County Fair

 “We were so close now that the sounds of the fair began to drift over the roar of motors: calliopes bleating, whistles, merry-go-round music, bells ringing, barkers.” Jean Shepherd

As the Porter County Fair prepares to open, I decided to reread Region bard Jean Shepherd’s account of “the Indiana county fairs I have known” in “Wandy Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories.”  Setting the stage, he described the scene the previous evening in Hammond as he and his friends debated whether the monster ride, called the Rocket Whip, addled one’s brains or stunted one’s growth: “The rain drizzled down steadily, carrying with it its full load of blast furnace dust and other by-products of the steel mills and oil refineries that ringed the town like iron dinosaurs.” His “Old Man” loved the dirt track races (“as much a part of Indiana county fairs as applesauce, pumpkins, and pig judging”), while his kid brother favored the Ferris Wheel and his long-suffering mother the quilt exhibit. After surviving a near-gridlocked traffic jam, the family observed a 2-ton prize-winning pumpkin that bore a resemblance to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a pig named “Big Horace” who had tiny red eyes and had eaten half his blue ribbon. A White Sox fan, the “Old Man” was awestruck by a quilt bearing the likeness of shortstop Luke Appling, “the foul ball king.”  

Approaching the thrill ride area, they passed “guys with leather jackets and great mops of carefully groomed, greasy hair ranging through the crowd, looking for fights and girls.” The “Old Man” insisted on taking the boys on the Rocket Whip, “a classic of its kind.”  Shepherd elaborated:

    It consisted of two bullet-shaped cars, one yellow, one red, attached to the ends of rotating arms.  It revolved simultaneously clockwise and up and down. At the same time, the individual cars rotated in their own orbits.  

Trapped in their wire mesh cage, the “Old Man” lost all his change and a prized fountain pen given to him by the bowling team.  Once the operator turned the power on full, his hat flew off and kid brother Randy puked all over him. Passing through the turnstile afterwards with “a bent cigarette hanging from his lips,” he told the operator it was great. Shepherd wrote: “He always judged a ride by how sick it made him. The nausea quotient of the Rocket Whip was about as high as they come.”

My initial Indiana fair experience came as a result of manning the Indiana University Northwest booth at the Lake County fair for several hours in a sweltering exhibition hall lacking air conditioning.  Leaving after dark, I had trouble locating our car since I’d had to park on a winding road rather than in a lot. 

Once I heard that the Porter County fair’s exhibition hall had air conditioning, I volunteered for it for about ten years during the time Phil and Dave were growing up.  It was a good way to socialize with and sometimes meet for the first time professors and staff working the same shift as I. Various displays were giving away pens, bottle openers, fans, and other stuff, and I could sample free Culligan water whenever I got thirsty.  The only drawback was that a Republican booth was almost always located straight across from us.  The kids’ favorite attraction was the pig races; you could bet on a pig and get a small prize if your entry won. A Religious Studies adjunct operated a food truck with his family and would always give me a generous assortment of fried vegetables. Though no longer tempted to patronize the fair, which was cancelled last year due to Covid, I look back fondly at the memories, especially of those pig races.

Jill Semko Underly shared her many memories of the Lake County Fair. “As a 10 year 4H member, I practically lived there. Jr. leaders ran a food stand too. Hopefully those exhibition halls are now air conditioned. They had a great pie stand run by a ladies sorority or maybe it was the homemakers association.” 

Maryland grad school buddy Ray Smock, who gave me Shepherd’s “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash” when I was hired to teach at IUN in Gary, wrote: “Thanks for a taste of Jean Shepherd. No matter how many times I read him, I laugh like I did the first time I read him. I laugh because his stories speak universal truths about everyday life, and hearing the truth is always a liberating thing.”

Connie Mack-Ward recalled attending county fairs in Sullivan County while at her grandmother’s in the tiny town of Hymera: “We could see the lights and the ferris wheel looming and hear the merry-go-round music from her house, at the picnic grounds behind the high school on a road that started every summer with fresh gravel but eventually was mostly red clay as the gravel was flung into the roadside ditches by passing vehicles. Every night of the three glorious days the small traveling carnival was there.  When desk approached, we were finally told that we could go now.  We four kids would run and speedwalk all the way there, earnestly discussing which rides we would pick for the three tickets we were allowed to buy each night. My favorites were the chair swings, the Octopus, and the absolute best, the Tilt-A-Whirl. As we approached our destination, we could smell the lubricating oil from the rides, the cotton candy, popcorn, as wellas the fryng chicken  and boiling corn-on-the-cob of the dinners in the Methodist food tent.”

Albert Einstein and Civil Rights

    “America’s worst disease is its treatment of the Negro.” Albert Einstein

When German physicist Albert Einstein arrived in the United States, Isabel Wilkerson wrote in “Caste,” he was saddened to discover “that he had landed in yet another caste system, one with a different scapegoat caste and different methods but with embedded hatreds that were not so unlike the one he had fled.” Even before he’d left his homeland, Einstein had spoken out on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, railroaded on false rape charges in Alabama, and written in “The Crisis,” edited by W.E.B. DuBois, encouraging African Americans not to let racists drag down their self-worth.  Living in Princeton, New Jersey, most of whose public facilities were segregated and whose African Americans were forced to live in ghetto slums, he and wife Elsa invited famed contralto Marion Anderson to stay with them following a 1937 sell-out performance McCarter Theater because she was unable to stay at the local Nassau Inn. He wrote, “Being a Jew myself, I can understand and empathize with how black people feel as victims of discrimination.”

After World War II Einstein was spurred to action when returning Black G.I. were subjected to torture and even death for refusing to act deferentially toward the dominant caste.  He agreed to chair the NAACP anti-lynching committee and delivered the commencement address at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the oldest Black college in America. While there, Einstein discussed the theory of relativity with Physics students, played with faculty kids, including Julian Bond, son of the university president, and accepted an honorary degree.

During the Red Scare, Southern demagogues in Congress focused their wrath on civil rights activists. W.E. B. DuBois was one victim, actor and old friend Paul Robeson another.  Einstein offered to be a character witness for DuBois and invited Robeson to Princeton University. In 1952, in an article for “Pageant” magazine, Einstein addressed those questioning the motives of civil rights activists: “Your ancestors dragged the black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and the easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is a result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.”

Dan Rather

     “I was tagged as too intense to be an anchor man, too bull-headed.” Dan Rather

Born in Texas in December of 1931, the son of a ditch digger, Dan Rather grew up in Houston, did play-by play for the city’s minor league baseball team, the Buffs, and established a national reputation as a television reporter with his coverage of Hurricane Carla in 1961, when 350,000 Texas residents had to be evacuated.  At one point Rather offered to chain himself to a tree to demonstrate nature’s powerful clout.  He covered the assassination of JFK in 1963, was a foreign correspondent in Vietnam in 1966, and served as White House correspondent during the Richard M. Nixon administration (see below), frequently annoying the President with persistent questions about the Watergate scandal. For an unprecedented 24 years beginning in 1981, Rather anchored the CBS Evening News but was terminated after airing a segment on “60 Minutes” based on questionable documents claiming that President George W. Bush’s service with the Air National Guard was virtually nonexistent. In his ninetieth year, Rather still has not retired and retains an edginess that came to be his trademark.

Rather’s 1994 book “The Camera Never Blinks Twice” discusses his harrowing on-the-ground adventures and coverage of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s and such breaking stories as Chinese student protest in Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf War, the Branch Davidian conflagration in Waco, Texas, starvation in Somalia, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and the 1993 Mississippi River flood. That year, he returned to Vietnam, where he still had reoccurring nightmares from seeing a soldier’s legs blown off by a land mine and visiting a room full of amputees on a hospital ship.  At a Da Nang hotel lighters taken off dead G.I.s were for sale.  He interviewed General Norman Schwarzkopf on the roof of the former American embassy, where cameras had captured helicopters rescuing Americans 18 years before.  Schwarzkopf told Rather he’d been stationed in Alaska at the time and after observing the humiliating end to America’s longest war (at the time) went out and got drunk.

Rather’s two journalistic role models were Edward R. Murrow and Eric Severeid, whom he described as “a man’s man when that was still something you said.”  Though he began with a self-deprecating anecdote about a fan informing him the his fly was unzipped, Rather was very much a macho Texan who admired personal bravery and for a time signed off the air with the single word “courage.”  In “The Camera Never Blinks Twice” he lets us know his fondness for Red Man chewing tobacco, that he hunted quail with Severeid, fly-fishes for trout, and likes to be where the action is. As he wrote, “The best stories do not make office calls.” He has survived being, as Walter Cronkite once said, “waist deep in water moccasins,” been “maced, mugged, and arrested,” and had his sleep in an Afghanistan barn interrupted by scorpions. Rather carried with him a Cuban cigar given him by Fidel Castro.  He bragged about drinking in Dubrovnik till dawn and missing the press plane as well as his “undiminished” respect for Marshall Josip Broz Tito, who well into his 80s spent days in Dubrovnik’s ancient mud baths with his mistress.

Like all great reporters Dan Rather had an eye for the human dimension of cataclysmic events. In Sarajevo in August 1993, where I had visited a decade before, prior to the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, Rather met 9-year-old Malik, a victim of an artillery shell that had landed in his home while he was eating breakfast during a siege that killed 9,000 civilians and maimed countless others. Rushed to a hospital that had been struck 14 times and lacked water or electricity, doctors operated on him by candlelight. Writing that because Malik and his parents were of the “wrong” race and religion, he was a paraplegic, Rather concluded: “Malik was excited to have visitors from America, and he mustered a weak smile in the sunlight of midmorning. It was a welcome I won’t forget.”

    “That’s all folks,” epitaph on tombstone of Mel Blanc, voice of Porky Pig and other Disney animated characters

Filmmaker Chris Robinson chose “Looted” as a fitting epitaph for his documentary of Gary, his hometown.  While the word is commonly associated with lawlessness that takes place in the aftermath of protest, it can also refer to illicit gains by public officials or private companies.  In “Looted” former mayor Dozier T. Allen points the finger at big business, while Karen Freeman-Wilson mentions the steel mills, which profited from being in Gary but did not repay the city commensurately.   Robinson told the Gary Crusader, prior to a screening of “Looted” at the ArtHouse:

    I love my city!  It’s a place that raised me, and I felt compelled to do the research and tell this story.  Once my generation learn the true history of Gary, we will be armed with knowledge and hopefully motivated to do our part to effect change. 

A recent NWI Times obit for Andrea “Conchita” Olivares, who died at age 90 and once co-owned and operated Sam and Conchita’s Bakery in East Chicago, ran photos of her both as a younger and elderly woman.  That makes ma lot of sense. Obits for Jean De Young and Sandra Schaefer included the fact that Jean was a gifted oil and china painter, while Sandra “will always be re-membered for her luck playing the slot machines on the casino boat.”

At Charlie and Naomi’s for four-couple bridge, Chuck Tomes mentioned hearing from a Gary Emerson grad that during Ted Karras’ pro football career, linemen were so poorly paid that he started teaching at a Gary school in the off season and was assigned a notoriously tough class.  On the first day, when a kid acted up, Karras picked up both him and the desk he was sitting in and tossed him out the door, along with the desk.  Nobody gave him trouble after that.  I told of interviewing Ted Karras at his home in Miller and being told by his wife that we needed to be done by 11 because that was when reruns of the sitcom Webster, starring brother Alex, came on.

Chesterton

“You know what we say in Chesterton, it’s a Chester ton of fun.” Jim Gaffigan

According to NWI Times correspondent Eloise Marie Valadez, “Happenings in Chesterton” was a “Community Calendar” comedy segment on a recent airing of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” On hand to poke fun at his Hoosier hometown was 55-year-old Jim Gaffigan, the youngest of six children who played football at La Porte La Lumiere High School and whose Irish Catholic father was CEO of Mercantile National Bank. Known as a “clean comic” whose stand-up routines often center on such subjects as food, fatherhood, and laziness, Gaffigan currently lives in Manhattan with a wife and five children and has appeared in KFC commercials as Colonel Sanders.

Among the things to do in Chesterton, Indiana, where Toni and I now live, mentioned by Colbert and Gaffigan were a Family-Friendly Improv Comedy event on the beach at the Indiana Dunes, Destruction Derby Night at the Porter County Fair, a Lake Michigan bachelorette cruise featuring an appearance by the Men of Michigan City Strippers, and European Market (which I’ve attended), where goods, according to Colbert, come from Milan, Illinois, Paris, Michigan, and French Lick, Indiana.

Prior to moving to Chesterton in 2010, I had heard that, like many rural Indiana towns, Blacks historically had been unwelcome; otherwise, I didn’t know much about the community beyond what a few of my IUN students had written for articles that appeared in issues of Steel Shavings. At one time downtown Chesterton evidently sported a movie theater and a roller rink. Forty years ago, Kevin B. Ryan interviewed Baillytown teacher Miss Larson, who recalled that during the 1920s numerous farmers went to work in the steel mills and young girls out of school could find jobs as clerks in downtown Gary stores and shops. During Prohibition many folks made their own homebrew, and Porter County sheriff W. F. Forney conducted frequent raids against bootleggers and their illegal stills.

In “Chesterton in Transition” Michael J. Hayduk wrote that during the 1920s many farmers were obtaining electricity, Dunes Highway (now U.S. 12) was completed, land developers, both legitimate and illegitimate, were proliferating, and downtown stores were selling such new consumer items as Kodak cameras and Pyrex glassware. Hayduk also wrote about railroad accidents and an unnecessary shooting:

The most controversial 1920 story in the pages of the Chesterton Tribune involved the New York Central railroad crossing on Calumet Road in the heart of the downtown section. After a woman was killed by a train in January, there were editorials advocating better safety precautions. Then when a beloved milkman was struck fatally in May, the outcry increased. Finally, after three Chicagoans died at the crossing on July 1, the New York Central replaced the incompetent guard with a new man and added warning bells and gates to “Death Crossing.”

The people of the Chesterton area imagined that their community was free of the problems besetting such cities as Gary and Chicago, but occasionally a crime story would shatter this bucolic image. The trial of two railway detectives charged with shooting a motorist who had been changing a tire at midnight near company property not only captured much public attention but revealed an undertone of racism in the proceedings. Those interested in freeing the detectives dwelled on the criminal record of the motorist and inferred that he was a Negro who had been trying to pass as white. The trial was not very fair, and the jury rendered a not guilty verdict on grounds of self-defense. 

Gun Victim Wallace Broadnax

 “I am heartbroken and disgusted by the senseless brutality that took the life of Wallace Broadnax, a dedicated, lifelong member of our community.  Violence in our community is a public health crisis.” Gary mayor Jerome Prince

My heart sank and I let out a groan upon learning from a front-page headline that former Gary Roosevelt basketball star Wallace Broadnax had been fatally shot at a Clark gas station on the 2200 block of Grant Street shortly after 7 a.m. Saturday during a botched robbery by two juveniles now in custody. It was the twenty-first homicide in Gary since the beginning of the year. As a high school basketball fan, his name was familiar to me as a junior on the legendary squad that defeated Indianapolis Shortridge 68-60 at Hinkle Fieldhouse just three months after Richard Gordon Hatcher took office as the first Black mayor of a significantly sized city. Blaine Smith recalled that in NIPSCO’s downtown display window were life-size pictures of all the players, coaches, and managers. When civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated a few weeks later on April 4, 1968, Hatcher asked members of that team to help prevent young people from taking out their anger and frustration in acts of destruction. Aside from a few isolated acts, Gary was one of few American cities to avoid a riot during those terrible hours. In 1993 Broadnax and his teammates were inducted into the I ndiana Basketball Hall of Fame.

After graduating in 1969, Broadnax played basketball in Europe for a few years before returning to Gary, where he spent 25 years as an engineer in the fire department and also worked for Guy and Allen Funeral Home. Former colleague Mark Jones recalled that “Wally was an exemplary firefighter, a great engineer [who] got us to where we needed to be.”  Retired fire captain William Todd told Bob Kasarda of the NWI Times: “Wally was a soft-spoken, well-mannered guy who would give you the shirt off his back.”

Those sentiments were echoed by nephew Anthony Broadnax, who told WGN’s Andy Koval after rushing to the scene of the tragedy, “He was backing away from these boys, they were pretty young and they just panicked, ran on foot, didn’t even get anything.  Completely senseless. If they had asked for money, he would have given it to them.  He wasn’t trying to tussle with these guys.” Anthony continued, “Back in 1968, Black teens took so much pride in their school and neighborhood because they weren’t allowed to live anywhere else in Gary.  To think of harming someone elderly would have been unthinkable.” The nephew concluded: “Most of our family is Christian and from Gary. We know the hopelessness and causes that breeds these things.  We are heartbroken and angry, but we understand where this comes from.  Those boys have thrown their lives away.”

A member of the First Baptist Church, Broadnax leaves behind grieving widow Valerie, an Aunt Lulu, two brothers and a sister, four children, ten grandchildren, and, to quote the obituary, “a host of nieces, nephews, other relatives, and friends.” He’ll be sorely missed.

Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell

 “Drew Pearson gained his power playing by pre-modern rules of journalism that we would now find reprehensible, New York Times reviewer Richard J. Tofel

Reviewers have had high praise for Donald Ritchie’s meticulously researched new book “The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel: Drew Pearson’s Washington.” Once a household name, the self-professed “keyhole peeper” whose syndicated column “Washington Merry-Go-Round” once appeared in over 600 newspapers, is far less well-known than Dallas Cowboys Hall of Famer Drew Pearson, recipient of Roger Staubach’s playoff game-winning “Hail Mary” pass. Born into an Illinois Quaker family in 1897, Pearson attended Swarthmore College and married the daughter of Washington Times-Herald owner Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson. His controversial column and radio program were famous for so-called “scoops,” combining outrage, sarcasm, and gallows humor delivered in a spirit of muckraking moral indignation.  He exposed foes’ sexual peccadilloes, such as that General Douglas MacArthur had an 18-year-old filipina mistress. Between 1932 and 1969 he broke stories about FDR’s court-packing plans, General George Patton slapping a soldier, the mental instability of Harry S Truman’s Defense secretary James Forrestal, Truman’s 1950 meeting with MacArthur on Wake Island, Senator Joseph McCarthy soliciting favors for Private G. David Schine, and Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy wire-tapping Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pearson was sued more than 150 times and lost only once – to a high-powered lobbyist.  The FBI tapped his phone, opened his mail, and employed spies against him, compiling thousands of pages for Director J. Edgar Hoover’s benefit, to which Ritchie gained access. Richard Tofel noted that when Pearson dropped dead of a heart attack in 1969, the New York Times editorialized about his “pugnacity, vindictiveness, and irresponsibility” but also praised his “fearless dedication to the belief that the independent and resourceful reporter is the indispensable guardian of good-government.”  Echoing that sentiment, Ritchie concluded: “The evidence confirms that he performed a public service by revealing how politicians and government really worked.”

The June 2021 Journal of American History contains a review of the “American Masters” documentary “Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip.” Like Pearson now almost forgotten and born, as was Pearson, in 1897 to Russian-born Jews, Winchell grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and was a tap dancer in vaudeville, a naval officer during World War,  and as a newspaper columnist and radio personality regarded journalism as entertainment. Syndicated in 2,000 newspapers and familiar to radio audiences for a staccato delivery, he began shows by saying, “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea.  Let’s go to press.”  For background effect, he employed the sound of a telegraph key.  

Winchell’s coverage of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping vaulted him into prominence as more than a gossip columnist, and during the Franklin Roosevelt administration he was an avid supporter of the New Deal, preparedness, the FBI, and civil rights. There was a nasty, thin-skinned side to Winchell, however, and he was a philanderer who welcomed feuds with the likes of Ed Sullivan and “Tonight”show  host Jack Paar. With a fedora on his head and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he was a familiar sight at Table 50 of Manhattan’s Stork Club, where he never paid and hobnobbed with those he wrote about.  He fell for demagogue Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist posturings, and his popularity was waning when selected in 1959 to narrate “The Untouchables” TV series. In 1963 the New York Daily Mirror folded during a newspaper strike at a time when his hysterical style was rapidly going out of favor, leaving him begging for work.  According to Professor Michael J. Socolow, before succumbing to prostate cancer in 1973, Winchell’s final years was spent as a recluse at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, pathetically “typing out mimeographed sheets with his column, handing them out on the corner.”

While Pearson and Winchell’s generation of frenetic newsmen was replaced by a group of professionals who came of age during World War II, their tabloid style has never gone away.  The PBS documentary compares their popularity and conservative populist style to the “Drudge Report” and in our age of social media acknowledges the temptation for news producers to cater to sensationalism and, in short, the lowest common denominator.

Ray Smock, like Ritchie a fellow University of Marylnd grad student during the late 1960s and diector of the Robert C. Byrd Center, wrote : “I first encountered Drew Pearson when I was ten years old and he had a cameo appearance in my all time favorite movie: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). It is Pearson who announces that a flying saucer had landed on the Mall in DC! How’s this for movie trivia?”  Smock recently hosted a zoom lecture by Ritchie on “The Columnist.” Progressice Era historian H. Samuel Merrill, author of “The Republican Command,” was Ritchie and my academic adviser, and Smock’s was Louis Harlan, acclaimed biographer of African-American educator Booker T. Washington.