historical perspective to their writings.  Vertrees had a daughter who was in a folkie group that also played a number of Talking Heads songs.  Mutka retired years ago but continues to do occasional assignments, especially about Region legends.

above, Jeff Manes; below, John Mutka

For gaming at Dave’s Sunday Tom Wade picked me up around 10:30.  He’s been having chest pains for a couple weeks and recently went to the ER but passed the EKG and other tests.  Dave had similar symptoms a couple weeks ago but dismissed it as heartburn from indigestion.  Both teach high school, a high-stress job.  I woke up with a sour stomach, probably from the McDonald’s meal the day before, but recovered and enjoyed Dave’s brats and salad.  We each won a game, my triumph coming in Acquire.  None was close, an oddity given how evenly matched we are, although Tom is slightly better at St. Petersburg than we are.

IU pulled off an unbelievable win at Michigan, whose team had not lost in Ann Arbor all year.  Leading by five points with a minute to go, the Wolverines had a breakaway opportunity and the player was fouled hard by Christian Watford.  Had the referees called a flagrant foul that would have been it.  Instead Michigan players missed several key free throws, enabling the Hoosiers to pull off a one-point victory, with Cory Zeller scoring IU’s final six points.  In the final seconds a Michigan shot hung on the rim, rolled around it for several anxious moments, and then fell off.  Watford got the rebound, tossed it to Zeller, and that, as they say, was all she wrote.

I critiqued an intro Ron Cohen wrote for a proposed book on folk music during the 1930s and wrote him: The first six pages have little to do with music.  Save the historiography stuff about politics and culture until after you have stated your purpose and thesis.  I suggest something like this:  What effect did the Great Depression have on folk music?  The dour conditions provided plenty of things for concerned musicians to sing about, but widespread poverty robbed many of the opportunity to perform before audiences.  Concerning the role of government, federal programs provided work in areas pertaining to the collecting and performing of songs, but anti-radical crackdowns, especially in states where there was labor unrest, stifled singers who dared to protest fundamental inequities in the American system.  Another factor was the availability of musical instruments and recording studios.  While many could not afford to purchase records, access to radio programs, especially with the REA bringing electricity to rural areas, was one of the most important elements of the decade in spreading the popularity of various strains of what might be lumped together as folk music.  Otherwise, well written, but to whet the appetite of readers you might mention performers other than Woody who started making their mark then, such as lead Belly, Bill Monroe, Jimmy Rodgers, and the Carter Family.

The December 2012 Journal of American History contains some interesting reviews, including one of “Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins.”  Charles H. Martin of Texas El Paso points out that the subtitle is misleading since JFK appears almost nowhere in the book; credit for desegregation should go to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall.  Two titles that attracted my attention were “Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition” and “Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan.”  Barnstorming with Ruth in the Far East were Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, Lefty Gomez, and Charlie Gehringer.  Bill Pelke would be interested in John D. Bessler’s impassioned arguments against capital punishment in “Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment.”  There’s also a “Round Table” section on Women’s and Gender History as well as reviews of “Clinton,” “Game Change” and other documentary films.

Both Missy Brush and Janet Bayer wished a Happy Birthday Wherever You Are to “Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” author Douglas Adams, who was born 61 years ago and died in 2001.  One a trip east we listened to an audiotape of the book, and I loved it.

Prior to the History Book Club gathering at Gino’s in Merrillville I perused Francis Russell’s Harding biography, the misleadingly named “Shadow of Blooming Grove.”  The title refers to a rumor, probably false, that Harding’s great-great-grandfather Amos was a mulatto.  Soon after Amos settled in Blooming Grove, Ohio, an enemy spread the story in order to defame him.  Similar rumors circulated during the 1920s about Babe Ruth, both of whose parents were German-American.  Spike Lee once stated that his dad, a big baseball fan, told him that the Babe had “some of the tar brush in him.”  After breaking Ruth’s home run record, Hank Aaron allegedly said, “They’re not going to dig up Babe (to check his DNA).  They don’t want it revealed that there could have been an ounce of black blood in him.” 

At Gino’s I had a pale ale and BLT salad and sat next to Clark Metz’s good friend David Gillian.  I told him how I got Clark to start bowling again and that he practiced four or five times a week until he was able to, in his words, “beat my ass.”  During the discussion of Harding it occurred to me how similar to him Ronald Reagan was, a sunny optimist and pragmatic politician whose administration had its share of corruption (HUD rigging scandal, S and L crisis, Sewergate, Iran Contra), only Reagan survived Tecumseh’s curse and a would-be assassin’s bullet and served five years longer than WGH.  Afterwards, Joy Anderson told me she always enjoyed my commentary when speakers went into hyperbole about their subjects’ greatness.  We used to play bridge with her and Ken, and she recalled asking Toni about purchasing a dunes painting when they moved away from Miller.  She recommended Robert Hoffman.  They liked the one they bought so much they got a second Hoffman piece.                                                     below, Robert Hoffman at work

On the ride home Dan Dakich’s sports talk show was on Lakeshore Radio.  A basketball star at Andrean High School and then at IU during the early 1980s, he is best known for holding Michael Jordan to 13 points when IU beat number 1 ranked North Carolina in the 1984 Regional Semifinal.  In the summer while in college Dakich worked in the IUN mailroom and would frequently deliver the morning mail to various departments.  After coaching at Bowling Green he briefly took over for Kelvin Sampson at IU in 2008 after Sampson resigned after caught violating NCAA recruiting rules.

Not much on TV after I got home but watched a few minutes of “American Reunion,” funny only when Eugene Levy was in scenes, smoking weed with Stifler’s mom or telling his son, the one who masturbated into a pie in “American Pie,” “Is it an erectile problem?  Because sometimes you can buy a little time with a well-placed thumb.”  I soon turned the sound down and put on a Foo Fighters CD, now on heavy rotation with Scarcely Scene, Sara McLaughlin, Cracker, and Robert Blaszkiewicz’s “Best of 2012.”

I found out that Garret Cope was having health problems and visited him at Methodist Hospital’s Northlake campus.  The physical therapist had him up in a chair, and he seemed in decent spirits.  Barbara said the day before someone asked him a bunch of questions, such as when he started teaching at IUN.  I told him we still have the phone message saved when he congratulated me for winning the Indiana Historical Society’s Riker Award.  I hadn’t been to Methodist Hospital in Gary in 30 years, but it looked good and the staff was very friendly.  Built during the 1920s, its trustees banned blacks from using the facilities for the first 20 years of its existence even though some had donated money for its construction.

I rested up for 83 year-old Ed Asner’s one-man show as Franklin D. Roosevelt at the refurbished Marquette Park Pavilion in Miller.  I thought his Lou Grant character silly when he was on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” but the spin-off, hour-long drama “Lou Grant” debuted in 1977, it was excellent.  In one episode he gets pulled over for driving drunk. He also played a lecherous old man in a recent episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”  A liberal who has been involved in many humanitarian causes, it was appropriate that he would play New Deal President FDR.  When a student at the University of Chicago, he worked one summer at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works at No. 1 Open Hearth.

We arrived at Marquette Park Pavilion early with the Hagelbergs in order to get a decent seat.  In fact, the chair next to mine was reserved for folks who’d paid three times what my ticket cost.  I told old friend Bud Rosen that my son Dave’s wedding reception took place here 15 years ago.  He said his parents had an anniversary party 50 or more years ago and the place looked the same now, with its expensive facelift, as it did then.  Also sitting near us were Jim and Elaine Spicer and Sam Barnett, Brenda, and Sam’s parents.  The program was running late, due to Ed Asner not feeling well, it was announced, so I talked with Purdue Cal retiree Lance Trusty, downstairs resting his back, about attending the recent Indiana Association of Historians meeting.  Fifteen years ago we were on a session together along with Steve McShane and George Roberts held at Rose-Hulman Institute in Terre Haute.  A volunteer usher gave me a flyer that summarized the show as covering FDR’s White House years, including “his Fireplace Chats, his controversial packing of the Supreme Court, his personal life with Eleanor and his affair with Lucy Mercer, his courage to break the neutrality Acts, his manipulation of Congress in order to get the country to have a draft, and the Pearl harbor controversy.”

From almost the moment he came on stage it was evident that Asner, as FDR, was not himself.  Sweating heavily and speaking haltingly, he opened with a joke Al Smith told him about addressing incarcerated prisoners, first calling them fellow citizens, then fellow inmates, and finally saying he was glad to see so many of them.  Then he kept getting names and dates wrong and repeated lines over and over again.  He seemed quite confused, as if he were having a stroke.  The show ended barely 15 minutes after it started with Asner promising to return to Gary in the future and do better.  As we were leaving, EMTs were wheeling him out on a stretcher.  He impulsively grabbed Cheryl Hagelbergs arm, apologized for being under the weather, and said he’d be back.  Later from a hospital in Chicago he tweeted: “Reports of my imminent demise are greatly exaggerated.  They tell me I am suffering from exhaustion.  Thanks for the good wishes.”  Earlier in the day, he had held a long workshop with area high school students.