“Life
does not consist only of what you have.
The
bigger part of life is what you can give."
“In the Presence of a Gift,” Hollis
Donald (November 2015)
The source for titles of Taylor Branch’s three-volume
history of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement in America is the
Old Testament book of Exodus. “Parting
the Waters” refers to crossing the Red Sea; “Pillar of Fire” allegedly was a
miracle that allowed Israelites to travel by night; “Edge of Canaan” refers to
nearing the Promised Land that Moses was able to see but, like Martin Luther King,
did not survive long enough to enter.
“Edge of Canaan” contains details about the near-fatal shooting in 1965
in Lowndes County, Alabama, of Richard Morrisroe, whose wife worked at E.C.
Central. The Morrisroes met after
Richard was assigned to a Puerto Rican congregation. Ring bearer at their wedding was her nephew
Bernabé “Bernie” Williams Figueroa, who as a Yankee centerfielder won four
championship rings.
According to the Bible, after the death of Moses,
Joshua conquered the Canaanites, who were descended from Ham, the son of Noah and
worshipped the false god Baal. Around
1200 B.C. in the aftermath of the battle of Jericho, Joshua’s army, supposedly
following revengeful Yahweh’s orders, slaughtered their foes and burned the
city to the ground. Following the death of King Solomon, a
spendthrift with a harem of a thousand wives and concubines, the 12 tribes of
Israel split into two groups. In 722
B.C. the Assyrians overran the northern kingdom; in 585 B.C. the Chaldeans
under King Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and marched remnants of the two
southern tribes to captivity in Babylon.
Some Israelites eventually returned to Jerusalem but were annihilated in
70 A.D. by Roman troops under Titus, the son of Emperor Vespasian.
At Lakeshore Toyota due to an airbag recall (a scandal
of momentous proportions involving Takata Corporation), a fellow asked, “Are you Dr. Lane?” It was Jason Kontos, who had interviewed
steelworker Clarence Ashley for my “Steelworkers Tales” Shavings issue (1990). In
“Silo” Kontos wrote:
The worst accident
Clarence B. Ashley remembers at U.S. Steel was when a huge silo exploded. His job was to load chunks of lime onto a
conveyor belt, which transported them to a silo that was at least 300 feet high
and 50 feet wide. One morning when
Ashley arrived at work, the silo had seemingly vanished. Water had somehow gotten into it, causing a
chemical explosion that left several people dead or injured.
Ashley’s worst personal
injury occurred in a less dramatic way.
He slipped on a piece of taconite and his own shovel hit him on the
head, requiring more than 20 stitches.
Jason grew up in Miller near Wells Street Beach and is
friends with Bob Wilcynski, my Seventies tennis partner. For years a special ed teacher, Kontos
presently is in real estate. His favorite
teacher, Rhiman Rotz, was such a showman that he’d be drenched in sweat by the
end of class. Several times Jason brought
guests who were mulling over whether to attend college. Rotz was faculty adviser to IUN’s Muslim
Student Association. He died of cancer in
2001 shortly after 9/11. The last time I
talked to him he was worried about its members.
from Anne Balay's "Steel Closets"
After Anne Balay spoke at Illinois Institute of Technology
on “Tradition and the Individual Steelworker,” Andrea Zeffiro, interviewing her
for “Nomorepotlucks,” asked about putting together the “Steel Closets” appendix,
titled “The Narrators,” which provided pseudonyms and descriptions of the 40
LGBT steelworkers. Balay answered:
My publisher and readers made me do that. I resisted for a long time.
Why? I was nervous about making the narrators visible. I had learned so much
about how vulnerable they were at work that I was very anxious not to add to
their struggles. But they don’t lack courage, certainly, and they agreed with
the publisher that readers would want some outline of a body and life to tie
the stories to, so I settled on the approach you describe. Even the aliases are
chosen to conceal identity (for example, narrators with “black” names are
white, etc.), and specific mills or job sites within mills are sometimes
changed. I had a hard time guessing their age, also, since the mill affects
your body.
Andrea asked how “Steel Closets” was received. Balay first mentioned that it helped prod the
United Steelworkers of America into guaranteeing contract protections for LGBT
members, then turned her attention to academia:
The academy has no respect for activism, though they give it lip
service. I was denied tenure, and haven’t found permanent academic work. Most
departments have their hearts in the right place, but when they go to hire,
they think more about the existing classes they need to cover than about what
needs to be added, or even changed in their course roster. Most departments
don’t find themselves asking who will teach their courses on blue-collar
queers, or courses that will send students out to the community to meet local
folks, hear their stories, and encourage them to change their worlds.
A colleague who once relished my company skedaddled as
I was about to join him in the cafeteria, fallout a year later, amazingly
(professors do carry grudges, as Anne
also discovered), from my defending Anne Balay, denied tenure on patently specious
grounds. The lie her enemies spread was
that she had favorites and was insensitive toward black students. Nothing could be further from the truth, as I
witnessed auditing her class for an entire semester. Anne was a rigorous grader
who encouraged her best students to present papers at academic
conferences. Some students assumed
incorrectly that her Children’s Literature course would be a piece of
cake. In an incident that her boss
seized on, several flunking students attempted to get their money back one day
before the withdrawal deadline by claiming outrage at being exposed to “Nappy
Hair.” Written by African American
Carolivia Herron, the book’s main point was for black kids to be proud of their
African heritage.
Niece Lisa Teuscher posted a photo of her with younger
sister Mary Ann and my son Dave taken during the blizzard of 1979, which caused
Chicago mayor Michael Bilandic to lose election the following month to Jane Byrne. Lisa’s family, visiting from New Jersey, had
left for home but turned around due to the storm. Commenting on the “huge DD jug” in Lisa’s left hand was hubby Fritz. Mary Ann joked, “I noticed Dave and I holding hands.
It must have been a good visit since we were usually arguing!!! LOL.”
A NWI Times article
about VU’s Welcome Project mentioned partnering with IUN’s Calumet Regional
Archives and included a photo of Archives volunteer Maurice Yancy. Project co-director Allison Schuette told
correspondent Rob Earnshaw: “We edit
interviews into short video or audio stories.
Then we facilitate conversations around those stories in various
venues.” Co-director Liz Wuerffel added: “Rather than let the dominant narrative narrow our ideas about
who we are or what kind of regional relationship we can have, we hope that,
through storytelling, research, and conversation, we can start to tell a new
story about who we are and what we can become.”
In the mail was “Indiana’s 200: The People Who Shaped
the Hoosier State,” a handsome tabletop volume celebrating the state’s 2016 Bicentennial. I wrote the essay on Vee-Jay Record Company
founder Vivian Carter. Other Gary natives
include “King of Pop” Michael Jackson, World War II combat photographer Johnny
Bushemi, and Roman Catholic Bishop Andrew Grutka. Actor Karl Malden and Mayor Richard Hatcher didn’t
make the cut, but I was happy to see dunes artist Frank Dudley and Region
humorist Jean Shepherd represented. On
the back jacket are quotes by Theodore Dreiser about Hoosiers being dreamers
and Kurt Vonnegut alleging that “wherever
you go, there is always a Hoosier doing something very important there.”
"Poppy Garden" by J. Ottis Adams (1914)
Steve Glazer, a self-described Jean Shepherd
historian, inquired if I knew anything about the humorist attending IU after
graduating from Hammond High in 1939. He ended the email using a favorite Gene
Shepherd word, “Excelsior.” I wrote
back: “I cannot directly answer your query, but in 1995, before Shep received
an honorary IU degree, he spoke for 20 minutes at a luncheon and joked about
going to IU’s East Chicago site after he got out of the army and being given an
aptitude test. Upon being told the results indicated that he'd make a
good dentist, he claimed that he walked out of the building and never went
back. I'll leave it to you to decide how
much of the story was apocryphal.”
In Steve McShane’s Indiana History class I’ll have
students read excerpts from my 1980s Steel
Shavings volume on that decade, “The Uncertainty of Everyday Life” (2008),
in particular my oral history of the Richard Hatcher administration. The issue is dedicated to the late IUN senior
lecturer Gary L. Martin, who while Lake County chief of police under Sheriff
Roy Dominguez rammed into during a bicycle rally to raise money for widows of
police officers. It contains an article
by Jillian Adams about Bob Hechlinski, a Dyer businessman who for 13 years
beginning in 1986 mentored interns for IUN’s Career Beginnings program directed
by SPEA professor Phil Rutledge. He was initially reluctant to participate due
to an onerous workload, but wife Nancy reminded him that his former boss at
Bendix Corporation, Dick Cordell, had pushed him to finish college. Of the
original 115 mentors, after two years Hechinski was the only white male
left. Jillian Adams wrote:
The obstacles were great,
but the rewards made up for it, Bob recalled.
One student named Malcolm had around a D average going into his senior
year. Bob was determined to prove he
wasn’t a complete washout and to get him into college. At their weekly meetings he worked to change
Malcolm’s study habits and to stress that schoolwork came before phone calls to
girls and other leisure activities. The
reward came when Malcolm called with news that he had made the honor roll. After Bob hung up, he realized that he was
crying tears of happiness.
The following year, he
had an intern who seemed sullen and angry to be paired with a white man. Throughout the relationship the student kept
his distance and didn’t open up to Bob, but he didn’t break off the
relationship. Bob even talked to Malcolm
about the situation. At commencement the
student was standing with family and friends when he spotted Bob and much to
Bob’s amazement threw his arms around him and embraced him. Said Bob, “That
alone made the experience worthwhile.
Everything was pushed aside, race and all.”
Bob and Nancy Hechlinski presently live in
Bloomington. He’s the author of “Honey,
I Bought An Airplane: Stories, Histories and Recollections of 597 Flights in
the Midwest.” In 1991 NWI Times correspondent Phil Wieland
covered the final flight of Hechlinski’s “quixotic
quest to land his airplane at every airport in Indiana.” He touched down at Grissom Air Force Base
during an air show witnessed by 100,000 people.
Hechlinski told Wieland, “I’d do
it again. I guess there are two crazy
men of the dunes – me and [aviation pioneer] Octave Chanute.”
left, Bernie Williams; right, The Ronnettes
In “Leaders of the Pack,” Sean MacLeod noted that girl
group “songs were the musical expression
of that transitory stage between the wonders of childhood and the realities of
adulthood, while endeavoring to bridge the gap between innocence and knowing,
between dependency and independence, and between self and other.” Fame was fleeting, as the singers were at
the mercy of an exploitative industry. Two
exceptions, Ronnie Bennett of the Ronnettes and Diana Ross of the Supremes,
were pursued romantically by producers Phil Spector and Berry Gordy.
Adele shined on Saturday
Night Live, as did Justin Bieber in the American Music Awards finale. IU blew a nine-point lead against Wake Forest
in the Maui Classic. I finished first in
the 15-person CBS Sports pool despite selecting the pathetic Eagles to beat
Tampa Bay. Bo Reyes, my closest competition, incorrectly picked Minnesota over
Green Bay.
photo by Luke Waters
Once nearly extinct in Indiana, wild turkeys are now a common sight. In the Chesterton Tribune Kevin Nevers wrote
about several dozen landing on I-149 and stopping traffic for 30 minutes. They appeared to be afraid of jumping over the
guard rail until steelworker Luke Waters and another driver started gobbling
and flapping their arms. Nevers wrote: “Together the two men led the rafter [i.e.,
flock] to freedom, to the Canaan beyond the guard rail.”
Under Coach Ryan Shelton the Lady Redhawks are 6 and
1, the only loss coming when NAIA All-American Nicki Monahan was out with an
injury. In the Viterbo NAIA Showcase
Classic IUN fell behind by 17 but defeated Saint Ambrose on a last-second shot
by Monahan, who finished with 34 points.
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