History Matters

“In our darkest hour
In my deepest despair
Will you still care?
Will you be there?”
Michael Jackson

At Cressmoor Lanes the Engineers again won one of three games. Thanks to five strikes I rolled a 202, then struggled the next two games. New bowler John has a 169 average but finished with a 606 series. Joined members of another team in a conversation about favorite live concerts. Mine included Warren Zevon, the Kinks, Bob Dylan, ZZ Top, Moody Blues, and the B52s. One guy saw Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five at the Houston Astrodome playing to a crowd of 70,000. Michael rarely came back to his home town of Gary, but brother Tito visited Lew Wallace High School in 1995 with sons Taj, Taryll, and J.T, who were in a group called 3T. Their song “Anything” was on the soul charts that year and was a big hit in Great Britain. Their “Didn’t Mean to Hurt You” was on the “Free Willy” soundtrack. At the assembly most questions to Tito were naturally about his brother Michael, whose “Will You be There” opens and closes the “Free Willy” soundtrack but like “Didn’t Mean to Hurt You” is about a woman, not a whale. Michael probably felt as trapped at times as Willy, with folks gawking at him and his peculiarities. The New York Post unfailingly referred to him as Jacko, as in “Rhymes with Wacko.” I think Michael’s serious problems in terms of becoming addicted to medication started when his hair caught fire in 1984 while doing a Pepsi commercial. Keiko, the whale who played Wiily, was eventually released into the North Atlantic Sea but didn’t do well and died of pneumonia soon afterwards.

A camera team from Flight 33 Productions is coming to Gary next week to film in 3-D locations that that, in their words, have fallen in hard times” for Discovery Channel’s “Abandoned Planet” series. Steffen Schlachtenhaufen wants me along to provide historical perspective and sent me a list of possible sites, including Union Station, Memorial Auditorium, City Methodist Church, and the Palace Theater. Froebel School was on the list but has been razed so might not fit in with their plans. Since someone lives in Michael Jackson’s childhood house and it’s been spruced up since his death, it’s not on the list. I suggested that they solicit radio and TV personality Tom Higgins and Stormy Weather founder Henry Farag to join us. Henry is working on a song about Vivian Carter, whose company Vee-Jay records is on Steffen’s list. One line goes, “Soon the curtain came falling down, all silent in the steel town.” I also talked to scriptwriter James Goldin and promised to send him “Gary’s First Hundred Years.” He was curious about why the downtown commercial district collapsed so suddenly and why Black entrepreneurs didn’t replace the fleeing white merchants. Before hanging up, he said he had enjoyed my recent blog entries. Interesting.

Indianapolis documentarian Nick Hess is researching a project relating to the Bailly Alliance, the antinuclear movement that got construction stopped on the power plant at nearby Burns Harbor. I mailed him the issue I did with Jim Newman, who was one of the interveners in the legal fight against NIPSCO utility company.

IU Northwest’s largest faculty merit raises (averaging about three percent) in years had led to grumbling from those on the low end. From what I could tell, the people who got big raises deserved them. One person wanted to bring up his gripe with Chancellor Lowe when he had breakfast Friday with my old department, but I talked him out of it. Our guest was eager to talk about old research projects, including Irish migration to Liverpool, the nineteenth-century Irish constabulary, and the Irish War for Independence, 1919-1922. Jonathan Briggs and Jerry Pierce noted that they cover aspects of Irish History in their courses on the Middle Ages and terrorism. I know they’d love to have Lowe make a guest appearance. As faculty members talked about their current scholarly interests, Nicole Anslover mentioned she was finishing a book about America’s Vietnam policy and then hoped to explore the modern office of vice-president. Lowe told her that while at Metropolitan State in Minneapolis he had talked to Walter Mondale a few times and believed that Mondale functions as Vice President under Jimmy Carter helped transform the office into one of importance. Of course it depended on who were first and second in command. When Dan Quayle was Bush the First’s Veep, the office regressed to where it wasn’t worth (in John Nance Garner’s words) a bucket of warm piss). Told Nicole I’d send her my review of “Dropping the Torch” about the 1980 Olympic boycott.

Jay Bumm appreciated the reunion photos and quipped: “Who are the old guys in the group shot?” I replied that I thought we all looked good. LeeLee reported that four American Airlines baggage handlers were charged with stealing valuables and wondered whether they made off with Wendy’s Homecoming tiara. She thinks it would make a good mystery story. Pretty funny. Emails from classmates are tapering off as people (to paraphrase Connie) are coming down from Cloud Nine. Hopefully Nancy Schrope is receiving many photos. Very few have been posted on Facebook. I got a request to be Facebook friends with Lyana Wade, Tom's daughter who lives in Russia. I've met her just twice, once when we went to the beach along Lake Michigan and she got a bad sunburn. Most of the postings on her site are in Cyrillic although we have several American friends in common, including several Halberstadts.

I really like Robert Downey, Jr., and Zach Galifianakis, the stars of “Due Date,” but the film does not match up well against the classic “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” to which it aspires. Toni would have hated it. The crash scenes are unnecessary and the dog masturbating is much too gross, but there are some undeniably funny scenes, especially when the unlikely pair visit a pot dealer played by Juliette Lewis. On the drive home it started snowing, just lake effect flurries at first, but within hours more than an inch had fallen. Our condo, I fear, is within the snow belt that gets hit hard when cold winds blow off Lake Michigan.