Hamlet

“Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.” Hamlet

Hamlet refers to a small rural settlement and, of course, is the title of one of William Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Because its hero was indecisive, which prevents Hamlet from acting until it’s too late, the word has been used to categorize those, such as 1952 and 1956 Democratic Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, who procrastinated, in Stevenson’s case, about throwing his hat in the ring. Historian Lance Trusty described early Munster, Indiana, as a hamlet during the 1860s with a general store opened by Jacob Munster with a postal station in back and serving as a gathering place for local farmers.  At bridge Naomi Goodman told me that Lance’s widow Jan is taking her granddaughter, who loves theater, to London and Stratford-upon-Avon to attend numerous plays.

 above, Jimbo, Riley Ash, Charlie, Kody Frasure; below, Savanna Sayiov, Tom Rea, Carre Allen

Oregon-Davis math teacher David Pinkham brought eight high school students to Charlie Halberstadt’s duplicate bridge game at Banta Center in Valparaiso. Most started playing about five months ago as part of a club Pinkham originated and seemed to enjoy themselves – or at least didn’t appear stressed out.  Charlie was initially worried many regulars wouldn’t be there because of a monthly women’s “Assembly” taking place at the same time; but he had enough for eight and a half tables, which enabled the four students pairs to play East-West, switching tables every three hands while the North-South pairs remained stationary.  Most were seniors except for Riley Ash, who was without her glasses, which had been busted, she said, during a game at Bible camp. Shvanna Sayiov plans to attend Miles Community College in Montana; her goal is to take part on rodeos.  Charlie and I finished second to Chuck Tomes and Dee Browne among the nine North-South pairs. After the final round former Portage math teacher Chuck Tomes stated, “Since I have the loudest voice, let me thank the Oregon-Davis students for enlivening the game.”  He received a round of applause from everyone. 

 depot in Hamlet, pre-1911

I had heard of the Oregon-Davis Bobcatas because of my interest in high school basketball but not Hamlet, Indiana, the town where it is located. Like Munster, Hamlet’s origins date back to the 1860s when John Hamlet established a post office.  Located in Starke County south of Valparaiso, the town of Hamlet had 800 residents according to the 2010 census.  In 2014 Oregon-Davis won the girls IHSAA state championship seven years after the Bobcats captured the boys title.

One reason I wanted to play in Valpo was to give the new Shavings to Rick Friedman (above) and Ed Hollander, whom students in Steve McShane’s class had interviewed for an oral history project. Barb Walczak’s Newsletter recently profiled Rick, an ophthalmologist for 40 years who learned bridge while in medical school but then took a break for nearly a half-century although, as he told Barb, he kept up by reading the bridge newspaper column.

At dinner Toni and I were talking about the recent images of a black hole, a phenomenon unknown when I was in school and until now never detected. Albert Einstein paved the way with the assertion that gravity was a warping of spacetime but initially was dismayed by German physicist Karl Schwarzchild’s prediction that when mass becomes too dense, it collapses into a black hole. Photographer Kyle Telechan wrote:“Scientists with the Event Horizon telescope have produced an image of a  black hole, or if we are being pedantic, the shadow of a black hole surrounded by particles in the accretion disk, some moving as fast as the speed of light.Totally ignoring how cool it is that we were able to get an image of a freaking black hole, how incredible is it that they were able to predict, correctly, what it would look like based on our understanding of black holes, without ever seeing one?It might be blurry, but it's the first of its kind. Can you imagine the images that'll be captured in our lifetimes?”

 Daniel Webster letter emancipating Paul Jennings; below, Webster

I finished “A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons.” Jennings finally achieved his freedom from Dolley Madison in 1847 after going to work for Massachusetts Senator (and two-time Secretary of State) Daniel Webster, who had purchased him the year before for $120.  Branding slavery “a great moral, social, and political evil,”Webster had previously helped others attain their freedom.  During the 1840s both Webster and former First lady Dolley Madison threw lavish parties in the nation’s capital that nearly bankrupted them.  In an effort to save the Union, Webster, known as “The great Expounder and Defender of the Constitution,” supported the Compromise of 1850, which abolished the slave trade in Washington, DC, but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act.  Abolitionists branded it the “Bloodhound Law,” and it tarnished Webster’s reputation.  For 14 years until his retirement Jennings worked at the pension office of the Interior Department, earning between $400 and $720 annually.  He died eight years later.

 Terry Kegebein and granddaughter

At Hobert Lanes after two terrible games I rolled a 180, as the Engineers salvaged a game from Frank’s Gang.  After a 170, Terry Kegebein quipped, “Another 60 pounds, and I’d have bowled my weight.”  Opponent Mike Reed, wearing a shirt reading “My mind is in the gutter,”took good-natured ribbing after he actually threw a ball in the gutter in an otherwise outstanding game. When he claimed to have exceeded his weight of 168 pounds, some teammates were disbelieving; but he is in good shape with no pot belly and noted that he has to keep his weight down due to high blood pressure.

 Archives holdings moved for renovation

Anne Balay is en route to St. Louis, where she has a new home and hopes to teach at a local college while beginning research on a third book about sex workers. Steve McShane updated Ron Cohen and me on the latest change of plans regarding what to do with Archives files while workers install new heating and air conditioning: “We had movers in yesterday, taking out all kinds of collections and materials from the CRA and moving them down the hallway to 2 “staging” rooms.   Phase 1 will begin in earnest on Monday, as contractors invade to tear down ceilings and remove lighting from this first half of the Archives:  reading room, large cage, and corner storage/work room.”  Still remaining in the main room are bookcases containing yearbooks and books about the Calumet Region, including Anne Balay’s pathbreaking accounts of LGBT steelworkers and long-haul truckers.

above, Anne's tattoo; below, Toni, Becca, Angie

We were all set to see James shine in the Portage H.S. senior musical, but a small fire that damaged the curtain caused its postponement.  Bummer! The previous evening Becca has honored at a ceremony for outstanding students.  Tomorrow Becca has a solo in Chesterton's talent show.

In the opening chapter of Saidiya Hartman’s “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” is this portrait of a turn-of-a- twentieth-century "ghetto girl" living in Africa Town, the Negro quarters of Philadelphia or New York:

 You can find her in the group of beautiful thugs and too fastgirls congregating on the corner and humming the latest rag, or lingering in front of Wanamaker’s and gazing lustfully at a fine pair of shoes displayed like jewels behind a plate-glass window.  Watch her in the alley passing a pitcher of beer back and forth with her friends, brash and lovely in a low-cut dress and silk ribbons; look in awe as she hangs halfway out of a tenement window, taking in the drama of the block and defying gravity’s downward pull.  Step onto any of the paths that cross the sprawling city and you’ll encounter her as she roams. Outsiders call the streets and alleys that comprise her world the slum.  For her, it is just the place where she stays.

Bent on using fear of immigrants as a primary campaign issue in 2020, Trump recently declared that the United States is filled up and doesn’t need any more newcomers, especially from south of the border.  Earlier he had expressed a preference for Norwegians over those from “shithole countries.”  The Washington Postrevealed that on two separate occasions the White House suggested migrants seeking asylum be bussed to sanctuary cities such as San Francisco, part of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional district, in retaliation for Democrats’ opposition to his draconian policies. When the idea was floated, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials responded that it was not feasible on several grounds.  Perhaps that is one reason Trump, at the advice of diabolical Stephan Miller, ordered a shake-up of top DHS leaders, beginning with Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. I predicted that the President, as Shakespeare once wrote in Hamlet,that he will be“hoisted on his own petard.”

 below, defeat of Spanish Armada

In the New YorkerJohn Lanchester reviewed Philipp Blom’s “Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed and Shaped the Present.”  I learned that for 300 million years the earth was entirely covered in ice and that 34 million years ago, the opposite was true and, in Lanchester’s words, “crocodiles swam in a fresh-water lake we know as the North Pole, and palm trees grew in Antarctica.”  For 110 years beginning in 1570, the temperature dropped almost 4 degrees Fahrenheit, which produced crop failures, disrupted feudalism, caused the Ming dynasty to fall, and contributed to such events as the defeat of the Spanish Armada (due to an unprecedented Arctic hurricane) and the 1666 London fire ( during an ultra-dry summer after a bitterly cold winter).  As Lanchester concluded, “Climate change changes everything.”