Prisoner

“I can taste the freedom just outside that door

same grey walls, same grey clothes”

         “Prison,” Ryan Adams

I’ve got Ryan Adams’ new CD on heavy rotation with Depeche Mode, Parquet Courts, Foo Fighters, and Steve Earle’s “Jerusalem,” which contains “John Walker’s Blues” (about the “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh), “Ashes to Ashes,” and the prison lament “What’s a Simple Man to Do?”  My favorite Ryan Adams song is “New York, New York,” which he performed on Saturday Night Live when the show came back on air following the 9/11/01 attack on the World Trade Center. On the way to IUN I heard “I Fought the Law and the Law Won” by the Clash.

 Howard Marks

History book club member Ken Anderson asked George Van Til if he’d consider talking to the group about his experience in Terre Haute Penitentiary.  I suggested he report on a book about someone else’s prison time and then compare and contrast those recollections with his own.  When I learned about “Mr. Nice” (1996) an autobiography of drug smuggler Howard Marks, who spent seven years at Terre Haute, I checked it out. Unlike Van Til, Marks was in the maximum-security unit, and his book devoted just a single chapter to his seven years there between 1988 and 1995.  Marks wrote:

    Known as “Terror Hut,” it was America’s “gladiator school” and provided an arena for tough redneck US Government hacks, Black inner-city gang leaders, bikers, and Psychopaths.  Half of those imprisoned there would never be released.  It promised to be different.  I was terrified.

    Built in 1940, and holding a 20-year, escape-free record, UPS Terre Haute resembles an enormous insect whose outside skeleton is razor wire, whose body is the main thoroughfare, whose legs are cell blocks for prisoners, whose claws are holes for administering torture, whose arms are mindless facilities for its 1,300 inhabitants, whose compound eyes are TV cameras, and whose head is a gymnasium.  The prison staff varied from fat military megalomaniacs to fat and demented local Ku Klux Klan rejects.

Marks didn’t fare badly at Terre Haute, securing a job at $40 a month teaching English grammar to inmates studying for their General Education Diploma (GED).  When he left, a former Black Panther, Veronza “Daoud” Bower, serving a life sentence for killing a policeman, gave him a sacred Indian stone, saying, “It goes invisible during shake-downs.  No one will find it.  This means a part of us will always be with you.”  Marks wrote of Bower:

  Daoud had grown waist-length deadlocks and had devoted his 20-odd years of continuous prison life to playing chess and Scrabble, perfecting his own physical fitness, and studying and practicing various healing techniques.  He could do several thousand push-ups non-stop and relieve or cure virtually any ailment.  Daoud was the only non-native American Indian who participated in religious sweat-lodge rituals.

A better choice, I believe, for a history book report would be “Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women” (2017) by Susan Burton and Cari Lynn. Growing up poor in Los Angeles, Burton was molested as a child by her aunt’s boyfriend and then by her mother’s sugar daddy, gang-raped as a teenager.  Despite having done well in school, Sue went downhill after a police squad car killed her five-year-old son when he dashed into the street.  She became a prostitute hooked on drugs and booze who was in and out of prison for 15 years.

Susan Burton’s road to recovery and rehabilitation began when her brother Melvin paid for her to enter a top-flight treatment program run by the CLARE Foundation. Sue described Melvin as a professional connector with pure charisma (he fathered 13 kids with almost as many women), who linked up people with doctors and lawyers and bail bondsmen, who made everyone he met feel special.  She started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and committed to its 12-step program.  Burton eventually founded A New Way of Life, a nonprofit organization that provides housing and emotional support for former women prisoners.  In the Foreword, Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” wrote: “There once lived a woman with deep brown skin and black hair who freed people from bondage and ushered them to safety.  Some people know this woman by the name of Harriet Tubman.  I know her as Susan.”

On the Showstopper Blog, Stop the Peepshow wrote of Burton (above):

     Beginning as a live-in caregiver, Burton saved enough money until she was able to purchase a house that she converted into a place for recovery. Provided with food, clothing and transportation, women were encouraged to face their pasts, heal and find strength together. Today, Burton owns five homes, which can each support 22 women at a time. Funded by an array of private foundations, Burton is able to focus her energy less on the monetary side of her business and more on integrating recovering offenders back into society. Burton personally picks up new arrivals either at the bus station or prison gates and greets her future residents with a signature line, “Welcome Home.” Burton helps women get ID cards so that they can begin work and regain custody of their children. Also, to encourage women to stay on track, Burton requires that her residents stay sober, attend 12-step meetings, and undergo drug treatment, enroll in school, or get a job. When the women choose to branch out independently, Burton aids in their home hunt and furnishings. In response to having rescued over 400 women, Burton says it simply: “Magic happened.”

Burton is a famous name in film.  Actor Richard Burton played Mark Antony opposite Elizabeth Taylor, whom he later married, in Cleopatra (1963).  LaVar Burton played slave Kunta Kinte in the mini-series Roots and Geordi La Forge in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Director Tim Burton blended fantasy, humor, and horror in Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorshands. Burton can also be a first name, as in singers Burton C. Bell of Fear Factory and Burton Cummings of Guess Who.  One of my best friends in grad school at Maryland was Dennis Burton, a native of Missoula, Montana.  He was part of a two-dollar-limit poker group that included Pete Daniel, Ray Smock, David Goldfield, and Walker Rumble – if your money was gone, you played on the dole (but couldn’t bet) until you won a hand.  Denny’s field was Middle East history, and his adviser was a terror – demanding he learn Arabic before even starting on his dissertation.  He never graduated and later committed suicide.

Jackson 5 by Joe Giolas

Photographer Joe Giolas passed away at age 87.  A Froebel graduate, Giolas opened a studio in 1958 in Gary’s Central District at the corner of Thirteenth and Broadway, later moving to 5070 Broadway and then 7994 Broadway, taking countless graduation and wedding pictures.  Columnist Jerry Davich wrote: “He photographed the Jackson 5 when the young Gary teens were still singing at weddings.”  In retirement, he favored shooting birds, flowers, dogs, and barns.  Once, after he stopped his car on a country road, someone asked Giolas what he was looking for.  “Barns,” he said, eliciting this reply: “What’s his first name?”

Samuel A. Love, Walter Jones, and members of Progressive Community Church: Post-Trib photo by Jim Karszewski

On July 25, there were three front-page stories in The Post-Tribune.  The first proclaimed: “Project adds poems on boarded up Gary school.”  Progressive Community Church members had paid for plywood for Emerson School, which had become an eyesore since its closing in 2010.  Two of the poems, “What the Sun Sees” and “Summer Sun, Summer Fun,” originated from workshops Samuel A. Love and Corey Hagelberg held at IU Northwest. The middle story, “Crackdown on air pollution stalls under Trump’s EPA,” explained that Indiana Harbor Coke Company was cited for EPA violations a half-dozen times since 2010 but escaped prosecution, with no prospect of enforcement of regulations in sight.  In fact, existing regulations may soon be emasculated. 

Indiana Harbor Coke Co.; Post-Trib photo by E. Jason Wambsgans

The third Post-Tribune front-page story, “Man tries to steal rabbit at Porter County Fair,” noted that children screamed when a man took a Polish bunny valued at $80 from its cage and tried to flee with the animal under his shirt.  Alerted by the girls’ screams, an adult working the rabbit barn stopped and held the would-be thief until police arrived.  Dave’s family was at the fair at the time.  I had volunteered to work at IUN’s booth, but University Advancement discontinued the practice of many years.  Too bad.

Trump spoke at the National Boy Scout jamboree in West Virginia.  He started one sentence, “What the hell?”  Ray Smock called it a pathetic display of the President’s total ignorance of being a role model for young Americans:

  He gave a rambling campaign speech about how great his election was and how badly he beat Hillary. He criticized Barack Obama for not attending the last jamboree 4 years ago. He cynically predicted that the large crowd of scouts would be under-reported by the press. Trump seemed to be under the impression that all those scouts had gathered just to hear him and had no other business at this major scouting event. 

Jojo FitzGerald replied:

  My source who is at the Jamboree said that all their events were cancelled for the evening, and that it was mandatory that all the scouts attend. They sat out in the heat for a considerable time just to hear the rants of a person who stands for the opposite of everything scouting stands for. This person is an abscess on the posterior of America. 

Traditionally, presidents have received Scouting's highest honor, the Silver Buffalo Award.  Carol Deboer-Langworthy suggested that a silver buffalo chip would be more appropriate.  Smock replied: “A real buffalo chip would be the perfect award.  And it should be fresh, too.”

My review of Stephen Meyer’s “Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland” appeared in the June 2017 issue of Indiana Magazine of History.  Here is part of what I wrote:

  When the workplace was largely a male preserve, Meyer concludes, masculine manifestations included cursing, fighting, vulgar banter with undertones of racism, hazing of newcomers, and crude horseplay, including such homoerotic behavior as goosing unsuspecting co-workers and pulling at their nipples. 

  Based for the most part on archival records of grievance proceedings rather than on oral testimony, Meyer’s findings on hazing and horseplay differ in tone from the humorous steelworker tales recorded by Hoosier folklorist Richard Dorson in Land of the Millrats (1981). Yet the pranks Dorson found directed at symbols of managerial authority find a parallel in attempts to cut off neckties at the General Motors Fleetwood plant after corporate honchos required foremen to wear white shirts as signs of authority. Like workers at Bendix Products brake shop, Local 1066 rank-and-file militants at East Chicago’s Inland Steel Company carried out numerous wildcat strikes until the most outspoken were purged during the Red Scare. And as Mary Margaret Fonow documented in Union Women: Forging Feminism in the United Steelworkers of America (2003), when significant numbers of women were hired in at Northwest Indiana steel mills after a 1974 consent decree, they fought back against demeaning practices by forming women’s caucuses. Like their sisters in the auto industry, Fonow’s steelworkers appealed to union leaders and governmental institutions until the situation improved somewhat by the mid-1980s. Meyer fails to mention the harassment of those perceived to be effeminate or gay, a situation union and management turned a blind eye to until Anne Balay’s Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers (2014) exposed the shameful problem. As was the case a generation before with the UAW’s stand against the harassment of women, once United Steel Workers (USW) leaders condemned abusive behavior, things improved.

After I posted the review excerpt on Facebook, among the replies was a WOW emoji from Beamer Pickert.

I heard from Vince Curll, my best friend in high school, for the first time in many years.  He has never returned for reunions, but I learned his email address from a reunion booklet.  I sent him a note about preparing a talk on the year 1957 in popular music in which I mention a Rock and Roll show in Philadelphia that I attended with him.  He noted that it took place on Vine Street (a seedy tenderloin area, as I recall, not far from center city) and that mutual friend Chuck Bahmueller had secured the tickets.  Bahmueller had an old Buick had got about five miles to the gallon and needed a quart of oil about once a week.  The three of us and Ray Bates would sometimes camp out overnight in woods near Bahmueller’s place, playing poker, drinking, and smoking (cigarettes). I last saw Chuck at a 1995 Upper Dublin reunion.  Beforehand, we split a quart of beer and argued politics.  We sat at a table with Molly Schade, Judy Jenkins, Susan Floyd, and Suzie Hummel.  Thelma Joy Van Sant drove us back to our motel at evening’s end.

Chuck Bahmueller

At bridge in Chesterton a record 14 couples showed up.  Against Chuck and Marcy Tomes I played 1 No-Trump, got set, but Dee and I got top board because other couples had over-bid.   We set the same bid by Alan Yngve for another high board; when Alan’s partner asked what went wrong, he merely said, “Good defense.”  On the other hand, Terry Bauer and Dottie made a small slam against us for high board with Terry successfully finessing my King of Clubs (I covered his Queen, but he had the Jack-ten in his hand).

Dottie Hart and Terry Bauer (foreground) play against Jim and Marcia Carson; photo by Hannah McCafferty