Flight Paths

I ran (so far away)

Space age love song

You can run

Don’t ask me.”

         “A Flock of Seagulls” (1982)

A Flock of Seagulls, a Liverpool synth-pop New Wave band formed b keyboardist and lead singer Mike Score, had a wildly successful self-titled 1982 concept album about an alien invasion featuring such hits as “Space Age Love Song,” “Modern Love Is Automatic,” and “I Ran (So Far Away).”  A recent critic wrote: “Of course, everyone remembers this group now for singer Mike Score's ridiculous back-combed haircut and the fact that they are mentioned in Pulp Fiction. So now they're kind of cool, but in the early 1980s it was a different story.”  A character in Pulp Fiction gets the nickname Flock of Seagulls because of his haircut.

VU professors Allison Schuette and Liz Wuerffel asked me to participate in an Oral History Association conference session in Salt Lake City in October dealing with their Flight Paths project, which envisions an interactive documentary website.  The proposal states: “[Wuerffel and Schuette] will play excerpts from their 26-minute audio documentary on the changing racial and economic demographics of Gary and Northwest Indiana. ‘Chorus of Voices’ re-presents residents’ memories of migration, neighborhood life, the rise of black political power and opportunity in the 1960s, the ‘flight’ of white residents and businesses to the suburbs, and deindustrialization. Voices in each chorus do not always agree; no single chorus is completely comprehensive. By interweaving the oral histories of black and white residents of Northwest Indiana—some of whose families stayed in Gary, some of whose left—the documentary suggests that remembered experience creates a conflicted historical portrait.” 

Wuerffel and Schuette began conducting oral histories of Valparaiso University students for a “Welcome Project” and then expanded its scope to include testimony from Valpo residents (many of whom had once lived in Gary) as well as those presently living in Gary.  I have spoken in their classes, taken them on a tour of neighborhoods in Glen Park and Miller, introduced them to community organizers, and welcomed them to IUN’s Calumet Regional Archives.  Recently, due to their interest in the history of Merrillville, I put them in touch with Lake County Auditor John Petalas, a former student who has intimate knowledge of that city on Gary’s southern border, formed in reaction to Richard Hatcher’s election, despite the existence of a buffer zone ststute designed to prevent such a development.  Speaking by phone to Petalas, I filled him in on “Flight Paths, and he reiterated his intention to donate an extensive collection of Region campaign buttons to the Archives.  They will make an excellent exhibit in one of the library/conference center’s first floor glass cases.  

Interviewed By Alison Schuette for Flight Paths, Brandi Casada spoke of being bussed to Glen Park during the 1960s:

    From about, say, 9th Avenue back to about 25th, and from the East Side of Gary up to Broadway was black area. That was where most of the black people lived. The West Side at that time was predominantly white. And Glen Park was predominantly white. So, blacks were kind of closed in in that one little area. We moved to the West Side of Gary, and Glen Park was still predominantly white because we were bussed from the West Side when there was forced integration. The first year I was bussed to Webster School in fifth grade. I was among the first group of students bussed for integration. A principal, Ruth Deverick, had two meetings: she called in the parents of the white students and the parents of the black students prior to school. And she said, “Now, we are coming together as a school—a united school—we are not going to have problems this year.”And that school year went smoothly. And then they got rid of her. And the next year, we had a new principal, and that was not his mindset. And it was chaotic almost the whole year. I often wonder now as I reflect on that, was that the mindset of the administration? Because they had to know that under her guidance, there were no problems, and they moved her, and moved him in, and he had a totally different mindset, and there were problems all year.  We went on from there to Bailly junior high school, and it kind of continued. You know, we were in school together, but we were separated.

    That was 1968, the year that Martin Luther King died, and we were very upset about it, and the school system kind of felt—we felt like it was just incidental to them. They did not care. So, we wanted some acknowledgment that this had happened, whether it be some type of assembly, even something said over the intercom. But they refused to do anything. They just acted like it had never happened, or like it was of no importance…. There were several of us who led a walkout, and we left. Now, Bailey School was quite a distance from where we lived because that was in Glen Park over on Georgia Street, and we were normally bussed home. But we walked that day. We walked home to show our solidarity behind the death of Dr. King. We were just happy that we were able—you know, we felt empowered by walking out and saying that we are showing how we feel about the death of Dr. King, whether or not you feel at all about it. There were no consequences. You know, no one was punished for it. I guess at that point, it was like, “If we don’t talk about it, it didn’t happen. And just go from there.”

 photo by Paul Kaczoha

I considered staying home because the temperature was right at zero, but reconsidered after noticing weather predictions for next week were even worse. I wore four layers and a scarf, first time in my memory – Toni had to show me how to wrap it.  I completed my final condo meeting minutes after 8 years as secretary on the board.  At the annual meeting we voted to reduce the board’s size from seven to five members. Since my term was up and we had volunteers, former president Ken Carlson and neighbor George Schott, to join the three remaining members, I was able to retire, at least temporarily.

Facebook is now being blamed not only for spreading misinformation that helped Trump win election but for allowing Russian agents to invent fake news that bore some responsibility for the Great Britain Brexit vote to quit the European Union. I still use Facebook, mainly to enjoy photos from relatives and keep in touch with high school friends LeeLee Minehart and Dave Seibold, but it has become increasingly littered with ads. Opening it, I found a “sponsored” (whatever that means) pitch from Salesforce, Choice Hotels, Medicare Supplement, and Ford Motor Company.  Fred McColly posted this comment (on Facebook): “2018 was a mess for Facebook.  In March news broke of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which exposed the private data of 87 million users.  And in December headlines announced that private photos had been leaked for 6.8 million users.”  On the up side, virtually every week Jim Spicer posts a humorous tale.  Here’s his latest:

  A couple, both age 78, went to a sex therapist's office. The doctor asked, “What can I do for you?” The man said, “Will you watch us have sex?”The doctor looked puzzled, but agreed.  When the couple finished, the doctor said, “There's nothing wrong with the way you have sex,”and charged them $50. This happened several weeks in a row. The couple would make an appointment, have sex with no problems, pay the doctor, then leave. Finally, the doctor asked, “Just exactly what are you trying to find out?” “We're not trying to find out anything,”the husband replied. “She's married and we can't go to her house. I'm married and we can't go to my house. The Holiday Inn charges $90. The Hilton charges $108. We do it here for $50...and I get $43 back from Medicare.”

The government shutdown has now lasted over a month, thanks to Trump’s imbecility.  Unpaid air traffic controllers are further stressed by dangerous drones that have been spotted near airports, causing shutdowns recently in Newark and London.  Drones interfered with pilots fighting California wild fires; one almost struck a medical helicopter in Dallas.  Imagine drones in the hands of domestic terrorists. 

In a South China Evening Post article titled “Why the world’s flight paths are such a mess”   Marco Hernandez wrote: “Pilots cannot just fly wherever they want.  Apart from technical and practical matters like waypoints and the Earth’s natural jet streams, there are also man-made constraints such as political, legal and financial restrictions on airspaces and flight paths.”

 Ring-tailed gulls near BP refinery

Dylan Kerr’s New Yorker article “Birds of a Feather” included an interview with designer Rebeca Mendez, who curated a New York’s Cooper Hewitt Museum show featuring avian art. Mendez said, “We are setting our boundaries tighter and tighter – we are entrenching in our location.  Birds represent incredible freedom.”  Commenting on current world affairs, Mendez stated: “Bird migration is a constant flow. The earth is screaming at us in all possible ways, ‘Migration is the way to go.’”  Flocks of ring-tailed gulls found on the southern shores of Lake Michigan as well as area parking lots migrate south in winter to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

At Hobart Lanes my 480 series helped the Electrical Engineers win two games from Fab Four.  We started with a one-point lead over two other Mel Guth Seniors teams so we probably dropped out of first place, with our clean-up bowler in Florida for the next six weeks and Melvin Nelson on the DL.  Both teams had more splits than normal and left plenty of seven or ten pins on apparent strikes, but my ancient ball came through most of the time, so I finished well above my average.  Afterwards, Joe Piunti rushed off to watch his granddaughter Kaitland Cherry play in a Hebron High School basketball game that apparently got postponed due to inclement weather.

 Kaitland Cherry

My Way

“I've lived a life that's full
I've traveled each and every highway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way”

         “My Way,” Paul Anka

“My Way” was originally a 1967 French song, “Comme d’Habitude” (“As Usual”).  Paul Anka wrote English lyrics expressly for Frank Sinatra, whose recording became a hit and thereafter his signature song. Elvis Presley covered it on the 1973 album “Aloha from Hawaii,” and it became a staple at his live shows, as well as Anka’s.  The Sex Pistols recorded a punk parody version with profane and nonsensical lyrics (i.e.,“To think, I killed a cat, and may I say, oh no, not their way”).  The final lines: “The record shows, I’ve got no clothes, and I did it my way.”  Martin Scorsese used the Sex Pistols rendition at the end of “Goodfellas,” as credits rolled.

  Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols  

Grandson James may perform “My Way” at a Portage H.S. Outstanding Student competition. I assume he’s familiar with the Sinatra version, but I told him that at Omar Farag’s Elvis Tribute shows, when the final performer sings “My Way,” women rush the stage to get scarves from “Elvis,” emulating The King’s female fans over 40 years ago.  I’d love it if James did an Elvis impression – or, even better Sid Vicious.  When Dave (whose high school nickname was Sid) was at Portage, he and his buddies appeared as the Sex Pistols in an air band contest and got disqualified.

 Al Samter and Mike Olszanski, circa 1974

A relative of Al Samter saw his name on my blog and asked for more information.  I replied that he was a labor activist, poker player, pipe smoker, and jazz expert who died from throat cancer.  A New Yorker who moved to Gary as a steel mill “colonizer” for the Communist Party, Samter would show up at a mutual friend’s house at Christmas bearing gifts and two geese for the hostess to cook. After he retired from the mill, Al Samter was a district leader in S.O.A.R, (Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees) and hosted a dinner dance at McBride Hall that went from 4 p.m. until 8.  At the time we poked fun at the hours, but now it makes perfect sense.  He and an African-American deejay took turns spinning records, alternating between jazz and rhythm ‘n’ blues.  At one point Samter played a Dixieland number and led the crowd in a strut around the room.  He had class.  Mike Olszanski and I interviewed him for our Steel Shavingsissue “Steelworkers Fight Back: Rank and File Insurgency in the Calumet Region during the 1970s” (volume 30, 2000).  Here is part of what he told us:

  After the war I had worked for a small record store in New York and then got laid off.  The big chain stores starting reducing prices on phonograph records, which forced mom-and-pop stores to cut back.  I was on and off the unemployment rolls and finally decided to make use of my G.I. Bill of Rights and get into an apprentice program.

 Everybody was going into the big industries, so in April of 1949 I came to Northwest Indiana and applied for an apprenticeship.  They didn’t have any such programs open but were hiring for the summer.  They sent me out to the coal chemical plant, as a pump operator.  The summer job turned into a permanent job.  I stayed 37 years.  I never did get into the apprenticeship program.  My job, especially after they built a new chemical coal plant in 1955, paid more than I would have gotten in any of the craft jobs.  My department took light oils which come off the coke-making process and separated and distilled them into the industrial oils benzene, toluene, and xylene.

  I became a shop steward and got acquainted with African-American Curtis Strong, who was running for grievance committeeman. I wrote some of his material. After he got elected, I became a shop steward.  One of my jobs was to sign up new members.  There were still some old-timers who were not union members, but I kept signing them up until our department was 100% union.

  Like Curtis Strong, I belonged to the caucus that supported John Mayerick, who became President of 1014 and formed a Civil Rights Committee.  I became its secretary. At one point we decided to have a joint civil rights committee meeting at Local 1014’s headquarters.  Among those attending were Fred Stern from Youngstown and Jim Balanoff from Inland.  At that point the International decided they better recognize us, so they sent somebody in from the International.  It was one of the things that pushed them into having a civil rights division. 

When I published a Shavingsissue on the Calumet Region during the Postwar years (volume 34, 2003), I dedicated it to a dozen “Old Lefties,” including Al Samter, who kept the faith in a time of repression. Class-conscious activists for civil rights, trade unionism, and peace, they realized the need for a fundamental reordering of wealth and power if the nation were to remain true to its historic ideals.

I was pleased that Garrett Peck’s “The Great War in America” had plentiful quotes from acerbic H.L. Mencken, a second-generation German-American and Baltimore Sun columnist critical of American participation in the conflict and the resultant abridgement of civil liberties. He supported women’s suffrage, and expressed outrage at the postwar Red Scare roundup of radicals.  He ridiculed the Eighteenth Amendment, Prohibition. In “A Carnival on Buncombe,” Mencken wrote: “Between [Woodrow] Wilson and his brigades of informers, spies, volunteer detectives, perjurers and complaisant judges, and the Prohibitionists and their messianic delusion, the liberty of the citizen has pretty well vanished in America.”  As Warren Gamaliel Harding was on his way to victory in the 1920 Presidential election, Mencken sneered:“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by an outright moron.”

In an epilogue, Peck, on the advisory council of the Woodrow Wilson House  at 2340 S Street, mentioned that Wilson lived out his remaining years in a Washington, D.C., townhouse located in the fashionable Kalorama neighborhood. The outgoing President purchased a replica of the White House Lincoln bed and kept his oval office chair and gifts received during his Presidential trip to Europe, including a huge tapestry.  Peck added:

  Along with the transport vans carrying Wilson’s furniture was a truck bearing a special cargo: their wine collection. Prohibition had made the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol illegal, but not its possession. Wilson had no desire to leave behind his collection for President Harding, who was known to throw a good party. “In the shipment was a whole barrel of fine Scotch whiskey, besides a variety of rare wines and liquors,”the New York Times reported.

 George Remus

I learned from author Garrett Peck that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled title character Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby” (1925) after Cincinnati bootlegger George Remus.  An actor assumes the role of Remus in the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.”  Born in Berlin, Germany, and growing up in Chicago, Remus became a pharmacist and then a lawyer who took advantage of a loophole in the Volstead Act permitting alcohol to be sold in drug stores for medicinal purposes. He invested heavily in both pharmacies and distilleries.  After moving to Cincinnati, he’d have his own men “steal” liquor from the distilleries and resell it for huge profits.  Remus threw lavish parties at his mansion, nicknamed the Marble Palace.  One featured a 15-piece orchestra and aquatic dancers wearing scandalous bathing suits.  At another he gave diamond stickpins to male guests and new automobiles to their wives. His extravagant lifestyle attracted the attention of federal agents.  Remus spent two years in prison for bootlegging, during which time wife Imogene and her lover cheated him of his fortune, and she filed for divorce.  He had left properties, stock, and bank accounts in her name.  Freed, he fatally shot Imogene and, pleading temporary insanity, was acquitted.  Thereafter, Remus lived modestly in Covington, Kentucky and died from a stroke in 1952 at age 77.    

 Tom Brady

Even though I was rooting for New Orleans and Kansas City in the conference championships, the contests, both going into overtime, could not have been more exciting. When Rams kicker Greg Zuerlein nailed a 57-yarder, Bears fans couldn’t help but think that could have been their fate had they signed a competent place kicker.  As Tom Brady led the Patriots on consecutive clutch TD drives, one couldn’t help but admire the 41-year-old future Hall of Famer.  New England’s presence will give me a team to root against in Super Bowl LIII. Still, I feel sorry for Saints QB Drew Brees and Chiefs coach Andy Reed, who had several good years with the Eagles.

 Charles Eastman

The HBO movie “Bury My Heart in Wounded Knee” not only traced the cruel fate befalling the Lakota tribes during the late nineteenth century but described the life of Hakadah, a Santee Lakota tribesman who took the Christian name Charles Eastman and graduated from Boston University medical school.  At Pine Ridge Reservation in 1890, he cared for survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre.  He was subsequently dismissed by the Bureau of Indiana Affairs for criticizing its policies toward Native-Americans. He married reformer Elaine Goodale, and the couple had six children.

Season 3 of “True Detective” has Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff teaming up as Arkansas troopers Wayne Hays and Roland West on a case involving the murder of a 12 year-old and the disappearance of his 10 year-old sister.  During one racially charged exchange Ali tells his partner that he is not one of his tribe.

 David Parnell

I spoke in David Parnell’s freshman seminar on the history of IU Northwest.  IU Extension classes began a hundred years ago and expanded rapidly during the 1920s.  School Superintendent William A. Wirt started Gary College in 1932 intended for enable students unable to go away to college to earn a two-year degree. Classes met at Horace Mann after high school hours.  After World War II, Gary College ended, and IU Extension classes met at Seaman Hall in downtown Gary, as well as a facility in East Chicago until the move to its present Glen Park location in 1959.  Eight years later, IU Northwest, as it came to be called, held its first graduation ceremony as a four-year institution, outdoors, near its one building, Gary Main, (later renamed Tamarack and condemned after the 2008 flood). I explained that Kern and my collaboration combined social and administrative history, with Paul relying on written sources while I provided oral testimony both from student interviews and my own.  Parnell’s acclaimed book, “Justinian’s Men: Careers and Relationships of Byzantine Army Officers, 518-610,” takes a similar approach.  When I mentioned that to Parnell, he replied: “​That's true! I would become even more of a social historian if I could conduct oral interviews on ancient Byzantines. What a treat that would be.”

Because the class will be discussing future possibilities for IUN, I brought up past debates over possible merger with Purdue Calumet.  One student asked whether doing recent history led to controversies, so I brought up incidents involving my Steelworkers Tales and cedar Lake issues and the Anne Balay case, Another question involved Glen Park student hangouts, and I brought up taking evening classes to Jenny’s Café and the Country Lounge in Hobart.  Even though desegregation was occurring in Glen Park, several bars along Broadway were still hostile toward African-American customers.

Rolling Thunder

“You might as well expect rivers to run backwards, as any man born free to be contented penned up.  Let me be a free man and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.” Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain (Chief Joseph) 

Young Chief Joseph

Rolling Thunder

Operation Rolling Thunder represented a dramatic escalation of the Vietnam War, as Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1965 ordered an intense bombing campaign against North Vietnam that lasted four years and though ineffective in shortening the war resulted in untold Vietnamese casualties andmany American pilots, including John McCain, being shot down and taken prisoner.  It became the name of a Vietnam veterans advocacy group. In the mid-Seventies Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue toured extensively with a supporting cast that included Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn.  Rolling Thunder is also the name of a Six Flags roller coaster.

Garrett Peck’s “The Great War in America” argues convincingly that World War I (as the conflict was called only after World War II) was the most momentous event of the twentieth century, breaking up the Ottoman and Austria-Hungarian empires, spawning Bolshevism, destabilizing the Middle East to this day, killing millions, sparking Third World nationalism, and, due to defects in the Versailles Treaty, sowing the seeds of World War II. It marked a vast increase in the power of the federal government and America’s “coming of age” in world affairs despite an isolationist backlash domestically and led to postwar runaway inflation, strikes, race riots, a Red Scare, and an ignoble experiment, Prohibition. In the introduction Peck wrote:

  War leaves a scar on a nation’s psyche, one that never fully heals. . . Arlington, Virginia, is my home, and every Memorial Day it witnesses tens of thousands of Vietnam war veterans who descend on the nation’s capital in the motorcycle caravan known as Rolling Thunder.  The veterans seek an answer to unanswerable questions: What good is war, and is the sacrifice worth it?

General William Westmoreland (Waste-more-land) once claimed with unintended irony that life was cheap in Asia.  During the World War II Japanese occupation of Vietnam, approximately 4 million peasants died of starvation because their crops went to feed foreigners.  Never again, nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh vowed, would Vietnam be at the mercy of a foreign power.

Charlie Halberstadt and I finished fourth in bridge with 52 percent, just one bad hand from second place.  In another we scored an unbelievable 2800 points.  An opponent opened one Heart and Charlie overcalled a Spade. The player to my right bid 2 Diamonds.  I held 8 points, including three Spades and five Hearts, King, Queen, Jack, nine, deuce. I bid 2 Hearts, alerting Charlie that I had that suit covered in case  he wanted to bid No Trump.  The player on my left, thinking I was indicating a void in Hearts, eventually bid 4 hearts, doubled and re-doubled.  We set the contract down 5. 

I gave Dee Browne a copy of Barbara Walczak’s Newsletter that paid tribute to Dee Van Bebber.  She was grateful, feeling she needed closure since there were no funeral services for her friend.   Terry Bauer, who finished first with partner Dottie Hart, mentioned that a car dealer asked him to fill out a survey that included this surprising question, “Do you identify as male, female or other?”  Earlier in the day I got my driver’s license renewed, needing a passport and multiple documents showing my social security number and proof of where I lived.  Ridiculous. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles folks were very nice and, after all, didn’t make up the stupid regulations.

Miller’s Aquatorium Society will show movies as part of its 2019 fundraising efforts, including the 1927 film “Wings” (the first ever to win an Oscar, starring Clara Bow and with a minor role for Gary Cooper), “Red Tails” (about the Tuskegee Airmen), and Fellini’s “Strada,” starring Anthony Quinn. According to Greg Reising, when Myrna Loy received her award for best actress, she claimed that the statue resembled her Uncle Oscar, and the name stuck.  The ten=dollar contribution will evidently include free popcorn.

A New York Times puzzle clue was “one keeping a secret metaphorically.”  Toni got it: clam.

Chicagoan Barbara Proctor died, Maurice Yancy informed me.  Before founding the largest black-owned advertising agency in America, Proctor worked for Vee-Jay Records writing liner notes. In 1962 she negotiated a contract with EMI Records in London obtaining for Vee-Jay the rights to 30 songs by the Beatles, then an unknown commodity. She grew up in a “shotgun shack” without electricity or running water in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

Also dead at age 71 is Hobart H.S. and Notre Dame football great Bob Kuechenberg, a six-time All-Star guard with the Miami Dolphins who played on the 1972 undefeated team that went on to beat the Washington Redskins, 14-7, in Super Bowl VII. Washington’s only points were the result of a blocked field goal attempt in the final minutes.  In 2013 when President Barack Obama invited the 1972 Dolphins to the White House, Kuechenberg declined to attend, citing political difference.  What a jerk.

At bowling, with Melvin Nelson being on the DL with a bum shoulder, Terry Kegebein in Florida, and Frank Shufran serving as a pallbearer at a friend’s funeral, half-blind Dick Maloney filled in admirably, as did sub Bob Fox, wearing a Marvin Harrison Colts jersey.  After splitting the first two games, we were up 13 pins when the final bowlers, Bob Fox and Larry Hamilton bowled in the tenth frame.  Hamilton struck out, meaning Fox needed to mark and then pick up 8 pins for us to prevail.  He left the 6-10 but converted the spare and ended the series with a strike.

After summarizing a multitude of connections between Trump and the Russians in an essay titled “An American President as Russian spy,”  Ray Smock concludes:

  Trump may not even comprehend that he has acted as a tool of the Russian government. He sees Russia as a cash cow. I do not think national security concerns ever entered Trump’s head. He was and is thinking about personal riches from Russia. He thinks in transactions, not in long-term strategies. He likes the exotic thrills of a country where the rich and powerful don’t have to play by all the rules and laws of the United States. He sees himself as the American version of an unfettered Russian oligarch. He likes people who bully their way through life with their money and their power. He has a natural affinity for Russia. Russia treats him nice.

 front, Wayne Carpenter, Laverne Niksch; back, Yuan Hsu, Dave Bigler

Laverne Niksch achieved the rank of Ruby Life Master, having accumulated over 1,000 master points. Fellow bridge players celebrated with a cake provided by Trudi McKamey.  His partner Wayne Carpenter told Newsletter editor Barbara Walczak: “We started out playing bridge in college and played party bridge for over 30 years with our long-time friends. After graduating with a degree in “retirement,” we play as partners two or three times a week and plan on playing until we get it right. This has been a great ride, and I can’t think of a more deserving person.”

 Portage lakefront erosion by Kyle Telechan

Meteorologists are predicting that a monster blizzard is on its way over the weekend, with snowfall reaching 12 inches including lake effect.  So far, ice mounds have not formed on Lake Michigan’s southern shore but that may change with temperatures plunging into the single digits.  Lakefront erosion has already decimated beaches in Portage and Ogden Dunes, with man-made development hindering the ability of nature to replenish itself.

I might teach a once-a-week Fall History seminar at Valparaiso University dealing with the Calumet Region.  I have already spoken to VU classes taught by Liz Wuerffel and Heath Carter and will be lecturing this semester in a Sociology course and next semester in one of Allison Schuette’s.  I’d assign Powell A. Moore’s “The Calumet Region: Indiana’s Last Frontier” and Ramon and Trisha Arredondo’s “Maria’s Journey” and give students Shavingsissues on Gary, Portage, Cedar Lake, and Hammond.  They’d do a paper on a key event in one particular community’s history.  A second paper, a family history, would cover three generations and fit in with VU’s Flight Paths project, of which I am a consultant. I envision first summarizing topics such as the Region’s place in Indiana history and the coming of industrialization, and then have sessions on Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, Whiting, Cedar Lake, Chesterton, Portage, and Valparaiso with guest appearances and student presentations.  There will be a class devoted to family history and a possible field trip to Gary and perhaps Cedar Lake’s museum at the old Lassen Hotel.  

Jonathyne Briggs invited me to attend a History department meeting.  I replied in the affirmative and added that whenI saw him and others at the December Holiday celebration, it hit me how much I missed running my old colleagues on a regular basis at Hawthorn Hall. I also plan to bring up these two topics:

1.   Calumet Regional Archives: As I’m sure you know, the Archives is in disarray due to plans to fix the antiquated library heating and cooling system, but plans are afoot to open up some space for researchers on the second floor.  This is the latest from Steve McShane:

Due to the high costs of moving to Arts on Grant, that plan has been scratched.  The latest plan is to move the entire Archives to the library's second floor.  We mapped it out yesterday, and there appears to be enough square footage.  Physical Plant would create two "rooms", one very large, and one somewhat smaller.  They would be secured with locked doors and accessible, including a small space for our researchers to use the materials.  Before that plan can be enacted, however, the folks at IUB have to be satisfied that the temperature/humidity environment would be acceptable for archival materials.  Our head of Physical Plant, Gary Greiner, said he can provide data on the second floor's environment, but he hasn't sent it out yet.  Also, the space person from Bloomington is coming up next week, along with a rep from Iron Mountain, a company specializing in moving archives, to look over the situation.

2.   Indiana History course: I was disappointed that Steve McShane decided to cease teaching the course and that the replacements are only of the on-line variety.  Neither instructor has bothered consulting McShane or me regarding the content or research possibilities in the Archives, and I suspect that there is no longer emphasis on Northwest Indiana, as before.  I may be teaching a History seminar on the Calumet Region at Valparaiso University in the Fall.  Several instructors have made Gary and nearby communities an integral part of their course and already have had me as a guest lecturer.  Perhaps in the future I might consider teaching a similar course at IUN, maybe in conjunction with Chris Young,  although a previous effort to offer a Liberal Studies course died on the vine.  It had been my hope that Young’s interest in Hoosier history might eventually lead him to teach that subject, but his present duties apparently make that impractical, given the need to offer other upper division courses in his area of specialization

Froebel School

“Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the expression of what is in the child’s soul,” Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852)

Gary School Superintendent  William A. Wirt had the city’s kindergarten through 12^thgrade “unit” schools named for admirable educators, beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson and continuing with Friedrich Froebel and Horace Mann.  Once known as the immigrant school, Froebel attracted visitors from all over the world intrigued by Wirt’s progressive educational “work-study-play” philosophy.  During the 1960s its graduates included future educator and State Representative Vernon Smith, responsible for a historical marker at the site where the historic school was demolished, and jazz pianist Billy Foster, who will appear on the cover of Steel Shavings,volume 48.  In its editor’s note I wrote:

  On March 19, 1965, Billy Foster (playing sax) and his Royal Imperials won a citywide talent show at Gary’s Memorial Auditorium representing Froebel High School. Famous as the home town of Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five, Gary has a long, proud musical tradition even though the Gary Conservatory “Music Man” professor Harold Hill claimed to have graduated from in never existed.  From its earliest years, music was an integral part of Superintendent William A. Wirt’s work-study-play curriculum.  Gary’s many ethnic groups produced a rich variety of musical strains, from Mexican mariachi bands to Serbian choral and tamburitza groups.  Metropolitan Opera tenor James McCracken, a Gary native, sang in a church choir as did the Spaniels and other doo wop groups recorded on Vivian Carter’s Vee-Jay label that originated in Gary.  The city’s rich jazz tradition dates to dance halls and nightclubs that sprang up during the “Roaring Twenties” and flowered during the 1940s.  At a young age jazz pianist Foster became familiar with local bandleader Tom Crump and horn player Art Hoyle.  In addition to teaching at Gary schools (primarily Charles R. Drew Elementary) for over 30 years as well as Valparaiso University, Foster performed with his own group, the Billy Foster Trio, as well as with such distinguished luminaries as Art Farmer, Slide Hampton, Tommy Harrell, Clark Terry, Bobby Watson, and many others. At present Foster hosts the WGVE radio show “Billy Foster Jazz Zone” and teaches a Senior College course at IU Northwest, whose Calumet Regional Archives recently started a collection in his name.

Froebel School gained notoriety in 1945 when many white students went out on strike just a month after World War II ended, protesting the policy of sending African Americans to their institution while most other Gary schools remained segregated.  In an effort to reduce tensions a liberal organization, Anselm Forum, invited singer Frank Sinatra and heavyweight champion Joe Louis to participate in a Tolerance program.  Sinatra’s appearance made national news, but Louis was unable to come due to other commitments.  I mention the incident in a forthcoming Traces article titled “Joe Louis and Gary.”  In “Gary’s First Hundred Years” I wrote that football coach Johnny Kyle became interim principal while Richard Nuzum was temporarily forced to step aside in the face of student pressure and school board cowardice.  Future IUN Performing Arts chair Garrett Cope was a student at Froebel at the time and could perform in musical programs but not in theater productions.

Twenty years ago I published a Steel Shavings issue (volume 27) titled “Froebel Daughters of Penelope,” about five Greek-Americans who attended Froebel during the 1940s, in some cases starting in elementary school, including Constance Girasin.  She recalled:

  At Froebel we were exposed not only to the three r’s but to sewing, cooking, orchestra, band, swimming, foreign language classes, wood shop, machine shop, a college-bound curriculum, and a whole line of business classes  such as shorthand, bookkeeping, and typing. The “Work” part of “Work, Study, Play” consisted of getting students ready for “life.”  Shops on the far west part of our building were for boys only, and girls didn’t so much as enter the.  However, we would pass them on our way to the band room.

  Twice Mrs. Jones was our history teacher, once in eighth grade and again in eleventh.  She was very soft-spoken and did 98 percent of her teaching sitting behind a desk.  She was a little too nice for us adolescents.  We were forever asking to be excused for band practice.  One day she came up with an expression I’ll never forget: “Constance, you are not going to earn your living baton-twirling.”  That’s true, but at the time I thought baton twirling was very important.  In my senior yearbook Jim Taneff jokingly wrote, “Constance, you are not going to earn your living by baton-twirling.”  

Randy Roberts’ “Joe Louis: Hard Times Man” (2010) begins with this quote from “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” by novelist Ernest J. Gaines: “When times get really hard, really tough, He always sends you somebody.  In the Depression it was tough on everybody, but twice as hard on the colored, and He sent us Joe.  Joe Louis was to lift the colored people’s heart.”  Roberts described the jubilation in 1938 among black people in all walks of life, from Harlem intellectuals to Gary steelworkers, listening on the radio and rejoicing when Louis defeated German Max Schmeling by knockout in the first round.  In Plains, Georgia, several dozen cotton and peanut field hands gathered on the front lawn of their boss Earl Carter, who had positioned his radio near an open window for their benefit.  Roberts wrote:

  Young Jimmy Carter remembered that they had listened to the fight without a word spoken or a cheer uttered, then filed away quietly, crossing a dirt road and a railroad track and entering a house out in a filed.  “At  that point pandemonium broke loose inside the house, as our black neighbors shouted and yelled in celebration of Louis’ victory.  But all the curious, accepted proprieties of a racially-segregated society had been carefully observed.”  Mister Earl’s “boys” knew “their place,”but in some way and for some period of time, Joe Louis had liberated them.  He had taken then to another place.

Roberts pointed out that in 1941 the three sports that mattered were horse racing (with Seabiscuit and Triple Crown winner Whirlaway, baseball (with Joe DiMaggio hitting in 56 straight games and Ted Williams batting .406), and boxing (with Gary’s “man of Steel” Tony Zale middleweight champ and Louis heavyweight champ).

Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin eulogized Bob Einstein, who played Funkhouser on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and, years before, “Super Dave” Osborne, “the master of not landing on his feet.”  I laughed out loud reading about bits I’d seen on Letterman.  With a deadpan delivery and mock seriousness, Einstein’s character became a parody of contemporary stuntman Evel Knieval whose feats always ended in failure, with Super Dave crushed, squashed or flattened like a pancake.  Rushin wrote:

  Osborne didn’t suffer the foolish questions of sports journalists.  When he fell off Toronto’s CN Tower, then the tallest man-made structure in the world, and landed face-down in a parking lot, sportscaster Mike Walden asked him how he felt. “Why are you talking to me?”Super replied.  “I’ve got a minute to live. I need an ambulance.  Help me, putz.”  An ambulance arrived, only to run Osborne over.

 Super Dave Osborne shortly before shot three times in 1980 bit

Portage English teacher Mr. Downes loved James’ paper on “Babbitt,” assigning it a grade of 98%.  His only criticism concerned verb tenses when quoting from the novel, something that I know from experience can be tricky.  At present the class, reading several chapters a day, is critiquing “Great Expectations” (1860) by Charles Dickens from Marxist and feminist perspectives.  Sounds like a great class.

A 16-letter crossword puzzle clue asked who was the lone American to win Pulitzers for both fiction and poetry. Toni had the first name, Robert, which enabled me to get Robert Penn Warren, author of two volumes of prize-winning poetry, “Promises” and “Now and Then,” and “All the King’s Men,” based on the career of Louisiana demagogue Huey Long and one of my favorites.

As I entered Jewel’s parking lot, Chesterton police were questioning a woman who evidently had broken into one of the cars in the lot.  Either someone spotted her in the act or she was caught on the store’s surveillance cameras.  Maybe an alarm went off.  Inside the employees were all abuzz.  As I left, the woman was being taken away in a fire department  vehicle.

Jeffery in middle

The Eagles jumped out to a 14-0 lead against favored New Orleans but got blanked the rest of the way.  With two minutes to go and down 20-14, Philadelphia was 30 yards away from pulling off an upset when a pass went through the hands of former Bears receiver Alshon Jeffery, enabling the Saints to run out the clock.  No miracle this time from QB “St. Nick” Foles, last year’s Superbowl MVP. There’s a statue of him (below) outside the stadium.  The Eagles bowed out like champions, barely losing  to hall of famer Drew Brees.

fast food for Clemson Tigers

As the government shutdown enters its fourth week with no end in sight, Trump served fast food to the NCAA champion Clemson Tigers during their trip to the White House. Also in the news: 13 year-old Jayme Closs escaped an abductor who killed her parents and held her capture for three months.  A 21 year-old in now in custody.  Locally, the trial of Portage mayor James Snyder commenced; he allegedly accepted $12,000 in return for awarding a contract to a towing company.