America's Best Idea?

Ken Burns’ six-part, 12-hour series, entitled “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” began to air on PBS. The subtitle is from a quote by Wallace Stegner. I’ve enjoyed Burns’ previous efforts on the West, Baseball, Jazz, the Civil War, Baseball, and World War II; but the fiddle and banjo music can get to be a little too much. A reviewer for the L.A. Times wrote that unlike many documentaries that dumb-down the study of the past, Burns teaches us that “history is a gorgeously complicated thing.” Burns refers to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, where Toni and I reside until our leaseback runs out in September 2010. As neighbor John Laue points out in a proposal to save some of the few remaining houses from “the wrecking ball,” the West Beach Unit where I live in the once tight knit community of Edgewater was added in a 1976 Expansion Bill that more than doubled the size of the park. Also the government negotiated more than twice as many leasebacks as any other park and for the first time did not issue lifetime leasebacks. We negotiated a 20-year leaseback that was subsequently extended another nine years. When that ran out in 2007, the government allowed us to extend it till September 2010, at which time all remaining homes will be torn down, if the Park Service gets its way.

In a 1991 volume of “Steel Shavings dealing with the history of Portage, Indiana, I included a poem called “The Oaks” by John’s father Gilbert Laue about the cost to nature of “progress.” He wrote:

Men in hardhats
chainsaws snarling
earthmovers roaring
exult in their power
as the old oaks crash to the ground
and every vine and violet
blade of grass and fallen leaf
in buried under raw sand
contoured
for the Interstate cloverleaf

entrance to the steelmills-in-the-dunes
and a new motel to be called
no doubt
The Oaks

In 1998 John Laue and I co-edited an oral history of Edgewater that included many wonderful sketch drawings by area artist Dale Fleming and appeared in volume 28 of Steel Shavings, entitled “Tales of Lake Michigan and the Northwest Indiana Dunelands. In the Editor’s Note I wrote that a violent thunder and lightning storm greeted us our first night at 9649 Maple Place, which was located high atop a sand dune in a wooded area not far from the lake. In time we got used to shoveling lake effect snow and having cold air permeate our double-paneled fireplace room north window when the wind chill factor dropped below zero. With mixed feelings we watched deer munch on our shrubs, cleaned up after raccoons raided our garbage cans, lost electricity several times a year, and experienced sensations similar to an earthquake after shock when vibrations from passing trains disturbed the sand under our home. Compensating for these minor inconveniences were the pleasures of hearing the surf on stormy days (“pounding the shore with the throb of an engine,” to quote French novelist Simone de Beauvoir), rummaging for firewood in a nearby ravine, tending our plants and garden vegetables, catching sight of toads, possums and even an occasional snake, and observing hummingbirds, woodpeckers, hawks, and dozens of other kinds of ornithological specimens, including migratory ducks and geese flying overhead in formation and seemingly honking at us.”

This Gilbert Laue poem appears in “Tales of Lake Michigan””

He wasn’t much for nature
Walks in the woods
Bird watching
Spring’s first hepatica
Home craftsman
Semi-pro
Was his line

Remodeling, rebuilding
Repairing
Fixing
Making and designing
Planning how to do it

Poor Dot was doomed
To never live
In a finished house
Her kitchen was torn up
He was building new cabinets
The rec room
New ceiling
Bathroom
Showerstall
And on and on

Once he even figured out
How to raise the roof
To add a whole new floor

He needed the attached garage for his tools and materials
So to it he attached a two-car garage, with a sun-deck roof
Neither car has ever been in it
There isn’t room.

Heard from Paul Kern about volume 40. He wrote: “I've read it cover-to-cover and found it very interesting. Of course, some might quibble that you cannot write a "retirement journal" when you are so obviously not retired. Somewhat startled to find my emails in your journal, I was relieved to not find anything in them that made me cringe. It's true that it was my dream in graduate school to teach at a liberal arts college, but after several years I concluded that IUN was a good place for me. I liked the students and enjoyed the freedom I had to do things like develop ancient history as one of my fields. The atmosphere at a small college might have seemed a little claustrophobic. Also I thought the Region was an interesting area and always admired and enjoyed your efforts to preserve its history and bring it to life. Writing the history of IUN with you was an honor. I had forgotten that you holed up in my apartment one Christmas to finish up City of the Century. I guess that's when I was spending the holidays with my sister and our parents. I liked the way you weaved background info and reminiscences into your journal. That brought back many good memories.”

Salem Press released my review of “1960: LBJ VS. JFK VS. NIXON: The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies by David Pietrusza. I mentioned that it captures the essence of a pivotal Presidential election that featured party primaries and television “debates” assuming immense and lasting importance and wrote: “Since the publication in 1961 of Theodore H. White’s classic The Making of the President, 1960, journalists and historians alike have swept aside the code of silence regarding the peccadilloes of politicians. Without verifying its veracity Pietrusza repeats an anecdote about John F. Kennedy having sex with a call girl at Chicago’s Palmer House 90 minutes before his first TV encounter with Richard M. Nixon, who looked, to quote Ben Bradlee, like an “awkward cadaver.” Afterwards, the story goes, the charismatic candidate was so pleased with how things went that, according to longtime confidant Langdon P. Marvin, Jr., “he insisted we line up a girl for him before each of the debates.” Concerning Lyndon Baines Johnson, also a notorious philanderer, the author quotes wife Lady Bird’s rationalization that since her husband loved everyone, ‘it would be unnatural for him to withhold love from half the people.’”

The review continued: “In recent years revelations have surfaced about the role Mobster money played in securing West Virginia for Kennedy in the Democratic primary, the amphetamine injections from “Miracle Max” Jacobson, nicknamed Dr. Feelgood, and how Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley provided the necessary “ghost votes” to secure Illinois in November. Had Nixon chosen the Prairie State’s Senator Everett Dirksen or Governor William “Wild Bill” Stratton as his running mate, he might have won. JFK’s choice of LBJ was shrewder. In the capable hands of prolific sports/social historian David Pietrusza (i.e, Teddy Ballgame: My Life in Pictures (with Ted Williams), the behind-the-scenes maneuvering and character flaws of these contenders in the bare-knuckles blood sport of politics come alive and serve as cautionary tales to a new generation of readers.”

Last Friday IU Northwest’s History and Philosophy department was to take Anja Matwijkiw out to Aladdin’s Restaurant in Merrillville to celebrate her getting tenure and promoted to associate professor only she was sick and couldn’t come. Ten of us had lunch anyway including fellow emeriti Ron Cohen and Fred Chary. Gave “Freddy,” as I sometimes call him, a copy of the Retirement Journal. Ron, whose wife Nancy Del Castillo, has been reading volume 40 and contributed a journal herself to my “Ides of March 2003” issue, asked about my method of journal keeping. Told him I’d scribble down notes in the late afternoon and type daily entries the next morning but then make additions and revisions later. I often call Ron “Sparky,” a nickname he dubbed himself when he was a deejay on a radio program. They both call me Jimbo, as does Chancellor Bruce Bergland and many others. As Ray Saluga of the Ace Trucking Company liked to say, “You can call me Ray, Or you can call me J., Or you can call me Ray J., Or you can call me Ray, J. J., Or you can call me R. J. J., Jr., but you doesn’t have to call me Johnson.” The grandkids love it when I do that routine.

On Saturday Toni and I went to a quilt show at Timothy Ball Elementary School in Crown Point, named in honor of the Calumet Region’s first teacher, minister, and historian. There is also a Solon Robinson School, named for Crown Point's first resident. A bowling teammate, Frank Shufran had a quilt in the show, as did his wife Joan. Her entry, entitled “The ABCs of Life,” had such words to live by from A to Z as “Accept differences,” “Be kind,” “Yearn for peace,” and “Zealously support a worthy cause.” The worthy cause that we support most zealously is the Southern Poverty Law Center, which helps victims of bigotry. Frank at age 78 plays golf whenever the weather permits and averages in the high 180s on my bowling team, the Electrical Engineers. Over the years, I have come to admire people ten years or so older than me who are still vibrant. Neighbor Chuck Bernstin, who was still repairing TVs and VCRs a couple years ago, was one. Local radio and TV personality and historian Tom Higgins is another.