All Shook Up

“My hands are shaky and my knees are weak

I can’t seem to stand on my own two feet.”

    “All Shook Up,” Elvis Presley

Neither Toni nor I could escape coming down with bad colds as the Thanksgiving vacation was coming to an end.  I felt so listless I spent most of the next three days in bed although I honored an agreement to speak to Steve’s class Tuesday evening on the postwar years in the Region.  Speaking about it being an age of anxiety, I neglected to mention that school officials gave Region kids tattoos of their blood types in case the Russians attacked.  I got more questions than usual, including thoughtful ones concerning Vee-Jay founder Vivian Carter and Tuskegee Airman Quentin Smith.

It’s hard to imagine that in all the years of teaching I never missed class because of an illness – I just gutted it out. In retrospect, that seems compulsive.  Often I’d come down with colds at semester’s end, as if the body was telling me that it needed down time.  I did miss two weeks after a knee replacement operation. I had it done right after the Fall semester ended and thought I could be back in the classroom four weeks later.  Wrong.  Instead Ron Cohen taught my upper division class and a supplementary instructor, Tom Pawelski, showed a four-hour documentary on Reconstruction to my survey students.  When I was finishing up my dissertation in grad school, I caught something going around that lasted three weeks but gutted it out in time to graduate.

When my dad came down with a cold, he’d sensibly take to his bed for three or four days, switch from Camel cigarettes to Kools (believing that the menthol had medicinal value), and have a bottle of bourbon nearby.  Midge would bring Vic meals, and sometimes I’d play gin rummy or cribbage with him. 

I caught IU’s impressive win over North Carolina as well as a couple HBO documentaries, including “41” (about George H.W. Bush).   It made no mention of the notorious 1988 Willie Horton attack ad implying that Michael Dukakis was complicit in allowing a murderer to go free only to have the black man kill again.  Neither was there mention of his involvement in secret agreements with Iran to delay the release of hostages until after the 1980 election or his role in Iran Contra.  When asked about things pertaining to when he was CIA director Bush flatly refused to discuss them. He blamed Ross Perot for his losing the 1992 election to Bill Clinton.  Surprisingly there was no mention of Bush’s subsequent friendship with Clinton and the charity work they worked on together.

Wartorn: 1861-2010,” movingly documents the effects of post-traumatic stress disorders on American soldiers and their families.  During WW I it was called shell-shock, in WW II battle fatigue.  In both cases the diagnosis implied cowardice or a moral failing.  Only after Vietnam did the problem come under examination, and even today soldiers are ill-prepared for the transition to civilian life.  After the Civil War and each succeeding conflict suicide and mental illness have reached shocking levels.  What makes the documentary so hard-hitting is that all the interviews are with veterans themselves, including WW II veterans talking for the first time about how their lives were ruined.  One Iraq War veteran compulsively sits by his computer watching photos he took during his multiple tours of duty.  He got all the men under him home safely but cannot even go to Walmart with his family without getting anxiety attacks.  Conducting the interviews was producer James Gandolfini, best known for his role of mobster Tony Soprano.

High school friend Phil Arnold has an Elvis blog.  Recently he posted photos of what Obama and Romney would look like dressed like Elvis.  Unlike Romney, Obama looks cool.

High school friend Phil Arnold has an Elvis blog.  Recently he posted photos of what Obama and Romney would look like dressed like Elvis.  Unlike Romney, Obama looks cool.

I sent Joyce Davis of Lake Street Gallery jpegs from a poster Paulette Lafata-Johnson produced advertising the IU Alumni Association authors event a week from Saturday.  That’s one reason I dragged my ailing body to school.  Also I needed to do final revisions of my “Dune-Fawn” article that will appear in South Shore Journal.  Editor Chris Young likes it so much it will be the lead article.

Prior to the condo board meeting, President Bernie Holicky mentioned that he hardly ever returns to Purdue Cal, where he was university librarian.  He does get together with several other retirees, however, including historian Lance Trusty.  In college during the 1950s, he recalled that his history textbook was by John D. Hicks, most famous for “The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party.”  At Bucknell Dr. William Harbaugh used a lively text by Thomas A. Bailey.

Sports Illustrated has an interesting article about legendary Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers, part of the double play combo of Tinker to Evers to Chance.  In 1908. the last time the Cubs won the World Series, Evers retrieved a ball after a hit to center that evidently scored the winning run of a crucial game against the Giants, touched second, and convinced the umpires that Fred Merkle, the runner on first was a force out, negating the score.  The author discovered that the famous ball is presently in the possession of political commentator Keith Olbermann.  Franklin Pierce Adams, the author of the poem “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” that repeats the refrain, Tinker to Evers to Chance, was one of the founders of the Algonquin Club.

In an issue dedicated to innovators Smithsonian magazine included a feature on Anne Kelly Knowles, whose field is historical geography.  Using an application called GIS (Geographic Information Systems), she uses spatial analysis to study everything from industrial technology to the Battle of Gettysburg.