Wrecking Ball

“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.”