Retirement

“Retire from work but not from life.” Indian homeopathic physician M.K. Soni

Dr. M.K. Soni 

“Calvin and Hobbes” creator Bill Waterson once said, “There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”  When I first retired as a full-time History professor, it seemed an impossible task to fill the waking hours; but before long, that problem vanished.  I am now playing duplicate bridge twice a week with fellow retirees when not at my emeritus office at Indiana U Northwest writing or interviewing people for the Calumet Regional Archives.  When Charlie Halberstadt offered to teach octogenarian Don Giedemann backgammon, which he had expressed interest in, Don told him it would probably have to wait until winter when he wasn’t so busy.  At the Valparaiso bridge game Norm Filipiak noticed my Cancun shirt and mentioned staying at a resort near the Mexican coastal city years ago and renting a jeep to take his family to Mayan sites only to have a sudden downpour ruin the plans minutes after they started out. Banta Canter winners were the Fieldhouses with an impressive 68.5 percent.  Karen Fieldhouse is a retired Grand Rapids teacher."

NWI Times reporter Emily Schnipke interviewed Barb Walczak and 94-year-old Jennie Alsobrooks (above) for an article about duplicate bridge.  “There’s always more to learn,” Walczak said.  Alsobrooks learned to play at age 10 and took it up seriously after moving to Gary in 1948. Now living  in a Merrillville facility for seniors, she still plays regularly, telling Schnipke, “At this age I like the challenge.  And I like to win.”

Paulette LaFata-Johnson retired as IUN’s Director of Alumni Relations, a position legendary Region newsman Tom Higgins held until deemed too opinionated – not enough of a yes-man - for former chancellor Bruce Bergland’s taste. Paulette was a worthy successor and seemed not to age in all the years I’ve known her.  She played a key role in graduation ceremonies.  After the university unfairly terminated English professor Anne Balay, graduating senior Amanda Board attempted to present IU president Michael McRobbie a copy of my Steel Shavingsissue that outlined how she had been unfairly denied promotion and tenure.  As the precession began, Paulette snatched the magazine away from her, claiming students were not allowed to carry things with them on stage. While University Advancement held a small going away party for Paulette, there evidently are no plans for a university-wide retirement ceremony, once an annual tradition.

above, Amanda Marie in 2019; below, Stewart O'Nan

Stewart O’Nan’s “Henry Himself” takes place in 1998, the year, O’Nan reminds readers, that baby doctor Dr. Spock, Cher partner Sonny Bono,singing cowboy Gene Autry, and Cubs announcer Harry Caray died.  The novel is such a realistic account of a 75-year-old retiree’s daily routine that I was surprised to find that O’Nan was only in his fifties.  The author of 20 books, including non-fiction, O’Nan co-wrote with Stephen King “Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season” – when the Bosox broke the so-called Babe Ruth curse, capturing their first World Series since “The Bambino” was traded to the Yankees in 1919.  Led by Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, and Manny Ramirez, they swept the Cardinals after a miracle comeback in the playoffs against the Yankees, winning four in a row after dropping the first three games.  O’Nan’s fiction has been compared to John Updike in terms of capturing the essence of everyday life, an insight I concur with and that O’Nan regards as a compliment.

In a chapter titled “The Birthday Boy” Henry Maxwell asks wife Emily not to make a fuss, knowing that she will.  O’Nan writes: 

 He was going to be 75 – a big one, as they never tired of reminding him. He wasn’t embarrassed by his age, but, like living longer than his mother, neither did he see it as an accomplishment. Birthdays were for children. . . . Like a funeral, a birthday wasn’t yours but for the people who loved you.  Why resist the inevitable?  Better to acquiesce, and yet the prospect depressed him, he couldn’t say why. Seventy-five years was a long time 

Aware that family physician Joseph P. Runco M.D. recently succumbed at age 75 to brain cancer, Henry’s birthday wish was for another. 

In “Side Effects” O’ Nan lists the dozen or more medications Henry and Edith swallowed, in addition to antihistamines, analgesics, and ointments in the medicine cabinet.   Two I also take: metoprolol for blood pressure and Klor-Con as a potassium supplement to counter the side effects of the former.   O’Nan writes: “The size of the crosshatched plastic reminders he and Emily relied on – organized by the days of the week, further divided into slots for morning, noon and night like a tackle box – had become a morbid joke among the children.”  There was no mention of Cialis or Viagra among the many pills – in fact, sex seems to have been a thing of the past between Henry and Emily.  On their anniversary, when Henry gets amorous, Emily firmly puts the kibosh on the idea, more interested in knitting or reading.  After spending years at Westinghouse working on a project ultimately scrapped, he is reduced to using his engineering expertise on mundane household chores.

“Henry Himself” ends seemingly without drama, inconsequentially, on a snowy winter morning, as Henry takes Rufus on a walk to a neighborhood reservoir in Pittsburgh, and they spot a ring of deer lolling beneath an apple tree, who file into the woods when Rufus barks.  O’Nan writes: “Later he would see this as a premonition, but at the time he had no reason to assign it a darker meaning.” “Henry Himself,” it turns out, is a prequel to “Wish You Were Here” and “Emily Alone” that chronicle a widow’s life after Henry’s death, which evidently followed a period of convalescence, not suddenly, as Henry had hoped.  New York Times reviewer Ruth Franklin repeated these lines from “Wish You Were Here” describing Emily tormented by memories of their honeymoon to Niagara Falls when there with grandchildren:

    The sun made the day sharp and promising, as if they might drive forever, only stopping to make love and eat. It had seemed that way, though they must have waited in line like this, and sat at stoplights, and fussed with the luggage. She remembered only the best of them, compensation for the months she'd spent at Henry's bedside, memories that caught her walking across the living room or washing out her teacup at the sink, leaving her useless and fretful for the rest of the day.

June 27 would have been Midge’s birthday number 103.  She lived well into her hundredth year.  At her assisted living facility in Rancho Mirage, California book club members read “Fifty Shades of Grey,” of which she claimed to disapprove when I noticed it partially hidden in her bookcase. Back in the 1970s she got Howard to take her to the X-rated “Candid Camera” producer Allen Funt’s movie “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?” and hinted that my stepfather was not as amorous as she would like.  Of course, I wanted nothing to do with either topic.

VU professor Liz Wuerrfel posted “Just Got the Impression,” on the Welcome Project’s “Flight Paths” website. The unnamed retiree who describes himself as a former history major reflects on the rapid racial turnover of his childhood Gary neighborhood and laments how neighborhoods are no longer tight-knit and people are dependent on the automobile. I’d love to live in a city where driving a car would be unnecessary. Growing up in North Philadelphia, Toni took a streetcar, bus or train everywhere – to school, museums, and later her job at a downtown law firm.  Her mother never learned to drive; everything she needed was within walking distance in their Port Richmond Polish neighborhood.  Here is an excerpt from "Just Got the Impression":

   I grew up in the Tolleston area of Gary which was, at the time, very Germanic and some Polish. I went to St. John’s Lutheran Church and spent much of my time there.  We lived right across the street.  In addition to church activities, we had school activities: the sports programs, the social programs.  All of these made a significant difference in our sense of community. Friends were made and became solidified as a result of the closeness of everything.

   Back in the mid and late ‘60s we had a pastor named Norman Brandt. The neighborhood was changing because of the steel mill and other economic activity. And so he went pretty much door-to-door and started inviting all kinds of interesting people to attend church and eventually become members. He was probably one of the first activists in that area, speaking before the city council and sharing thoughts about how we should be a unified society regardless of our race.  But as the situation, economically and socially, changed and whites began to leave, the church became more and more African American. 

   Realtors would come into a neighborhood and say, “Better move now while your property is still worth something because when this neighborhood starts changing, property values will decrease and you’ll lose out on a lot of money.” And that eventually became illegal, but folks just felt, “Well, I’d better do as they say and turn my house over to the realtor and get rid of it while I move elsewhere.”

   So many people just heard about these problems; they didn’t really experience them. They were watching television, seeing all kinds of marches and rebellions across the country, and they just got the impression that the black culture was one that was antisocial. When we watched, on television, the funeral of Martin Luther King, you know, my uncles would say, “Oh, man, we can’t have this.”You know,“What is going on here? What’s happening to our society?”All they saw was the violence they thought was going to be widespread and come into Gary. And I guess the whole idea of being in the same neighborhood in the same church with black people was just something that they could not understand or tolerate.

     My parents moved from the Tolleston area to the Horace Mann district, which seemed to be changing more rapidly than Tolleston.  Residents were hearing all kinds of news about fights and violence, and they just got a little scared and moved to Merrillville or other suburbs.  In Merrillville, there was a black family living next door. My parents were fine with that, but they didn’t really communicate or socialize with that family. We’d say, “Hi,” over the fence and ask how things are going but not invite each other to a social event, you know, a marriage or birthday party. That was just not something we would do. Some of our former friends from St. John’s moved into that subdivision and we’d celebrate events with those families; but in terms of actually visiting the neighbor next door, that wasn’t done. The community was more outside of Merrillville. It was still at the church. It was still at the school for the kids.  And I see that still today. A lot of people just don’t have the neighborhood relationship that was once there forty, fifty years ago.

   It used to be that people could walk to downtown Gary or take a bus.  A car was not as prevalent as it became later on, but now it’s a car to the doctor’s, a car to the shopping mall, a car to an auto repair shop. And the use of the car, I think, has dramatically changed the way people live in a way that would be totally alien to previous generations.    

Widespread Panic

“I just spent sixty days in the jailhouse
For the crime of having no dough, no no
Now here I am back out on the street
For the crime of having nowhere to go”

    Robbie Robertson, “Shape I’m In” 

I heard a Widespread Panic song from their cleverly named live album “Light Fuse, Get Away” on WXRT’s Lin Brehmer morning show on the way to IUN.  A Southern rock band from Athens, Georgia, formed in 1986, Widespread Panic is famous for extended jams and often compared to the Grateful Dead.  At the first Bonnaroo festival in 2002, the band performed for 70,000 fans.  Their cover of “Ophelia” and “Shape I’m In” by the Band is a staple of live shows.  The opening lines of “Shape I’m In” go:

Go out yonder, peace in the valley
Come downtown, have to rumble in the alley
Oh, you don't know the shape I'm in

Dame Emma Thompson and the great American actor (“The World According to Garp,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Footloose”) John Lithgow star in the comedy drama “Late Night.”  Mindy Kaling wrote the screenplay and plays an Indian-American who joins the white male staff of a seemingly over-the-hill late-night hostess as a diversity hire. She reinvigorates the show and saves it from being cancelled.  Kaling’s character is fetching, original, and believable; she is initially insecure and cries frequently but has an iron will and loyalty to the truth.  Widespread panic ensues when a story breaks that the Thompson character (Katherine Newbury) has cheated on her husband (Lithgow as a professor emeritus suffering from Parkinson’s)) and had an affair with a staff member.  She is about to accept her show being cancelled when Molly Patel (Kaling) intervenes. Katherine’s confession speech reminded me of when David Letterman had to fess up to copulating with numerous underlings.

I’m 175 pages into Stewart O’Nan’s new novel “Henry Himself,” set in Pittsburgh and about a 74-year-old former Westinghouse engineer and World War II veteran who vacations yearly at Chautauqua with a wife and two married children with offspring of their own.  Taking place in the late 1990s, there’s mention of a Chevy Lumina, Ford Explorer, and the family Oldsmobile.  On rainy summer evenings at the family cabin, family members work on multi-piece puzzles or watch movies from Blockbuster while Henry’s wife Emily knits or reads. Each person has his or her favorite genre: science fiction, English dramas, old classics, comedies, even westerns. The first night they settle on “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  Henry’s mother, who’d been dead nearly 20 years, loved silly sayings such as “Lead on, MacDuff”(a misquote from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”) and “I see said the blind man”(one I say, including the punch line, “as he picked up his hammer and saw”).

Henry drinks Dewar’s (same brand of scotch as our friend Herb Passo), remembers eating animal crackers as a kid, and has a bum knee, arthritis in the hips, occasional back spasms, and frequent nighttime bathroom visits due to prostate problems, yet plays golf and is a gifted handyman around the house. When Emily forbids him to ascend to the cabin roof on a ladder to remove an obsolete antenna, his son botches the job.  So far everything is humdrum but charming, but one senses widespread panic lurking in the pages ahead.  Henry’s fingertips, for example, often go numb at night, as do mine.  Dr. Ostroski diagnosed my condition as carpel tunnel, but Henry frets that it is one of five signs of an impending heart attack. 

NWI TimesEditorial writer Marc Chase, partly responsible for Gary mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson’s recent primary election defeat, is continuing his misguided vendetta against her.  Why? Perhaps to play to the former Hammond Times’suburban readership. Chase ridiculed the Mayor’s reasonable plan to balance the city budget as hare-brained, only he misspelled the word as hair-brained.  He’s a lightweight as a muckraker with a flawed sense of proportion.

Over the weekend we played party bridge with our monthly group of eight (Toni was the winner), first dining at iconic, 90-year-old Teibel’s Restaurant in Schererville (Herb Passo ordered a Dewar’s. I had a Three Floyd’s IPA). Next evening Charlie Halberstadt and Naomi Goodman invited us to her place in Valparaiso; Charlie made a delicious pie that resembled cheese cake.  In between I met Ron and Nancy Cohen at Miller Beach Farmers Market, where we traded his old copies of New York Review of Booksfor the Tracesissue containing my article about “The Champ” Joe Louis.  He included a couple items for archivist Steve McShane, including a Post-Tribunearticle about the death of environmentalist Charlotte Read.

Jerry Clemons and Zeke Ronders

At Miller Beach Market entertainment was provided by the Nick Danger Band, a great blues/rock group featuring guitarists Jerry Clemons and Zeke Rongers and drummer Lannie Turner.  The band often plays with vocalist Nicole Jamrose and keyboardist Chris Wander. They jammed on such numbers as “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash, “Down Under” by Men at Work,” “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits, and an extended jam on “Cold Shot” by Stevie Ray Vaughan, which showed off virtuoso guitar playing by Clemons and Rongers. The first verse goes

Once was a sweet thang baby, held out love in our hands
Now I reach to kiss your lips the touch don't mean a thing
And that's a cold shot baby, yeah that's a drag
A cold shot baby, I let our love go bad

Band members kept repeating “Cold Shot, Cold Shot” between musical interludes.  What an unexpected delight to watch three professionals honing their craft.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Nick Danger Band included a Widespread Panic number or two in their impressive repertoire, perhaps “Pigeons” or “Can’t Get High.”

Loose cannon Trump vows utter destruction of Iran one day and an offer to meet with President Hassan Rouhani with no preconditions the next.  Either would probably end in a complete disaster. Rouhani called Trump, who caused the mess by pulling out of a nuclear agreement, retarded.

In a recent New York Review appeared Sean Wilentz’s essay on Michael Tomasky’s “If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved.”  Wilentz wrote:

 At least some of the current mess derives from the undemocratic apportionment of the US Senate – in which Wyoming, with just a half a million people, and California, with 40 million, each have 2 seats – and the hyperpartisan gerrymandering of House districts.

Tomasky quoted Franklin D. Roosevelt as remarking in 1944: “We ought to have two real parties, one liberal and one conservative.”  That’s what we’re stuck with today, which Tomasky regards as a serious problem. Wilentz prefers a statement FDR made in October 1936 at New York City’s Madison Square Garden when facing a Republican rightwing not unlike today:

 I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match.  I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.

Wilentz adds: “That’s the spirit.”

New York Review of Books Personals are always worth a read, although sadly less erotic as Baby Boomers have become senior citizens.  These appeared in the May 9 issue:

   NYC woman seeks young-at-heart gentleman (70s) with similar sensibilities for one more fling.

   Sarasota Florida man, 75, no children. Passions: long walks and talks, holding hands, sharing life.  Let’s meet.

   NYC attorney, well read and well-traveled, vigorous, eclectic, good listener.  Francophile.  But life is more.  Seeks woman to share the adventures.

History professor David Parnell, who taught an experimental freshman seminar last semester that he and Mark Baer had developed and had me speak about the history of IUN, announced that the class is now mandatory for freshman Arts and Sciences students.  Five sections are on the Fall schedule, including one taught by historian Jonathyne Briggs.  I wouldn’t mind contributing, perhaps assigning a journal or history project in the form of an interview.  Hopefully neither would induce widespread student panic, as oral presentations often do (I’ve had a student nearly faint on me, others clam up, and one literally left a puddle of sweat).  We shall see. 

James registered for Fall classes at Valparaiso University.  I’ll have to check if I know any of my grandson’s professors. During orientation parents were told, better if students not go home on weekends for at least the first month.  Toni has given James the same advice. He was considering bowling one more season at Inman’s, enabling me to take him to Culver’s afterwards, but it looks like that won’t happen - maybe for the best.

 James Wozniak

At Quick Cut in Portage for my bimonthly (every other month) haircut from Anna I ran into James Wozniak, who used to bowl in the Sheet and Tin league at Cressmoor Lanes on a team with Randy Marshall and his dad (“Big Randy”). The same age as Dave, James works shift work at U.S. Steel and has recently been putting in 56 hours a week. A third Jim was having his hair cut in a chair near me, telling the barber to be careful not to touch an area where he feared he was going bald.  A guitar player, he claimed to have played backup for Styx.  When he learned his hair stylist’s son played guitar, he recommended that he watch Carlos Santana play “El Farol” on YouTube (the live version), vowing that it would change his life. When he started mimicking the guitar sounds, Anna said, “We’re being entertained.”  I told him I’d seen the Nick Danger Band on Sunday; he knew them and said, “They started in the Eighties.”

Hitting Home

    “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever.  Use a pile driver.  Hit the point once.  Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.” Winston Churchill

For a Flight Paths project that I’m involved with, Valparaiso University professor Liz Wuerrful posted interviews with African-Americans who attended Gary’s segregated East Pulaski School. Here is an excerpt from one titled “Hitting Home”:

    The school I went to in Detroit was what they say now was integrated. When I came here to Gary, there was an East Pulaski and a West Pulaski. East Pulaski was for my people, and West Pulaski was for other people. That’s the way it was. One of the buildings was a cooking classroom. We from East Pulaski would go to our cooking class, and make lunch for the children at both West Pulaski and East Pulaski. I don’t know if you realize, I don’t know if you realize, the shock to a child of 11 years old, almost realizing that you’re not accepted because of the color, and that was hard.

   Roosevelt was an entirely black school. I think there were two or three white students there because their parents owned property in the area. Froebel was the only integrated school in the area. Emerson had a few black students, but that was because they lived in the area. And my mother had to go to Horace Mann school in order to get me transferred from Roosevelt to Froebel.

   I read a lot. I’m what they would have called a nerd at the time. And I wanted to take mechanical drawing. They would not let me take that. And I was so upset. They did not want the girls to participate in things. They steered us to the cooking class, sewing class, and to a typist class.

   There is one thing that we all disliked: we were not allowed to go to swimming classes until Fridays. After we were supposed to take those swimming classes, they would drain the pool. When my mother found out, I thought for sure I was going to get kicked out of the school. I don’t know what she said, what she did, or what she had to do, but I was never allowed to go swimming, and they didn’t even put that on my schedule. I was glad because I didn’t feel like it was right because my first thing is, “Why do I have to go in there after they’ve been in there and it’s all dirty?”

   We started a club and we called it Fro-Ro, which was Froebel Roosevelt. We would get together, and have dances and sit around, even do our homework together.  That’s when we found out that the books Roosevelt had were almost five years older than what we had. The information that we had in our history books, even our math books, our literature, all of that was totally different from what they had. Why didn’t they have the same information available to them that we had? And that’s when it really started hitting home about how things were. I was starting to grow up and starting to see things the way my parents were seeing them. And I started to realize how much of a sacrifice they were making. They did a lot of things that were quiet. They did not come, they didn’t do the marching, and all this stuff that everybody else is doing. They did whatever they had to do to let them know that it wasn’t acceptable. They did it in a very quiet way. It was almost like they did not want us to see the hardship they were having to make it possible for us to get a very good education.

In “A Well-Kept Secret” a second respondent told Flight Paths interviewer Reagan Skaggs:

   Seventh grade, we had a speech teacher. She introduced us to black poets—black poetry—and all of us kids were shocked, like, “What? Black folks wrote poems?”We had never heard of it. I was elated, and I went home, and I told my mother. I said, “Momma, black folks wrote poems. Look at this! They wrote these poems!”Langston Hughes, to name just one, but there were so many! She didn’t know it either, of course, and she bought the very first book of poetry we owned - this expensive book - a book for twenty or thirty bucks was a lot for her.  It was a compilation of poems by African Americans, and then you had your Caribbean folk, and it also included Europeans. And that is a thick volume. It’s not in print anymore. I still have it to this day.  So that was a great sacrifice for her, but she bought that book, and boy, did I get into those poems. I loved them. I was so grateful to know about that.

   Throughout my life, looking at TV, movies, magazines, there was never, ever anything pleasant said about the continent of Africa, nor the brown, black people in it. It was always bad. It was always sad. It was not stuff that would make you feel proud and honored to be a part of that heritage. They never, ever spoke about Ancient Egyptians being chocolate people. That was a well-kept secret. I didn’t learn that until I was a grown woman. Actually, a very mature grown woman. When I went to Egypt, I saw the pictures on the walls, and the people were black, and dark, and brown, and I was in awe. This is really true. They were a black race, so why is it hidden? Why is it kept secret? Why is it never mentioned? All I ever heard was negative things, so, to learn that during the Harlem Renaissance we had these phenomenal poets step out, and writers, and I mean, you just didn’t hear about it in any form or fashion.

   You know, we’ve been so disconnected to those truths because we didn’t control things that would allow us access to that information. And it all has to do with this thing that’s called institutional racism. The group that’s in charge controls information as well. So, if you don’t have access to that information, you don’t know what your potential is. And the potential is always for greatness.

According to Noah Isenberg’s “We’ll Always Have Casablanca,” the idea for “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” the play that became the basis for what the author calls “America’s most beloved movie”originated during a trip writer Murray Burnett made to Vienna during the summer of 1938. What hit home was the utter terror Jews faced, including his wife’s family, as a result of Anschluss, Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria. After successfully smuggling out of the country some of her relatives’ prize possessions, including a fur coat wife Frances wore and diamond rings of each finger, Burnett visited a nightclub in the South of France.  An African-American pianist was playing jazz standards, providing respite from the insanity outside its smoky walls. The atmosphere was in stark contrast to the “tragedy and tears”Burnett had witnessed in Vienna and a perfect setting for a play, named for a Moroccan city Burnett never visited Casablanca in his entire life.

Depressing cable fare abounds, including movies about the breakup of a marriage (“Wild Fire”), a musician’s self-destructive path to eventual suicide suicide (“A Star Is Born”), and a lesbian marriage that turns sour due to one being a psychopathic murder (“What Keeps You Alive”).   “Big Little Lies” began its second season in the aftermath of an abusive husband having been murdered.  The pilot of the super-depressing mini-series “Euphoria” portrays teenagers as drug and sex obsessed misfits dependent on cell phones and bereft of meaningful adult role models.  Unlike “Big Little Lies,” which has a brilliant cast, I doubt I’ll keep watching “Euphoria.” The so-called comedy series “Barry” stars Bill Hader as a hired hitman taking acting lessons from the “Fonz” of old, Henry Winkler and killing his lady friend, a cop. Barry’s diabolical boss is a hoot.  When police close in on him, he manages to say something like “Thank heaven you’ve finally arrived.”

Charlie Halberstadt and I had an excellent bridge week, finishing second in the Chesterton game and first at Banta Senior Center in Valparaiso out of 12 pairs for a combined 3.86 master points each within 24 hours, by far my most ever. At Chesterton I was getting weak hands all evening until one contained 26 high card points, Ace, King, Queen, spot, spot in both Hearts and Diamonds, Ace, Jack, of Spades, and bare King of Clubs. I bid 2 Clubs, indicating at least 23 high card points, and Charlie responded 2 Diamonds, meaning 0 to 3 points. I went to 4 Hearts and made it on the nose.  Others playing an automatic 2 Diamond response to 2 Clubs didn’t get to game since the strong hand got passed out at 2 Hearts.  

Banta Center was once an elementary school; bridge opponent Knoefel Jones recalled the names of his first, second, and third grade teachers.  The latter, he claimed, collected a quarter from his students, promising they’d get a European pen pal, but they never did. That guy must have pocketed at least five dollars, I joked.  But think of how much money that would be today, he replied, straight-faced.  Knoefel is always joking around, so when he first told me his name (pronounced no-fell), I thought he was putting me on.  Knowing Tom and Sylvia Luekens were big Valparaiso University boosters, I told them grandson James was going to VU in the Fall and that I will be in a history session in October with professors Allison Schuette and Liz Wuerrfel in Salt Lake City.  When Sylvia said she knew Allison, I told of working on their Flight Paths project tracing the Gary roots of Valpo residents.

Barbara Walczak’s newsletter contained “A Poem about Alzheimer’s,” which began:

Do not ask me to remember

Don’t try to make me understand

Let me rest and know you’re with me

Kiss my cheek and hold my hand

Bridge players with mild Alzheimer’s often remain cogent at the card table. Bridge is great mental stimulation for retirees, even after the initial signs of what was once cruelly referred to as senility hits home.

Mel Allen

Samantha Gauer taped my hour-long interview with retired Hammond Teachers Federation president Patrick O’Rourke.  His father ran into New York Yankee announced Mel Allen while at a conference, leading to a lifelong friendship that provided Patrick with some of his most vivid memories, including a ping pong match with Mickey Mantle.  Allen loved Phil Smidt’s Restaurant in Hammond, and the two would meet there when the Yankees were in Chicago to play the White Sox. Elston Howard, the first Black Yankee, often slept at the O’Rourke home, unwelcome at the team’s hotel.  When New York faced Milwaukee in the 1957 World Series, 15-year-old Patrick got to watch the game from the Yankee press box.  In fact, O’Rourke claimed that “Ellie” Howard once saved his life after he fell off a pier and ended up under it until Howard reached down and fished him out.  

O’Rourke’s sister eloped at 16 with someone who was neither Irish nor Catholic.  When they returned from Iowa, the father and grandfather tried to have the marriage annulled, only to be told by the bishop that if it had been consummated (it was) to forget it.  The union lasted a lifetime and produced seven children.  O’Rourke still has a crooked knuckle from his seventh grade teacher at St. Joseph School in Hammond rapping him with a ruler. Once after he misbehaved, the nun made him recite the Gettysburg Address from memory.  Another nun refused to teach girls.  Forced to do so, she gave them huge amounts of homework and kept them inside during recess while the boys got off scot free.

I got a call from Michael Keating, who with Chris Smith has been photographing over 300 Indiana gyms over the past six years.  Many are featured in an Indiana Historical Society Bicentennial exhibit, and a book entitled “Hoosier Hardwood” is in the works.  Keating was familiar with my work and with the Calumet Region’s proud basketball tradition.  He knew that the remnants of Gary’s Memorial Auditorium, once the site of Sectional tournaments, was in danger of being demolished.  Asked my opinion of the best Region team ever, I mentioned the 1971 East Chicago Washington team with Pete Trgovich, Junior Bridgeman, and Tim Stoddard and the 2006 EC Central champions Trgovich coached starring E’Twaun Moore, Kawann Short, and Angel Garcia, then added two Gary Roosevelt teams that lost in the finals, the 1955 team with future NBA star Dick Barnett that lost to Indianapolis Crispus Attucks despite “Mr. Basketball” Wilson Eison outscoring Attucks star Oscar Robertson, 31-30, and the 1991 squad that lost in double overtime to Plymouth, with Scott Skiles scoring 39, including a miracle shot at the end of regulation. 

 Oscar Robertson

Keating has interviewed Emerson coach Earl Smith, whose Golden Tornado team my family followed closely.  In 1975 Emerson lost to Lafayette Jefferson in the Regional after a downstate ref called two egregious fouls on center Earner Calhoun Mays within the first few minutes. In 1977 we were in Hinkle Fieldhouse when Emerson won the Thanksgiving “Turkey Classic” with “twin towers” Wallace Bryant and Frank Smith (one of the teams was the Frankfort “Hot Dogs”).  I noted that in 1991, when Gary Roosevelt defeated Indianapolis Brebauf by 19 points in the state finals, it took a 40-point effort by Glenn “Big Dog” Robinson, including a game-winning, last-second jump shot, to win the Regional against East Chicago.  

The Jesuits who run Indianapolis Brebeuf defied the Archdiocese and refused to fire a lesbian teacher who married another woman, supposedly counter to church doctrine.  In retaliation the Archdiocese will no longer recognize Brebeuf as a Catholic school.  Shameful!  I’ve been following the story since niece Sophia Dietz, who attends Indianapolis Roncalli, told me about a popular guidance counselor fired from her school despite student protests.  I’m certain this would not have happened if Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin hadn’t been transferred to Newark.  Kirsten Bayer-Petras praised Brebauf’s stand and posted this statement by the school board:

  The decree follows a sincere and significant disagreement between the Archdiocese, on the one hand, and Brebeuf Jesuit and the USA Midwest Province of the Society of Jesus, on the other, regarding whether the Archdiocese or our school’s leaders should make final governance decisions related to internal administrative matters at Brebeuf Jesuit and, in particular, the employment status of our faculty and staff. Specifically, Brebeuf Jesuit has respectfully declined the Archdiocese’s insistence and directive that we dismiss a highly capable and qualified teacher due to the teacher being a spouse within a civilly-recognized same-sex marriage.

Agreeing with Kristen and the school board, Connie Mack-Ward wrote: “This is an outrage! It's perfectly ordinary for schools of orders within a diocese to run their school independently of diocesan interference. Jesuit schools are among the finest in the country--and that's because they're run by Jesuits!” 

first day of summer at Wells Street Beach, photo by Mary Ann Best

Summer begins and about time considering the cool, wet spring we've undergone.

Father's Day

“He adopted a role called being a father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a protector,” Tom Wolfe

I’ve always regarded Father’s Day as a “Hallmark” holiday promoted as a gimmick to merchandize cards and gifts.  The idea was first proposed by Sonora Dodd of Spokane, Washington, in 1910 to honor her father, a Civil war veteran, and as a complement to Mother’s Day.  In 1972 Richard Nixon signed a bill proclaiming Father’s Day to be a national holiday.  I discourage cards but welcome phone calls.  Phil checked in after his kids took him to brunch.  Dave called en route to the University of Cincinnati's College Conservatory of Music, where Becca will participate in its summer program.  Granddaughter Alissa, who lived with us for seven years, telephoned in the evening. Unlike Mother’s Day, I don’t recall celebrating Father’s Day growing up.

 below, Barb and Steve at Lincoln Park gig

At Miller Beach Farmers Market the duo Silver Rose, featuring Barb Silverman and Steve Rose, performed a variety of popular songs.  Barb’s late father lived in Miller, and she teaches at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago.  Ron Cohen, who knows her, attended with Nancy, primarily interested in the antiques on display at the old Miller School nearby.  Nancy recently completed my latest Steel Shavings and said she particularly liked Ray Smock’s essays on the state of the Union under Trump. A big NBA fan, Nancy was disappointed that Seth Curry and Golden State lost in the championship round to Toronto.  I admitted rooting for the Raptors, mainly because they had defeated the 76ers on a miracle shot by Kawhi Leonard and had never gone all the way before.

In the final round of the U.S. Open Tiger Woods, already out of contention, bogeyed four of the first six holes and seemed headed for an ignoble 80. Then he birdied six of the last 12 for a 69, wowing the crowds and demonstrating some of that old Tiger magic.

The “young people edition” of Michael Bronski’s “A Queer History of the United States” consists mainly of short biographies of activists who were often in civil rights, antiwar, environmental, and labor movements, as well as the arts.  I learned, for instance, that “Queen of Disco” Sylvester, who recorded the dance classic “Do You Wanna Funk?” was in a San Francisco theatrical group called the Cockettes.  I particularly enjoyed profiles on Mattachine Society co-founder Harry Hay, Daughters of Bilitis founders Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, and Kiyoshi Kuramiya, born in 1943 in Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming during World War II.  From my days as a teaching assistant at University of Hawaii, I learned to pronounce Japanese names, which are phonetic and much easier than Eastern European ones encountered in Northwest Indiana.  Our friend Sheila Hamanaka had a son named Kiyoshi, whom everyone called Kiyo. While a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Kuramiya was beaten and hospitalized participating in civil rights activities in Montgomery. He joined SDS and took part in the 1967 March on the Pentagon, providing the FBI an excuse to scrutinize his activities. He belonged to ECHO (East Coast Hemophile Organization) and later the Gay Liberation Front.  An architect who collaborated with Buckminster Fuller, he died of AIDS at age 57, like so many contemporaries. 

 Kiyoshi Kuramiya

Sylvester in 1974

Bayard Rustin

I met Bayard Rustin, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, at an IUN function and noticed that he smoked European cigarettes from a holder, had manicured nails, and made no effort to camouflage his effeminate mannerisms.  While jailed as a conscientious objector during World Wat II, lover Davis Platt wrote him as a woman to avoid the letters being confiscated. Bronski’s “A Queer History of the United States” noted: “Rustin’s habit of seeking hookups in public places, called cruising at the time, often got him into trouble.”  In 1953 he was arrested for having sex with a man in a car.  In 1977 65-year-old Rustin settled into a permanent relationship with 27-year-old VISTA worker Walter Naegle.

Twenty years ago, my colleague Terry Lukas was arrested and briefly detained during a raid on a park where gay trysts were taking place.  He was fearful he might lose his position at IU Northwest and thankful when I stuck by him.  I recall his telling me that there were few places where gays could meet.  The bust was front page headlines; one man identified was a Baptist minister.  Chancellor Hilda Richards called Lukas to her office and warned him not to put himself in a potentially embarrassing position again, then dropped the matter. 

When Paul Kern and I wrote a history of IUN, we mentioned numerous matters of sex but left out that incident as well as one where a professor was punished unfairly due to unproved innuendoes that he was involved in an inappropriate relationship with a male student - despite a predecessor having slept with a string of comely coeds under his charge with impunity.  Now I wish we’d have included the incidents - perhaps in a revised addition, now that both principals are dead.  Writing a queer history of IUN would be a pathbreaking accomplishment, albeit difficult to research, even for an oral historian. 

 Jimmy Hoffa flips RFK the bird during 1957 Senate hearing

Brother-in-law Sonny, a truck driver who became a Republican after Attorney-General Robert Kennedy went after Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and who postured as a big Trump supporter when alive, had a gay friend named Harry who got caught in a police sweep of a public park in Florida frequently by gays.  The Korean War vet claimed he was merely taking donuts to those hanging out there.  A onetime victim of police harassment himself during younger days, Sonny defended Harry and thought it disgraceful that he was identified in the local newspaper, jeopardizing his job as a supermarket packer.  After a cop ordered Harry to cease crossing an intersection in a golf cart on the way to work, Sonny told him to keep on doing it, that the cop had no right to stop him.

In the “We Do History” Indiana Historical Society blog, Kathy Mulder discussed father and grandson William Henry and Benjamin Harrison, who became the country’s ninth and twenty-third presidents.  The latter lived in Indianapolis from 1854 until his death 47 years later. Mulder wrote: “One of Benjamin Harrison’s most notable campaign attractions was a giant campaign ball made with a steel frame and slogan-covered canvas. The ball was modeled after his grandfather’s 1840 presidential campaign ball and was rolled nearly 5,000 miles to Harrison’s Indianapolis home during the 1888 election.” On several occasions Harrison vacationed by the Kankakee Marsh and shot down countless migratory birds. In 1888, for example, the President-elect recuperated from the campaign on General Lew Wallace’s houseboat at Baum’s Bridge.

Playing poker for the first time in a year at Dick Hagelberg and George McGuan’s place of business, Kidstuff Playsystems, I was rather rusty and not used to high-low Omaha, which requires one to use two cards from your hand of four and three of the five up cards.  I had many second-best hands, in which I stayed in for the large final bet only to lose, for example to an Ace high flush when mine was King high. Twice I would have won low except for a rule that the winning hand needed to be eight high or better.