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!