Limber Jim

“All literature is gossip.”
Truman Capote

Calumet Regional Archives buddy Steve McShane took wife Cindy on a surprise vacation to the Keys for their thirtieth anniversary. They had no honeymoon because he was a struggling grad student then. Part-time assistant Peg Schoon was holding down the fort. On sabbatical, husband Ken was on hand researching a book on the dunes. The week before, he had visited Save the Dunes mainstays Herb and Charlotte Read at their house that the government is forcing them to abandon. They are hoping it can be designated a historic landmark because important meetings took place there involving Senator Paul Douglas and other luminaries that led to creation of the National Lakeshore. Meg Renslow and her daughter stopped by. Meg is teaching an intro course for future Elementary school teachers and was considering a field trip for them to the Archives until we told her that eventually they all will be taking Steve’s course on Indiana History, a subject covered in fourth grade. The daughter is doing a documentary on Hoosier Gene Stratten-Porter, the author of “A Girl of the Limberlost” (1909) and many other romantic novels and Anne Balay’s favorite author of children’s literature. A building at Purdue Cal is named for Stratten-Porter, an avid wetlands preservationist (Limberlost was a swamp until drained to make way for “progress”) who died in California in 1923 when a streetcar struck her vehicle. A restoration project begun in the 1990s has reclaimed Loblolly Marsh, covering 1,500 of the original 13,000 acres of Limberlost Swamp. The name derives from a man nicknamed “Limber Jim” who got lost in the swamp. There are two variations of the story: in one the man is never seen again; in the other Limber Jim makes it home. Loblolly is from a Miami Indian word meaning “stinking river.”

Wish I were Limber Jim. I popped something in my right arm bowling and pulled a shoulder muscle from nothing more strenuous than sneezing.

IUN’s cafeteria was serving beef tacos, which went well with Darcy Wade’s potato salad. Chancellor Bill Lowe joined our table and told Jim Tolhuizen that he enjoyed last evening’s Northwest Indiana Symphony Chorus presentation at the Horseshoe Casino. He added, to everyone’s surprise, that he had never been to a casino before. Zoran Kilibarda mentioned that he recently became an American citizen, and I told the group of my plan to get former Faculty Organization chairs, including John Ban, F.C. Richardson, Fred Chary, and George Roberts, to gavel open the monthly meetings. One person at the table groaned when I mentioned Richardson, but F.C. was a real bulldog in fighting for what he believed in, including launching IUN’s Black Studies program (one of the first in the country).

Started Truman Capote’s “Music for Chameleons,” a volume of short stories written during the 1970s. It is dedicated to fellow gay playwright Tennessee Williams and employs elements that Capote used in his so-called nonfiction novels. In the title story dozens of chameleons come out of the woodwork when a lady in Martinique plays the piano. Capote, a true craftsman, characterizes writing as “a noble but merciless master.” I read is “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and started “In Cold Blood” (about a murderer) but couldn’t get through it – too gruesome. “Esquire” during the 1970s published a gossipy piece that later appeared posthumously in “Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel.” Among the Capote quotes on Google, I found this: “Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.”

Sheriff Dominguez flew to south Texas to interview relatives about their memories of when his family came north. The material might make a fitting epilogue to his autobiography, “Spirits from the Fields.” His Uncle Saul brought them to Northwest Indiana a half-century ago in his pick-up truck and felt so lonely on the trip back that he broke down and cried at times, he told Roy yesterday on the phone. Roy wrote a Guest Commentary” for “The Times” taking the town of Winfield to task for reneging on their promise to pay the sheriff’s department $100,000 in return for police protection. Incorporated as a town in 1993, Winfield never created a police force or town marshal as required by state statute, instead depending on county officers to patrol their community for free and boasting that their “tax rate is the lowest in lake County.” Dominquez warned that if his office did not receive the $100,000 good faith payment, all patrols and nonemergency services would cease. Good for him.

Salem Press sent a copy of the published version of my review of “Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town.” Parallels with Northwest Indiana are obvious. As is my custom, I started with a quote:

“I became a union man at my father’s knee, and I’ll be one till they put me in a box,” Manuel Alvarez

Deborah Rudacille, whose previous books dealt with animal rights (The Scalpel and the Butterfly) and transgendered Americans (The Riddle of Gender), returned to her childhood neighborhood in Dundalk, Maryland, a blue collar suburb of Baltimore, and produced an elegy to a vanishing culture. For more than a century Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point plant symbolized the triumph and travail of industrial capitalism. With the advent of unionism in 1941 laborers secured a significant stake in the system. Jessie Schultz, one of over 50 interviewees, recalled: “It was a dangerous job. But if it wasn’t for Bethlehem Steel, I wouldn’t have what I got today.” Workers had to cope with a racial and ethnic pecking order, shift work, asbestos, noxious pollution, and a harsh workplace environment that drove many to drink (as her dad’s sidekick, the author recalls coaxing bar patrons into giving her coins for the jukebox).

Though certainly no utopia, those days seem idyllic to old-timers, who regret the loss of solidarity among neighbors and union comrades. Now, to quote Judy Martin, there is homelessness, overcrowded soup kitchens, and “everyone is afraid of opening doors.” Rudacille blames the “bust” not only on automation but on management shortsightedness and greed. Still it was counterproductive in the long run for unions to have pressed for employer-funded health and retirement plans rather than national health insurance and adequate Social Security pensions. Starting in 2001 with Bethlehem’s bogus bankruptcy, Sparrows Point changed corporate hands five times in eight years, with the inevitable downsizing and huge profits accruing to speculators. When Roots of Steel went to press, the mill, whose patriotic workers helped win two world wars and fueled the mid-twentieth century prosperity, was in Russian (OAO Severstal) hands.

I should have had the last line read, “in the hands of Russian capitalists.”