Killers

“I'm the man, come round and
Nothing can break, you can't break me down”

         Killers, “The Man”

 Brandon Flowers and Ric Ocasek

The Killers, a rock band from Las Vegas, opened the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony TV special on HBO by belting out the Tom Petty classic “American Girl,” with a few bars of “Free Fallin’ thrown in, as shots of the late, great rocker from Gainesville, Florida flashed on a big screen. Then Killers frontman Brandon Flowers introduced Ric Ocasek and The Cars and mentioned their song “Moving in Stereo” being the soundtrack during the hot fantasy swimming pool scene in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” with  Phoebe Cates removing her red bikini top. The Killers are one of nephew Bob’s favorite bands. Dave included “The Man,” from the album “Wonderful Wonderful,” on his “Best of 2017” Christmas CD.  Its final lines go:

Who's the man with the plan?
I'm the man

I don't give a damn
I'm the man

Stevie Van Zandt introduced a half-dozen singles honored, including Link Wray’s “Rumble” (1958), probably the only instrumental ever banned by radio stations, and “Louie, Louie” (1963) by the Kingsman, ordered off airways by the governor of Indiana because it was supposedly a dirty party song. Others included “The Twist” by Chubby Checker and one of my all-time favorites, “Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum.  I particularly enjoyed the long overdue induction of Moody Blues, eulogized by Ann Wilson of Heart and their subsequent performance.  Even though “Knights in White Satin” is not one of my favorites, Justin Hayward still has an awesome voice that he showed off splendidly.  Sadly, founding member and flautist Ray Thomas died a few months ago.  He hadn’t been with the band the last few times I saw them live.

Moodies, Justin Hayward on left 

Reporting on “The Devil’s Ticket” by Gary Pomerantz to book club members at Gino’s, I mentioned that after Myrtle Bennett killed husband Jack over a bridge hand and was arrested, she shared a cell with Evelyn Holmes, a 29-year-old vaudevillian who had gunned down her husband after, to quote Pomerantz, “years of neglect and cruel treatment”:

  Evelyn Helms had known hunger and deprivation.  Her husband Frank had threatened to leave her.  She shot him during a chase in which he had run from their house and fallen in the yard.  She stood over him, gun in hand, and was heard to say, “You will leave me, will you?”  She fired once, repeated the question, and fired again.  She tried to turn the gun on herself, but there were no bullets left.  

Like Myrtle, Evelyn was prosecuted by Jackson County D.A. Jim Page but, unable to hire a prominent attorney such as Myrtle’s mouthpiece, Missouri Senator James A. Reed, she was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in jail. Pomerantz compares young Myrtle to Lorilei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and an aging Myrtle (she lived well into her 90s) to Auntie Mame. She overcame a hardscrabble childhood in rural Arkansas as well as the notoriety of her trial (unimaginable in our day and age, as Joy Anderson pointed out) and became a successful social director for a fashionable New York City hotel and continuing to enjoy bridge,

Before I began my talk, I introduced my guests, bridge couple Charlie Halberstadt and Naomi Goodman and old friend Rocky Fraire, who came with Barbara Wisdom.  It turned out he knew Charlie from backgammon games at Another Roadside Attraction Restaurant in the 1970s.  The night before, I had reminded Roy Dominguez and George Van Til of the event and both showed up.  Dominguez is active in the protest against Maya Energy’s bid to build a waste/recycling facility near Steel City Academy, as is our mutual friend Samuel A. Love.

Steel City Academy students at City Council; NWI Times photo by John J. Watkins

My talk produced a lively discussion about social trends during the Roaring 20s and the effect of World War I and the mass production of automobiles on the breakdown of traditional moral standards.  Lee Christakis quoted from the song “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm, After They’ve Seen Paree?”  Bennett’s husband Jack, a World War I vet born on an Illinois farm, had been a traveling salesman hawking Parisian perfumes, and Brian Barnes noted that his father had a similar job selling windows.   Jack was quite a charmer and had at least one mistress to whom he was about to flee when Myrtle stopped him in his tracks.  Ken Anderson noted that we’d met in a Miller bridge group that included the son of longtime IUN English professor Walter Brown.  Debra Dubovich compared “The Devil’s Ticket” to Erik Larson’s nonfiction masterpiece “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.”  Debra tried to get her bridge-playing mother to attend.

Ron Cohen and I finalized selections for the new chapter in the forthcoming third edition of “Gary: A Pictorial History.” My latest find: a photo by Guy Rhodes of Rudy Clay celebrating his 2007 election victory for Mayor at Tri-City Commons Shopping Center.  A Gary Roosevelt, grad, Clay served in the Indiana Senate and as Lake County Commissioner for 20 years prior to becoming mayor in a special election following the resignation of Scott King in 2006.  A year later, he was elected to a full term.  In April 2011, Clay cut short his re-election bid because he’d been diagnosed with cancer and endorsed Karen Freeman-Wilson as his successor.  As I was leaving, Ron gave me a brownie from a batch Nancy made for Ron’s movie night hosted by Larry Lapidus. 

I arrived home in time to see Janet and Kirsten Bayer, who had a business meeting scheduled at Ivy’s Bohemian House in Chesterton and brought her mom along from Indy, who dined at Lucretia’s with Toni.  Having visited her brother-in-law Joe in Finland, she predicted Dave and I will love Helsinki and that Joe’s house, where we’re spending the mid-summer holiday weekend, is a mere half-block from the subway, which will get us anywhere in the city.

 Melvin Tolson

I found a great Denzel Washington biopic on HBO, “The Great Debaters” (2007), is based on the true story of Wiley College debate coach Melvin B. Tolson, who during the 1930s in Jim Crow Texas coached a successful debate team that included 14-year-old James Farmer.  The movie opens with Tolson reciting “I, Too, Sing America” by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. Driving to a debate, team members come across a black man who’d been lynched and set on fire.  The lone woman debater, Samantha Booke, was based on Henrietta Bell Wells, who went on to marry an Episcopalian minister, Wallace L. Wells, and became a teacher and social worker in Gary at the time St. Augustine’s Church was built.  James Farmer founded the civil rights group CORE in 1942, not long after graduating from Wiley College.  I heard him speak at IUN when he described being on the 1961 Freedom Ride.  Tolson, a noted poet, was accused of being a radical because he was active in organizing tenant farmers.  He later began teaching at Langston University, another historically black institution, and between 1954 and 1960 served three terms as mayor of Langston, Oklahoma.

My two favorite TV series are “Barry” starring Bill Hader as a hired killer (it’s kind of a weird comedy”) and “The Americans” in its final season. The most recent episode, “Harvest,” was particularly violent, as former Soviet spy Philip Jennings reluctantly comes out of retirement to protect wife Elizabeth and shoots two FBI agents in a gun battle and then chops off the head and hands of a dead comrade to prevent the Feds from learning her identity.  I tried not to look. 

 Alissa and Toni

For Mother’s Day Alissa drove down from Michigan and Dave’s family arrived after visiting Angie’s mom with Chinese food from Wing Wah. Toni gave Alissa plants and flowers from her garden.  I donated Gene Clifford’s hand-crafted bird feeder for her and Josh’s backyard.  They have it fenced in for the dog, Jerry, and recently put in a patio.

I spoke to Steve McShane’s summer class about interviewing someone who is in a bowling league.  After I told them their oral history paper will be deposited in a Archives collection and excerpts published in a forthcoming Steel Shavings, student asked me what the purpose was.  I talked about how sociologists and social historians are interested in social organizations and how they changes (and declined) due in part to TV and the Internet. I explained that history can be defined as the record of change over time and that a number of bowlers in my Mel Guth Seniors League can recall a time before automatic pin setters and scoring devices.  Some bowl in both mixed leagues and men-only leagues, where it is common for teams to use risqué playing cards for betting purposes to reward strikes and/or spares in a version of poker.

Kelly Cochran

A Hobart woman, Kelly Cochran, 35, was convicted of murdering husband Jason by injecting him with a massive dose of heroin and then smothering him.  Previously, assisted by Jason, she had murdered a boyfriend in Michigan, cut up the body, and, according to rumors, barbequed parts of him.  She had been a suspect in other incidents of foul play as well and will serve a life sentence in prison without possibility of parole.

At bridge Joel Carpentier noticed the Inman’s Bowling League shirt I was wearing and said he bowled with deaf teammates there after Camelot Lanes in Portage abruptly closed in mid-season.  That’s why grandson James started bowling there.  I told Joel that most of my teammates on the Electrical Engineers were half-deaf as well.  Barb Mort said she ran across my name reading Jerry Davich’s “Lost Gary.”  I replied that even though I disagreed with the emphasis Davich put on such themes as declension and corruption, I respected that he included my views and presented them accurately.  Davich has an interesting section on 86  all-concrete Thomas Edison Concept row homes built over 100 years ago as housing for workers. Davich wrote that many are presently unoccupied, in ruins, and scheduled for demolition despite their historical significance.

Below, Thomas Edison Concept Homes along Adams St.; photo by Jerry Davich