Wallbangers

"Bring It On Home, Wallbanger," Alice Clayton

Harvey Kuenn, who managed the Milwaukee Brewers in 1982 (hence the American League champs’ nickname “Harvey’s Wallbangers”), was my favorite player when he held down shortstop for the Detroit Tigers and I lived in Birmingham, Michigan during the mid-1950s. I can still recall Al Kaline (RF), Ray Boone (3B), Charlie “Paw Paw” Maxwell (LF), and former Phillies first baseman Earl Torgeson.  Future Philly Jim Bunning pitched for the Tigers, as did Virgil “Fire” Trucks, and “Yankee Killer” Frank Lary, whose record against the perennial American League champs was 27-10 between 1955 and 1961. Even though those Detroit teams finished well over .500, they never remained in pennant contention by August and September. In 1956 Kuenn led the team with a .332 batting average, while a trio of wallbangers hit over 25 home runs, led by “Paw Paw” Maxwell with 28.

Charlie Maxwell at 2010 memorial dedication in Paw Paw, Michigan; Toni and I cross the Paw Paw River on the way to Grand Rapids

The Harvey Wallbanger is a mixed drink that became popular in the 1970s and combines vodka, orange juice and Galliano liqueur. Bartender Donato “Duke” Antone claimed to be its inventor and that he named the drink for a surfer who was a regular at his establishment.  Antone made similar claims about other mixed drinks, so many are skeptical.

 Garrett Jones; Vince Lloyd and Lou Boudreau

In CB trucker lingo wallbanger refers to a drunk driver who has drifted into another lane.  Wallbanger became a nickname for Quaaludes in the 1970s and, more recently, getting high by a breathing process of deliberately passing out.  It can also refer to having furtive sex against a wall or a couple being so raucous in bed that the headboard repeatedly bangs against the wall. Wallbanger is a fit description for hardnosed natives of Harvey, Illinois, including comedian Tom Dreeson, singer Syleena Johnson, and numerous athletes, including basketball stars Kevin Duckworth, Eddy Curry, and Solomon Hill and baseball players Lou Boudreau and Garrett Jones. In high school Boudreau led the Thornton Township “Flying Clouds” to an unlikely state basketball championship.  1948 was a highlight of a long pro baseball career; he was American League MVP and as player-manager led the Cleveland Indiana to a World Series championship. For many years he announced Cubs ball games with Vince Lloyd, who called him “Good kid.”

patriarch T.W. Harvey and family

scene from The Blues Brothers

Located south of Chicago, the city of Harvey was the brainchild of real estate developer Turlington W. Harvey, a close associate of Moody Bible Institute founder Dwight Moody.  He hoped to create a model town blending capitalism and Christianity, but unlike the planned community of Pullman, Harvey’s syndicate provide for home ownership.  By 1895, six years after its founding residents voted to allow the sale and purchase of alcoholic beverages.  A similar brief Prohibition attempt in pioneer Gary failed miserably.  Harvey grew rapidly during the affluent 1950s but now suffers from high levels of poverty and unemployment.  Current population has dropped to under 25,000.  The car chase scene in The Blues Brothers (1980) took place in Harvey’s Dixie Square Mall that had closed the year before until revived by moviemakers for two days and then boarded up again.  During its mere 13-year existence the 800,000-square foot mall had become, according to the Daily Mail’s Joshua Gardner, “a hot bed of gang activity.”   By then, Harvey’s African-American population had reached 66 percent, and scars remained from a 1969 race riot.  The number of abandoned homes escalated, as many HUD loan recipients could not afford to meet mortgage payments

Tongue in cheek, Harvey native and former historian of the U.S. House of Representatives Ray Smock wrote on Facebook: “It is beginning to look like there were more people in the Russian meeting with Donald Trump, Jr at Trump Tower than attended his father's inauguration, which, you will recall, was the largest inaugural crowd in history.” Jonathan Ganz replied: “I suspect that Mr. Trump not only knew about the meeting after the fact, but knew about it before hand, and perhaps he attended.”  Smock then joked: “Trump's lawyers told him to make this meeting an ‘arm's-length transaction.’  So, President Trump always stayed at least an arm's length away from the Russians in the room. This way he can tell the TRUTH when he says: ‘I had no contact with Russians at Don Jr's meeting.’ It all depends on what the meaning of ‘contact’ is.” Ray continued:

When Trump is sent to prison, he will negotiate a nice federal facility next to an adjoining golf course, or, have a prison built on one of his existing courses. This we should allow. His punishment, which he will claim is cruel and unusual, will be that he must tell the Truth about his golf score. Perhaps after 8 to 10 years of being forced to tell the Truth, it will help rehabilitate him.

On a serious note, Ray wrote: “I prefer not to denigrate Trump voters as a group but I do think the vote for such a flawed human being was a mistake that the whole nation must try to fix, preferably without finger pointing. We are all in the same boat on this one.”  Several years ago, Ray Smock tried unsuccessfully to preserve historical documents relating to Harvey that were located in the attic of a musty museum by moving them to a facility similar to IUN’s Calumet Regional Archives. Ray grew up not far from Lou Boudreau’s home.

IUN student interviewed Jermaine Buchanan  Jim Carson, who grew up in Harvey and attended the same high school as Boudreaux and Smock:

      Jim Carson was born in Chicago and grew up in the village of Riverdale. Jim’s dad (James, Sr.) managed a Standard gas station in Hyde Park, and during the summer Jim would help him out, riding the train to and from the station.  During this time gas stations weren’t self-serve and it was hard work. A number of Chicago White Sox players stopped for gas, including Minnie Minoso, whom Jim got to recognize.  Jim’s father eventually got a new job working for Ford as an assembly line worker.  

Jim Ard; below, Jim Carson

      In  high school Jim grew to be six feet, five inches tall.  During his junior year at Thornton Township, he played on the 1966 state championship basketball team led by future NBA star Jim Ard.  Erma, Jim’s mother, was a substitute teacher at Thornton. When kids talked nasty about her, Jim sometimes got into fights.  At Thornton Junior College (now South Suburban Community College) Jim played both basketball and golf.   He went on to pursue a college degree in Mechanical Engineering and, after a number of years, an MBA from IU Northwest. During his career he worked at Ford, Pullman, and, the last 20 years, for U.S. Steel Inland doing environmental engineering to help the mills deal with damage to the environment.

      Taught by a friend of his mother, Jim started playing bridge at age 21.  Now Jim usually plays duplicate twice a week.  Games typically involve around 20-25 hands and last about three hours.  Jim explained that duplicate bridge is very much like golf because during the play there isn’t much talking - it is a thinking game. Partners come up with systems, he said, to establish communication.  He admitted that bridge can be very frustrating and very intense for someone as competitive as himself, especially when he has realized he made a bad decision. He usually plays with his wife Marcia, and he’s learning to keep his emotions in check and stay calm even when things aren’t going well.

Moe Dixon and Jim Carson

      In addition to duplicate bridge, Jim and Marcia have a group of friends that for 27 years have been playing once a month. On a typical night, Jim would get out the blender to prepare Pina Coladas. Jim’s friends would tease him by claiming that he’s broken all their blenders. Jim has even been to weddings where they played bridge.  The couples vacation together and have played bridge all over the world and on ski trips.  One time going to Russia on a cruise ship, Jim and Marcia bid and made a Grand Slam taking all 13 tricks – a rarity.

      Jim and his family have lived all over the Calumet Region, including Hammond, Munster, and finally Valparaiso.  Retiring at age 65, he and Marcia have two sons, both college graduates, one living in Boston and the other in California.  They are successful and took his advice not to live beyond their means.

Anthony Zaragoza (above), a historian at Evergreen State College in Washington who graduated from Hammond Gavit (1992) and Indiana University, is working on a project titled “Neoliberalism in the Neighborhood” and wants to meet with me next month at IUN’s Calumet Regional Archives.  He asked: “Are there faculty members or independent scholars there that you know of who are doing any research or teach about deindustrialization, economic transformation, or neoliberalism in the region, especially connected to the steel industry, casinos, gangs, drugs, prisons or policing.”  Zaragoza defined his working definition of neoliberalism as follows:

Neoliberalism is a process of global economic restructuring that has been based in enormous increases in corporate free trade, resulting in deindustrialization across the country, financialization of the economy, and the development of global economic governance through various bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements (such as NAFTA) as well as the prominence of international bodies like the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. This has resulted in a massive growth in inequality not only between nations but also within them. I use the term “neoliberalism” to describe the package of economic policies, political priorities and ideological justifications that create and enable these changes. Though regional implementation varies across the country and world, the economic policies often include de/reregulation, tax cuts/austerity, privatization, free trade, among others and are often accompanied by political policies that deal with the resulting economic polarization, labor precariousness, and instability through a growth in law and order governance anchored in increasingly militarized policing, a massive growth in prisons, and further military expansion. Culturally/ideologically there is a dominant tendency to undermine various kinds of collective action such as unions and the social wage, an emphasis on personal responsibility and punitive culture, and the glorification of wealth and fame.

Zaragoza has made use of oral history and local history assignments in his classes, and I suggested that he might consider narrowing his focus to a single community.  Blue-collar Black Oak, located on the far southwest side of Gary and adjoining Griffith and unincorporated Calumet Township, would make an excellent case study.  Annexed by Gary in 1976, Black Oak is the city’s only majority-white neighborhood.  Many of its residents live in mobile homes. Like other surrounding communities, Black Oak has a high degree of poverty and unemployment, as well as environmental degradation due to illegal dumping of mattresses, tires, and other trash and the presence of a former toxic waste dump. 

I recommended that Zaragoza read Joe Klein’s “Payback: Five Marines and Vietnam” (1984).   One of them, Gary Cooper from Black Oak, was killed by Hammond police in 1981 when he got drunk, suffered a flashback, and imagined himself back in the field.  Klein first became interested in Cooper when he saw this newspaper headline: “Viet Vet Goes Berserk over Hostage Welcome.”  The truth was much more complex than that.  According to Klein, Copper’s girlfriend Barbara had these thoughts upon learning from a police officer that Gary had “expired”:

At least we wouldn’t have to stand in line anymore, waiting for job applications, waiting for the telephone to ring, waiting for his unemployment to run out, thinking about getting high again, always fighting that temptation, inevitably succumbing. Maybe – and she was horrified to realize that she was thinking this – maybe he was better off.

At the Community Bridge Club in Gary I gave DVDs to Lou Nimnicht and Joe Chin of interviews I did with them and signed them up for a Fall semester student project that will include an email correspondence about weekly bridge highlights and anecdotes.  Director Alan Yngve tried to get me to stay, but I begged off, promising to come back soon with a partner.  On the way home, I picked up carry-out meals from Wagner’s Ribs.