“Let
us dare to read, think, speak, and write.” John Adams
My cellar-dwelling Engineers swept three games
from a team of 200+ bowlers called Write That Down, as Dick Maloney and Robbie
Robinson finished the night 70 pins above their averages. Stringing
together a four-bagger, I rolled a 202 in the only close game, which we won by
ten pins. Their ace, lefty Mike Novak, who has several dozen perfect
games to his credit, left seven-pin after seven-pin on apparently perfect hits.
Rather than gripe, he was philosophical about it and quite friendly.
In 1979, flushed with having been recently
tenured, I taught a History of Journalism course and advised IUN’s student
newspaper, the Northwest Phoenix, which had published a single issue the
previous semester. Under my tutelage, one came out each week, often
causing controversy. It was invigorating, and I became friends with
several students, including SPEA secretary Michele Yanna and the Nommensen
brothers, Neil and Mike, whom I first knew as neighbor kids. Mike Nommensen’s cartoons in the student
newspaper gave new meaning to “Airin’ My Beef.” Neil and Jeff Vagnone
[son of Arts and Sciences administrator Helen Southwell] house-sat our pets
during a family trip to the Bahamas with some of the Porter Acres softball
gang; the walls shook during their Nerf basketball games, Neil admitted
later.
At Country Lounge following the final class
Michele presented me with a drinking mug inscribed, “Write It Up.”
The phrase had become my mantra whenever someone pitched a good story.
The brothers Nommensen: above, Mike as santa; below, Neil
Titillatingly titled “Tinseltown: Murder,
Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood” investigates the unsolved 1922
murder of actor-director William Desmond Taylor. Police questioned a
dozen suspects, half of them women; one on her deathbed confessed 40 years
later. In all likelihood, a blackmailer, Blackie Madsen, did it. Taylor’s primary lover, George Hopkins, was a
skilled set designer for such movies as “Casablanca,”” Aunty meme,” “Hello,
Dolly,” and “The Day of the Locust.” The
latter was based on a Nathaneal West novel describing Hollywood outcasts much
like Blackie Madsen. Author William J. Mann
has written biographies of Barbra Streisand, Liz Taylor, and Katharine Hepburn,
as well as “Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood.”
Chuck Gallmeier and I exchanged badinage at lunch
about campus characters, and he introduced me to Natalie Haber-Barker (above),
an IUN grad and niece of former Nursing professor Donna Russell, who went on to
earn a PhD in Sociology and is now an adjunct. Board president of the
North Central Rural Crisis Center, Natalie recently visited in Durban, South
Africa, which gave me an opportunity to talk about my brief sojourn there ten
years ago prior to an oral history conference in Pietermaritzburg. From
an oceanfront hotel I called home using a special card that required me to dial
30 numbers. First evening I walked around in search of a sports bar until
it became obvious the area was dangerous, a fact later confirmed by a tour
guide who took a group of us to the highest peak in the Maloti mountain range,
located in the landlocked kingdom of Lesotho.
Communication adjunct Alex Semchuck dropped off
two copies of his documentary “Stagnant Hope: Gary, Indiana,” one for me and
the other for the Calumet Regional Archives. If critics thought “My Name
Is Gary” was negative, it was downright cheery compared to “Stagnant
Hope.” Describing “The city of the century . . . a century later,”
Semchuck stated:
“It took Gary,
Indiana less than 20 years to grow from a fledgling company town to a
mini-Chicago. After several decades of prosperity, it took roughly the
same amount of time to resemble a post-industrial ghost town. For decades
the place known as the ‘Miracle City of the 20th Century’ has been
plagued with a series of social, economic, and perceptual problems that is
keeping it fighting for its life in the 21st century.”
Tim Sutherland invited the Archives staff to the
annual library Holiday lunch. With plenty of meat choices, I opted for a
juicy beef sandwich, salad, scalloped potatoes, and chocolate cake. I told
Anne Koehler, who earlier in the day had ordered William Mann’s “Behind the
Screen: How Gays and lesbians Shaped Hollywood” for me through interlibrary
loan, about Alissa’s recent visit to Berlin, where her sister lives.
Dr. William Scholl
At Lake County Welcome Center John Davies hosted
the tenth annual Legends Wall of Fame ceremony with customary enthusiasm
and panache. The only living honoree still alive, Frank Borman, 88, currently
resides in Montana. The three others were inventor Neil Ruzic, Medal of Honor
recipient Frank Ono, and podiatrist William M. Scholl, founder of Dr. School’s,
one of the most successful businesses of the twentieth century. For the
occasion I had on a pair of Dr. Scholl’s shoes. Like me, Tim Sutherland
attended, in part to validate Steve McShane’s invaluable participation in a
worthy endeavor.
Nearly a half-century before Gary’s birth as a
company town, Frank Borman’s great-grandfather moved to Tolleston, a German
community later annexed to Gary. A native of Hanover, Germany, Christopher
Bormann had found work as a tuba player in a traveling circus. Anxious to
avoid conscription during the Civil war, he planned on moving west and boarded
a train. According to family lore, at the Tolleston depot a conductor bellowed:
“All immigrants get off here.”
Bormann dutifully obeyed, perhaps thinking he had reached his destination,
Texas. He opened a trading post that housed Tolleston’s first post
office.
Born in Gary, when Borman was six, his family
moved to Arizona because the polluted air from the steel mills cause Frank to
suffer from chronic sinus infections. In
“Countdown” Borman recalled that in 1933 his father paid five dollars o take his
five year-old son for a ride in a biplane with a former barnstorming
pilot. Frank recalled: “I sat next
to Dad in the front seat, with the pilot in the cockpit behind us, and I was
captivated by the feel of the wind and the sense of freedom that flight creates
so magically.”
On January 14, 1966, Gary dignitaries honored the
West Point graduate and NASA astronaut who’d completed the 14-day Gemini 7
mission months earlier. Mayor A. Martin Katz presented him with a key to
the city. An estimated 50,000 spectators lined Broadway for a parade that
featured marching bands from local schools. Prior to an evening banquet,
Borman spoke to school children, civic leaders, and students at IUN. On Christmas Eve 1968, Borman, James Lovell,
and Bill Anders orbited the moon ten times. Their unprecedented
accomplishment, coming at the end of a turbulent year of assassinations, urban
riots, and setbacks in Vietnam, prompted Time magazine to name them
“People of the Year.” In 1976 Borman returned to Gary to accept an honorary
degree from my esteemed institution.
Chancellor Dan Orescanin, President John Ryan, Borman, trustee Carolyn Gutman
At the end of the program four Portage High
School junior ROTC cadets (including a Latino and an African American)
performed a complicated rifle exhibition drill in honor of Private Frank Ono, a
Japanese-American who grew up in North Judson and fought with the famed 442nd
Regimental Combat team. During the battle for the town of Castellina Marittima
in Italy he almost singlehandedly held off an attack on his unit’s position by
German forces.
above, David Ruzic; below, Jim Brix. NWI Times photos by John J. Watkins
In attendance were numerous relatives of Ono and
Ruzic, plus Borman’s hippie-looking nephew, Jim Brix, whom I’d love to know
better. Filling in for Scott Bocock, who nominated Dr. Scholl. Scholl, whose father was a cobbler, became
interested in repairing shoes at a young age and practiced his trade in Cedar
Lake. He invented and patented an arch support that was the secret
to his initial success. In my seminar on Cedar Lake Carnahan’s son Scott
interviewed both beloved town historian Beatrice Horner and his dad, who recalled
working at the Cedar Lake roller rink, staring at age 11. Bob Carnahan
recalled:
I put skates on kids and later did
the announcing and floor guarding. I learned to set counters up and how
to put paint on a wood floor. I even learned a little about plumbing and
furnaces. It was a practical education.
I worked as a kid in a lot of
places, including Kohler’s Bakery and Grocery Store, where they would stack
cereal boxes all the way to the ceiling. They had this stick device that
you would use to lower the boxes down.
Edgewater Beach had a bathhouse
where you could change clothes. One day in March the owner said he lost
his fishing pole out in the lake. I jumped in the cold water and rescued the
rod and reel. It actually had a fish on it when I pulled it out.
That summer he let me operate his pier concession, charging folks a quarter to
put their clothes in a basket. Many customers came from a picnic grove
located across the street.
I used to caddy for Nick Schafer, the
golf pro at South Shore Country Club. When we got to the refreshment
sand, he’d buy me a hot dog and coke. Then after we got back to the
clubhouse, he’d buy me a hamburger, French fries, and coke and pay me two
dollars for caddying 18 holes.
I remember Stan Kenton’s band playing
at Midway Ballroom, where I parked cars as a kid. Sometimes they had live
entertainment in all three rooms. One night they had the Everly Brothers
in in the back section, Bobby Vee in the center section and a local group from
Hobart called the Sundowners in the front section.
The United States will finally establish
diplomatic relations with Cuba after 53 years, and a full quarter century since
the Cold War. Perhaps President Obama finally feels free to follow his
instincts. Predictably, save for libertarian-leaning Rand Paul,
Republican presidential hopefuls are howling, but Colin Powell and Pope Francis
are all for it. Shame on Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz for not embracing this new
page in Cuban-American relations, which promises to improve dramatically the
lives of their poor cousins.
I asked Blandine and Frederic for permission to
subtitle my forthcoming Steel Shavings “My Name Is Gary” and use photos
from their noteworthy documentary by that name. Blandine replied:
“Hello Jimbo, it¹s good
to hear from you (we still follow every post on your blog) and of course you
can use ‘My Name is Gary’ as subtitle and photos of the film and of us for the
cover. In fact, we are really proud to be included in the new Steel
Shavings. We are trying to think about the next documentary project,
which is a little difficult for us for the moment because our mind and our
heart are still in Gary! But we would like for sure to come back to the
USA. I think that all the people we met in Gary, and you especially, gave us
the desire to come back for a next film in the USA.”
Wouldn’t it be awesome if the French filmmakers
next focused on Miller Beach, Gary’s unique “jewel” by the lake? They’ve
entered “My Name Is Gary” in film festivals in Toronto and Chicago and
eventually will make a copy available to the Archives. Blandine invited
us to stay at her Paris apartment. I’d love to see them again, perhaps
with Toni and Victoria.
Time’s Persons of the Year are the
Ebola Fighters in West Africa. Other
finalists included the Ferguson protestors, Vladimir Putin, and Alibaba CEO
Jack Ma. The Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame’s 2015 inductees will include Green Day, Lou Reed, and Joan Jett and the
Blackhearts. What a show that will be.
Grandson James is studying the 1804-1806 Lewis and Clark
Expedition. He knew about Shoshone
Indian guide Sacajawea and the slave York but not about the monster blue
catfish caught by a Private Goodrich in the Missouri River that weighed 130
pounds and was 51 inches long. With
Alissa, Miranda, Beth, and Toni, I visited Fort Clatsop in Oregon, where the
explorers made camp during their second winter after finding sites closer to
the Pacific inhospitable.
Gasolineos down to near two dollars a gallon, good news for folks
counting their pennies, such as secretary Vickie Milenkovski, bowling teammate
John Uylocki, and unemployed English professor Anne Balay.
On WXRT I heard “Meet the Flintstones” by the B52s, who promised that
when you’re with that “modern stone age
family,” you’ll have “a yabba dabba
doo time, a dabba doo time, . . . a gay old time.” Twenty years ago, when John Goodman was
Fred and Rosie O’Donnell played Betty Rubble in the Flintstones movie, I tried
to get Alissa to check it out while we were at the theater for a different film
to see if she might want to see it later.
She recoiled at the suggestion, as if I were asking her to break the
law.
