IU Bicentennial

“Sometimes it's best to brave the wind and rain
By havin’ strength to go against the grain”

         Oak Ridge Boys, “Goin’ Against the Grain”

I interviewed former Lake County surveyor George Van Til at the Calumet Regional Archives as part of IU’s Bicentennial project. Another motivation was to convince Van Til to set up an Archives collection in his name. Although discussing events a half-century old, he recalled vividly how influential the campus experience was to his intellectual growth and subsequent political career.  Although his father never went to college due to financial exigencies, books and Newsweek magazines were in the house and dinner table discussion often centered on a pastor’s Sunday sermon.  A Political Science class offered by Fedor Cicak transformed his life. He signed up for it because he’d heard all one had to do was keep abreast of current world events, something George did anyway.  On the day of the first exam, George had come from visiting his father, who had just endured open heart surgery, and feared he’d fared poorly.  Later, as Cicak was returning the blue books, he read from Van Til’s and after class recruited him for the Political Science Club.  George rose to a leadership position and gained confidence that carried into other endeavors.  A Speech course also proved invaluable, as did an offering by Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher, who taught at IUN for more than 40 years and, shamefully, has never been awarded an honorary degree due to fears of alienating alumni donors.

 IUN Young Democrats in 1970 (from left, George Van Til, Ted Bownowski, Sandi Weissbuch, Patti Puplava, Linda Mosorx, Mike Reza, Joe Ciesielski, George Sufana

Political Science professor Fedor Cicak

Cicak had a distinctive Eastern European accent and organized student trips to the Mideast.  He frequently invited students and faculty to his home in Hobart.  Prior to my first visit, he told me to turn right after passing the Dough Boy.  He was referring to a World War I statue, but at first I thought he meant the Pillsbury Poppin’ Fresh Doughboy. As I recall, before I went to Saudi Arabia for three weeks to teach a course on the History of American Ideas, Cicak briefed me on what to expect in that Muslim monarchy.

 above, Dough Boy Memorial; below, Oak Ridge Boys

Van Til attended the Oak Ridge Boys annual Christmas concert at the Star Plaza, the final event before a wrecking ball demolishes the 40-year-old landmark.  The Oak Ridge Boys are the only group to have performed there every single year of its existence and a total of 111 times.  The group dedicated “I Guess It Never Hurts to Hurt Sometimes” to Bruce White, whose father Dean built the Star Plaza, and ended with “Amazing Grace.” Eloise Valadez of the NWI Times wrote: “The group stepped back to wait for the curtain to close as a number of Star Plaza Theatre personnel joined them onstage. Audience members then watched with tears in their eyes as the familiar red curtain slowly started to move.”

Having never visited the Archives, Van Til was impressed by the variety of our holdings, including a picture of IUN’s former Calumet Center in East Chicago and painting of steel baron Elbert H. Gary.  He noticed a 1977 union poster touting labor leaders Ed Sadlowski and Jim Balanoff during their Steelworkers Fight Back campaign and recalled that Balanoff’s wife Betty was a historian and the old warhorse’s complete opposite in demeanor but, like him, devoted to the rank and file. 

Videotaping Van Til’s comments in the Ronald Cohen Room of the Archives was Samantha Gauer, a recent graduate from Miami University in Ohio, who I’m hoping to use for subsequent interviews with IUN grads Congressman Peter Visclosky and Lake County Auditor John Petalas. Helping her set up was Aaron Pigors, director of Instructional Media Services, who accompanied me to a FACET conference in French Lick, where I interviewed more than a dozen celebrated educators from across the IU system in a single day.  I reminded Aaron that he’d hurried back to his wife, who’d recently given birth.  The child is now almost 8 years old, he said.  How time flies.  The following year, son Phil was my FACET conference camera man and won 50 dollars spinning the wheel at French Lick’s casino.  My prize was a French Lick t-shirt that I still wear on occasion.

My favorite characters in Richard Russo’s “Everybody’s Fool” (2016) are African Americans Clarice, assistant to Police Chief Doug Raymer, and octogenarian Mr. Hymes, seen most days in a roadside chair waving a small American flag to passersby.  Both are witty and have common sense.  After Clarice invites Raymer for a dinner of lamb chops and wine, he fears he’s insulted her by falling asleep. Apparently most everyone in Bath knew Raymer’s wife was having an affair with Clarice’s twin brother Jerome but the Chief.

Dee Van Bebber and I picked up 2.04 master points by winning at bridge with a score of 70.83%, my first time reaching that milestone.  We had a bye in the final round, so I left early and didn’t find out until the following morning.  As usual, what I mulled over afterwards was a hand where I got set down two doubled when Joel Chandelier trumped my good Heart trick before I could get the lead and then took my Queen of Spades as a finesse failed.  I could have minimized the damage to down one, which would have given us a decent board.  We did extremely well, however, against the two runners-up, Chuck and Marcy Tomes and Terry Bauer and Dottie Hart.  A day later, Dee and Chuck finished first at Charlie Halberstadt’s game in Valpo. 

Ray Smock wrote:

    The president promised the nation a Christmas present and he will deliver it. It should be clear to all but the GOP that this monstrous tax bill was not written by Santa Claus and his elves, but by Satan and Mammon, Satan's dark prince of Money and Greed. I can't remember the last time I used Satan in a sentence. But this is bad stuff. You don't kick 13 million people off health insurance rolls and call it a Christmas present.

    You don’t give the richest people in America a trillion dollars in tax savings and talk about Christmas in the same breath.  This is the largest single legalized theft in the history of this country. It is a big gift of charity for the very group of people who don’t need it.  It is only Christmas for billionaires like our president. The Trump family will be most merry indeed this year.

    Trump has no idea what is in the bill. But he will sign it with glee and great fanfare. He will be proud of this colossal theft, the greatest in his long career as a con man.

As Hollis Donald wrote in the poem “This Town Won’t Last Too Long”:

Those on top are talking ill will

Efforts to kill the little man are going on still

At the library pot luck luncheon, I pigged out on rib tips, chicken wings, a tamale, baked beans, spaghetti, salad, and deli pickles (my contribution to the cause). Betty Wilson suggested I try the frappe she made, which turned out to be Sprite with rainbow sherbet added.  I sat with Scott Sandberg, who has asked me to participate in a roundtable discussion of Martin Luther King’s Nobel lecture, “The Quest for Peace and Justice.”  He has submitted a Humanities Grant proposal for that purpose.  Also at our table was Cele Morris, who worked in the library for 18 and is married to emeritus Physics professor John Morris.  She reported that he recently messed up a knee falling down steps; in a previous spill, he had injured the other knee.  I knew him when he was first hired and couldn’t believe it when he retired. I recall Dean Mark Hoyert reading off a list of Morris’ scholarly publications that produced laughs because they were so arcane, including “Fermionic and Bosonic Stabilizing Effects for Type I and Type II Dimension Bubbles” in Physical Review.

At the Holiday bowling banquet a day later, I sat with Gene Clifford, who explained why a record number of snowy owls have flocked to Northwest Indiana in what experts call an eruption.  They feast on lemmings, field mice, and other small rodents and often hang out atop utility poles.  Gene spotted one near Lake Shore Toyota in Porter. Henrietta Irwin joined us, and we compared cheese cake recipes since she brought one with cherries on top. We both had an ample share of corn pudding, a specialty of my great Aunt Grace.  I almost told her she reminded me of Aunt Grace, being about the same age as she was the last time I saw her, but feared she might take it the wrong way. I once told sister-in-law Maureen she looked somewhat like actor Robert Mitchum, a handsome guy with bedroom eyes, but she didn’t seem to appreciate the sentiment.  Electrical Engineer teammate Bob Robinson, who has been on the DL all year with cancer and pretty much incommunicado, came with his wife, who I’d never met.  She called me Professor Lane and said she’d earned a master’s degree in Mathematics from IUN during the 1980s.