“I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow
And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow
This place is cruel, nowhere could be much colder
If we don't change the world will soon be over
Living just enough, just enough for the city”
And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow
This place is cruel, nowhere could be much colder
If we don't change the world will soon be over
Living just enough, just enough for the city”
Stevie Wonder, “Living for the City”
Martayveus Carter
I became heartsick when I saw a Times front page headline, “NFL hopeful critical after deadly shootout in E.C.,” caught my eye. The gunshot victim, at a gas station shortly before midnight Saturday, was Martayveus Carter. Dead at the scene was 30-year-old Hammond resident Brian Thomas, apparently an innocent bystander, whom Dave remembered fondly when he taught him at East Chicago Central. In 2013 Martayveus Carter led East Chicago Central to an unforgettable upset victory in the football Regionals against number 3 ranked New Prairie. I was in the press box with Dave, who was announcing the game, when Martayveus scored the game winning TD on a fourth down plunge. In addition to his considerable offensive skills (he scored on several kickoff returns), he was The Timesdefensive player of 2013, registering a record 505 tackles and several “pick six” interceptions. Carter went on to become the leading rusher in Grand Valley State University’s history, plus scored 28 touchdowns during a stellar career. When GVSU Coach Matt Mitchell heard he’d been shot, he was devastated and said, “He was a good person at heart. He had some highs and lows. My heart goes out to his family and what they’re going through right now.” According to Times reporter Joseph Pete, Carter had two children and recently attended a Kansas City Chiefs workout. Pete wrote:
His mother Sharon Carter was hit on the streets of East Chicago and dragged for a block while pregnant, an accident that put her in a wheelchair. Her brother Percy Long, a star football player in California in the late 1980s, was shot dead by a skinhead. “It’s like I’m reliving his life,”Martayveus said in 2013. “I never had a chance to meet him, I know he wishes he could be in my shoes. Instead it’s me. That’s why I sent him a kiss. Now I’m doing what he would want me to do if he were still on the Earth.”
Tragically, no more, in all likelihood.
A SundayTimes editorial, taking issue Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson’s characterization of a recent rash of homicides as an “aberration,”preferred the word “epidemic” to describe the 30 shooting fatalities since the beginning of the year, a 16 percent increase from 2017. Victims included 55-year-old Terrence Conley, shot in the face near the Miller South Shore station, and East Glen Park resident Pamela Hunter, 28, killed at her home, the assassin also wounding an 8-year-old daughter. One possible cause: she was a witness in an upcoming murder trial.
I spent much of the weekend in Gary. At IUN’s emeritus luncheon Chancellor Lowe announced that a recent poll listed the university as among the safest urban campuses in America. Campus police patrol the surrounding area east of Broadway to Martin Luther King Drive and south to Ridge Road. Recent incidents have been minor crimes of opportunity, thefts, and almost always, Lowe claimed, the stolen items were recovered. The City of Gary is attempting to purchase Franklin School and adjoining property near Thirty-Fifth and Georgia as part of its University Corridor plan, envisioning the site being converted to affordable housing. Lowe noted that the area is comparable in size to our campus. Unfortunately, the state-appointed emergence manager who runs the Gary schools wants more than a million dollars for the property. She is also cavalierly auctioning off valuable school possessions, including a bust of educator William A. Wirt that should rightly be in a safe place, such as the Calumet Regional Archives, rather than, in all probability, melted down for financial gain.
At Gardner Center in Miller a retrospective art exhibit featured dunes scenes by Jim Wilson, Della Schaller, and Dale Fleming. A gentle soul, Wilson and Toni were active in the Gary Artist League. Fleming, our Edgewater neighbor, composed several dozen drawings for an issue of Steel Shavings(volume 28, 1998) on “Tales of Lake Michigan and the Northwest Indiana Dunelands” for a mere $200. Among his drawings I spotted a familiar one showing dunes artists boarding a South Shore train that originally appeared in “Tales of Lake Michigan.” Most of those prints are presently in the Archives, but Jack Tonk had purchased the one in question at a 1998 Lake Street Gallery reception. Dale subsequently moved to Bloomington to live with son Carl. His present whereabouts are unknown. Corey Hagelberg introduced me to Sierra Club staff member Ashley Williams, Northwest Indiana Organizing Representative for a Beyond Coal Campaign. They invited me to a community conversation at Gary’s Progressive Community Church featuring “Ecopolis Southshore,” a presentation written and performed by community activists Sam Love and Walter Jones, and two artists in residence, Krystal Wilson, and Jeff Biggers. I decided to attend.
Ashley Williams
Progressive Community Church is located at 656 Carolina Street, across from abandoned Emerson School, founded in 1908 and the first institution to implement progressive educator William A. Wirt’s work-study-play platoon system. When I arrived, I noticed were a half-dozen huge hoop houses in use. Cars were parked all around the block, and the chapel was nearly filled to capacity. The dramatic reading, “Ecopolis Southshore,” envisioned a time in the near future when the Emerson district had been transformed into urban gardens and small-scale enterprises emanating from a refurbished Emerson School, with coal no longer needed as an energy source. The Billy Foster Trio provided musical interludes. Here are notable excerpts:
Walter: People heated their homes with coal when I was a kid. The strong scent of hydrocarbons stinging the cold night air. Gary, Indiana, was built on two things, sand and steel. The maw of the beast, the steel industry, takes up 9 miles of lakefront, keeping that beautiful asset away from the view of its citizens.
Krystal:The pollution, all of it, causing heart damage, lung disease, respiratory distress, reproductive problems, gastrointestinal illness, birth defects, and impaired bone growth in children. Cancer. You live near an unlined coal ash pond, you may have as much as 1 in 50 chance of getting cancer from drinking cancer-contaminated water.
Samuel: I heard the voice of Curtis Whitaker, the great environmental activist in our town. He stood up, rang a bell, silenced the table, and said: “It’s time for Gary to rethink our ways in an age of climate change, to rethink ways that regenerate our energy, our food, our land, our ways of getting around – beyond sustainability, we must heal our damage to this land. We must heal ourselves. We need to go back to our roots as a laboratory of democracy on the south shore.” Pastor Whitaker launched Faith farms, starting with three raised beds, then 4 hoop houses, and then a community orchard. What started at a single intersection soon grew to encompass ’ Walter:It began with a vision. That’s why I came back. The Region gave us so much, has so much to offer. But mainly it reminds us that hope dies last, that hope resists. Tough, resilient, steely. You wind up being people who make it work, because that’s all you’ve got.
Sam: Sure, we’re polluted, poisoned, and there’s nowhere to run. But this is home. We want to do the immediate planting of tiny acorns that yield mighty oaks for generations to enjoy, rather than blathering beneath a decaying tree about all the good things that could be done. Just do it.
Krystal: We’re doing work that our grandkids’ generation will still be doing.
Walter: And we love it.
Rev. Curtis Whitaker; Times photos by John Luke
Visitors to Progressive Community Church were treated to fruit smoothies, which will be sold at a neighborhood juice bar in containers processed from fruit products. During a tour of Faith Farms, Pastor Curtis Whitaker pointed out produce being grown in hoop houses that eventually will operate year round. He noted that solar panels on the church were purchased with the help of a grant. Nearby was a fancy chicken coop (the hip Reverend labeled it “dope”) that will not only house poultry but a bee hive to provide honey and discourage predators. Listening to this inspirational man, dressed simply with no trace of false piety, gave me a sense that common people just might be able to overcome a harsh environment that most former residents were eager to flee. With proper leadership in place and help from Sierra Club members, who turned out in force for the four-hour program, one can dare hope.
2017 and 2018 New Yorker covers
New Yorker correspondent Margaret Talbot wrote:
The theme of cruelty unfolding at the southern border last week was the purest distillation yet of what it means to be governed by a President with no moral center. The Trump administration, enacting its “zero tolerance” policy regarding migrants, forcibly separated children from their parents and detained them in a tent city and a repurposed Walmart in parched South Texas. Photographs showed children penned in large cages and sprawled on concrete floors under plastic blankets. Many were sent on to facilities thousands of miles away. Those under the age of 12, including babies and toddlers, were discharged to “tender age” shelters, a concept for which the term “Orwellian” does not quite suffice.
Staci Abrams
I wouldn’t mind living in Gary. How nice not to have to commute on 80/94. My fantasy is to win the MacArthur prize for Steel Shavings and with the money build a residence near campus that I’d bequeath to IUN as a dorm for foreign exchange students and possibly the Chancellor’s residence. As I walked into IUN’s Anderson Library, a young man responded to my greeting as saying, “How’s it going?” “OK,” I replied, then seconds later teared up, recalling Martayveus Carter lying in a hospital bed in critical condition. I actually turned around and would have said,“Actually, I’m not OK”except he was gone.
Aetna has long been considered part of Miller although it is a little separated from it. In 1881 the Miami Powder company began erection of the Aetna Powder works because it was in a fairly remote location although still close to the railroads and a source of labor. By 1888 the plant had 26 buildings and employed 45 men producing 60,000 pounds of powder a day. Powder was marketed to farmers to blow stumps, and by the onset of World War One the plant employed some 300 men. The plant flourished making gun cotton during the war. It employed some 1200 men, but at the end of the war, with the expansion of Gary and Miller, there was little justification of maintaining a plant in such close proximity to the growing population and the plant closed.
Spicer reprinted a Chesterton Tribunearticle from April 12, 1888, entitled “Terrible Explosion: 3,000 Pounds of Nitro-glycerin Accidentally Explodes at the Aetna Powder Works. Three men Blown Into Atoms and Parts of Their Bodies Found a Mile Away”:
This is the second explosion within the last two years, though the first was not so disastrous. The president of the company evidently expects the worst, and prefers his cozy Chicago office to the dangers of the works, for whenever business compels him to visit Miller the works are shut down and nothing is done until he gets away to a safe distance.
Henry Scott, one of the men killed, was from Wheeler and had been employed in the powder factory about seven years. John A. Gill was from Boston, and Jansen from Denmark. All were single men. Scott was the mixer, Gill his assistant, and Jansen the trucker, who wheeled the powder to another department. Scott got $60 month, and Gill and H.L. Jansen $2 a day for their perilous work. Their funeral took place on Saturday, and the remains were buried in the cemetery at Millers.
Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City,” from the 1973 “Innervisions” album, provides background music for a dramatic crack house scene in Spike Lee’s 1991 film “Jungle Fever.” I think of that scene often, given the country’s current opioid crisis. A Timecover story about Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams mentioned that one of her brothers is a heroin addict and ex-convict. Their college-educated father was, according to the cover story, “relegated by his race to working at a shipyard in southern Mississippi in the 1970s.” Stacy’s mother had a graduate degree but earned less as a librarian than the building’s janitor. The family of seven shared a tiny house sometimewithout water and electricity. One of Stacy’s siblings became a social worker, another a microbiologist. Uncertain of the Stevie Wonder title, my Google search turned up the great Foghat number “Fool for the City,” about a country bumpkin moving to the big city. One verse goes:
Breathin' all the clean air, sittin' in the sun,
When I get my train fare, I'll get up and run.
I'm ready for the city, air pollution here I come!
When I get my train fare, I'll get up and run.
I'm ready for the city, air pollution here I come!
Some thought the lyric was “evolution here I come,”not “air pollution.”
photo by Joseph Pete
On a lighter note: at Whiting’s Pierogi Fest Joseph Pete heard someone say, “I think you can gain weight just by breathing the air here.”
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