“Well now, I get low and I got high
And if I can’t either, I really try
Got the wings of heaven on my shoes
I’m a dancing man, and I just can’t lose.”
“Stayin’ Alive,” Bee Gees
While many ridicule the Bee Gees and disco music, I loved “Saturday Night Fever” and the soundtrack that includes the blazing Trammps number, “Disco Inferno.” “Stayin’ Alive” made Rolling Stone’s list of 500 greatest songs of all time at number 191, just ahead of Bob Dylan’s “Knock on Heaven’s Door” and behind AC/DC’s “”Back in Black.” Number one, appropriately, was Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” edging out “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. In 1983 John Travolta again starred as Tony Manera, now an aspiring Broadway director, in the sequel “Staying Alive,” universally panned as slick and soulless.
In Jefferson Cowie’s “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class” (2010) United Steelworkers of America district director for the Chicago-Northwest Indiana area Eddie Sadlowski (1938-2018) figures prominently. Cowie introduces “Oil can Eddie” (his nickname from when he was a machinist’s apprentice) as a rank and file leader “emerging from the ashen haze of South Chicago’s steel works” and quotes him as bragging, “There’s a fire in the steelworkers’ union, and I’m not going to piss on it.” Cowie traces his rise at age 25 to the presidency of Steel Works Local 65. In 1973 USW leaders angered the rank-and-file by entering an agreement with steel executives without consulting its 1.4 million members not to strike even after the expiration of contracts. Sadlowski defeated bureaucrat Sam Evert for district direct in 1974 by a two-to-one margin after the Labor Department nullified the previous year’s contest due to widespread fraud. That government agency refused to supervise Sadlowski’s 1977 bid to defeat Lloyd McBride for the USW presidency, however, and, in all the likelihood, the election was stolen from him. Cowie sees parallels between Steelworkers Fight Back and Miners for Democracy, whose leader Arnold Miller triumphed over the entrenched establishment after the brutal murder in 1969 of Joseph “Jock” Yablonski and his family on orders from corrupt United Mine Workers president Tony Boyle.
Jock Yablonski visiting coal mine
Balanoff, Sadlowski’s successor as district director, recruited steelworker Mike Olszanki to join his caucus and campaign for Sadlowski in 1977.Oz and I took Eddie with us to a Labor Studies conference in Youngstown after publishing our “Steelworkers Fight Back” Shavings issue. Although Cowie failed to cite our magazine, he consulted an impressive array of sources, including Philip W. Nyden’s “Steelworkers Rank-and-File” (1984) and such Seventies articles as Joe Klein, “Old Fashioned Hero of the Working Class” (Rolling Stone), Judith Colburn, “Ed Sadlowski Strides Toward Bethlehem” (Village Voice), and Stephen Singular, “Man of Steel” (New York Times). As Studs Terkel once said, “When you think of Chicago and labor, you think of someone like Eddie.” During the 1977 campaign Sadlowski accused the union hierarchy not so much of being corrupt as “soft, pompous, dull, a bit lazy, and distant from the membership.” He went on to say, “There’s no room in the union for bodyguards and limousines. And the staff guys, once they go from drinking beer and lugging lunch buckets to carrying briefcases, they forget where they came from.”
In the Jeopardy category “Olympic City Landmarks” no contestant knew that Ebenezer Baptist Church was in Atlanta. I identified a Herman Hesse quote from “Siddartha” thanks to James. With the final category being “Names in American History,” the question asked what family won a $16 million judgement from the federal government for 30 seconds of film. Obviously it was footage of JFK’s being shot in Dallas. I would have written down Zagruder, not Zapruder. Even though misspellings are allowed, I doubt my answer would have been acceptable.
IUN’s Samantha Gauer burned a copy of Art Hoyle reciting Martin Luther King’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail Cell” in 2010 with City Lights Orchestra for the Archives after City Lights Foundation founder Rich Daniels graciously granted permission to reproduce the “Voices of Freedom album project”on a CD. I vividly recall the profound effect King’s “Letter” had on me and the nation, enunciating a philosophy of nonviolent disobedience against unjust laws morally superior to his adversaries.
At Hobart Lanes get well or sympathy cards often get passed around for ailing or deceased bowlers, but this week the only league announcement was belated birthday wishes. I rolled a 513 series, my best of the year. After splitting the first two games, Frank Vitalone, the final bowler on Frank’s Gang, needed to pick up a ten-pin for the win. Calm and cool, he did just that. Adjacent to us, Lonnie Cotner, carrying a 161 average, made seven strikes in a row. Frank’s teammate Mike Reed demanded a urine test, and Frank took a plastic cup over to Lonnie. Vitalone handles a highest-game-with -average pot and, on the microphone, announced his own name, followed by “Nice game, Frank.”
New York Times reporter Christina Caron sought my help concerning an 88-year-old woman (Genevieve Purinton) who gave birth to a daughter in a Gary hospital in 1949 when unmarried and 19, then was told the baby had died. Instead, she was put up for adoption, and just recently the two learned about one another. I offered information about Mercy and Methodist hospitals being in existence then but that Mercy no longer exists. I also found the names and addresses of the two Gary families with the 88-year-old’s maiden name in the 1948 Gary City Directory that we have in the Archives. Christina later learned that Genevieve was from LaPorte. The burning question is whether the 19-year-old’s parents were in on the adoption decision in cahoots with the hospital and adoption agency, as they got her to sign some papers under false pretenses. Genevieve after giving birth, Caron wrote, “severed ties with her parents and moved to Florida.” From DNA findings the daughter, Connie Moultroup, also learned about her birth father, who was married when he impregnated Genevieve, and has reunited with his two daughters, her half-sisters. Here is part of Caron’s New York Time s article:
A DNA test has helped reunite a mother and daughter after nearly 70 years by uncovering a startling secret: A baby girl long thought to be dead was alive, and had been covertly adopted by a family in Southern California that lied about her origins.
The girl, Connie Moultroup, who is now 69, met her birth mother for the first time this month.
“I was absolutely floored,”she said, upon discovering that her mother, Genevieve Purinton, 88, was living in Tampa, Fla.
Ms. Purinton was similarly shocked. After giving birth in 1949, she said, she was told her newborn had died.
When they met for the first time on Dec. 3, the connection “was almost instantaneous,” said Ms. Moultroup, a massage therapist who traveled to Florida from her hometown in Richmond, Vt As they hugged, Ms. Moultroup recalled, her mother looked at her and said, “You’re not dead.”
They both cried.
“It was a bawlfest,”Ms. Moultroup said. “She was so happy to meet me.”
They found each other after Ms. Moultroup took an Ancestry.com DNA test that led her to a cousin, who in turn led Ms. Moultroup to her birth mother.
Connie Moultroup and her mother Genevieve Purinton; below, baby Connie
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