“Gambling man rolls the dice
Working man pays the bill
It’s still fast and easy
Up on bankers hill.”
“Bruce
Springsteen, “Shackled and Drawn”
Rolling
Stone ranked Springsteen’s “Wrecking Ball” best CD of the year,
edging out notable records by Frank Ocean, Jack White, Bob Dylan, and Fiona
Apple. Song of the year was “Hold On” by
the Alabama Shakes. Movie of the year
was the quirky “The Master,” beating out “Zero Dark 30,” “Beasts of the
Southern Wild,” and my choice, “Lincoln.”
All four movies have historical significance. Most of the top sports
stories are bummers: the Jerry Sandusky trial, football concussions and
bounties, the Heat becoming NBA champs after Derrick Rose gets hurt, the NHL
lockout, Notre Dame being number one (half joking).
I missed the IUNW library holiday lunch, my stomach
aching, perhaps from over-indulging the day before at the Arts and Sciences
celebration. I did rouse myself to go to
the post office and food shop with Toni.
Fiddling with On Demand, I discovered Showtime programs were free; it
must be a special deal to get folks hooked.
There is cautious optimism that the federal government
will do something to ban assault rifles and magazine clips that contain
multiple rounds of ammunition. Even the
powerful NRA seems a bit chastened, or, more likely, at least laying low for
now. The problem has been that there has
been no comparable countervailing gun control lobby group. The NRA went after Obama like he was a sworn
enemy even though he did virtually nothing to earn their enmity. Let’s hope he’s ready to man up to the
challenge. He’s put Vice President Biden
in charge of the effort, announcing, “This is not some Washington commission. This is a team that has a very specific task:
to pull together real reports, right now” and have recommendations ready within
a month. Funeral services are underway
in Newtown, Connecticut, and Jonathan Rix posted a photo of the young victims.
Brenden Bayer, Colin Kern, and Beamer Pickert all posted
jokes about the world supposedly ending on December 21. Beamer, who’s half Polish, also sent out a
recipe for three-mushroom pierogis featuring oyster, shitake, and portabella
prepared in potatoes and onions. Angie
wanted my recipe for cherry cobbler and I had to look it up, it’s been so long
since I made it. You dump a large can of
cherry pie filling and a small can of crushed pineapple into a pan, put white
cake mix on top, spoon a quarter pound of melted butter over it, and bake for
45 minutes at 350 degrees.
Vickie Milenkovski, secretary of the Department of
History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religious Studies, helped me send
off a document to TIAA-CREF. It required
my signature, so she scanned it before emailing it to the client relationship
consultant.
Dave escorted a dozen East Chicago Central students to
IUNW for a campus tour. After giving me
a heads up, he had the student guide bring them to the archives, and I gave
them a ten-minute tour. After Dave
mentioned my Steel Shavings series, I
pulled out the Portage issue that has a photo of Dave at age 12 when he was a blond,
tow-headed batboy for Porter Acres softball team.
In his book on postwar consumer culture Andrew Hurley
describes efforts after automatic pinsetters made bowling alleys potentially lucrative,
to court suburbanites, including women and children. Willow Grove Lanes,
located northwest of Philadelphia, near where I grew up, had a décor that
resembled a theme park. Not everyone was pleased with the trend. Hurley writes that in 1961, upon visiting Gil
Hodges Lanes in Brooklyn, named for the beloved Dodger first baseman, grizzled
reporter Bill Slocum “encountered none of
the shady characters or illicit activities he had come to expect. Searching for the customary back room where
local bookmakers posted winning horses, Slocum stumbles upon a playroom where
parents could deposit their children while they bowled. As far as he could tell, there were no
scratch sheets or pornographic material being passed from one person to
another. Even the alleys themselves had
changed; mechanized equipment now set pins, returned balls, and kept score.”
I made what I hope is a final trip shopping trip along
Route 30 to pick up a honey-baked ham for Christmas Eve and macadamia nuts for
Toni. Unlike years past, Albanese had no
free samples out or gift packages of a few malted milk balls thrown in with
one’s purchase.
Gaard Logan loved the photo in our Christmas card and the
caption about Jimbo’s suit making a rare appearance. Concerning how white-haired I looked, I
replied that not long ago my mother sent a driver to pick me up at the airport,
describing me as having brown hair. He
and I shared a laugh over that, but in her eyes I was still that brown-haired
son of hers. I tried to get Gaard to
send a photo of her and Chuck. She was a
gorgeous redhead in high school.
A strange email came my way that I’m not certain was
intended for my eyes. A charter school
official wrote to a colleague about whether to invite me back to talk to
teachers at Roosevelt. A third party
told him that if I did “a deep dive” and focused on the history and importance
of Roosevelt HS, that would be great but “that the larger overview he gave at
Induction wouldn’t be deep enough for staff members.” WTF. I
guess my previous dive was too shallow.
I actually centered my induction talk on Roosevelt’s historical
legacy. This does give me an idea,
however, for a future article on “The ‘Velt.”
Roosevelt’s origins were the result of a black population
boom during the 1920s and the 1927 white protest over sending African American
high school students to Emerson. Blacks
got a first-class unit (K through12), but it marked the first instance where a
northern city instituted segregationist policies. Roosevelt’s first principal was a Garveyite
who believed black students would be better off in a school without white
teachers and administrators who looked down on them. His successor, H. Theo Tatum, demanded high
standards from his faculty both inside and outside of the classroom; he forbade
them to patronize jazz joints and eateries such as Mae’s Louisiana Chicken
where they might come in contact with unsavory elements. Over the years Roosevelt produced many
distinguished alumni, including doctors and lawyers, athletes such as George
Taliaferro and Lee Calhoun, actors William Marshall and Avery Brooks, plus
Vivian Carter and the Spaniels.
Since Gary mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson took office, scores
of abandoned building have been subject to the wrecking ball, but there are an
estimated 3,000 more that need to come down.
The mayor has about a million dollars in Community Development Block
Grants but estimates that forty times that amount is needed to complete the
task. She has made abandoned homes near
the university a priority.
Bart Letica sent me photos and an account of his being
part of a Bomber Maintenance Squadron in India and the Pacific Theater during
WW II. Our association goes back a
quarter century to when I published (Shavings,
volume 18) an interview with him along with his brother John’s account of
growing up in Indiana Harbor during the Depression. The Army Air Corps took him to Miami Beach,
New Bedford (Mass.), Chicago, Salina (Kansas), Casablanca (Morocco), Oran
(Algeria), Karaghpor (India), Kwang Poo (China), Melbourne (Australia), and
Tinian (Mariana Islands). He wrote: “On September 19, 1945, the ground personnel
were given the opportunity to sign up to see Tokyo from the air. This was the place and the day of the signing
of the Peace Treaty. On that day I was
aboard a B29 flying over the USS Missouri while listening on the radio to this
historical event that was taking place right down there below us – an
experience that I will remember as long as I live.”
Shortly thereafter Bart was relieved to get a letter from
brother John that he had survived the war unhurt. On October 16 he boarded an LST to
Saipan. He was on his way home. After stops in Los Angeles and Helper, Utah,
he arrived at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and received his discharge on November 30,
1956, at eleven a.m. He concluded, “As I relived those days and talked about
them as years went by, it seemed like I was on an all-expense-paid pleasure
trip around the world, and if not for being at war, it would have been.”
