IUN Lady Redhawks

Last Saturday Toni and I cheered the IU Northwest’s women’s basketball team, the Lady Redhawks, as they won a thriller against the number one seeded Ohio Dominican Panthers in the finals of a postseason tournament held at IUN’s Savannah Center gym. The game was tied 40-40 at halftime, and with less than a minute to go the Panthers had a chance to take the lead but the Lady Redhawks prevailed, led by their six foot, four inch superstar Sharon Houston, who scored 27 points in the 70-67 win. The team has two scrappy guards, Juliette Keller and Nina Wills, who also played great. Two years ago the team had only one or two subs and went winless. Coach Ryan Shelton, a really good guy who helped me lay out volume 40 of Steel Shavings, was quite emotional as he presented team members with their first place medals. There was a pretty good faculty contingent at the game including Jim Tolhuizen, Ruth Needleman, Mark Hoyert and Cynthia O’Dell with their two kids, and (with their spouses) Rick Hug and Chuck Gallmeier.

Right after the game there was a reception for photography professor Gary Wilk, who is retiring at the end of the semester, in connection with an exhibit entitled “Master and Mentor” that included works both by Gary and some of his students. The most interested group were entitled “As I Remember It, Vietnam,” with images inside a border simulating the counting off of days remaining of a soldier’s tour, although in these cases they represent KIAs. As mentioned in the interview of Gary in “Brothers in Arms” (Steel Shavings, volume 39), Gary was a cook who didn’t see much military action during his first 365 days so he extended his stay so he could afterwards receive an early discharge from the army. As fate would have it, he did this on the eve of the Tet Offensive and his base was constantly under attack during his final four months in country. During most of that time he lived in a bunker.

Won one (Amun Re) out of four board games against Dave and Tom Wade and watched the exciting Winter Olympics ice hockey final between the U.S. and Canada. Miraculously America tied the game with less than 30 seconds to go only to lose in overtime on a goal by baby-faced Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby, who reminds me of my favorite Philadelphia Flyers player from the Seventies Bobby Clarke. I was rooting for the Americans but didn’t mind the Canadians ending “their” Olympics on such a celebratory note. That story pales though compared to the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Chile just weeks after an even more deadly one wracked Haiti.

Got into Anne Tyler’s “A Patchwork Planet.” Like with “Morgan’s Crossing” the main character, Barnaby, is a male oddball nonconformist, but the real theme is how this person transforms and in some ways liberates the life of the (in this case older) woman he hooks up with. The book opens with Barnaby at the Baltimore train station on his way to visit his daughter when he notices a man trying to get someone to carry a package to his daughter at the Philadelphia station. Supposedly the daughter is flying overseas and forgot her passport, and the man himself can’t go because his wife is ill. Sylvia, the woman Barnaby later hooks with, agrees to take the package, and a suspicious Barnaby follows her.

Watched “Jeopardy” yesterday afternoon with friend Clark Metz. I was pretty slow on the draw coming up with answers, but did well on the “March 1” category that featured historical things that occurred on that date. The “Final Jeopardy” question was about Lizzie Borden, who allegedly killed her father and stepmother with an axe. Both Clark and I got it, as did two of the contestants. A young woman drew a blank but had enough of a lead to win anyway. Lizzie was found not guilty but inspired this rhyme, to which girls sometimes skipped rope:

“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.”