“I remember you, Fred Montoya
You were the first vato (guy) to ever kiss
me
I was twelve years old.
My mother said shame on you,
My teacher said shame on you, and
I said shame on me, and nobody
Said a word to you.”
Bernice
Zamora, “Pueblo, 1950”
Historian Vicki Ruiz
Nicole Anslover’s
homework assignment included “The Flapper and the Chaperone” by Vicki Ruiz from
“Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America.” Like me an
oral historian, Ruiz interviewed 17 Latinas who recalled as teenagers clashing
with parents over dress, hairstyle, cosmetics, and, most of all, dating customs.
Daughters had to be chaperoned at
dances, movies or other social events but, seeking freedom, found ways to
resist and evade such restraints.
The double standard
in regard to sex roles was still around during the 1950s, my teen years. Guys were expected to pursue sex as far as
dates would allow, while “good girls” worried about their reputations and
reserved heavy petting for with “steady” boyfriends only. Several Upper Dublin classmates had to get
married, and if a girl was too stand-offish, she’d get a reputation of being
“frigid.” Feminist Alix Kates Shulman
summed up the dilemma in “The War in the Back Seat”:
“In those crucial battles in the back row of
the movie house or on the floor in the living room or out behind the backstop
or in the darkened back seat of a parked car – those scenes which are the very
essence of pretense and guile – the girls somehow always wind up the culprits,
bitchy and ridiculous, damned if they do and damned again if they don’t.”
Evan Davis came in
from Fort Wayne for gaming at Tom Wades.
Around 4 pm Dave arrived from James and Becca’s music competition and
took my place so I could spend time with Alissa, down from Grand Rapids, and
Beth (her mom), up from Indy. Dave
stopped in to see them the next morning after playing tennis in Michigan City.
On Beth’s
recommendation I checked out “Boyhood,” all two hours and 45 minutes. Watching the brother and sister grow into young
adults over 12 years was fascinating. I
especially liked the portrayal by Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette of the
parents. If the dad was immature, the
mom’s next two husbands, both control freaks and drunks, were far worse. One was a pompous professor, the other a
corrections officer who had served in Iraq.
Viewers could see train wrecks coming even if Arquette’s character
couldn’t.
The Grammy’s opened
with ACDC wailing on “Highway to Hell.”
Brit Sam Smith, a big winner, declared, “I want to thank the man I fell in love with last year . . . for
breaking my heart because you got me four Grammys.” I also enjoyed pop stars Ariana Grande and
Pharrell Williams and old-timers Madonna, ELO, Tom Jones, Tony Bennett (with
Lady Gaga), and Annie Lennox (with Hozier).
During commercials I switched to “Downton Abbey,” which I can watch
later OnDemand, and caught glimpses of Lady Mary on horseback with a
Flapper-type haircut.
Murray Hall and Billy Tipton
In anticipation of
subbing for Nicole Anslover, recovering from oral surgery, I dreamt about being
in front of the class and having no clue what to say. I actually had all 75 minutes carefully
planned out, including time for discussion. I led off by soliciting opinions on why in the
past many women “passed” as men and spoke briefly about Revolutionary soldier
Deborah Sampson (AKA Robert Shurtlieff), Tammany politician Murray Hall (Mary
Thompson), stagecoach driver Charley (Charlotte) Parkhurst, and jazz pianist
Billy Lee (Lucille) Tipton. Students mostly
brought up economic issues or individuals seeking freedom and adventure. I noted that some were lesbians or, like some transgender
people today, saw themselves as men wrapped in women’s bodies. Murray Hall, for example, seems to have loved
smoking cigars, playing poker, getting drunk in saloons and wheeling and
dealing politically.
Woodhull cartoon; Johnston in drag
Rob Seals from
Instructional Media Center put photos on the screen for me and played short
YouTube segments on social settlement pioneer Jane Addams, “free love” feminist
Victoria Woodhull, and photojournalist Frances Benjamin Johnston. We discussed the propriety and relevance of
examining the sexuality of public figures.
Jane Addams, I pointed out, may never have gone into social work had she
not developed a crush on Hull House co-founder Ellen Gates and rebelled against
parental wishes for her to marry and bear children. Discussing the Victorian Era toleration of a
double standard (guys expected to sow wild oats while decent women remained
virgins till marriage), I mentioned male doctors’ woeful ignorance of female
anatomy and the Social Hygiene movement to make sex education and birth control
devices available, in part to protect women from venereal disease and Syphilis.
Contrasting the Gibson
Girl “hour glass” ideal with the Flapper image, I struggled to come up with an
analogy. Tim, who frequently speaks up
in Jonathyne Briggs’ class, suggested rectangle. When I rued that birth control advocate
Margaret Sanger turned conservative in her later years and became infatuated
with eugenics, Tim added, “like the
Nazis.”
Passing around Pete
Daniel and Ray Smock’s “A Talent for Detail: The Photographs of Miss Frances
Benjamin Johnston,” Not content to be a society photographer, Johnston went all
over the country to record the disparate faces of America, including sharecroppers,
miners and women factory workers. One
photo shows Johnston with a cigarette in one hand and a beer nug in the
other. She lived with Matie Hewill and
once confided in a letter: “Ah, I love
you better than you ever know. I slept
in your place and on your pillow. It was
almost as good as the cigarette you li and gave me all gooey.” Like Jane Addams, she ordered her letters
destroyed upon her death, so historians can only speculate about their bedroom
activities. There is a tendency, however, for each generation to underestimate
the degree to which their predecessors were sexually active. When Jane Addams traveled with Mary Rozet Smith,
she made sure the reserved room contained a double bed. Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey having established
that masturbation is virtually a universal trait, it would be naïve indeed to
believe that beloved companions kept their hands to themselves.
I touched on women
in early Gary, including prostitutes, mail order brides, pioneer wives, teachers,
and urban missionaries such as Neighborhood House founders Kate and Jane
Williams. I contrasted 1920s social life
of affluent Horace Mann “Flapper” wannabes with daughters of immigrants from
Eastern Europe, Mexico, and the Deep South. Student Jessica Korman made several
good points from the Vicki Ruiz article that pertained equally to barrios in
Bary and Indiana Harbor. There, too, young
Latinas balked at efforts to chaperone their behavior yet felt pangs of guilt going
against parental expectations.
In “The Flapper and
the Chaperone” Ruiz concluded: “Hard as
it was for young heterosexual women to carve out their own sexual boundaries,
imagine the greater difficulty for lesbians coming of age in the Southwest
barrios.” I wish she’d have elaborated, but perhaps her
subjects did not talk candidly about this.
In a later chapter of “Out From the Shadows” Ruiz wrote: “The stories of Mexicana/Chicana lesbians
have only begun to be told.” She
mentioned, however, that Yolanda Chavez Levya founded a Latina lesbian archives
at the University of Arizona and listed several anthologies devoted o the
subject, including Carla Trujillo’s “Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers
Warned Us About” (1991).
I found a copy of
“Chicana Lesbians in IUN’s library. In
the Introduction Carla Trujillo wrote:
“Our own existence imposes a reclamation of
what we’re told is bad, wrong, or taboo, namely our own sexuality. Add to this
the sexuality of other women, our lovers, and we become participants in a
series of actions which give validation to the sexuality of another women as
well. As a student in a recent workshop
on lesbian sexuality stated, ‘Now I get
it. Not only do you have to learn to
love your own vagina, but someone else’s too.’”
A brawl broke out
in the first minutes of a high school basketball game between Hammond and
Griffith. The IHSAA ordered both schools
to cancel the rest of their season. Bad
blood existed due to texting taunts, and trash-talking continued during
warm-ups. With his team up 4-0,
Griffith’s Anthony Murphy went in for a dunk and got pushed head-first into a
wall. When Murphy’s twin brother rushed
to his aid, a Hammond player sucker punched him in the back of the head,
precipitating a wild melee, prompting the referees to terminate the game. Sixty-eight year-old Griffith coach Gary
Hayes told Steve Hanlon of the NWI Times:
“"It's
the worst flagrant foul I've ever seen since I've been coaching. It was like a
tackle in football. Anthony went into the wall like a rag doll.” Hays accepted partial blame
for not having noticed warning signs that could have headed off the incident.
Niki and Amy
Niki Quasney passed away of ovarian cancer at
age 38, Jerry Davich reported. Four
years ago she and longtime mate Amy Sandler had been on his Friday radio
show. Married in Illinois, they couldn’t
join a gym under a family membership plan even though they shared an insurance
plan and had a baby. Republican state
legislators are pushing to allow businesses to discriminate against gay
customers if serving them violated their religious convictions. Wrote Davich: “Quasney lost
her life to cancer but she showed us how to enjoy our own lives and fight for
the rights of others. Her battle against a terminal disease transcended another
type of cancer that spreads from bigoted ignorance or homophobic confusion.” Good
for Davich, also a champion of Anne Balay.
I spoke to Steve
McShane’s Indiana History class about Tolleston, which became part of
Gary. Settlement began during the 1845s
when the Michigan Central railroad passed through the area. Early settlers were mainly German: railroad
workers, farmers, and, later, employees of a Hammond slaughterhouse. George Tolle laid out the streets. A post office opened in 1860. Some made a living by hunting, trapping,
fishing, and berry picking; then came sand mining and ice harvesting.
In 1922, skilled at
taking shorthand, oral historian J.W. Lester interviewed pioneer residents
Henrietta Gibson, whose husband was Tolleson’s first railroad station agent,
and William Kunert, whose father was postmaster, recording their words in
shorthand. Born in 1864, Kunert started
hunting mallards with a muzzleloader at age 12, selling them for about a dollar
a dozen. He averaged about three dozen a
day and some days got 70. In 1889 at age
25 Kunert became became superintendent of the Tolleston Gun Club, established
by Chicago millionaires including Marshall Field John W. Gates, and J. Ogden
Amour and recalled battles between local poachers and watchmen:
“In 1893 James Conroy, head gamekeeper, and
John Cleary were killed by Al Looker at John Hargen’s saloon. In 1894 Dick Stone, one of the guards, was
killed on the marsh. In 1896 a battle
raged between the farmer boys south of the river in which Theodore Prott had
his kneecap shot off and Frank Kostic, a farmer boy, was shot through the
lungs. Barney Whitlock and Charles Blackburn, guards, were sent to prison,
Barney for 6 months and Charley for 15 months.
On the other hand,
a local jury acquitted Looker, who killed two guards three years earlier, on
grounds of self-defense, and postmaster Silas E. green celebrated him in verse:
The trial is
over and Looker is free;
The people
are glad, and, of course, so is he.
Lake County
is rid of terrible pests,
Their spirits
gone hunting, their bodies at rest.
All glory to
Looker, let every one sing
The praise of
a man who would do such a thing.
The Calumet
marshes will miss heir soft tread,
For the
terrors of Calumet Township are dead.”
After reading
excerpts of the Lester interviews, I told the class how future historians might
make use of their journals just as I made use of the recollections of Henrietta
Gibson and William Kunert. I reiterated
that they might make use of family histories and could also examine their daily
lives and things they are passionate about.
As an example, I noted Alicia Tai’s 2011 journal entitled “Geocaching”
which I previously knew nothing about and is like a scavenger hunt for
containers planted by others using GPS devices.
Alicia wrote that there were about 30 caches in Gary, including two on
the IUN campus. When she went in search
for some of them, a friend warned her to be careful, that Gary was unsafe. Alicia wrote:
“I started today’s hunt in Ridgelawn cemetery
on Ridge Road. Two caches were easily located
in trees along the lanes. After making
my finds and signing my name to the log sheet (a requirement of the activity),
I walked into a wooded area on the outskirts to place my own cache.
Three weeks later
Alicia made this journal entry:
“During my four-hour break between classes I
went caching in Griffith. The bike
trails are continually being expanded, so new caches are popping up along the
routes. I threw on my hiking boots and
explored some of the newer trails. I
made four finds and placed my own hide during the short walk. Unfortunately there was garbage all over,
including tires, an old mailbox, broken window blinds, a broken TV, and other
household appliances. It’s discouraging
to see nature being littered with things people could easily throw in the garbage
or take to a disposal facility. I
attempted o grab he old mailbox to use in an art project or even as a geocache,
but it was very rusty and heavy.”
BP strike begins; NWI Times photos by Keith Benman and Jeff Dildine
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