“After a hard day, I’m safe at home
Foolin’ with my baby on the telephone
Out of nowhere somebody cuts in and says,
Hmmm, you in some trouble boy, we know where
you’ve been.”
Eagles, “On the Border”
The most popular songs
on the Eagles’ “On the Border” album were “James Dean” (my favorite) and
“Already Gone.” Concerning the “Rebel
without a Cause,” the “James Dean” lyrics go:
“You were just too cool for school
Sock
hop, soda pop, basketball and auto shop,
The only thing that got you off
was breakin' all the rules.”
Recorded
in 1974 while the Watergate scandal was reaching a crescendo, the song “On the
Border” has to do with “Big Brother” (the federal government under “Tricky
Dick” Nixon) spying on private citizens.
At the very end the Eagles’ Glenn Frey whispers “Good night, Dick,” borrowing a line Dan Rowan addressed to Dick
Martin at the end of “Laugh In” but referring to the President who would
shortly thereafter resign in disgrace.
Ron Cohen has a book for me to read by Rick Perlstein, author of
“Nixonland,” entitled “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of
Reagan.”
Texas
governor Rick Perry’s latest grandstanding stunt was to authorize 2,200
National Guard troops to patrol the Mexican border against illegal aliens and “narco-terrorists.” Of course, the federal government has over
18,000 Border Patrol agents there already, and the Obama administration
(unfortunately) has deported a record number of Mexicans for illegally crossing
the border. It’s another cheap shot at
the President. In my opinion, America’s
immigrants are our best hope for the future, just as they formed an invaluable
source of labor and talent in the past.
Saturday
morning I dropped off grandson James at Camelot Lanes and gave a copy of volume
43 to Sheet and Tin League bowling opponent Anthony Forbes, there with his wife
and nine year-old daughter. He is in the
issue because he substituted for the Engineers a year ago. I drove to Grand Rapids for Anthony’s soccer
game. Playing the second-ranked team in
the state, Grand Rapids Christian (known to recruit talented members from
year-round “Crew” squads), Anthony and his teammates never gave up in a losing
cause. Tori was across town for a
volleyball tournament. Her team finished
third, thanks in part to her hard overhand serves.
Nine
of us dined at On the Border, including Phil’s entire family plus Josh and
Alissa’s friend Stephanie, passing through after a wedding. I split a fajita meal with Alissa and still had
some left over. Our table devoured a
half-dozen bowls of chips and tasty salsa, which left several of us thirty for
beer that came in ample pitchers.
Back at Phil and Delia’s, Phil won SOB and
then several two-handed games of Pitch. We reminisced about the ten years
beginning in 1974 when we attended Gary high school basketball games, rooting
for Emerson and then, after the school dropped its sports program, Lew
Wallace. In all those years we encountered only three instances of racial
animus. Once at West Side I was at the urinal when one guy said to
another, “I hate white guys.” I piped in with, “I don’t like
them either” after his buddy said, “Are you going to do anything about
it?” That broke the tension. Another time, leaving Roosevelt
with the crowd surging for the exit, only one door was open. Toni,
fearful Phil and Dave would be crushed, spread her arms to create some
space. A woman elbowed her, but another chastised the culprit for doing
so, saying, “She’s not your problem.” The last game we attended at
Wallace, a kid tossed something at Phil and put gum on my seat while I stood
for the “National Anthem.” By this time Phil and Dave were in high
school, so I started going to Portage games. The final Wallace game I saw
was in 1986, the great Jerome Harmon’s senior year, at Chesterton. After
one of his trademark dunks, Chesterton fans held up signs like you would in a
dunk contest, reading 10, 10, 9.5, and 10. Harmon later won the
McDonald’s All-American Game dunk contest before attending Louisville.
Jerome and Jeromey Harmon in 2013
A
few years ago, Phil taught a special course on the use of video equipment at an
inner city school. One day a student
walking past him in the hall muttered, “Jimmy.” He learned from a teacher that the wisecrack wasn’t
as bad as “Cracker” but not exactly a compliment.
The
cats Piper and Rascal gradually stopped being skittish every time I drew
near. Rascal eventually managed to get
into Anthony’s room where I was sleeping but, unlike, last time I stayed over,
settled for a pillow in the corner. Piper
sleeps with Phil and Delia but no longer on the headboard, once his favorite
spot until he slipped and landing on my son’s head. Phil cooked breakfast before his round of
golf, and I read in the paper that IU beat number 18 Missouri a week after
losing to lowly Bowling Green.
I
was home for an afternoon of football. Detroit
beat Green Bay despite Lion Stephen Tulloch tearing an ACL celebrating a sack
on Aaron Rodgers while attempting a bump-and-grind dance move. He’ll be out for the season. Because the noon game ended early, FOX
switched to the exciting conclusion of the Eagles’ victory over
Washington. Shockingly, running back
LeSean McCoy only rushed for 22 yards; his entire starting offensive line got
injured or, in one case, ejected for fighting in retaliation for a cheap hit on
QB Nick Foles, causing me to lose my Fantasy contest by a single point (!!!!)
against Dave. I stupidly stuck with Dallas tight end Jason Whitten instead of
inserting Martellus Bennett.
I
chuckled at a State Farm “double check” ad featuring the SNL characters Hanz and Franz (Dana Carvey and Chris Nealon)
helping Aaron Rodgers pump up after ridiculing his “girly man” workout. Actress
and stunt performer Vanessa Carter tells Rodgers he has “puny arms.” After Rodgers
follows their advice, he’s too bulky to throw a football.
The
endless commercials provided plenty of time for reading. “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand begins with
12 year-old Louis Zamperini witnessing the German airship Graf Zeppelin passing over the small town of Torrence, California,
at night in August 1929. The enormous
object seemed to block off the stars.
The era of hydrogen-filled airships ended with the 1938 Hindenburg disaster, and in 1940 German
Air Minister Hermann Goring ordered Graf
Zeppelin salvaged for scrap.
mill photos by Jerry Davich
After
touring the Burns Harbor ArcelorMittal plant on the steel mill’s fiftieth
anniversary, Jerry Davich wrote: “Working
in a steel mill is not the job for everyone, including me, despite its great
salary, boastful benefits and retirement security.” Donald Binkley
responded:
“I work here and I
see the workers slowly losing ground of how it once was. Every contract, more and more gets chipped
away. There once were 25,000 workers;
now it is just 4,000. We are slowly
becoming extinct. I have seen the highs
and lows in this industry. My father was
a steelworker. He didn’t live to see
retirement. I just hope we remember the
steel workers whose lives were taken during these 50 years – the people who
fought for us to work today.”
Sherri
LaFrance Larson added: “My dad was
diagnosed with mesothelioma and other ailments associated with the mill. And although we had a comfortable life
growing up, he died WAY too young.”
In a New York Review of Books essay about same-sex
marriage entitled “I Do, I Do,” Edmund White declared that 2013 could rightly
be labeled “The Year of the Gay.” In New
York City the African American wife of Mayor Bill de Blasio, in White’s words, “proudly announced that she had been a
lesbian before her marriage.” One
reason for acceptance of gays was due to something White himself does not
believe – that sexual identity is genetically determined as opposed to
individuals making a conscious choice at some point to be gay. As White cynically summarizes the genetic
argument: “If the poor buggers can’t help
being pansies, then why persecute them?” Similar to what Anne Balay found in steel
mills, White contended that visibility and publicity about gays has produced a
backlash among bigots and religious fanatics, most notably in Russia, Africa,
and Muslim countries.
Quoting from
“Redeeming the Dream” by David Boies and Theodore B. Olson, White quibbles with
their description of gays and lesbians “as
normal, loving, decent members of our lives and our communities,” adding
sadly: “As a gay men in his seventies I
don’t quite recognize in that description most of the flamboyant, creative,
edgy, promiscuous, deeply urban gays I have known.” White sees a danger on what Kenji Yoshino
termed “covering” or toning down
one’s gayness – what White calls “downplaying a discordant trait in order to
blend into the mainstream.”
On the way to Heath
Carter’s class on race-relations, after obtaining a visitors parking pass in
the library, I drove around the Valparaiso campus several times before an elderly
officer friendly escorted me to Mueller Hall.
I found Room 108 at 2:50 on the dot.
The seminar students were discussing Gary during the 1920s and 1930s
based on readings by Ron Cohen, Ray Mohl, and myself. Mayor Hatcher was due to arrive at 4, so during
the break the students moved to a larger room while Carter waited for him. I had a chance to show the class my Traces article about Hatcher’s father
Carlton and tell about his escaping from Georgia before a boss could have him
locked up on bogus charges in order to chain him to his job. He learned to read at age 80 so he could
understand the Bible.
Hatcher was one of
three incoming black VU law students in 1958; the other two didn’t survive
first year. After attending classes all
day, Hatcher worked an 8-hour shift as a psychiatric aide at Beatty
Hospital. In Constitutional Law
Professor Burton Wechsler called on him every day. Believing the man to be prejudiced, Hatcher confronted
him and said, “I know what you’re doing
but want you to understand that I’ll always be prepared.” Wechsler, who lived in Miller and belonged to
the Gary NAACP, claimed he just wanted students, who had probably never been
with an articulate black person, to benefit from Hatcher’s intelligence. The two became friends, and after Hatcher
moved to Gary, he was a frequent dinner guest at the Wechslers. Wechsler and fellow Jewish liberals, dubbed
the “Miller Mafia,” encouraged him to run for city council in 1963 and mayor in
1967.
Hatcher told of
receiving an invitation to Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity’s rush party, a
social affair that required a date.
Someone set him up with the lone African American VU undergraduate. Next morning a fellow student asked Hatcher
if he’d heard what happened last night at Phi Alpha Delta. Yes, he was there, he replied. No, afterwards, the friend said. Members stayed up all night debating whether
to accept Hatcher into the fraternity before narrowly voting to do so. Taken aback, Hatcher wondered why they’d
invited him if it was so controversial.
They never expected you to show up, his friend told him. He joined anyway.
Hatcher rarely
talks about his childhood, never about the accident that left him blind in one
eye, but he did mention that in the 1930s there were only two Michigan City
neighborhoods where blacks could live.
One was a waterfront area known as the Patch where his mother gave birth
to a dozen children, several of whom died young of pneumonia due to hardships
of the time. Hatcher also told of his
father being in a store when a man nearby made racist comments, such as telling
a friend, “An Ace of Spades sure is
black.” Knowing he’d probably be
arrested if he accosted the tormentor, Carlton kept silent but was shaking with
rage and shame at the dinner table that evening as he told his children, “Don’t ever let anybody disrespect you.”
Mayoralty candidate Richard Hatcher (r) with USWA leaders John L. Haywood, Peter Calacci and Joe Germano, Oct. 27, 1967, from the Calumet Regional Archives
Hatcher was in his
third year as mayor when I started at IUN.
Our first house at 54th and Maryland was just south of the city
limits. Neighbors had previously lost
money during the white flight from Gary and feared an influx of blacks into the
subdivision. A few blocks to the west
was “The Border,” a ten-block strip where teenagers cruising Broadway sometimes
parked in a strip mall lot that divided Gary and unincorporated Ross Township. Richard Lugar became mayor of Indianapolis in
1967, the same year as Hatcher’s election, and, with the support of corporate
leaders, pushed through a Unigov plan that kept the city’s black population a
permanent minority. Hatcher foiled
similar plans in Northwest Indiana; but since he’s left office after five
four-year terms, Gary home rule is basically nonexistent. When area banks decided to develop the area
along Route 30 and stores like Sears relocated, Gary’s downtown never
recovered.
Richard Lugar in 1977
Heath Carter took
his students to he ruins of City Methodist Church on the day they visited the
Archives. Part of the roof near the
sanctuary recently collapsed, probably curtailing future excursions by
photographers and others who still regard the structure as awe-inspiring.
NWI Times photo by Jonathan Miano
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