“It’s a cold
world out there. Sometimes I feel like
I’m getting a little frosty myself.” Meg (Mary Kay Place) in “The Big Chill
A winter storm has hit areas north and west of us, and the temp has
dropped 30 degrees since yesterday, but predictions are for the snow and ice to
mostly miss Chicagoland. Let’s hope.
I read two interesting articles about the rejuvenation of Miller
Beach in Gary. One had to do with plans
to construct a 150-bed hotel called Dunes Inn on five acres of property near the
end of Lake Street that had been the location of a charter school. As Ron Cohen noted, no hotel in Northwest
Indiana presently offers patrons immediate access to the beachfront. The other concerned a micro-brewery, 18th
Street Brewery, opening near Lake Street and Miller Avenue. Owner Drew Fox said, “I want to give something that’s positive to this community.” NWI Times Correspondent Rob Earnshaw
quoted George Rogge as saying, “This will
be a corridor in the Miller Beach arts district. That’s how we’ll get ourselves together.” Fox expressed his appreciation for Rogge’s
support by naming a year-round IPA beer Rogge Racer.
At the end of Nicole Anslover’s final class of the semester she and
several students thanked me for my participation. She asked students to summarize Sixties
legacies in two or three words. Answers
included liberating, questioning, and
violence. My contribution: conscious-raising. I said
that if I could use five words, they’d be “Let
it all hang out.” In contrast to the
repressed Fifties, when most people tried to fit in and act normal, young
people spoke out, experimented with new lifestyles, and sought freedom from
societal restraints. That was exciting
and intoxicating but also dangerous, and could end in tragedy for some
protestors, runaways, and drug users. Steve
Abbott thought he had found the perfect environment when he moved to
post-Stonewall San Francisco, but he and most of his friends succumbed to AIDS. I wanted to bring up the quote, “I’d hate to think it was all just fashion”
but couldn’t come up the appropriate movie title. Neither could Marla Gee, sitting next to me,
but after class she emailed: “The Big
Chill”!!!!” Of course.
Riva, Emma, and Anne
Samuel A. Love and Anne Koehler spread the speech I gave in support
of Anne Balay on Facebook. Several dozen
people responded, including Charles Halberstadt, who wrote: “Best status I’ve read this year.” I even heard from high school classmate
LeeLee Devenney, who said, “I do believe
Mrs. Vandling would give you A++++ for that speech.” Anne’s friend Riva Lehrer said, “Proud of the toughness and smarts and
dedication of all involved.” While
I’m pretty satisfied with what I said, I wished I’d have gone into detail about
a Gender Studies topic concerning transgendered people in prison. I knew very little about the subject, and we
learned about CeCe McDonald, a male-to-female transgender who went clubbing,
looking somewhat like a drag queen with a wig, lipstick, high heels, and the
like. Passing a bar, she and friends
were insulted, hassled and harassed until a fight broke out. She stabbed a guy who accosted her with a
broken bottle, and he died. She accepted
a plea bargain of second-degree manslaughter and got sent to a men’s
prison. Whether that was fair produced
lively discussion. Perhaps the one
student who wrote, “WEIRD” on her course evaluation (all the others were very
positive) was not so much criticizing Anne per se but just referring to the
content.
above, Ce Ce McDonald; below, Shannon Gibney
April Lipinsky forwarded an article from Slate entitled “The Discomfort Zone” about Professor Shannon Gibney
of Minneapolis Community and Technical College, who was reprimanded for discussing
structural racism in a manner that made three white complainants
uncomfortable. Tressie McMillan Cottom
wrote: “Elevating discomfort
to discrimination mocks the intent of the policy, but that’s not the whole of
it. By sanctioning Gibney for making students uncomfortable, MCTC is pushing a
disturbing higher-education trend. When colleges and universities become a
market, there is no incentive to teach what customers would rather not know.
When colleges are in the business of making customers comfortable, we are all
poorer for it.”
Ron Cohen mentioned that the campus is considering gender-neutral
bathrooms, as least for the new building.
The idea would be that they’d be for one person and lock from the
inside. Ron suggested, in his words, “that
the campus can have restrooms open to all, as they do in France and other
European countries, but it appears IUN will not be on the cutting edge of
sexual/gender liberation any time soon.”
I had introduced Ron to April Lipinsky while we were outside the
conference room where the Faculty Board of Review met. She was interested in the history of IUN I
had with me, and I showed her the section on the History Department during the
Seventies. Dave Malham is quoted as
saying: “There were a whole bunch of
young Turks from good universities.” Bill
Neil had hired all of us and, after becoming Vice Chancellor for Academic
Affairs, had picked fellow U. of Chicago graduate Jim Newman, like him about 20
years older than the rest of us, to be department chair. Neil recalled: “Jim Newman really liked being chairman and wanted to stay on, but a
couple members engineered a plan to have the position rotate every four years
or so.”
The way I remember it, Fred Chary, John Haller, and Ron Cohen were
for rotation because they wanted more emphasis given to research in terms of
salary increases, travel stipends, and the like. Paul Kern and I were perfectly fine with
Newman, an affable, laid back colleague, but a majority voted for rotation and
Chary succeeded Newman as chair. Neil
and Newman accepted the change gracefully, outwardly at least, although when
the department subsequently wanted to hire a woman Latin Americanist rather
than a third Europeanist, he vetoed the recommendation, arguing that there
wouldn’t be adequate enrollment to justify the position. So we hired a male Renaissance/Reformation
man, Rhiman Rotz. At a retirement party
Ron threw for me, Neil said: “Jim was one
of my good hires.” He had said the
same thing when Paul Kern retired. For
all I know, he said the same thing about the other “Young Turks.” Or he might have still been harboring a trace
of resentment.
Jeff Manes started out his SALT column about Hammond art gallery
owner Dave Mueller with the Jean Shepherd quote about “shards and midden heaps of the past” containing nuggets of what
life was like in the distant past. Paul
Henry’s Art Gallery was once a hardware store founded in 1887 by
great-grandfather P.H. Mueller, a German immigrant. Mueller recalled the days
when downtown Hammond was a shopping mecca, before people moved to the suburbs
and shopping malls went up in Woodmar and River Oaks. He hopes the downtown can become viable
commercially again and hosts an Thursday Acoustic Night featuring live music
and a potluck dinner for five dollars.
Ken Schoon is thinking about doing a book on Scandinavians from
Porter County. I showed wife Peg my
history of Portage Shavings and told
her about the transcripts of oral histories of old-timers housed at the Portage
Public Library. Many early settlers were
from Sweden, as was also the case in Miller.
No comments:
Post a Comment