Fiber artist Marianita Porterfield

Attended Garrett Cope’s monthly Glen Park Conversation. The featured speaker was fiber artist Marianita Porterfield, who weaves beautiful, original art pieces. She and my wife Toni took some art classes together at IU Northwest, including an Art History course taught by Harold Hayden that I audited. Her son J.J. went to school with my sons Philip and David, and she recalled that I once called her house and asked to talk to her teenaged daughter Gina because we were looking for a baby sitter. She mentioned moving to Gary with her first husband, attorney Jackie Shropshire, and told several anecdotes about her husband Harry, a Chicago TV anchor for years who does a feature entitled “Someone You Should Know.” They are great people, and Marianita charmed the audience both with her personality and her splendid art pieces.

During the second part of the program Steve McShane showed off some Archives treasures, including an 1818 map that showed the Lake Michigan shoreline being part of the Northwest Territory rather than Indiana, whose first governor, Jonathan Jennings, finally persuaded the federal government to allow it to be part of the Hoosier state. Steve also showed glass plates of early U.S. Steel mill and town construction sites and gave everyone a photo of the Jackson Five, circa 1972, in front of the Palace Theatre. In attendance, in addition to the two dozen or so Gary senior citizens, were Chancellor Bruce Bergland, several library staff, SPEA professor Rick Hug, Garret’s wife Barbara (formerly Dean of Student Services), photographer Don Young (a former student and IU Northwest police officer), and 91 year-old former Tuskegee Airman and West Side principal Quentin Smith, who still has a booming voice, a firm handshake, and an active mind.

Spoke to Nicole’s class about Gary IN during the 1960s. Had students read excerpts from stuff in my Sixties issue, including these recollections by Bette Julkes, a 1967 Gary Roosevelt grad who recalled Afros being the rage her senior year: recalls that during her senior year of 1966-67 the Afro hair style was in vogue and girls could wear pants to school for the first time. Bette recalled: “A shy, young, white student teacher was assigned to my Biology class. Some students were irate, but to my surprise I liked him right away. In fact, after initial reservations, most of my classmates accepted him. We had a lot of fun, perhaps because he was closer to our age than our regular teacher. When his teaching time was drawing to an end, we decided to buy him a ten-dollar briefcase. On his last day he spent the last 15 minutes telling us how sorry he was to be leaving. When we gave him our gift, his eyes filled with tears as he managed to mutter a thank-you. It was sort of a great release. At that moment I loved him for liking us so much to cry and for being so different from what we had been conditioned to expect.”

Judy Fouladi interviewed “Laurie” who recalled: “One day my friends and I met a few hippies on the beach who asked us if we’d like to party. Of course, we said yes. The guys had bell-bottom jeans on and no shirts. They had long hair, and some were wearing headbands. They took us to an apartment that was on the top floor of a two-story house. I will never forget what it looked like. There were beads in the doorways separating the rooms. They had black light posters highlighted with black lights and strobe lights. Several folks were already there, sitting in the living room on big pillows, smoking pot out of this big water pipe. They offered us some, and we said yes. When it was time to go home, I had a lot of difficulty walking down the stairs. One of the guys took me home, and for the first time I experiences a French kiss. I thought it was gross.

Laurie continued: “Sex was fun it the Sixties. We did not have the fear of life-threatening diseases or unwanted pregnancy because of The Pill. It was also a time of exploring different ways to have sex. My girlfriends and I compared notes and discussed new techniques. Experimentation was practical because you could avoid marrying a guy who was a dud in bed. My fantasy in 1969 was to go to Woodstock. Some of my friends’ older brothers went in a couple of vans but getting my parents’ permission was out of the question. In the summer of 1969 I bought a ring bikini. The top was held together in the middle by a plastic ring, and the bottom was held together at each side by plastic rings. One day in Lake Michigan both bottom rings broke. I had to wear a towel home.”

Dario Llano interviewed his father, whose world during the Sixties revolved around music. He recalled: I had a pair of socks that resembled the American flag and was in a band called Sadly Mistaken. I channeled all the energy that had previously got me into trouble into singing. I loved The House of the Rising Sun by the Animals. I also listened to the Young Rascals, who recorded Good Lovin’, Groovin’, and Mustang Sally. My older sister Phyllis loved the Kingston Trio and the Beatles. My dad had a jukebox in the basement filled with 78 rpm Latin records. I couldn’t understand them except for the cuss words. I could sing La Bamba, however. It made me feel good.

I gave everyone in the class copies of “Brothers in Arms” and had three people read excerpts from the remembrances of Iu Northweest professors Jim Tolhuizen, Gary Wilk, and Raoul Contreras, who recalled an incident during a Search and Destroy mission that changed his perspective: “We were searching a village, and for whatever reason I was extremely pissed off, which at that time was common for me. We were trying to move people out and destroy their possessions. There were people standing next to their huts, while I was yelling and screaming at them to move. There was a small, bent, elderly woman who was running in the direction that I was telling her, along with the children. She turned around for a moment, and I immediately stopped screaming. As I saw her face, suddenly it dawned on me and I said to myself, ‘Jesus, she looks like my grandmother!’ All of a sudden it hit me, goddamn, here I am yelling and screaming at this woman. I could only imagine what I looked like with this weapon, helmet, and other shit on, and how she must be terrorized about what we might do to them. It made me think about what she must have been thinking when she looked at me. It made me think of what we were doing. From then on, I always got along well with the Vietnamese.”

Talked about Richard Gordon Hatcher’s election in 1967 and had students read these perspectives by Hatcher supporters James Holland and Jean Thurman. Holland recalled: “When the outcome was announced, thousands of black people danced in the streets. It reminded me of what we used to do when I was a kid after Joe Louis won a fight. I stayed around and talked to people about what we had to do next. Then I went to a friend’s house and we stayed up most of the night talking about what was going to happen.” Jean Thurman noted: “After the election, in one of his first speeches Mayor Hatcher said that the only people not welcome in Gary were crooks. They could go. His vision was a multi-cultural, multi-racial city. That was the vision most of us had. We didn’t push the white people out. They decided on their own that they wanted to go. I remember people saying on talk shows that they were moving because they couldn’t raise their children in a city where the mayor was black. That was disheartening. I really don’t think Hatcher expected that. You know, we can talk about how awful racism is, but you never really want to believe it. You want to think that, deep down, people are decent. The white flight came as a rude awakening. Hatcher didn’t even get a chance to get in office before people were getting ready to leave.”

After showing a video of the Jackson Five’s first hit, “I Want You Back,” I mentioned how they were allegedly discovered by Diana Ross performing at a Hatcher fundraiser and had someone read a quote from Michael’s autobiography Moon Walk about growing up the seventh of nine children in a three-room house in Gary and strict papa Joe was.