Margaret Bourke-White

“Work is something you can count on, a trusted, lifelong friend who never deserts you.” Margaret Bourke-White

below, Margaret Bourke-White in Tunis, 1943

A star photographer for Lifemagazine, Margaret Bourke-White did a cover feature for a 1943 issue portraying women defense workers in Gary, which I showed on the screen to Nicole Anslover’s students.  Bourke-White (1904-1971) also followed the troops to Tunisia and other combat zones. With General George S. Patton she toured the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald.  Referring to those in her profession, she once said, “We are in a privileged and sometimes happy position. We see a great deal of the world. Our obligation is to pass it on to others.”During the 1950s she traveled to South Africa and captured the inhumanity of apartheid.

boundary of Moroka Township in Johannesburg by Margaret Bourke-White

Born in the Bronx of Polish and Irish descent and growing up in New Jersey, Margaret Bourke-White attended many colleges, including Purdue, before graduating from Cornell in 1927 after a failed two-year marriage, whereupon she added her mother’s surname, Bourke, to her maiden name.  Her big break came in 1929 when Fortune magazine hired her as an associate editor and photographer.  A year later she became the first foreigner permitted to take pictures of Soviet industrial workers.  In 1936 she joined Life as its first female photojournalist, a relationship that continued for 21 years and then, despite the onset of Parkinson’s disease, occasionally until 1969. One of her most famous shots was of flood victims in 1937 standing in front of a sign reading “World’s Highest Standard of Living.”  In 1948 she photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi just hours before he was assassinated. 

 John Bushemi

Wearing a sweater given to me as a subscriber of Sports Illustrated with SI on the front (for supplemental instructor, I joked), I began Nicole’s class by showing a two-minute YouTube trailer for “See Here, Private Hargrove” (1944), based on Marion Hargrove’s account of basic training at Fort Bragg.  One of his best friends was Gary private Johnny Bushemi, who went on to work for Yank magazine and died under fire on an island in the Pacific.  Next I provided this summary of Gary during wartime, which I titled “From Depression to Boom Times”:

 Almost 80 years have gone by since America’s participation is what oral historian Studs Terkel called “The Good War.”  Among those Terkel interviewed for his 1984 history of World War II was journalist Mike Royko, who grew up in one of Chicago’s ethnic, working-class neighborhoods similar to many in Gary. Royko recalled newsboys shouting “extra, extra” in the streets, ration coupons and Victory gardens, white-helmeted wardens threatening to report blackout violators to the F.B.I., his sister becoming a “Rosie the Riveter,” names of dead soldiers being added to a flagpole marker, and listening attentively to radio broadcasts about such faraway places as Bataan, Anzio, Guadalcanal and Normandy.  As vivid as those memories were to the so-called “Greatest Generation,” events of that critical era have faded in the nation’s collective memory.  All but a few Americans are too young to remember Pearl Harbor or to have heard President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech. Riding through Gary, it is hard to imagine how vital its once bustling industrial plants were to the fate of the planet at a time when the Northwest Indiana homefront was the world’s leading steel producer.  Almost overnight, it seemed, the lean years of the Great Depression disappeared  as Region mills began producing for war.  Accompanying the economic boom were social transformations, especially in race-relations and relationships between the sexes.

 pan man Rosalie Ivy; below, transfer car operator Mae Harris; photos by Margaret Bourke-White

All-Out Americans summer camp at Dunes State Park

I showed about 20 Bourke-White photos of Region “Rosies” that were easily accessible on the Internet.  When I first tried to use some of them in “City of the Century” Time/Life wanted an arm and a leg that Indiana Press declined to pay. I followed them with photos depicting activities of the All-Out Americans, Gary students under the supervision of Mark Roser who organized scrap iron drives, Clean Plate campaigns, and other homefront efforts.  Students enjoyed a pin-up photo of U.S. Steel war worker Shirley Anne Franzitta, which she described during a 1992 interview conducted by IUN student William Kehoe:

 I wrote about 17 guys in the service.  I always wrote different letters for each person, all hand-written.  I have pictures of all these guys; one from Oklahoma reminded me of Tarzan. One named Frank thought I was in love with him, so I had to stop writing him.  They all thought I cared for them and wanted to meet me after they got home.  One of the guys, Don Nelson, made a grass skirt and top out of parachute strings.  It must have taken a lot of time.  The skirt was beautiful, and he wanted a picture of me in it.  It wouldn’t go all the way around my waist.  I was a little bit chubbier than what he thought.  I had to have a piece added in.  Everyone I was writing got a picture.  

 The Gary YMCA held USO (United Service Organizations, a military support organization) dances downstairs.  Several of us girls would go and dance or talk to the G.I.s There were no camps around here, so they’d mainly be boys on leave.  If you went to Chicago, you’d find G.Is and sailors especially. There were no silk stockings to buy.  Some girls painted their legs.  If it rained, you had runny legs.  Gas was hard to come by.  If you had a car, you’d go in groups, like to a skating rink in Chesterton; then afterwards we’d go out and eat something and maybe dance to music from a juke box.  We used to have parties at home and play post office.  Aunt Dorothy, who was about 40 years old, used to be post mistress.  She loved the part.  Everyone had a number,  If it was called, you’d go to the post office and be kissed.  Then another number would be called and someone would come in and kiss you.  
  One night at a party a guy pulled me up and we started dancing to “Don’t Wanna Set the World on Fire.”  I just went crazy; I just loved dancing.  Five or six of us from the mill would catch the old Shoreline bus and go to Madura's Danceland by Lever Brothers in Hammond.  Married girls, single girls we all went there and danced. No one went home with anybody unless they would take us all home.  Otherwise we’d come home on the bus.  They served soft drinks at Danceland.  You never drank – well, hardly ever.    

 In those days you just flirted.  I didn’t feel I had to wiggle anything.  Men didn’t expect a kiss on the first date and were lucky to get one.  You knew when was enough.  You did some things but not enough to sweat it out monthly.  You could pet, even heavy pet, but that was it. We kissed with our mouths closed.

I met Shirley when she worked for the Hobart Gazette at a time when the company printed my magazines.  She showed me her World War II scrapbook that contained many priceless photos including a U.S. Steel Halloween party and a mill bowling banquet, as well as the grass skirt pin-up.

Tom Harmon, middle, back row

I showed the class covers of Traces magazines that featured Gary sports heroes Tom Harmon (“Old 98,” the “Galloping Ghost”) and Tony Zale (Gary’s “Man of Steel”).  A four-letterman at Horace Mann, Harmon was a two-time All-American running back at Michigan and then joined the air force.  Shot down over China, he was missing for a month and feared dead until escorted to safety by Chinese villagers who rescued him. Zale became world middleweight champ a year before Pearl Harbor and joined the navy when war came.  With championship prize fights banned, Zale was inactive in the ring during what would have been his peak years physically. Joining the navy, he became a physical education instructor and good will ambassador on war bond drives.  He went on to have three brutal title fights with Rocky Graziano, winning the rubber match that nonetheless took a heavy toll on his health.  In 1949 he retired after a loss to Frenchman Marcel Cerdan. I met him several times in his later years and found him to be charming and self-effacing; in fact his second wife hoped I’d ghost-write his autobiography.  He died in 1997 at age 84.

 Zale knocks down Graziano

I discussed with the class four short readings from Steel Shavings, volume 47, and mentioned that I had no war memories, having been born in 1942. I did relate old friend (and IUN colleague) John Haller’s anecdote about being with his parents on a military base at a service marking war’s end.  His parents, like other adults, bowed their heads in prayer; upon opening their eyes they were horrified to discover that little Johnny had several wads of gum in his mouth that he had discovered under folding chairs.  I ended with a YouTube video of “Ration Blues” by Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five that featured people dancing wild versions of the jitterbug. If I’d had a few more minutes, I’d have shown a cartoon making fun of Hitler for the satirical Spike Jones number “Der Fuhrer’s Face.”  In a recent Jeopardy tournament nobody recognized that he was the band leader of the City Slickers.  Listening to their wacky compositions, such as “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” was my first musical memory. 

Spike Jones

Meanwhile, Trump was in Hanoi, meeting again with Kim Jong Um, fruitlessly it turned out while former “fixer,” Michael Cohen told a Congressional committee headed by Elijah Cummings about dirty deeds undertaken on behalf of the president.  Here is Ray Smock’s reaction:

  The most significant point of Michael Cohen’s 7-hour testimony before the House Government Oversight Committee was that it was in public. It was televised for all to see and its purpose was public education about the president of the United States. Michael Cohen pulled back the curtain on Donald Trump and revealed an ego-driven con man, a racist, and a man who has covered up crimes of one kind or another most of his life.  Many of us concluded this on our own long ago from other evidence. But hearing it from one of Trump’s most trusted lieutenants, a man convicted of crimes of his own making and crimes committed on behalf of President Trump, will be fresh news for millions of Americans who do not follow politics and national affairs closely.

  This is the way we begin to check the president. We begin by shedding light in dark places and letting the American people see for themselves the extent of the damage Trump is doing to the nation and the extent to which he is destroying government institutions and the Republican Party. Whatever comes from the Mueller investigations or the cases underway in the Southern District of New York that are focusing on Trump’s businesses and financial matters, it is important for Congress to help educate the public about matters of vital importance to us all. Today the education began in earnest.