“Sometimes it's best to brave the
wind and rain
By havin’ strength to go against the grain”
By havin’ strength to go against the grain”
Oak
Ridge Boys, “Goin’ Against the Grain”
I interviewed
former Lake County surveyor George Van Til at the Calumet Regional Archives as
part of IU’s Bicentennial project. Another motivation was to convince Van Til
to set up an Archives collection in his name. Although discussing events a
half-century old, he recalled vividly how influential the campus experience was
to his intellectual growth and subsequent political career. Although his father never went to college due
to financial exigencies, books and Newsweek
magazines were in the house and dinner table discussion often centered on a
pastor’s Sunday sermon. A Political
Science class offered by Fedor Cicak transformed his life. He signed up for it
because he’d heard all one had to do was keep abreast of current world events,
something George did anyway. On the day
of the first exam, George had come from visiting his father, who had just
endured open heart surgery, and feared he’d fared poorly. Later, as Cicak was returning the blue books,
he read from Van Til’s and after class recruited him for the Political Science
Club. George rose to a leadership
position and gained confidence that carried into other endeavors. A Speech course also proved invaluable, as
did an offering by Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher, who taught at IUN for more than
40 years and, shamefully, has never been awarded an honorary degree due to
fears of alienating alumni donors.
IUN Young Democrats in 1970 (from left, George Van Til, Ted Bownowski, Sandi Weissbuch, Patti Puplava, Linda Mosorx, Mike Reza, Joe Ciesielski, George Sufana
Political Science professor Fedor Cicak
Cicak
had a distinctive Eastern European accent and organized student trips to the
Mideast. He frequently invited students
and faculty to his home in Hobart. Prior
to my first visit, he told me to turn right after passing the Dough Boy. He was referring to a World War I statue, but
at first I thought he meant the Pillsbury Poppin’ Fresh Doughboy. As I recall,
before I went to Saudi Arabia for three weeks to teach a course on the History
of American Ideas, Cicak briefed me on what to expect in that Muslim monarchy.
Van Til
attended the Oak Ridge Boys annual Christmas concert at the Star Plaza, the
final event before a wrecking ball demolishes the 40-year-old landmark. The Oak Ridge Boys are the only group to have performed there every single year of its existence and a total of 111
times. The group dedicated “I Guess It
Never Hurts to Hurt Sometimes” to Bruce White, whose father Dean built the Star
Plaza, and ended with “Amazing Grace.” Eloise Valadez of the NWI Times wrote: “The
group stepped back to wait for the curtain to close as a number of Star Plaza
Theatre personnel joined them onstage. Audience members then watched with tears
in their eyes as the familiar red curtain slowly started to move.”
Having never
visited the Archives, Van Til was impressed by the variety of our holdings,
including a picture of IUN’s former Calumet Center in East Chicago and painting
of steel baron Elbert H. Gary. He
noticed a 1977 union poster touting labor leaders Ed Sadlowski and Jim Balanoff
during their Steelworkers Fight Back campaign and recalled that Balanoff’s wife
Betty was a historian and the old warhorse’s complete opposite in demeanor but,
like him, devoted to the rank and file.
Videotaping
Van Til’s comments in the Ronald Cohen Room of the Archives was Samantha Gauer,
a recent graduate from Miami University in Ohio, who I’m hoping to use for
subsequent interviews with IUN grads Congressman Peter Visclosky and Lake
County Auditor John Petalas. Helping her set up was Aaron Pigors, director of
Instructional Media Services, who accompanied me to a FACET conference in
French Lick, where I interviewed more than a dozen celebrated educators from
across the IU system in a single day. I
reminded Aaron that he’d hurried back to his wife, who’d recently given
birth. The child is now almost 8 years
old, he said. How time flies. The following year, son Phil was my FACET
conference camera man and won 50 dollars spinning the wheel at French Lick’s
casino. My prize was a French Lick
t-shirt that I still wear on occasion.
My
favorite characters in Richard Russo’s “Everybody’s Fool” (2016) are African
Americans Clarice, assistant to Police Chief Doug Raymer, and octogenarian Mr.
Hymes, seen most days in a roadside chair waving a small American flag to
passersby. Both are witty and have
common sense. After Clarice invites
Raymer for a dinner of lamb chops and wine, he fears he’s insulted her by
falling asleep. Apparently most everyone in Bath knew Raymer’s wife was having
an affair with Clarice’s twin brother Jerome but the Chief.
Dee Van
Bebber and I picked up 2.04 master points by winning at bridge with a score of
70.83%, my first time reaching that milestone.
We had a bye in the final round, so I left early and didn’t find out
until the following morning. As usual,
what I mulled over afterwards was a hand where I got set down two doubled when
Joel Chandelier trumped my good Heart trick before I could get the lead and then
took my Queen of Spades as a finesse failed. I could have minimized the damage to down one,
which would have given us a decent board.
We did extremely well, however, against the two runners-up, Chuck and
Marcy Tomes and Terry Bauer and Dottie Hart.
A day later, Dee and Chuck finished first at Charlie Halberstadt’s game
in Valpo.
Ray
Smock wrote:
The
president promised the nation a Christmas present and he will deliver it. It
should be clear to all but the GOP that this monstrous tax bill was
not written by Santa Claus and his elves, but by Satan and Mammon, Satan's dark
prince of Money and Greed. I
can't remember the last time I used Satan in a sentence. But this is bad stuff.
You don't kick 13 million people off health insurance rolls and call it a
Christmas present.
You don’t give the richest people in
America a trillion dollars in tax savings and talk about Christmas in the same
breath. This is the largest single
legalized theft in the history of this country. It is a big gift of charity for
the very group of people who don’t need it.
It is only Christmas for billionaires like our president. The Trump
family will be most merry indeed this year.
Trump has no idea what is in the bill. But
he will sign it with glee and great fanfare. He will be proud of this colossal
theft, the greatest in his long career as a con man.
As
Hollis Donald wrote in the poem “This Town Won’t Last Too Long”:
Those on top are
talking ill will
Efforts to kill
the little man are going on still
At the library pot luck
luncheon, I pigged out on rib tips, chicken wings, a tamale, baked beans,
spaghetti, salad, and deli pickles (my contribution to the cause). Betty Wilson
suggested I try the frappe she made, which turned out to be Sprite with rainbow
sherbet added. I sat with Scott Sandberg,
who has asked me to participate in a roundtable discussion of Martin Luther
King’s Nobel lecture, “The Quest for Peace and Justice.” He has submitted a Humanities Grant proposal
for that purpose. Also at our table was
Cele Morris, who worked in the library for 18 and is married to emeritus Physics
professor John Morris. She reported that
he recently messed up a knee falling down steps; in a previous spill, he had
injured the other knee. I knew him when
he was first hired and couldn’t believe it when he retired. I recall Dean Mark
Hoyert reading off a list of Morris’ scholarly publications that produced
laughs because they were so arcane, including “Fermionic and Bosonic
Stabilizing Effects for Type I and Type II Dimension Bubbles” in Physical Review.
At the
Holiday bowling banquet a day later, I sat with Gene Clifford, who explained
why a record number of snowy owls have flocked to Northwest Indiana in what
experts call an eruption. They feast on
lemmings, field mice, and other small rodents and often hang out atop utility
poles. Gene spotted one near Lake Shore
Toyota in Porter. Henrietta Irwin joined us, and we compared cheese cake
recipes since she brought one with cherries on top. We both had an ample share
of corn pudding, a specialty of my great Aunt Grace. I almost told her she reminded me of Aunt
Grace, being about the same age as she was the last time I saw her, but feared
she might take it the wrong way. I once told sister-in-law Maureen she looked
somewhat like actor Robert Mitchum, a handsome guy with bedroom eyes, but she
didn’t seem to appreciate the sentiment.
Electrical Engineer teammate Bob Robinson, who has been on the DL all
year with cancer and pretty much incommunicado, came with his wife, who I’d
never met. She called me Professor Lane
and said she’d earned a master’s degree in Mathematics from IUN during the 1980s.
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