Homecoming

“Poetry is a sort of homecoming,” Paul Celan

I provided free copies of Steel Shavings, volume 47, at a Homecoming “Legacy” lunch for IUN grads and their children or grandchildren presently enrolled.  Alumni Relations director Paulette LaFata invited me to stay, so I made myself a salad and sat with Annalynn Morin and her mother Jean, who were at a table by themselves.  Annalynn is a Biology major active in several student groups; Jean took classes with Ron Cohen and remembered him fondly as a folk music expert.  Afterwards, I watched IUN’s Lady Redhawks defeat the Madonna University Crusaders, from Michigan judging from where their players hailed from. IUN’s best player Grayce Roach looks to be 100 percent recovered from a finger injury.  Veterans Michelle Borgen, Gina Rubino, and Chloe Salman also played well. Freshman Brittney Williams from Merrillville came off the bench to grab several rebounds and score two terrific follow-up shot on hustle plays.  I congratulated Coach Ryan Shelton, also IUN’s athletic director, on the university getting accepted into the CCAC (Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference) and expressed condolences on the death of assistant Ken Markfull.

Brittney Williams while at Merrillville; Times photo by John Luke

James as "narrator"

Grandson James was a narrator in the Portage H.S. play “Ten Ways to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse.”  Phil and Delia came in for the occasion.  Unbeknownst to me, James starts out in the audience.  Minutes before the curtain went up, Becca nudged me, and I turned to see him beaming just a few rows behind us.   Slightly deaf, I had trouble understanding much dialogue, but James belted out lines loud and clear.  In the program bio James quoted from the Nintendo game WarioWare: “It’s pizza time!  Oh yeah, no money.” 

 Z. Kierstead’s“I could’ve dropped my croissant”is from a YouTube vine gone viral.  Maria Sosa’s “No”is in honor of Rosa Parks, whose refusal to yield her seat sparked the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Makayla Butala’s “Don’t let the muggles get you down”is from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Meghan Smeltzer repeated a popular meme, “This is so sad.  Alexa, play Despacito.”  Toni sometimes calls upon digital assistant Alexa for crossword puzzle answers. “Despacito” is a song by Luis Fonsi.  Senior thespian Angelo Jarvis thanked former theater director Kevin Lee Giess, unfairly terminated on school board orders, “for allowing me my first opportunity.”

 Tom Wade, Waiting to see Obama at Gary Genesis Center

Obama photo by Kyle Telethon

Tom and Darcey Wade were part of a standing-room only audience at Gary Genesis Center that heard Barack Obama campaign for Indiana Democrats.  Beforehand, Tom stood for 90 minutes to obtain two free tickets and then another 90 minutes waiting to get inside, as rumors had circulated that not everyone would be able to get in.  Close to the stage with Darcey in a wheelchair, both got to shake the former President’s hand as he was leaving.  On Facebook Tom confessed to having a man-crush and wrote: “We will not wash our hands for a long while! He is such a gregarious, beautiful man.”

Major Brent Taylor, 39, mayor of North Ogden, Utah, and father of seven, died in Afghanistan at the hands of someone he was training during his second tour of duty there with the U.S. National Guard.  Previously, he had served two tours in Iran. His assassin, a member of the Afghan National Defense Force, was immediately shot and killed. Brent Taylor was a true hero, a selfless public servant at home and abroad.

Region author and Times correspondent Jane Ammeson praised Ken Schoon’s new book, “Swedish Settlements on the South Shore of Lake Michigan."  Schoon noted, “Many Swedes came first to Chicago, which at one time had more Swedes than any city on Earth except Stockholm.”  Ammeson quoted extensively from Schoon’s account of Joel Wicker, son-in-law of French fur trader Joseph Bailly, whose estate near Chellberg Farm in Porter has been preserved by the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Wicker hired Swedish newcomers  to chop down trees for use as railroad ties and fuel for steam engines.  Schoon wrote:

  Logs were also needed to build and heat homes and for cooking.  When enough trees were cut down, Wicker then sold the land to his Swedish employees who then cleared the land for farming.  Other Swedes found employment as farm laborers and working for sand and ice-mining companies, and as blacksmiths and carpenters.

  As the immigrants had more money, many purchased their own farms or started businesses in town.  The first licensed embalmer in Indiana was carpenter John Lundberg, a Chesterton Swede.  

Svanti Nordstrom (above with Fredrika); photos from Verlaine Wright

Schoon’s bibliography lists my Portage Shavings and a 1974 Post-Tribune article titled “Swedes started new church” about Miller pioneer Syena “Svanti” A. Nordstrom, who learned of the area from friends in LaPorte and Baillytown.  He wrote idyllic, albeit, exaggerated accounts of Miller’s scenic beauty and job opportunities that convinced former neighbors to join him.  He was acting pastor of Bethel Lutheran Church.  In October 1874 the congregation met for the first time in a one-room log schoolhouse.  A minister from Baillytown came periodically to preach and conduct communion; in his absence Nordstrom performed emergency baptisms.  Ruggedly handsome with yellow, curly hair and a long, flowing beard, Nordstrom, one parishioner recalled, “had the bearing of a man that you could not help but respect.”  Wife Fredrika died in 1888 at age 70, but Svanti, three years younger, lived another 22 years.

Cindy inside abandoned Horace Mann School 

Photographer Cindy “Cupcake” Bean sent Ron Cohen and me shots taken inside abandoned Horace Mann, including one of a letter from a Japanese visitor back when the K-12 “unit school” was implementing the vision of progressive educator Superintendent William A. Wirt.  The Gary school, in decent shape when it first closed, has been reduced to the scrap heap of history.  I told Cindy about the upcoming “Gary Haunts” South Shore exhibit in Munster featuring work similar to hers.

I picked up a needed win in Fantasy Football over nephew Bob to improve to 5-4.  Bob’s QB Mitch Trubisky threw only one TD pass, to Bears tight end Trey Burton, whom I had in the lineup because the Eagles’ Zach Ertz was on a bye week.  Trubisky earned Bob just 8 points; my backup QB (for Carson Wentz), Ben Roethilsberger got me 24, including a TD on the ground while Trubisky’s similar end zone effort ended a half-yard short.

James Lane voting for first time

George Van Til and Jimbo; photo by Jim Lazarus

On election day former Lake County Surveyor George Van Til invited me to lunch at Old Chicago Restaurant in Merrillville.  At the table were county auditor John Petalas and wife Karen, Lake County Democratic chairmen Jim Wieser, former Timesreporter Jim Lazerus (who came from California to volunteer for Senator Joe Donnelly, North Township Board member Peter Katic, writer Douglas Simmons, and current Lake County surveyor Bill Emerson.  They were pessimistic about Donnelly’s chances but otherwise guardedly confident.  Katic recalled election day gatherings at recently demolished Old Mill restaurant.  Wieser recalled former Lake County politician Andy Holinga inviting party members to his house, where he’d bang his huge fists on the kitchen table with such emphasis that things on it would fly into the air.  Petalas, a former student whose father owned a shoe repair shop on Broadway, first near Thirteenth and then in Glen Park, invited me to Rep. Peter Visclosky victory celebration that evening at Croatian Hall, but I was playing duplicate bridge. 

Barbara Walczak’s bridge Newsletter contained a photo taken at the Gary game of participants dressed in Halloween costumes, including Barbara Stroud, Charlotte Abernethy, Barb Walczak, Helen Miller, Daryl Fraley, Carolyn Potasnik, Alta Allen, and Trudi McKamey.  Pretty cool.

Charlie Halberstadt and I finished in the middle of the pack with 51.37%. Charlie told me about a player with a new partner who was asked what happened with her previous one.  “Bridge divorce,”she replied.  We edged out Terry Bauer and Dottie Hart, who usually clean our clock.  In one hand playing 3 No Trump against them, I had eight sure tricks but needed a finesse to make the contract.  If it failed I’d go down two.  It worked!  I was very disappointed in the results in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee; but, asMichael Moore said, Democrats swept the races in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, the three states whose electoral votes in 2016 elected Trump, a tumor on the body politic that hopefully is receding in influence.

At lunch, Miller resident Douglas Simmons had told me I could find his books on Amazon.  His bio states: “Read, so that you may know. Write, so that you may tell what you know. Tell, that others to come may also know: The written word is the light that leads us all through the darkness that is ignorance.”  Well put. He continued,“Having been, over the years (along with lesser pursuits) employed as soldier, postal worker, carpenter, caterer, photographer, professional musician, a millwright, an overhead crane operator, and last to this day an adventurer who sometimes pauses to muse about his wanderings,without fail, no matter the diverse undertakings of my life, I have been a writer.”  In “Reluctantly Collected Poems” (2013) – Simmons would rather have his poems read one at a time - is one I particularly like titled “I Spoke”:

Thinking that I had no words;
I spoke no more.
Thinking I had done it all;
I closed the door.

Thinking I had heard the world;
I closed my heart.
Thinking to escape the pain;
I drew apart.

Then you were there laughing
At a voice I didn't hear.
Hoping I might laugh again;

               I spoke: to draw you near.  

As days shorten with winter in the air and snow predicted in 48 hours, I thought of “Homecoming” by Romanian-born Jew Paul Celan (1920-1970), who survived a Nazi work camp but intentionally drowned in the Seine River:

Snowfall, denser and denser,
dove-colored as yesterday,
snowfall, as if even now you were sleeping.

White, stacked into distance.
Above it, endless,
the sleigh track of the lost.

Below, hidden,
presses up
what so hurts the eyes,
hill upon hill,
invisible.

On each,
fetched home into its today,
as I slipped away into dumbness:
wooden, a post.

There: a feeling,
blown across by the ice wind
attaching its dove- its snow-
colored cloth as a flag.