Traces

“The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.” 

    Lew Wallace, “Ben Hur” 

 Lew Wallace

Writing about Lew Wallace (1827-1905) in the Spring 2018 issue of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History,editor Ray Boomhower in “One Writer’s Beginning” noted that the nineteenth-century Civil War general and novelist credited teacher Samuel K. Hoshour with passing on to him at a young age this invaluable advice:“In writing, everything is to be sacrificed to clearness of expression – everything.”  After a diplomatic career that culminated in his service as U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire, Wallace became independently wealthy man as a result of the novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ(1880) becoming a best-seller.  Wallace subsequently turned his attention to designing a study on his Crawfordsville estate and later a seven-story apartment building in Indianapolis, The Blachern, that is still occupied. 

The once-grand Gary unit school named for the soldier-scholar and designed to implement progressive educator William A. Wirt’s work-study-play system closed in 2014, but a Lew Wallace elementary school in Hammond is still in use.  The 2018 Gary Preservation Tour included a visit to Glen’s Park Morningside neighborhood, located just blocks from boarded-up Lew Wallace School. An effort is underway to sell over 30 abandoned Gary schools, including Franklin Elementary along Thirty-Fifth, but the asking prices so far are unrealistic, given their sad state.

Mari Evans 

On the Tracescover is a mural of longtime Indianapolis community activist Mari Evans (1919-2017), poet, novelist, and a founder of the Black Arts Movement.  David Hoppe’s “The Radical Clarity of Mari Evans” contains this quote from one of her essays: “From the time I was five I was aware that color was an issue over which society and I would war.”  Near the end of her life Evans resisted efforts of well-intentioned acquaintances to persuade her to relocate from the ghetto to a safer neighborhood, arguing that moving all her books was impractical and, besides, she had a firearm for protection.

 Rev. Jim Jones

Tracesalso contains Dan Carpenter’s “Countdown to Armageddon: The Reverend Jim Jones and Indiana.”  The megalomaniacal cult leader responsible for the mass suicide (and, in some cases, murder) of over 900 people in a South American jungle, many of them children, started Peoples Temple in Indianapolis prior to relocating his ministry to California and ultimately Guyana.  While in Indianapolis Jones led crusades to desegregate public facilities and personally integrated  Methodist Hospital after being placed in a black ward by mistake because his physician was African American, then refusing to be moved.  He and wife Marceline adopted a black child, James Warren Jones, Jr. and three Koreans.  When daughter Stephanie died in a 1959 car accident, Carpenter claimed that “no Indianapolis cemetery would allow the child, a Korean-American, to be buried alongside whites; only a black mortician would prepare the body, and she was interred in a weedy section set aside for African Americans in a cemetery whose name is lost.”  Could this be true?  Unbelievable! Emulating black spiritual leader Father M.J. Divine, whom he came to know personally, Jones had a voracious appetite for hard work, sex, and power. 

While cleaning my teeth, and with WXRT apparently playing in the background, Dr. John Sikora revealed that he had been pulling for Croatia in the World Cup because his father had been Croatian.  Ditto Chuck Logan, whose maternal grandparents had emigrated from that small nation. Upon returning to Zagrab, the silver medalists received a hero’s welcome despite having lost to France due to two fluke goals.

Fred McColly and Liliya

Former student Fred McColly likes to refer to himself as the last of the Region’s industrial workers. After working at Atco-Gary Metals Technology for almost 40 years, the company ceased operations. A year shy of being eligible for social security, McColly has applied for unemployment compensation and is looking for employment.  Visiting the Archives, he dropped off the 39th and apparently final volume of his journal documenting his experiences at Atco-Gary Metals, titled “The Zone of Alienation” as well as a special supplement, “the brutal saga of a rat hole’s demise,”covering his final week, ending April 27.  Ten days later, the company bookkeeper called to ask how many hours he put in that week because somebody had stolen all the computers plus the main drive that included work files.  Fred commented: “Why would someone want something so obsolescent?  Sounds like an inside job to me.” A typed epilogue contains these observations:

    It has been 36 days since my ‘career’ ground to a halt.  I have had time to let it percolate through my subconscious and bubble up again, and what I have come up with is pretty much one word: waste. Even the failure of the company was marked by an incredible waste.  We basically threw everything in the basement into the scrap dumpster or the garbage dumpster – shelves, fittings, and skid after skid of paper that was probably recyclable.  One surmises that we threw away millions of dollars of value – probably worth more than the company wants for the building.

 skids of paper by Fred McColly

Jodi and Gary Biederer

Barbara Walczak’s Newsletter contained a photo of Jodi and Gary Biederer along with this caption: “Jodi and Gary came all the way from Deerfield, Illinois to play in one of Diane martin’s games at the Highland Elks Club.  They met her at several tournaments and wanted to visit her at one of her games – a 120-mile round trip going back home in a torrential rain storm.  Jodi and gary started their bridge playing about 35 years ago, and then they took a 25-year break, returning about a year ago. We hope to meet these delightful people again, perhaps at some future tournament.”

Dancing bear and Bulgarian owner, circa 1970

Witold Szablowski’s “Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny” compares Eastern Europeans who lived under communism to animals rescued from captivity and presently kept at Belitsa Dancing Bears Park in Bulgaria.  New York Reviewessayist Orlando Figes noted that for centuries young bears captured in the wild had been trained to dance “by attaching chains to rings driven through their noses and forcing them to step on red-hot sheets of metal.” Most had survived on a steady diet of bread and beer.  Figes stated:

  Some of the bears are so infected with the prisoner mentality that for years they start to dance when they see a human being.  “They stand up on their hind legs and start rocking from side to side,” Szablowski writes. “As if they were begging, as in the past, for bread, candy, a sip of beer, a caress, or to be free of pain. Pain that nobody has been inflicting on them for years.”

Ray Smock wrote:

President Trump is a lot like Captain Queeg, the character in Herman Wauk’s The Caine Mutiny,the 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel about the commander of a World War II destroyer who is incompetent at running his ship, displays disturbing mental quirks, is extremely paranoid, and drives his crew to hate him. The crew loses confidence in their commander, become disloyal, and eventually mutiny and take over the ship during a typhoon at sea, when the commander proved incapable of acting to save his own vessel.

 I visited Fred Chary, recovering from a medical setback, at Avalon Springs Health Campus. The facility’s physical therapists are pushing him hard to exercise.  He’s anxious to get back to revising a novel he recently completed about seventeenth-century Russia and, like me, is still writing book reviews. We talked about Philadelphia sports teams, and he invited me to watch Eagles games at his place once football season starts (he’s got a special NFL package).  

Home alone since Toni’s in Canada at a Shakespeare festival with Alissa and Beth, I stopped at MacDonald’s and asked if I could have the girl (Edna) in Incredibles 2as a three-dollar Happy Meal prize and ended up with Frozone as well.