“Curiosity never killed this cat – that’s what
I’d like as my epitaph.” Studs Terkel
Studs Terkel in 2001; below, Ray Smock in 2014
Ray Smock sent me an excerpt from Tom
Englehardt’s blog (TomDispatch) about the legendary Chicago oral historian
Studs Terkel. Englehardt wrote:
Given the grim panorama of death these days -- from
beheadings to pandemics -- and the hysteria accompanying it all, I thought it
might be both a relief and a change of pace to turn back to Studs’ oral history
of death, which as its editor I can testify is moving and uncannily uplifting.
That, of course, is not as odd as it sounds from the man who was the troubadour
for the extraordinary ordinary American. This is the only book I ever remember
editing while, in some cases, crying.
Introducing two interviews that appeared
in Terkel’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and
Hunger for a Faith,” Englehardt noted that “the first focuses on an impulse that
may be among the hardest to understand and yet most moving to encounter, forgiveness;
and the second, from this country's medical front lines, centers on a subject
that, unfortunately, is still all too timely: the trauma deaths of young
Americans from gunshot wounds.”
Maurine Young’s 19
year-old son Andrew was shot by a teenage Latin Kings member named Mario. A year after the killing, Maurine wrote Mario
and told him she forgave him. They
started corresponding, and 18 months later Maurine visited him. It went well, and she continued the
relationship, telling Studs: “I’m
convinced that if I did not forgive and I held on to my anger, that I probably
would have become mentally ill. Maybe
killed myself, maybe hurt someone else.”
The second interview was with surgeon John Barrett, Trauma Unit chief at Chicago’s
Cook County Hospital. He told Terkel:
“You do things that live on after you. Each of us, as we pass
through life, influences others. You leave behind you a legacy of things you
did and people you influenced. So even if you don’t believe in a life after
death, you’ve had an influence. And people say, ‘I haven’t had any influence.
What did I do? I worked in a steel mill all my life, I didn’t actually do
anything. Got married, had a few
kids...’ Well, you did - you had an effect as you went through life, and it was
either a good effect or an indifferent effect or a bad effect. That effect
continues on. I have two children, and they’re going to have influences on
people and they’re going to do things. I’m also a teacher: I’ve taught lots of
people, hundreds, perhaps even a thousand people that I have influenced in a
very fundamental fashion. Many of them are now surgeons themselves. There’s
little pieces of me that exist in all of that. So even though you’re dead,
you’re not gone.”
As I’ve been sitting in on Nicole
Anslover’s World War II class, I think often of Terkel’s “’The Good War,’”
which he deliberately put in quotes because all wars are terrible. One veteran summarized his military
experiences as “four years of diarrhea.” A nurse told him of him of walking
with a soldier whose face had been disfigured and how people recoiled and tried
not to look at him. From Terkel I
learned about PAFs, veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish
Civil War whom by 1945 certain government agencies had begun to regard with
suspicion, as the Cold War commenced.
Terkel spoke at an Oral History
Association conference about his book “Working: People Talk about What They Do
All Day and How They Feel about What They Do.”
He mentioned that a milkman told him that one of the few perks of his
job was coming across women in various stages of undress. That got a big laugh although some feminists
in the audience didn’t think it was funny.
Amanda Board, a Psychology major who graduated
with honors from IUN last May, joined me for lunch at Applebee’s in
Chesterton. I met Amanda through Anne
Balay and the LGBT group Connectionz.
She finished her paid internship with the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore
recently and is mulling over what to do next.
She’d love a career with the Park Service and is thinking about grad
school. I suggested going to Hawaii,
where she could probably work in a national park all year round and take
courses at the University of Hawaii, which has an excellent program in the
field she is interested in. I told her
that moving to Hawaii right to work on a masters degree was one of the best
decisions I ever made. At present Amanda
is taking care of her fiancé’s four year-old boy, putting her Psychology degree
to good use. If Phil had been born a girl, Amanda was one of three
possibilities on our short list, along with Carrie Ann and Ramona.
Inappropriate Halloween costumes from Brendan and Missy: "wrong on so many levels"
I invited new neighbor George to join us
passing out candy on Halloween and have chili and beer with us. It turns out he’s a Catholic priest and will
be conducting mass at a Hispanic church in Illinois.
Archives volunteer David Mergl, under
orders from his wife to thin out his closet, gave me a Ports of Indiana fall
jacket. It fit so well I promptly
trashed a flannel one I’d worn to IUN that Toni declared fit only for
gardening.
Jean Poulard arranged a display marking
the hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I in a Conference Center
lobby display case, including photos of several of his ancestors who fought in
the 1914 Battle of the Marne, where French and English troops stopped a German advance
that had reached the outskirts of Paris.
The Allied victory ended German hopes for a short war but came at the
cost of a quarter-million French casualties, including about 80,000 dead. Among them were Elie and Antoine Poulard.
Nicole Anslover is asking students to critique
a journal article about WW II, so I told them where they could find them in the
IUN, library if they didn’t want to access them online. I took in a Journal of American History
volume from March 2014 that contains an article about John Hersey’s “A Bell for
Adano,” which the Office of War Information trumpeted as an example of the
“good” occupation of Italy. The author
points out that what Italians wanted more than a church bell was food. In a bound volume located I found an article
in he September 2008 issue of Indiana Magazine of History entitled about
“Race and Employment in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that concentrated on changes
during wartime.
Since Nicole’s class was discussing women
war workers, I told them about a book dealing with Latinas entitled “From
Coveralls to Zoot Suits” and added that quite a few Mexican-American women from
Northwest Indiana joined the Women’s Army Corps (WACs). Someone had brought up attitudes towards
homosexuals in the previous class, so I read them a quote I found in Lillian
Faderman’s “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers” from WAC Sergeant Johnnie Pheps when
asked by General Dwight Eisenhower to ferret out lesbians in her
battalion. She recalled telling Ike:
“Yessir. If the General pleases I will be happy to do
this investigation. But, sir, it would
be unfair of me not to tell you, my name is going to head the list. You should also be aware hat you’re going to
have to replace all the file clerks, the section heads, most of the commanders,
and the motor pool. I think you should
also take into consideration that there have been no illegal pregnancies, no
cases of venereal disease, and the General himself has been the one to award
good conduct commendations and service commendations to these members of the
WAC detachment.”
Eisenhower replied to forget the order.
Sgt. Johnnie Phelps
One could reasonably ask whether or not
the women Phelps referred to were lesbians.
They may have been bisexual or, like men in prison, finding ways to
release their tension and sexual drive away from their normal environment. In all likelihood, some returned stateside
and got married while others continued same-sex relationships as, in Lillian
Faderman’s words, “twilight lovers.”
I had a mediocre night bowling but won
half the quarter pots, paid out every tenth strike, and picked up a difficult
1-3-6-8-10 spare. We won game one by 5
pins over a superior team when Mel and John both doubled in the tenth and the
rest off us marked. Robbie Krooswyk,
subbing for D’s Sporting Goods, rolled a perfect game. I got home in time to watch the final three
outs of the World Series, as Giant Madison Bumgarner pitched five shutout
innings on two days rest.
