Perilous Journeys

“The thing that has gotten me going is discrimination. I tried to be equal to, and as good as, the Anglos. I wanted to make as much money, speak as well, and have all the goodies as the dominant society. But no matter what I did, I was always a ‘Mexican’.” Julian Samora (1920-1996)

Julian Samora (above) was a pioneer in the field of Mexican-American studies.  He grew up in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, whose public park had a sign at its entrance reading, “No Mexicans, Indians or Dogs.”   He was a History major at Adams State College and received a PhD in Sociology and Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Samora taught for two years at Michigan State and spent the rest of his academic career at Notre Dame.  In addition to his academic accomplishments, he helped found the National Council of La Raza, the leading Mexican-American civil rights organization.  I read his book “La Raza: Forgotten Americans” (1966) in grad school.  Ed Escobar and I included an excerpt from his 1967 publication with Richard Lamanna “Mexican-Americans in a Midwest Metropolis: A Study of East Chicago" in our 1987 anthology on Latinos in Northwest Indiana, “Forging a Community.”

 Rita Perez and daughter Maria Arredondo, circa 1922

I’m putting the final touches on “The Journeys of Maria Arredondo,” a talk I’ll be delivering at Michigan State during a conference celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Julian Samora Institute.  Maria came to America from Mexico at age 7, 19, and 32, the final time after her mother had been deported.  Describing a confrontation with customs official on the third border crossing, I’ll quote this passage from Ramon and Trisha’s “Maria’s Journey”: 

    Early in the day they reached customs.

  “My children and I are going home to Indiana to join my husband,” she explained to the guard at the border. 

  “I think not, Senora,” replied the guard gruffly. “Nobody goes across without passports.”

  It was true.  She had no documents.  She had left them at home.  When she hurriedly left the States, her discouragement was such that she believed Mexico would be her home until she died; why bother with documents? She saw now that she had acted without thought, but it was too late.

  She explained again her intentions, but with no proof of her story, no papers supporting her claim, she was turned away once more.  Just when she was ready to abandon all hope, another border guard, noticing her distress, walked over to her.  He took in the desperation on her face and the 8 wide-eyed children who clustered around her.  “Go sit over there,” he pointed to some shade, “and wait until evening.  The guards are no so hard then.  They may let you cross, but be careful.  Don’t make them angry.”

  With that small amount of encouragement, Maria resolved to make one more attempt.  She prayed hard to her saints, pleading for a miracle.  That night the bedraggled little band tried to cross once more.  At first demands for documents were repeated.  As the night wore on, the guards relented somewhat and asked for proof that Maria had only been in Mexico a short time.  Did she have some receipts or other evidence that their stay had been less than six months?

 Tangible proof, however, was simply not to be had, no matter how hard they searched the two pathetic suitcases with their meager cache of clothes and sundries.

    Another guard gazed at the mother and her children.  Seeing the hopelessness in Maria’s lovely face, he cleared his throat and spoke for the first time since the border drama had begun: “I’ve been talking to this boy here [Pepe], and he’s answered every question in English.  He knows his name, his age, and where he lives.  He says his Dad is waiting for them in the States,” he said to his colleague.

  “So what?” replied the other customs man, disgusted with the delay caused by the family.  “They have no proof!”

  “Let them go,” answered the other.  “There’s no way this little boy could speak such good English if they’d been in Mexico any length of time.”

  Pepe had been discussing his life with the second guard in great detail and with enthusiasm.  His talkativeness proved the family’s salvation.  

  “Oh, very well, go.  Take those snotty-nosed kids and get out of my sight before I change my mind,”said the officer, tired of the aggravation.  It was late, and he wanted to relax and drink his coffee, not hassle with a nearly hysterical woman and her brood of sad-eyed kids.

  The guard motioned for them to cross.  Maria hustled the children into one of the many taxis stationed at the border before the guard could change his mind.  They were squished into the hot car before Maria allowed herself to believe they were truly going home.  

  As they crossed the long bridge to stateside, Jenny looked back.  “Wow, ma, look how long this bridge is!”

  “Don’t turn around!” Maria admonished her.  “What if they call us back?”  Wiser than Lot’s wife, Maria stared fixedly forward until they were safely delivered onto America’s soil.

Young Pepe (José Arredondo, 1934-2017) went on to earn a doctorate in Education from IU and be elected sheriff of Lake County. This is my final paragraph: “Finally, I’d like to acknowledge my intellectual debt to Julian Samora whose 1967 book about East Chicago, Indiana, “Mexican-Americans in a Midwest Metropolis” (with Richard Lamanna) was the starting point for my intellectual journey into this subject.  Samora proclaimed that family was the bulwark of Mexican tradition.  Maria would have agreed.”

 José Arredondo

Conservative commentator George Will criticized Republicans as “vegetative” for their “canine obedience” to that “scofflaw” Trump.  Well put.

Ray Smock wrote:

    President Trump likened the impeachment process to a lynching in the hopes of elevating the emotions of his supporters.  He wants us to believe that impeachment, a provision of the U.S. Constitution that gives the sole power of impeachment to the House of Representatives, and the sole power of conducting an impeachment trial to the Senate, is the same as a lynching, a word forever etched in American history with the most illegal acts of violent murder suffered mostly by African American men during a hundred-year war with terrorists in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

      Trump is accusing duly elected members of the House as being nothing more than vigilantes taking the law in their own hands just because they don’t like him and want to un-do the 2016 election.  This emotional narrative is the kind that demagogues like Trump thrive on. In Trump’s case, it is the only kind of narrative he can use.  He lives in a maelstrom of conspiracy theories, where everyone is out to get him.  His current narrative is but an extension of what we have heard for three years, that any and all investigations of the president are part of an extensive witch hunt with no basis in fact.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other members of the GOP have not described the process as a lynching. Indeed, most have eschewed such comparisons, except for the mercurial and inconsistent Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who agrees that Democrats want to lynch Trump.

Going on TV to announce that an American special operations raid resulted in the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr-al-Baghdadi, Trump couldn’t resist taking swipes at leakers and whistleblowers, thanking Russia for its cooperation, bragging that this was more important than the mission Obama ordered that killed Osama bin Laden, and claiming that before blowing himself up, Baghdadi was “whimpering and crying.” The latter was palpably untrue and certain to inflame Islamic extremists.  Replying to comments by columnist Jerry Davich, Robert Malkowski wrote: “Donald was rushed to the hospital for dislocating his own shoulder while patting himself on the back for 45 minutes.”

Michael Frisch emailed that it was good seeing me at the OHA conference, meeting Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette, and learning about their Welcome Initiative and Flight Paths project.  He added, in a reference to my longstanding magazine: “Glad to know Steel is still being Shaved, and I look forward to seeing the current issue.”  I replied that one was on its way.

In the Journal of American History Dylan Gottlieb’s “Hoboken Is Burning: Yuppies, Arson, and Displacement in the Postindustrial City” wrote that nearly 500 fires set by arsonists-for-hire in Hoboken’s Puerto Ricanbarrio killed at least 50 people and drove displaced residents to leave the city permanently, paving the way for a yuppie “rebirth” for the traditional blue-collar city (hometown of Frank Sinatra, son of Italian immigrants), situated just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.  Similar trends occurred in Chicago and Atlanta, the author concludes, as the arrival of yuppies signaled the beginning of a new phase of exploitation and profit-seeking.

I informed University Advancement that former trustee James W. Dye passed away and invited Media Specialist Erika Rose to make use of an interview I conducted last year published in Steel Shavings, volume 48.  My email stated:

    At the request of IU’s Bicentennial Committee, I interviewed James Dye, 87, a retired builder and major university donor. I showed Dye the Rev. Robert Lowery library study area funded by the James and Betty Dye Foundation.  It also offers scholarships to many IUN students. 

  Manager for IU’s football and basketball squads in the early 1950s, Dye recalled a Sigma Chi fraternity party that lasted 48 hours after the Hoosiers beat Notre Dame and then Kansas for the 1953 NCAA championship. He joked that IU probably gave him an honorary degree for attending so many losing gridiron contests.  

  Dye was an imaginative entrepreneur who built his first house by himself at age 20.  His company, the Landmark Corporation, built Mansards Apartments in Griffith.  On its tennis courts Dye competed with former Gary mayor George Chacharis and driver John Diamond.  Dye praised past IUN chancellors Dan Orescanin and Peggy Elliott and asked me about Chancellor Lowe.  I lauded Lowe’s participation in community affairs, History Department functions, basketball games, and student functions. 

 Gary Crusader collage

Jonathyne Briggs mentioned that he might include a unit of IU Northwest in his Spring seminar covering the year 1968.  I suggested he expand the project to concentrate on the city of Gary and wrote him this explanation: 

    Early in the morning of January 1, 1968, Richard Gordon Hatcher was sworn in as mayor and became the first African American to serve as chief executive of a significantly sized city.  During a year of riots (but not in Gary), assassinations, antiwar protests, and white backlash, Hatcher played a major role in national events, meeting with President Lyndon Johnson as Washington, DC, went up in flames, launching imaginative War on Poverty programs funded by the federal government, campaigning with Robert F. Kennedy as he sought the Democratic presidential nomination, and attracting major grants from foundations eager for his administration to be a success.  On the other hand, white flight and business disinvestment escalated, fueled by fear, racism, and corporate decisions beyond Hatcher’s control. Detractors turned the slogan “City on the Move” on its head, adding the words, “Yah, moving out” and asking, “Will the last [white] person to leave, please turn out the lights?”

    Students could make use of my Gary publications (“Gary’s First Hundred Years,” a Sixties Steel Shavings that includes an oral history of Hatcher’s first two years in office, a chapter in “Black Mayors”) as well as magazines, material in the Calumet Regional Archives, the Post-Tribune (on microfilm), as well as interviews on the Valparaiso University website Flight Paths and oral histories that students themselves conduct.  Perhaps the entire class could produce a podcast or documentary as a final project.  What was happening at IUN regarding Black Studies would fit within the context of Gary, regional, national, and international events.

In Elizabeth Strout’s “Amy and Isabell” daughter Amy resents her distant, nagging mother and enjoys the lunchroom chatter in the factory where she has a summer job.  Stout wrote:

  Everything talked about was interesting to her, even the story of the refrigerator gone on the blink: a half gallon of chocolate ice cream melted in the sink, soured, and smelled to high hell by morning.  The voices were comfortable and comforting; Amy, in her silence, looked from face to face.  She was not excluded from any of this, but the women had the decency, or lack of desire, not to engage her in their conversations either.  It took Amy’s mind off things.  

  Fat Bev hit a button on the soda machine and a can of Tab rocked noisily in place.  She bent her huge body to retrieve it.  “Three more weeks and Dottie can have sex,” she said. “She wishes it were three more months,” and here her soda can was popped open.  “But I take it, Wally’s getting irritated.  Chomping at the bit.”

  Amy swallowed the crust of her sandwich.

  “Tell him to take care of it himself,” someone said, and there was laughter.  Amy’s heartbeat quickened, sweat broke out above her lip.

  “You get dry after a hysterectomy, you know,” Arlene Tucker offered this with a meaningful nod of her head.

  “I didn’t.”

   “Because you didn’t have your ovaries out,” Arlene nodded again she was a woman who believed what she said.  “They yanked the whole business with Dot.”

  “Oh, my mother went crazy with hot flashes,” somebody said, and thankfully irritable Wally was left behind; hot flashes and crying jags were talked about instead.

Green Feather

“Rise and rise again until lambs become lions,” Robin Hood

seventeenth-century woodcut

During the 1950s Red Scare a zealous anticommunist on the Indiana textbook commission demanded that public schools purge any books that mentioned Robin Hood.  Reason: the heroic outlaw of English folklore and his merry band robbed the rich to give to the poor and must have been commies.  In reaction, Blas Davis from Gary and four other students, Ed Napier, Bernard Bray, Mary Dawson, and Jeanine Carter, belonging to a Baptist youth group, Roger Williams Fellowship, rose to defend free speech and academic freedom. In the Indiana University bicentennial magazine 200, Mary Ann Wynkook wrote:

   They began their campaign in Spring 1954, by dyeing some chicken feathers green (a reference to Robin Hood) and attaching them to white buttons with slogans like “They’re your books; don’t let McCarthyism burn them” that they handed out to students across campus.

While supported by the campus newspaper and local American Civil Liberties Union chapter, the Bloomington Herald-Telephone labeled the ringleaders “dupes,” “puppets,” and “long hairs.” Students at several other campuses, including Purdue, took up the cause. McCarthy’s popularity suddenly plummeted in the wake of the Army-McCarthy hearings. By year’s end, the ludicrous efforts to eradicate the legend of Robin Hood ceased.

IU’s bicentennial magazine also contained Dina Kellams’ article on Preston Eagleson, Indiana University’s first African-American football player, beginning in 1883.  Son of a prominent Bloomington barber, Eagleson apparently was accepted by teammates but mistreated by opposing players and fans during contests at Butler and Wabash College.  Traveling to Crawfordsville, the team was turned away at two hotels. Eagleson’s father successfully sued the racist owners.

above, Preston Eagleson; below, Herman Wells

200 editor Sarah Jacobi asked if I’d write an article about IU President Herman Wells and the censoring of sociologist Edwin Sutherland’s White-Collar Crime (1949).  Under pressure from Wells and his publisher, the Bloomington professor deleted material referring to several prominent corporations as criminals. Finally, in 1983, Yale University Press published a third edition which restored the excised chapter, “Three Case Histories,” that named American Smelting and Refining Company, Pittsburgh Coal Company, and United States Rubber Company as lawbreakers.  Being unfamiliar with the exact  role of Herman Wells in the matter, I offered instead to submit a sidebar about Wells pressuring IUN director Jack Buhner to fire English professor Saul Maloff, who had once been active in an organization that detractors claimed was a communist-front group. Though staunch in his support of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and efforts to desegregate campus facilities, Wells was fearful that reactionary IU trustees and legislators might retaliate and bowed to Hoosier Red Baiters.

After a week away from duplicate bridge competition, I finished first partnering with Joel Charpentier and in the middle of the pack with Charlie Halberstadt.  Charlie and I were doing great until Terry Brendel and Fred Green cleaned our clock in four straight hands – through no fault on our part. At Hobart Lanes I struggled the first six frames until opponent Gene Clifford advised facing the pins on spares.   I promptly converted four in a row and then rolled a 182, causing Gene’s teammate Gregg Halaburt to joke, “Don’t give him any more tips.”

above, Gene Clifford; below, Cora DuBois

In the “What I’m Reading” section of Bucknell’s alumni magazine Anthropology professor Michelle Johnson cited Susan Seymour’s “Cora DuBois: Anthropologist, Diplomat, Agent.”  An expert on East Indian tribes, DuBois (1903-1991) served during World War II with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA.  In 1950 she turned down an offer to head up Berkeley’s anthropology department because state law would have required her to sign a loyalty oath. She went on to teach at Harvard and Cornell and enjoyed a long-term lesbian relationship with Jeanne Taylor, whom she met in 1944 in Sri Lanka.  DuBois was the first tenured woman professor at Harvard and only permitted to enter Harvard’s faculty club through a side door. Imagine.

At Chesterton library I added my name to a list of those wishing to reserve Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Again” (a sequel to her acclaimed “Olive Kitteridge”) and checked out her first novel, “Amy and Isabelle.”  Set in Shirley Falls, a New England mill town, it begins:

  It was terribly hot that summer.  Mr. Robinson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead.  Just a dead brown snake of a thing lying flat through the center of town, dirty yellow foam collecting at its edge.  Strangers driving by on the turnpike rolled up their windows at the gagging sulfurous smell and wondered how anyone could live with that kind of stench coming from the river and the mill.

I also picked up the Lumineers’ new CD, III, which includes their smash hit “Gloria” and the bonus track “Democracy.”  One verse goes:

Sail on, sail on

O mighty ship of state

To the shores of need

Past the reefs of greed

Through the squalls of hate

Sail on, sail on, sail on

And these lines: “I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean/ I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.”

 Natasha Varner, Geoff Froh and Micah Mizukami at OHA session

OHA member Micah Mizukami, whom I met at a session on Hawai’ian customs and cowboys, wrote to say he enjoyed meeting me and hearing about my time at the University of Hawaii, where he teaches at the Center for Ethnic Studies.  He stated: “Although I had only met the Hawaiʻi panel just an hour earlier, I could feel their aloha. Here’s a photo of me with the presenters from Denshō -- they had a great session about the mass incarceration of the Japanese-Americans (at Topaz internment camp in Utah) and how to incorporate it into classroom curriculum.”

Close to 20 oldtimers attended the Chancellor’s annual emeritus faculty lunch.  I sat next to John Ban, looking fit at age 87, and Mike Certa, who recently ushered his 365th Chicago theatrical production (an average on one every ten days since his retirement).  Other usual suspects in attendance were Rick Hug, Ron Cohen, Margaret Skurka, and Ken Schoon.  Lowe announced he’s retiring in eight months but is presently teaching a seminar on Irish history and plans to return after a year’s leave.

 above, Margaret Skurka; below, Joe Madden

Angels manager Joe Madden said his pipe dream is that his new team defeat his former employer, the Cubs, in the World Series.  Sports jock Mike Mulligan of The SCORE blasted Madden for using a word that initially derived from opium-inspired visions not long after Angels player Tyler Skaggs died from a drug overdose.  How dumb of “Mully” to bring such a thing up!

Oral History Conference

  “A’a i ka hula, waiho i ka maka’u i ka hale”  (Dare to dance, leave shame at home). Hawaiian proverb

 Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette on hike near Salt Lake City, Utah

Utah bound, I was up at 3 a.m. to catch a 7:45 flight to Salt Lake City for the 53rd annual Oral History Association (OHA) conference.  At the Welcome reception Diné (Navaho) women demonstrated how to make fry bread, a symbol of hope and survival, as tribes pushed west often were given only lard and wheat during the journey.  I chatted with old friends from past conferences Kristine McCuster, Ruth Hill, Alphine Jefferson, and Don Ritchie, the latter a fellow Sam Merrill student at Maryland who is presently completing a book on outspoken American columnist Drew Pearson.  When I mentioned that Seinfeld co-creator Larry David graduated in 1970 with a major in History, the year I received my PhD, Ritchie said that the department contacted him and discovered that he often cut classes and only recalled one professor Keith Olson. At a lunch with Larry David, Olson admitted he didn’t own a TV and knew nothing about Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm.  One of my favorite professors, Olson put together a special seminar to prepare grad students like myself for our comprehensive American history exam.

The Sheraton’s only breakfast choices being an over-priced Starbucks or room service, I spotted a MacDonald’s a block away and ordered an egg McMuffin meal with o.j. and milk after making myself admittedly good Starbucks coffee in my room.  A young man on a cellphone nearby appeared to be explaining that he needed $38 for epilepsy medicine before his young son could board a plane for get medical attention.  As he started to leave, a man gave him the money.  In all likelihood, it was a scam, but, if so, the guy was a great actor.

I went to a session to hear Kate Scott, a former protégé of Dan Ritchie at the Senate Historical Office, who offered common sense advice on setting aside one’s political beliefs and getting subjects to open up.  Also on the program was Pitt professor Kathleen Blee, who had interviewed white supremacists but worried about giving them a platform for their hateful beliefs.  She belonged to the Tree of Life synagogue where a neo-Nazi massacred 11 people, one of whom was Kathleen’s friend.  I met three women from UNLV, who contributed oral histories to a book about a Healing Garden dedicated to the concertgoers gunned down in seconds two years ago from a hotel room.  Barbara Tabach used the word Latinx, gender-neutral academic jargon for Latinos and Latinas that I refuse to adopt.  I also learned that Mormons prefer the term Latter Day Saints.

Tanya Pearson

Juan Coronado, whom I met last year in Montreal, took part in a plenary session titled “Potholes in the Path” about oral historians’ mishaps. I could have added a few of my own.  At a session entitled “Rock and Roll Will Never Die,” tattooed Tanya Pearson recounted interviewing “Women of Rock,” including Fifties child star Brenda Lee, Exene Cervenka from the L.A. punk pioneers X, Tanya Donelly from Belly (one of my favorite alternative bands), and Liz Phair, whose image appeared on her arm (also Judy Garland). I asked whether young punk bands admire 70s forerunners such as The Ramones; all panelists emphatically answered in the affirmative.     

Chris Stanley and Valerie Yow

Waiting for the bus to the Presidential reception at The Leonardo, a modernistic museum, I struck up a conversation with Ponaganset (R.I.) High School teacher (and volunteer fireman) Chris Stanley, winner of a teaching award named after an OHA founder, Martha Ross, who was responsible for my getting involved in the organization.  Stanley’s students produced oral history documentaries on clambakes (he described the procedure) and Vietnam vets.  They invited several distinguished authors to visit their class, included Tim O’Brien (“The Things They Carried”); all came, accepting no speakers fee, only air fare. On the ride back to the Sheraton I chatted with OHA veteran Valerie Yow, who interviewed three generations of North Carolina women mill workers and whose primer “Recording Oral History” has gone through several editions.

Our session “Do You Hear Race?: The Ethics of Interweaving Black and White Oral Histories in Audio Documentary” went exceptionally well, despite a fire alarm went off about 30 minutes into it.  We all trooped outside until receiving word that it was just a water leak.  Nearly everyone returned, and several African-Americans familiar with such practices as redlining and block busting had particularly interesting things to say about growing up in neighborhoods similar to Gary’s Central District. Allison Schuette and Liz Wuerffel wisely passed out typescripts of three audio clips that blended various narrators’ testimony. Here is a sample from the “Neighborhood Chorus”:

  In those days, everyone was Mr. or Mrs. or Grandma This and grandpa That.  They were just neighbors, but we presented ourselves and talked to them with respect. I got to see doctors, dentists, architects in my neighborhood.  So I knew that if I grew up and this is what I wanted to be, I saw an example of it.

  Most of the fathers were steelworkers.  It was very working class; everybody’s parents made about the same amount of money.  Lots of home cooked food.  We didn’t go out that much.  We didn’t have a refrigerator back then.  You had an icebox, and I can remember eating beans three days in a row.

  Five kids, two adults, two-bedroom house, one bathroom.  

  There were four families in my household, so I know what it’s like to sleep seven deep.  Mom and dad slept in the living room on a pull-out couch, my grandparents stayed in one of the bedrooms and the four of us girls stayed in the other bedroom.

  During the summer we got up, ate breakfast, went outside, ran the streets till we were hungry, came home, had lunch, went back out.

  We rode or bike miles away from the neighborhood.  We’d go to the back of the school and play in the dunes and come back with our socks full of sand.

  If my parents weren’t there, the next-door neighbors were like my surrogate parents or my surrogate grandparents.  It was a time when the neighbor’s mother wasn’t shy about telling you if you did something wrong. 

In the "Flight Paths Chorus," one person concluded, “It is easy to pinpoint the reasons for the fall of Gary on a race or a person, and the fact of the matter is, there were many factors, and in 1967 it was a perfect storm.”

Alexis Ching second from left

A wonderful session titled “Voices from Hawaii” took me back to starting married life in the Aloha State.  Chaired by Tamara Halliwell-Verhault from the University of Hawaii, Hilo, it began with all four participants, plus Micah Mizukami from the U. of Hawaii Center for Oral History, performing an Oli or chant, after which Tamara explained the various uses of chants, including when visiting friends and neighbors.  Lynne Wolforth’s fascinating talk on Hawaiian cowboys, “Stories of the Paniolo,” made me think of Chang Apana, the inspiration for fictional detective Charlie Chan.  Apana started out as a paniolo on the Parker Ranch, once the country’s second largest cattle ranch.  Alexis Ching described outrigger canoe making and recounted a myth about boat harnesses originally designed by a jealous chief as a chastity belt for his Polynesian princess.  

At an LGBTQ session, “Silent No More,” I heard stories about Wendelinus Hamutenya, who called himself Mr. Gay Namibia, and a trans Vietnam vet who’d been gang raped by fellow sailors.  Commentator Estelle Freedman of Stanford did an excellent job of putting the case studies in historical context, mentioning, for example, gay soldiers during World War II. I brought up Anne Balay’s “Steel Closets” documenting homoerotic horseplay by macho steelworkers, who didn’t regard getting blow jobs at work as queer behavior.

The International Oral History Association reception was pretty tame compared to last year’s gathering at an Irish pub in Montreal.  One highlight: Kerry Taylor from The Citadel introduced himself as a 1995 IUN Labor Studies graduate familiar with Steel Shavings and a friend of Ron Cohen and Ruth Needleman.  At the time he lived in East Chicago, and we had many Miller friends in common. After receiving a PhD from the University of North Carolina, Taylor published “Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below during the Long Seventies” (2010). At present he is interviewing Latino workers in the Charleston (SC) area.

 Ball State filmmakers; Elizabeth Agnew and Ren Halter Rainey in back, right

Bibi Bahrami, first woman Islamic Center President with Ball State Pres. Geoffrey Mearns

Saturday I attended a session devoted to Muslim oral histories plus a screening of the award-winning documentary “Muslims in Muncie” produced by students at Ball State who received 15 credit hours for working on that one project for an entire semester.  The narrators were from many different countries and included several African Americans and an Irish-American skeptic welcomed by members of the mosque. Al and Liz mentioned having interviewed several Valparaiso University Muslim students for the Welcome Project.  Undergraduate Ren Halter Rainey spoke about the importance of pre-interviews, something I’ve shied away from for fear the retelling would lack freshness.  He and Religious Studies professor Elizabeth Agnew had attended our session, and we all promised to stay in touch.  

 Jimbo and Juan Coronado at Sunday Send-off

The Southwest Oral History Association awards reception guest of honor was Ignacio M. Garcia, who grew up in a poor Texas border community and heard tales of Mexican Revolutionary heroes Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata from a gardener.  A medic in Vietnam, PhD graduate from Arizona, and professor at Brigham Young, Garcia has written such award-winning books as Viva Kennedy, When Mexican Could Play Ball, and a forthcoming memoir Chicano While Mormon: Activism, War, and Keeping the Faith.  At the Sunday Send-Off Juan Coronado, who had introduced Ignacio, said that they were from the same hometown.  We’ll see each other in two weeks at an MSU conference in East Lansing honoring Julian Samara, as Juan convinced me to submit a proposal on “Maria’s Journey.”  At my table was Miyuki Daimaruya from Yamaguchi, Japan, who is researching Japanese-American Korean War veterans, a subject unfamiliar to me.  Many, interned during World War II, were inspired by the example of the decorated Nisei 442nd Infantry Regiment that had fought in Italy.  Topaz internment camp in Utah was about 100 miles from Salt Lake City. The OHA organized a tour but it was for an entire day, so I reluctantly declined. 

On the ride to the airport I noticed that the Wasatch Mountains were snow-covered unlike five days earlier.  Fellow Sheraton bus passenger Stephen Sloan mentioned attending an unscheduled tribute to Tom Charlton, an OHA mainstay who had launched Baylor’s prestigious oral history program.   Charlton was a class act. In the airport I watched the futile Bears struggle against a New Orleans team competing without future Hall of Fame QB Drew Brees and stud running back Alvin Kamara. The plane ride was uneventful, but I noticed that United flight attendants no longer parroted the half-century old slogan “Fly the Friendly Skies.”  Home by 10 p.m., I described a few conference highlights to a weary wife, popped a beer, and put on Weezer’s Blue album.  The six-pack purchased at a Salt Lake City gas station food mart turned out to be 3.2 beer, I learned later, so it was nice to savor a Yuengling and ruminate over a productive five days.  

While gone, the family celebrated Angie’ 49th birthday. Jonathyne Briggs reported that Hanif Abdurraqib gave a stirring campus talk, reading one of my favorite essays, “It Rained in Ohio the Night Allen Iverson Hit Michael Jordon with a Crossover,” from “They Can’t Kill us Until They Kill Us”   Corey Hagelberg dropped by with a copy of his latest project, an ecology-minded coloring book.  On a sad note Philosophy professor Gianluca Di Muzio informed me that longtime colleague Ed Kenar fell off the roof of his house in Hammond and died.  He was a gentle soul who went out of his way to tutor students struggling with the material.  I called Paul Kern in Florida to pass on the grim news, skipping over the usual lamentations over the Bears.  Ed started at IUN in 1983.  Here is an excerpt from the obit:

    Edmund was one of those core people who quietly went about his life’s work. He was devoted to the care of his family, especially his mother. He was passionate about teaching and his students and poured himself into every course and class. He loved working with his students and colleagues. He carried his burdens with stoic grace and dignity and maintained the family property, built by his grandfather, with skill.   Edmund was a devout member of the Carmelite Monastery and took comfort and solace in his community of fellow members there. He was a true Eagle Scout. He was a graduate of St. Stanislaus School, Bishop Noll Institute, and Fairfield University, and attended Notre Dame University, and St. Louis University.

Ed Kenar