“Hey farmer farmer
Put away that D.D.T. now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave the birds and the bees.”
Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970)
I was listening to the Counting Crows CD “Hard Candy” and after a minute’s silence at the end on came a hidden track, “Big Yellow Taxi,” a Joni Mitchell cover with Vanessa Carlton on backing vocals. The most famous line is, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Helping Adam Duritz out on other tracks were Ryan Adams, Matthew Sweet, and Cheryl Crowe. In the lyrics to “Hard Candy” someone is dreaming of better days and lost loved ones who fade just out of sight and then in the morning, “it’s just the same hard candy you’re remembering again.”
I gave the new edition of “Gary: A Pictorial History” to Chancellor Bill Lowe; we used a photo of him peering through a telescope on campus during the solar eclipse of 21 August 2017. Spotting one of the IUN Lady Redhawks celebrating a second straight AII (Association of Independent Institutions) championship on 27 February 2011, Lowe, a frequent spectator at university basketball games, exclaimed, “I’d have been in that one also if it hadn’t been cropped.” He inquired about Ron Cohen acquiring the William A. Wirt bust, I invited him to come see it at the Archives. Nearby, in the library/conference hallway was a compelling glass case exhibit Steve McShane put together on IUN’s predecessor, Gary College.
Kyle Telechan posted photos from last weekend’s second annual Mexican Independence Day parade in Hammond, hosted by the HUGS Cultural Committee and coordinated by Rosa Maria Rodgriguez. Ron Cohen and I used a Times photo by Jonathan Miano of Rodriguez outside Gary City Council chambers protesting efforts by GEO to build an immigrant detention center near Gary Airport. She once worked as a security guard for the School City of East Chicago. Son Dave knows her and praised her dedication to bettering the community.
Huffington Post reporter David Uberti, a young, confident Detroit native, interviewed me for 90 minutes about housing in Gary, frequently checking his recording device to make sure it was still working. He had read “Gary’s First Hundred Years” beforehand and seemed knowledgeable about current developments regarding abandoned buildings and community efforts to jumpstart development. I provided a historic overview of steel mill employment, unionization, the GI Bill, and suburbanization. I showed him pages from the pictorial history about urban gardens and discussed City Hall initiatives, such as the Blight Elimination Program. He’ll meet with Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson and Pastor Curtis Whitaker of Progressive Community Church, who has learned how to make soil healthy and fertile; other urban gardens use raised beds. I suggested contacting, if possible, former mayor Richard Hatcher and someone from the Latino community, often ignored by national correspondents.
Karla and Craig Hoskins courthouse ceremony in 2014; Times photo by Jonathan Miano
Couples getting hitched at Crown Point courthouse, once branded a “Marriage Mill,” has become an integral feature of Crown Point Hometown Festival Days. For a half-century, until a 1952 ordinance forbade clerks from issuing licenses to women who did not reside in Lake County, there was no waiting period, unlike in Illinois, which, beginning in the 1930s, also required blood tests for communicable sexual diseases. Justices of the Peace charged $2.50 during day, $8 after hours, $10 between midnight and dawn. Crown Point hosted the nuptials of actors Tom Mix, Rudolph Valentino (Rodolfe Guglielmo), and Ronald Reagan (to first wife Jane Wyman), comedian Red Skelton, and film producer Mike Todd.
circa 1930
Lake County historian Bruce Woods told the Post-Tribune that the 24/7 operation at one time required a half dozen JPs: “There were certain restrictions, but the clerks did not always follow them. The male had to be 21 and the female 18, but they could be younger with parental consent. And they had to be sober, although there was one justice of the peace who had an office on the second floor who said, ‘If they could get up to the second floor, they could get married.’”Wedding parties arrived by the busload, and local jewelers offered a wide variety of rings to those who came unprepared. Florists and tuxedo rental establishments also flourished. Muhammad Ali got married there during the 1960s.
In Laredo, Texas, U.S. Border Patrol agent Juan David Ortiz has been arrested for allegedly murdering four sex workers following the escape of a fifth, who fled to authorities. District Attorney Isidro Alaniz branded Ortiz a serial killer. Nicholas Villanueva Jr.’s “The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands” (2017) documented the increase in vigilante murders a century ago, beginning in 1910 when a suspected felon was dragged from jail and burned alive. The most horrendous incident occurred in 1918 after refugees who’d fled the Mexican Revolution were mistaken for bandits who had recently pillaged Texas ranches. Journal of American History reviewer Tim Bowman wrote:
A confluence of events caused a drastic decline in the number of ethnic lynchings in Texas via a transference of public suspicions from Mexicans to Germans; the onset of political stability in Mexico; and Texas state legislature investigations into depredations committed against ethnic Mexicans by Texas Rangers.
above, Anne and Michelle
Anne Balay reported: “I spent the weekend having awesome trucker adventures.” Anne participated in a truck parade across to Macinaw Island. Michelle Kitchin, whose rig for the excursion was loaded with pineapples picked up in Trenton, New Jersey, wrote “We were the only truck full of women. Haha!” They also took in the St. Ignace, Michigan, truck show, a three-day event held at the Little Bear East Arena.
Helen Boothe and I finished third in the Chesterton bridge club championship, earning 1.15 master points each. An aggressive bidder, Helen twice successfully put us in slam where I would have been too cautious. We went down one bidding 2 No-Trump only because she had an Ace-King doubleton and I held a bare Queen-Jack, wasting two honors. Had either of us held a third Club, we’d have made the contract. Sitting North-South in another key hand against winners John and Karen Fieldhouse, we were bidding Hearts and our opponents Spades. We went down one at 4 Hearts for minus 50, while all other East-West couples went to 4 Spades and got set. Thus, another low board through no fault of our own. Helen, 87, will soon board a train at Chicago’s Union Station and travel overnight to West Virginia for a family reunion.
Sara Jane Moore
In 2005, when Martha Stewart was released from Alderson federal prison in West Virginia after serving five months for giving false testimony about an insider stock deal, Helen Boothe’s brother-in-law, James A. Haught, wrote a Charleston Gazettecolumn about previous celebrities incarcerated there. These included radical Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, jailed during the McCarthy witch hunts, Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron, who participated in a 1954 attack on Congress, and pacifist Claire Hanrahan for trespassing at an army school that trained military operatives for Latin American dictators. Blues singer Billie Holiday landed in Alderson in 1947 for possession of heroin, Mildred “Axis Sally” Gillars for treason, and Charleston native Sarah Jane Moore for firing at President Gerald R. Ford outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. Decorated Vietnam War marine veteran Oliver Sipple grabbed her pistol and deflected the shot. Haught wrote, “Ford did little to thank the man because reports said he was gay.” Moore, like fellow inmate and would-be presidential assassin Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, escaped from Alderson but was caught and transferred to a more secure facility.
Buffalo Creek flood damage, 1972
Helen Boothe told me about former West Virginia governor William C. Marland, a progressive Democrat, who became a taxi driver in Chicago after he left office in 1957 and overcame alcohol addiction. While governor, Marland took on coal companies that depleted the state’s natural resources and attempted to implement school desegregation at a time other Southern governors were defying federal mandates. More popular was three-term Republican governor Arch Moore who in 1990, a year after leaving office, pled guilty to accepting bribes from coal company moguls, including Buffalo Mining Company executives responsible for the 1972 Buffalo Creek tragedy. James Haught wrote:
The historic flood – caused by rupture of the coal company’s illegal, makeshift, unlicensed, unstable chain of “gob pile” dams – killed 125 Logan countians, injured 1,000 and left 4,000 homeless amid sodden debris. It destroyed a 15-mile valley, wrecking more than 1,000 homes, 1,000 vehicles, 30 businesses, 10 bridges and miles of roads. Arch Moore accepted a $1 million settlement as complete payment for the state government’s loss in the disaster, leaving West Virginia taxpayers stuck for up to $13 million in unpaid costs.
Moore served three years in prison in Petersburg, Virginia.
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