Hanging Up

“Let me have wisdom and passion,

Bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch.

Give me but these, and though the darkness close,

Even the night will blossom as the rose,”

  “On Growing Old,” John Masefield

On Westchester Public Library’s free rack was “Jubilee: One Hundred Years of The Atlantic,” published in 1957.  What a treasure trove.  A section on “The City” contained selections by Progressive reformers Jacob A. Riis, Jane Addams, and Mary Antin.  One on “The West” had stories by Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Bret Harte.  There are fiction pieces by Hemingway, Saroyan, and Faulkner.  John Masefield, English poet laureate for 37 years until his death in 1967, wrote “On Growing Old” in 1919 when he was 41.  He died of a gangrene infection.  One of his final poems instructed that “no religious rite be done or read in any place for me when I am dead.”  “Jubilee’s” poetry section included Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Calverly’s,” about the demise of a watering hole and the narrator’s drinking buddies Leffingwell, Lingard, the Moon-calf, and Clavering (“who died because he couldn’t laugh”).

         “Who knows or cares? No sign is here’

No face, no voice, no memory;

No Lingard with his eerie joy,

No Clavering, no Calverly.

We cannot have them here with us

To say where their light lives are gone.”

1979, featured Saturday morning on WXRT, was a great year.  Musically, new groups included the Police, Cars, B52s, Dire Straits, and Clash, all performing in Chicago for the first time, as did Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, John “Hoosier” Mellancamp, and Rickie Lee Jones.  Tom Petty, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen were at the top of their game.  Movies included “Kramer V. Kramer,” “Alien,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” “Star Trek,” Apocalypse Now,” “Norma Rae,” and “Breaking Away” (a special treat for Hoosiers).  John Lennon was still alive and Ronald Reagan not yet president, although the Three Mile Island accident, Margaret Thatcher’s election as British Prime Minister, and the seizing of the American embassy in Teheran were ominous signs of trouble ahead.  I taught a History of Journalism class, coached Little League, pitched for Porter Acres (1979 was our championship season), and visited the Bahamas with family and teammates, including Ivan Jasper, Sam “The Bahama Llama” Johnston, Paulie Van Wormer, and Dave Serynek – characters all.

above, 1957 Nash; below, Samuel Love and Carl Devose

The onerous heat wave abated in time for Saturday’s Pop Up Art fest along Lake Street in Miller.  Realtor Gene Ayers put together a classic cars show featuring a ’56 Chevy, George Rogge’s ’57 Dodge, a ‘63 Thunderbird, and a couple VW Beetles; my favorite was a blue and white 1957 Nash Metropolitan.  What a beauty!  At the Gardiner Center Sam and Brenda introduced me to photographer Carl Devose.  I brought up the previous evening’s Earl Smith banquet to Tom Eaton, like me once a big Gary high school basketball fan.  I joked that often so few white people were in the stands that some folks figured we were college scouts; or cops, Tom interjected.   In a building across the street Corey Hagelberg had woodcuts on display and was demonstrating how the process works.  Walking down Lake Street, I heard someone shout,”Jimbo!”  It was Emma Balay with her neighbor Bob.  We checked out Lake Street Gallery, where Ken Schoon was autographing copies of “Dreams of Duneland” (in three hours he sold over 30 copies).  Bob spotted a photo of otter and asked where it had been taken.  Michigan City, Ken said, at the zoo, it turned out.  Ken mentioned that at IUN Ann Fritz was organizing an exhibit by the 30 photographers who contributed to “Dreams of Duneland.”

Spotting the T-bird, Emma asked if I’d buy it for her; how about a Pop Up Art t-shirt, I countered.  Back at Gardiner Center, I introduced Emma and Bob to Brenda and Sam, who recognized Bob from a meeting of folks interested in the Shirley Heinze Land Trust, established with an endowment from Robert and Bette Lou Seidner and named in memory of an Indiana Dunes preservationist who had lived in Ogden Dunes.  In the past 32 years Shirley Heinze Land Trust has acquired more than 1,200 acres in Northwest Indiana, including wetlands adjacent to Bob’s house on Hemlock Avenue.  Its first board president was Ed Osann, who had led the fight against construction of the Bailly Nuclear Plant; current president is Dale Engquist, formerly superintendent of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  On the board are environmentalists Lee Botts and Mark Reshkin.

In Sports Illustrated is a story about Tom Gouttierre, who joined the Peace Corps and in the mid-1960s went to Afghanistan.  Kids asked Tom to be their basketball coach, and he ended up putting together a national team.  The America he returned to in 1967 was nothing like the country he’d left in 1965, but he adjusted and even attended the Monterrey Pop Festival featuring Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, and many more.  Back in Afghanistan for another tour in 1970, he played host to future Senator Bill Bradley.  After helping the New York Knicks win an NBA championship, Bradley visited Afghanistan in order to journey to the mountainous Hindu Kush, the locale for Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King.”  Gouttierre accompanied him and sang rock ‘n’ roll songs to villagers while Bradley played a harmonica like the CIA agent in “The Ugly American.”  In 1966 my Upper Dublin classmate LeeLee Minehart was a Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan and knew Gouttierre.

above LeeLee Minehart (front, right) with roommate and Peace Corps staff members

 below, from left, "Monster Joe" Radek, Cody Cooper, "The German," NWI Times photo by John J. Watkins 

Roy Boy’s Tattoo Parlor, The Badlands, re-opened Saturday at its old location, 3844 Broadway in Glen Park, with Roy Boy’s 18 year-old son Cody Cooper taking over three years after his father died, assisted by a couple of tattoo artists who call themselves “Monster Joe” and “The German.”  Cody told NWI Times correspondent Rob Earnshaw that he hopes to purchase some tigers like his dad once owned.

While watching Phil Michelson win the British Open with a final round 66 (Tiger Woods limped in with a 74), I finished Delia Ephron’s “Hanging Up” and to my surprise ended up sympathizing with the grouchy old father, Lou Mozell (played with relish in the 2000 film by Walter Matthau).  Poor Lou not only had major memory problems but two wives who left him and three narcissistic daughters who found his frequent phone calls a tremendous bother.  Lou once told daughter Eve, “You can exist without love, but never without like.”  He’d been a screenwriter for several John Wayne movies, and “Duke” had allegedly given him a bullet that the daughters fought over after he died.

In the season one “Sopranos” finale Johnny blames cunnilingus and psychiatry for the rift between him and Uncle Junior.  He has teased Junior about “going south” and had hoped to keep his visits with a shrink secret.  He told her he’d dreamed of mounting neighbor Jeannie Cusamano doggie style after her hubby’s friends asked him humiliating questions on the golf course.   Discovering that Livia, his own mother, squealed on him and suggested that his uncle have him killed, Johnny goes to the nursing home and grabs a pillow, intent, it seemed, on smothering her only to learn that she was faking a stroke just as she had pretended to be senile.  Shouting accusations as she is being wheeled away on a gurney, he becomes enraged when he notices she is smiling.  As violent as the episode was, there are moments of hilarity, such as Paulie (Tony Sirico) catching poison ivy while chasing Uncle Junior’s chief lieutenant in the woods.

Time’s cover story “After Trayvon” includes an opinion piece by Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” that argues that so long as white society views young blacks as “a problem” rather than people, some of whom have problems, we will continue to treat them in a discriminatory way.  Another woman wrote about “The Talk” black parents give sons about how to act if face to face with an aggressive white policeman.  Now, in Florida at least, The Talk will have to include gun-totin’ vigilantes.  President Obama recently said, “Trayvon Martin could have been be me 35 years ago.”  Trayvon’s parents called the statement “a beautiful tribute to our boy.”  Conservatives, as expected, jumped all over him.  Wretched Fox contributor Tammy Bruce tweeted: “So Obama could have been Trayvon 35 years ago?  I had no idea Obama sucker-punched a watch volunteer and then bashed his head in?  Who knew?” 

I’m nauseated by all the media attention to the impending birth of the so-called royal baby.  The “Today” show has planted Natalie Morales and Dr. Nancy Snyderman outside St. Mary’s Hospital in London for a week now.  As Ray Smock’s friend Richard Bernstein wrote: “One small question: Did we not fight a revolution 200+ years ago because we were sick of royals?  Why are we now carrying on like obsessive whingwhangs about a royal birth?”  Ray commented: “For unto us a child is given.  Humbug.”

I went to put on “London Calling” by the Clash (best band ever) and discovered that sides one and two were missing, which included “Lost in the Supermarket” and “Clampdown.”  At least sides three and four were there.