Got Styrofoam boxes for the
ozone layer.”
“Rockin’ in the Free World,” Neil Young
Whenever
I hear “Rockin’ in the Free World,” I think of Voodoo Chili performing it with
Dave on vocals and Tim “Big Voodoo Daddy” Brush on lead guitar. Today the words seem more relevant than ever,
as Trump prepares to gut – or even eliminate, as some in Congress are proposing
- the Environmental Protection Agency. One consequence, if the White House Office of Management
and Budget has its way, is to reduce funds for the Great Lakes Restoration
Initiative from $300 million to a paltry $10 million. According to Todd Spangler of the Detroit Free Press, such action would
decimate programs to improve water quality, restore wetlands, and keep Asian
carp from entering Lake Michigan, where they'd wreak havoc on its ecosystem by
gobbling up plankton. Trump has been on
the cover of Time so many times, Toni is ready to cancel our subscription. As it is, she turns over the issues so she
doesn’t have to look at that mendacious mug.
Dave and Angie Lane, March 1998
Just
when it looked like winter might pass without a major storm, Northwest Indiana
got hit with huge amounts of lake effect snow exactly 19 years after a blizzard
left us without electricity during the week Angie and Dave got married. Even the motel where our out-of-town guests were to stay lost
power initially. We pretty much lived in
our Maple Place fireplace room until power was finally
restored. An East Coast nor’easter,
officially designated Winter Storm Stella, affected some 60 million people.
109th and Broadway; Post-Trib photo by Joe Puchek
Stella hits Pennsylvania by Jerry Pierce
Spicers in Key West
On
Facebook Elaine Spicer wrote of meeting future husband Jim:
In February
1998, I moved from Lafayette to Miller, knowing only one person, C.D.
Hullinger. Five weeks later, after a
week without power due to a severe ice storm, Saturday morning found me at the
Marquette Perk barista heading to the only seat left at the counter. The seat
was right next to a dude wearing a Wisconsin Badger knit hat...an hour of chit
chat later we planned to see a movie that night, after the late afternoon movie
an agreement to go out to dinner, a call the next morning about hanging out at
his place for newspaper reading and breakfast, afternoon arrangements for me to
come back for dinner. Fa-a-a-st forward 19 years!! Wow, and little did I know
then that I was taking a tried and true bachelor off the rolls in Miller.
Tom
Eaton replied: “I guess, when you’ve found
the right person, you don’t have to mess around.”
Fourteen
years ago, I asked students to keep “Ides of March” journals. I kept one myself, as did several former
students, including Fred McCoy. The results in Steel Shavings, volume 36 (2005).
McColly wrote:
March 15: One local bar had a St. Baldrick
event to raise money for a cancer foundation.
Both men and women were shaving their heads. My boss was complaining about her NIPSCO
bill. She averages $50 a month and isn’t
even home during the day. War propaganda is making everyone frantic. The government claims we need duct tape and
gas masks in case we are hit with nerve gas.
This is like telling kids to get under their desks in case the Russians
start using nuclear bombs on us. They
aren’t going to save you.
I was
in Bradenton, Florida, that day visiting Midge and stepfather Howard. I went body surfing in the afternoon, and we
dined at a classy place called the Sand Bar.
I wrote:
The scallops reminded me of when I’d order
them at Another Roadside Attraction in Wheeler.
Owners (and softball buddies) Tom Orr and Ivan Jasper both moved to the
Virgin Islands after selling the place.
The good life, they though. Ivan’s in Fort Lauderdale now, running his
own business. Tom tried to sail the Atlantic,
and his sailboat got totaled when a sub suddenly surfaced. He’s a hospital administrator now. Watched IU lose by one point to Illinois and
then played Rummy Cube. He still has it together at age 95 and gets in nine
holes of golf weekly. On the news: scenes of antiwar protestors in the streets,
while Bush is in the Azores making final war plans with British Prime Minister
Tony Blair.
Post-Trib columnist Jeff Manes wrote
about Jim Phares, who has restored 20 acres in Pine Township to wetlands.
Phares said: “Not
everybody has this much land to work with, but when you do something like this,
especially a wetland area, every little bit helps. I'm not tellin' anybody what
to do with their property, but I drive by places where people are mowin' like
three acres of grass. Why?” On Facebook Manes posted this
observation:
I've
never been defeated by a dish drainer yet. Those pots, pans, knives, forks and,
spaghetti spoons will all fit one way or another. The
bad news is when Val comes home from work and tries to remove just one utensil
from Mt. Kilimanjaro, they will all end up on the kitchen floor.
Jeff Manes creation
My
NCAA tournament brackets have all number-2 seeds reaching the Final Four, the
same strategy I employed last year when I won the pool by picking
Villanova. I have Kentucky beating
Arizona in the championship game. Dave
has picked Arizona, so it would be great if it came done to him or me, like in
2016. I first leaned toward Duke but
hate the Blue Devils too much to root for them.
I got
a headache booking flights to California for Phil, Dave, and me to see The Head
and the Heart at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown with nephew Bob. The airlines advertise one price for round
trips but then want additional money for all but the most impractical return
flights. I finally booked three tickets for a nonstop flight to San Diego for
about $550 apiece. Flying straight into
Palm Springs would have cost at least a thousand dollars more. “Relative Surplus Value” by the Weakerthans
begins, “Find the airport at 7 a.m.” –
the time we’ll arrive at O’Hare if everything goes smoothly. The Canadian group
also recorded “Elegy for Gump Worsley,” about an ice hockey goaltender who
resembled the comic-strip character Andy Gump and one of the last players not
to wear a mask. He played ten years with the lowly New York Rangers and then
helped the Montreal Canadiens win four Stanley Cup between 1965 and 1969. Here
are some of the lyrics:
He
looked more like our fathers, not a goalie, player, athlete, period. Smoke, half ash, stuck in that permanent smirk,
tugging jersey around the beer gut. He
swore he was never afraid of the puck.
We believe him. If anyone asks,
the inscription should read, “My face was
my mask.”
Lorne "Gump" Worsley
Working
on a crossword puzzle, Toni asked if I knew a famous baseball family in six
letters, starting with “A.” “Alomar,” I replied,
knowing that catcher Sandy, Jr., and brother Roberto both followed their
dad from Puerto Rico to the major leagues.
Roberto is a Hall of Famer, infamous for spitting on an umpire.
Indiana History
student Artur Sorg interviewed someone who requested that his pseudonym be Bocephus,
the nickname of Hank Williams, Jr., given to the country singer by his dad and
also the name of Grand Ole Opry ventriloquist Rod Brasfield’s dummy. Sorg wrote:
In 1952 Bocephus was ten, entering fifth grade, and had, in his
words, “a spiked haircut with so much
hairspray on it I could stack books on it!
I also had a rat tail hanging down my back and lightning bolts shaved
into my sideburns! That hair was as
stiff as a board!” Like many of his
friends, Bocephus proudly wore a Michael Jordan jersey. During middle school sports dominated his
everyday activity, especially basketball. He recalled: “We pretty much lived at the local YMCA. Hell, I even had swimming lessons there and
weight lifting.” One summer Bocephus broke his ankle a week before the
start of the Little League season. He recalled: “We were short a player one game.
Coach had no choice, I was going to play right field. I was more than happy to hobble my butt out
there. Cast and all! Naturally the other teams coach was
instructing his players to hit the ball to the kid in the cast. Which one finally did, it wasn’t a good hit,
but the coach sent him to second base anyways.
I hopped over to that ball as fast as I possibly could and ended up
throwing that kid out at second! Dude,
that’s stuff you just don’t forget!” A
year later, his baseball season was again
cut short due to appendicitis. He said; “Well, I almost died! Three dang days of lying in pain. Mom finally took me to the ER. They told her, if she would have waited
another day, I probably wouldn’t have made it through the night. Thing exploded inside me. They did surgery right away.”
Excelling at cross-country, Bocephus recalled being asked to
work out with high school players the summer before his freshman year. “We
were running around a local lake that summer and one of the upper classman
dared me to run and jump off the end of a pier.
Without hesitation, I took a B-line straight for that pier and ran right
off the end. I guess, that event in
particular, solidified my acceptance by the upper classman who were often dicks
to the other freshman. I ran varsity the whole season as the number 2
runner on the team and won the largest freshman only race in the State.”
Sophomore year Bocephus had stress fractures throughout the
entire cross-country season and began to lose interest in the sport. “I was missing out on other things,” he
said. Bocephus got his license the following
summer. His parents bought him a 1987
Ford Bronco for $1,800 on the condition that he put gas in it and pay for the
insurance and upkeep. Bocephus found a
summer job framing houses and said, “I
figured I could make enough money to keep my car going all year if I worked
hard all summer. It seemed like everyone
I hung out with out of school was in their early 20’s at this point! I quickly began acting like I was, too.” He
bought a new Polaris Scrambler 500 four-wheeler and found employment weekends
working construction.
Bocephus recalled “We
started throwing great parties almost every weekend down at my neighbor Joe’s
place. Girls everywhere, 4-wheelers jumping the fire, trucks running through
the mudbug. I bet we had 100 kids there
on prom night junior year. Insane! There were cars still parked in the field a
week later. We had no idea who they even
belonged to.” The result was that he
struggled in school, even flunking one eleventh grade class. Bocephus tried to mellow out a little his
senior year. “I started listening to Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. I had a tie-dyed Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, a pair
of green corduroys, and one of those hemp necklaces. Everyone thought I had become a stoner at
that point!” Bocephus occasionally smoked
marijuana, but it never became a thing.
He pretty much stuck to alcohol. He
said, “There were Saturdays where I’d
show up to work hungover, often still buzzed, on zero sleep, and put in 10- 12
hours. If that doesn’t prepare you for
the real world I’m not sure what would!”
In the fall of his senior year Bocephus starting dating his
future wife. They had known each other
for a while, but never really talked. Up to this point Bocephus hadn’t had a
lot of girlfriends. “I was always busy having fun!
Besides, my friends had girlfriends and I saw how much damn time they
took up. Bros before hoes was our motto.” Bocephus described how he was smitten: “Two 17-year-olds, a couple beers, a kiss by
the fire, well, you can imagine the rest. She was good for me. She was a big reason I ended up graduating.” She
even managed to drag him to their Senior Prom. After high school Bocephus went to work and at
age 19 bought his first home with his then-pregnant fiancé on 5 acres of
land. “I was a borderline alcoholic for most of my high school days,” he
concluded, “but pretty much quit drinking
at the age of 19.”
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