Just Friends

“The only way to have a friend is to be one,” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whenever Jeopardy has a category about nineteenth century authors, it’s almost certain that either Emerson or Henry David Thoreau’s name will show up.  Only slightly less frequently are Harriet Beecher Stowe (“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”) and Herman Melville (“Moby Dick”).

At IU Northwest Thursday three programs occurred simultaneously at midday.  Motivational speaker Chaz Pitts-Kyser (above), author of “Careeranista: The Woman’s Guide to Success,” conducted a session sponsored by James Wallace’s Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs entitled “The Only One in the Room.”  The term could apply to a woman, an African American, or, in her case, both.  A Student Affairs “Soup and Substance” discussion of Andrew Carroll’s “Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families” took place in Savannah gallery, featuring speakers from Veterans’ Life Changing Services.  I elected to attend a Brown Bag event organized by Chris Young’s Teaching and Learning Center (CISTL) to hear Vice Chancellor Mark L. McPhail speak about “Rhetorical Warriorship.”  The intriguing title reminded me of the African-American street-corner practice of “doing the dozens” or trading trash talk.  Arriving early, I told Chris Young, “You’re the only one in the room,” a take-off on the title of Chaz Pitts-Kyser’s workshop.  I don’t think he got the reference.

Mark McPhail (above) has specialized in both Communication and English Composition, plus he holds a black belt in martial arts.  A traditionalist when it comes to composition pedagogy, he is critical of so-called expressionists more interested in the process of discovery than grammatical standards.   I asked what he thought of primary school teachers who encouraged kids to write with little regard for correct spelling or grammar.  Not much, he replied.  He once taught a class that combined writing and martial arts.  For the first hour “warriors” did physical exercises; then they’d write 50-minute essays that McPhail critiqued with, as the expression goes, a fine-toothed comb (to get rid of nits in one's hair), seeing that they followed proper principles of rhetoric and rewarding those who did it with flair.   McPhail impressed me as someone who cared deeply about academic standards.

At Hobart Lanes the Engineers won two of three from Just Friends, a team that included Doris Guth, John Gonzales, a guy who danced a jig each time he struck, and Dennis Cavanaugh sporting a 195 average.  Thankfully it’s a 100% handicap league.  In my best game, a 157, I left four ten-pins and converted only one.  I’m still getting used to the synthetic lane surfaces.  In the final frame 83 year-old Frank Shufran doubled to win the third game for us.

Walking from the parking lot a couple hundred yards ahead of me, Associate Director of Development Leeann Wright (above) asked if I were going to the library and waited for me.  She vowed that this year’s IUN Philanthropy Week will have even more sizzle than last year, when Chancellor Lowe and Chuck Gallmeier dressed up as the Blues Brothers.

On a beautiful Friday afternoon Dave Serynek took former Porter Acres softball teammate Paulie Van Wormer and me out on his boat on Lake Louise in Valparaiso.  When he first asked if I wanted to go out on the lake, I thought he meant lake Michigan. We passed kayakers and a water skier, and I gaped at waterfront mansions that had to be worth millions.  We reminisced about the time 13 of us went to the Bahamas and some of the characters we used to party with.  Paulie reported on the death of 76 year-old James “Fat Cat” Clemons, a member of the Wanderers Motorcycle Club.  “I’m surprised he lived that long,” Dave said.  Paulie refuses to work on Veterans Day and, expressing dissatisfaction with both Democrats and Republicans, claimed he was going to vote for the Libertine Party.  Pretty funny. He reported that 13 cyclists died during the August rally in Sturgis, South Dakota.  Over 150 crashes occurred.  The number of DUIs was down, however, just 220 compared to 257 a year ago.

 Sturgis, South Dakota

Dave returned a David Burner biography of Herbert Hoover and is reading Jean Edward Smith’s “FDR,” considered the best one-volume book about the four-term, thirty-second President.  Dave noticed my University of Kwa-Zulu-Natal t-shirt that I had purchased in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, during a 2002 oral history conference.  One highlight was a performance of a couple dozen young female Zulu dancers, who were topless, to the considerable discomfort of some feminist scholars.  For the outing I had worn a Hawaiian shirt on top of it, inspired by James’ example for theme dress week at Portage High School, but left it in the car since it was so warm outside. 

At Camelot Lanes Saturday to watch James bowl, Kevin Horn invited us to son Kaiden’s fourteenth birthday party.  It turns out the Horns live in Sherwood Forest just blocks from Dave and Barbara Serynek.  Previously they lived two doors down from Paulie Van Wormer, who ten years ago was my horseshoes partner at a party Kevin hosted. Small world.

President Obama made the cover of Rolling Stone because of his trip to Alaska to dramatize the effects of global warming.  The first President to visit the Arctic Circle, he expressed regret that he couldn’t spend two weeks in America’s “Last Frontier State” like Warren G. Harding did in 1923.  What he didn’t mention is that Harding died shortly afterwards.

IUN Biologist Spencer Cortwright provided this campus nature news:

  I recently found a discarded hiking boot in the prairie north of campus.  I tossed it on the sidewalk along Broadway to ensure I'd remember to throw it out, but out of the boot popped a prairie vole!  It didn't want to leave the boot, so I thought there must be young inside the boot and sure enough there were (see picture below), one of which ran around outside the boot (see picture).  It got back in the boot and the boot was replaced in the prairie.

Voles eat grasses, roots, seeds, and some insects.  They are food for hawks, owls, foxes, coyotes, snakes, etc.

Later in the year, when the young are out of the house, I'll finally get rid of the boot.  But for now it's not Mother Hubbard in the boot, but Mother Vole and her young!  I should actually say Mother and Father, because prairie voles have just about the highest fidelity in the realm of mammals!

Sunday routine included gaming with Dave and Tom (we each won a game), a spaghetti dinner with Dave’s family, and football on TV.  The pace of NFL games, given the endless commercials, coach’s challenges, and record number of penalties, is painfully slow.  Dave and I were switching channels to catch three games simultaneously, and as often as not, there were stops in the action of all three of them.  To make matters worse, the Bears were beyond awful, getting shut out and ending each possession with a punt, first time that happened in franchise history.  Toni and I, excited by the discovery of water on mars, were looking forward to observing a lunar eclipse, but clouds obscured the phenomenon.  In West Virginia, however, Ray Smock photographed the event.

Saints and Sinners

“They say I am impersonal.  I want you to know I am the only candidate who said he would get rid of [FBI director] J. Edgar Hoover and that is a person.” 1968 Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy

In Jonathyne Briggs’ seminar on 1968 Youth Rebellions I discussed why so many Americans were protesting the Vietnam War, namely the atrocities committed by our “killing machine,” composed of 500,000 troops carrying out “search and destroy” missions in “free fire zones” and utilizing heinous weapons (i.e., cluster bombs, Agent Orange, and napalm) in an unwinnable conflict against people who wanted their country united and free from foreign domination.  The autocratic leaders we supported against Ho Chi Minh, the George Washington of his country, were crooks and former French collaborators.  After mentioning my participation in the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, I read from Norman Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night” about the incarceration of Quaker pacifists who refused to accept a plea bargain:                    

     Some of [the women] refused to eat or drink and were fed intravenously.    Several men at the D.C.    jail would not wear prison clothing.  Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole.  There they lived in cells so small not all could lie down at once to sleep.  For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor.  For many days they did not eat or drink water.  Dehydration brought them near to madness.

Then Mailer wonders:

  Did they pray, these Quakers, for forgiveness of the nation?  Did they pray with tears in their eyes . . . “O Lord, bring more suffering upon me that the sins of our soldiers in Vietnam be not utterly unforgiven – they are too young to be damned forever."

“Armies of the Night” rests in a bookcase next to favorites “Breakfast of Champions” (Kurt Vonnegut), “Rabbit Is Rich” (John Updike), and “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories” (Jean Shepherd).  In “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” the Mailer book the class is reading, the author tells 1968 antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy that his 1960 nominating speech on behalf of Adlai Stevenson (during which the Minnesota Senator said, “Do not reject this man who made us all proud to be called Democrats”) was the second greatest oration he’d ever witnessed.  Taking the bait, McCarthy inquired about who was better.  Vito Marcantonio, Mailer replied, in 1948 at Yankee Stadium in front of 50,000 people.  That occasion was a Progressive Party rally for anti-Cold War Presidential candidate Henry Wallace.  Like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Marcantonio was a democratic socialist.  I told Jon’s students that although McCarthy and Mailer were on the correct side of history in their views about Vietnam, neither was a saint – and, in Mailer’s case, more a sinner – a notorious bully and womanizer who on the final night of the convention unwound at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy club.

Addressing California delegates at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, An embittered McCarthy answered charges that he would be a passive President:

      Well, a little passivity in that office is all right, a kind of balance, I think.  I have never known what active compassion is.  Actually, compassion, in my mind, is to suffer with someone, not in advance of him.  Or not in public necessarily.  But I have been, whether I have been passive or not, the most active candidate in the party this year, raising issues all the way.

 above, Eugene McCarthy; below, Ethan Schmidt

Nicole Anslover was a good friend of Ethan Schmidt, the American History professor at Delta State gunned down by an apparently crazed adjunct.  Schmidt and Nicole were both grad students at the University of Kansas.  The murderer, Shannon Lamb, first killed his girlfriend and after a police chase took his own life.  According to the Daily Mail, Lamb had gotten a nasty spider bite on the cheek that caused him a great deal of anxiety. Lamb claimed he shot his girlfriend by mistake when she tried to prevent him from committing suicide. Police remain baffled about why he had wanted Schmidt dead.  The two hardly knew each other, and Schmidt was by all accounts a good family man.  David Parnell took over Nicole’s Monday class so she could attend the funeral.

Visiting the Archives was Archie Allen of Clover Lane Media in pursuit of photographs for a two-hour documentary about civil rights in Indiana.  Vernon Smith had given him a copy of “Gary’s First Hundred Years,” and I pulled out “Gary: A Pictorial History” plus pictorial histories of Miller Beach and Glen Park so he could compile a list for Steve McShane.

In Steve’s class to find out how the students’ oral histories were progressing (nearly all had identified their subject), I read from Anastasia Polite’s reminiscences to give them ideas about aspects of ethnicity, including parental influences, home life, food, church, and social events.  In an interview for “Daughters of Penelope” Tasia recalled her parents insisting that she speak Greek, being served wine with meals (which she hated), and her grandmother taking her to St. Constantine’s Church.  Tasia added:

     My dad was very pro-Greek, but he hated the church.  He wouldn’t go, and my mother agreed with him, whatever he said.  He thought church was nonsense.  A fraud.  He hated the priests.  I think he had a bad experience in Greece with one of them.  His big thing was, “Never be alone with a priest.”  We’d have to go to confession, and he’d try to stop us. 

     When I was growing up, I probably went to hundreds of weddings.  People bought food for their weddings at our stores.  In those days nothing was catered.  The family cooked fried meatballs and Greek lamb in the church basement.  Everybody was welcome.  There were no formal invitations.  When somebody was getting married, we went to the weddings.  The ceremony was held in the church, of course, and the receptions were downstairs.  Later the church added a bigger hall.

     My dad was a beautiful dancer.  It seemed that dancing was when his soul came out.  There were a lot of Greek gatherings in those days.  Nearly every week a band would be playing, and we’d go to the church hall to dance.  When he got up, there would be a whisper, “Vlasie’s going to dance.”  Everybody would gather around to watch him, like in the movie “Zorba the Greek.”  Once one of the more forward, well-endowed women got up and started to dance with him.  He completely ignored her and went on with his dance, pretending she wasn’t there.

        

Professor Allison Schuette of Valparaiso University, co-director of the “Welcome Project,” will meet with me regarding a Gary initiative titled “Flight Paths: Mapping Our Changing Neighborhoods.”  In an interview for that project Valpo mayor Jon Costas, who grew up on Gary’s West Side in a house later purchased by Dolly Millender, asserted that the year 1967 was a “turbulent time” – a “perfect storm” - in terms of Black protest nationwide and local tension due to Richard Hatcher being elected mayor.  His family joined the “white flight” shortly after a Halloween incident.  Jon was walking home after trick-or-treating with his older brother and friends when suddenly a gang of African Americans surrounded him.  The others fled, but Jon had his candy stolen and feared for his safety until a gang member said, “Leave him alone, he’s just a kid.”

above, Mayor Jon Costas; below, Yogi Berra

New York Yankee Hall of Fame catcher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra passed away at age 90.  A hero to my dad, he famous, especially when Yankee manager, for off-the-wall “Yogi-isms,” such as, “It ain’t over till it’s over” and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  He once said, “Always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise they won’t come to yours.”

above, Jeff Manes; below, Union Mills Sectional champs

Jeff Manes interviewed Matt Werner, author of “Season of Upsets,” about Union Mills, the 1950 high school basketball Sectional champions who defeated Michigan City Elston, which had an enrollment of 1,000 students compared to 65 at Union Mills.  Werner told Manes that he spent about three years researching and writing the book and interviewed more than 70 people.

Is nothing sacred?  The blurb for Molly Geidel’s “Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties,” in the University of Minnesota “Critical American Studies” series, proclaims:

  The practice of development work, embodied by iconic Peace Corps volunteers, allowed U.S. policy makers to manage global inequality while assuaging their own gendered anxieties about postwar affluence.  Geidel traces how modernization theorists used the Peace Corps to craft the archetype of the heroic development worker: a ruggedly masculine figure who would inspire individuals and communities to abandon traditional lifestyles and seek integration into the global capitalist world.

 statue of Junipero Serra in San Gabriel, CA

On American soil Pope Francis canonized Spaniard Junipero Serra, an eighteenth century Franciscan monk, despite protests from 50 California Native American tribes.  Valentin Lopez declared: “We’re stunned and we’re in disbelief.”  Deborah Miranda wrote, “The missions ended up killing about 90 percent of the California Indians present at the time of missionization.”  Historian Carey McWilliams called missions “charnel houses” where victims were pressed into forced labor and infected with deadly diseases.  In The Guardian Andrew Gumbel wrote:

       When the Native Americans rebelled, which they did on at least two occasions, the rebellions were put down in brutal fashion. When Native American women were caught trying to abort babies conceived through rape, the mission fathers had them beaten for days on end, clamped them in irons, had their heads shaved and forced them to stand at the church altar every Sunday carrying a painted wooden child in their arms.

Writing from a federal prison camp in Terre Haute, George Van Til began, “Hello my friend,” While his health is still shaky, his spirit was lifted by a visit from Dana Holland Neal and Carolyn McCrady and he’s pleased at my interest in coming, adding: “I’m fortunate that I’ve had visitors every weekend – family plus friends – but as the novelty wears off, who knows?  Representative Charlie Brown came down with former State Rep. Peter Katic.”

above, Charlie Brown; below, Peter Katic