Follies of the Past

“Now I don’t like that kind of man

That operates on the installment plan.”

   “You Gotta See Mamma Ev’ry Night (Or You Can’t See mamma At All)”

A sales gimmick first widely used during the pre-credit card 1920s, the installment plan allowed customers to buy a Model T Ford for just a few dollars a month.  Now virtually everything is available on the installment plan, including college education (a burgeoning scandal that threatens to exceed even the harm from the housing bubble).

Skipping Sunday morning news shows, I got caught up on season four of “Boardwalk Empire,” set mainly in Atlantic City during the “Roaring Twenties.” Background included the 1923 “Gotta See Momma” Billy Rose composition sung by Liza Minelli and Fletcher Henderson’s 1924 hit “Araby.”  The show isn’t quite the same since they killed off gangster Gyp Rosetti (Bobby Canavale), but the Al Capone and Arnold Rothstein characters are fascinating.

In “The Clinton Tapes” Taylor Branch describes how the President got snookered, despite the First Lady’s vehement objections, into allowing a special prosecutor to investigate Whitewater, a failed business venture that Bill and Hillary had some connection to through an S and L company.  After Republican partisan Kenneth Starr replaced the original prosecutor, Robert B. Fiske, the investigation morphed into a witch-hunt into Clinton’s womanizing, ending in House Republicans impeaching him.

 House on 35th Court near Ivy Tech, Post-Trib photo by Carole Carlson

In 1997 an Indiana National Guard engineer battalion commanded by Richard Ligon demolished abandoned houses in Gary suspected of being used by drug dealers. Lake County sheriff John Buncich has endorsed a similar plan to get rid of the thousands of vacant buildings.  Ligon, who finished second to Buncich in 2012, will probably challenge Buncich in 2016.

In memory of my mother, who died a year ago this week,” Anne Balay wrote,  “I ironed all my shirts, made a apple pie and shared it, and sewed pajamas for my daughters, flat felting the seams just like she taught me. She isn't gone -- I feel her in things like the sounds of fingernails scratching across material to make it lie right -- but I miss EVERYTHING about her.”

Anne Invited French filmmakers Frederic Cousseau and Blandine Huk over to her place, along with Toni and me, Corey Halegberg, and noted environmentalist Lee Botts, who brought open-faced bagels topped with salmon meat her neighbor Bob Calvert had brought back from an Alaskan fishing trip.   Born in 1928 in Kansas, Lee lived in Oklahoma during the so-called “Dust Bowl” years.  Bob and Anne’s daughter Emma came later, as they had been fishing at Salt Creek, a Little Calumet River tributary that begins just south of Valparaiso and flows into Burns Waterway and then Lake Michigan.  In addition to an MGD 12-pack and a veggie plate I took along the latest Rolling Stone, with Michael J. Fox on the cover, for Emma.  It contained an article about RuPaul and his TV show “Drag Race.”  She is a fan despite the absence of a TV in the house.

In the late afternoon we walked to Bob Calvert’s pier to feed fish, turtles and beaver that have come to expect a daily visit.  After Anne and Emma took Toni for a paddleboat ride, Frederic and Blandine ventured out with their camera. In the past 24 hours they’d attended a mass at St. Hedwig, interviewed a fellow they’d met at the Roosevelt football game, and met with State Senator Earline Rogers.  I arranged for them an interview former mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher on Thursday.

Bob Calvert asked my opinion of historian Howard Zinn, pilloried by former governor Mitch Daniels, now President of Purdue, and defended recently before an overflow crowd by a Purdue professor.  Bob had read Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and didn’t think it was inaccurate.  I agreed.  What Daniels’ objected to was Zinn’s leftist point of view – he preferred arch-conservative William J. Bennett’s chauvinistic “America: The Last Best Hope.”  Bennett calls Christopher Columbus “The Christ Bearer” and spends less time on the ruthless aspect of conquest than claiming Indian women were sexually open and spread syphilis among their oppressors, who responded in kind with measles and smallbox microbes.  Portraying Columbus as a gold seeker who enslaved Arawak Indians on the island of Hispaniola, Zinn wrote: “In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.  The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.”

above, Lee Botts; below, Mark Reshkin

A friend of Lee Botts, Mark Reshkin, recently set up an IU Northwest scholarship in his late wife Bettimae’s name.  The two met in 1971 while

were grad students in Bloomington.  I cite Reshkin in my Gary book when discussing the geological history of the Region.  When he retired, he claimed to be the luckiest man in the world to have married Bettimae and worked at a university that paid him to do what he loved and encouraged him to engage in public service activities related to his areas of expertise.

During the Bears-Steelers game I phoned nephew Bob, a big Pittsburgh fan unhappy over his team’s dismal start.  Jerry Davich quipped, “Dear Pittsburgh fans: Knock, knock, who’s there?  Owen.  Owen who?  O an’ three.”  Chicago surprisingly is undefeated with a much-improved offensive line finally protecting QB Jay Cutler from excessive sacks.  Bob has been playing Cracker music ever since attending Campout 9 at Pappy and Harriet’s last weekend.

 Kids in Harlem playing with barbies, photo by Camilo VergaraI recommended to Chancellor Lowe that Camilo Vergara be considered to be an IU Northwest honorary degree recipient.  Though his primary interest was documenting what he called “American ruins,” he never lost sight of the human consequences of urban neglect, and his most moving photographs contain people coping and surviving in an inhospitable environment.  The Chancellor thanked me for suggesting the nomination.

Atlantic magazine published two seemingly contradictory articles, one about how sports is ruining high school and the other about students having too much homework.  While athletics has its place, it’s crazy, in my opinion, to sacrifice art and when foreign language curricula in order to sustain a football program. Coaches schedule practices during Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and in some cases discourage players from going out for other sports during the off-season.  Much homework is rote memorization due in part to the importance given to standardized tests.

The biggest American foreign policy folly of my lifetime was the Vietnam War, the subject this week in Nicole Anslover’s Sixties class.  I gave copies of my Vietnam Shavings to the two-dozen students.  The class was so lively, I only spoke twice, mentioning that Ike belonged to the “never again” club regarding sending troops to Asia but nevertheless adapted policies that deepened the quagmire and severely limited his successor’s options.  Later a concluded that the Achilles Heel of our efforts in Vietnam was that we could never establish a stable anti-communist government in Saigon.

Gaard Logan’s book club is reading “Transatlantic,” a novel by Colum McCann that includes material on Frederick Douglas’ lecture tour in Ireland.  In “My Bondage and My Freedom” Douglass recorded his first impressions of that land: “Eleven days and a half gone and I have crossed three thousand miles of the perilous deep. Instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchical government. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle [Ireland]. I breathe, and lo! the chattel [slave] becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult. I employ a cab—I am seated beside white people—I reach the hotel—I enter the same door—I am shown into the same parlour—I dine at the same table—and no one is offended... I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. When I go to church, I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip to tell me, ‘We don't allow niggers in here!’”