Hoosier Pride

“I don’t know what it is about Hoosiers, but wherever I go there is always a Hoosier doing something very important there.” Kurt Vonnegut

 Vonnegut self-portrait

In a 1999 speech to the Indiana Humanities Council titled “To be a Native Middle-Westerner” Kurt Vonnegut told about being a product of Indianapolis public schools:

  To grow up in such a city, as I did, was to find cultural institutions as ordinary as police stations or fire houses. So it was reasonable for a young person to daydream of becoming some sort of artist or intellectual, if not a policeman or fireman. So I did. So did many like me. 

  I studied clarinet under the first chair clarinetist of our orchestra. I remember the orchestra's performance of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture,in which the cannons' roars were supplied by a policeman firing blank cartridges into an empty garbage can. I knew the policeman. He sometimes guarded street crossings used by students on their way to or from School 43, my school, the James Whitcomb Riley School. 

  It is unsurprising, then, that the Middle West has produced so many artists of such different sorts, from world-class to merely competent, as provincial cities and towns in Europe used to do. 

Vonnegut noted that two Hoosiers who profoundly influenced his way of thinking were Abraham Lincoln and Eugene V. Debs, who believed, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

In “Cat’s Cradle” the protagonist meets businessman’s spouse Hazel Crosby on a plane who, sensing a familiar accent, starts this conversation:

“My God, are you a Hoosier?”

 I admitted I was.

  “I’m a Hoosier, too.  Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier.”

   “I’m not.  I never knew anybody who was.”

In “Indiana’s 200: The People Who Shaped the Hoosier State,” edited by Linda C. Gugin and James St. Clair, Traces editor Ray Boomhower wrote the essay on Hoosier bard Kurt Vonnegut (1922- 2007), whose wealthy parents were forced by economic setbacks during the Great Depression to withdraw Kurt from a private academy and send him to public school. His mother, the daughter of a wealthy family, committed suicide in 1944.  His father an architect, recommended he major in something more practical in college, such as the biosciences, which he did at Cornell, site of nuclear scientist Felix Hoenikker’s lab in “Cat’s Cradle.”  Boomhower wrote:

 Along with instilling Vonnegut with a strong sense of ideals and pacifism, his time in Indianapolis’s public schools started him toward a writing career.  Attending Shortridge High School from 1936 to 1940, Vonnegut during his junior and senior years edited the Tuesday edition of the school’s newspaper, the Daily Echo.  His duties offered Vonnegut a unique opportunity to write for a large audience, in this case his fellow students.  Vonnegut developed a simple writing style, emphasizing clear, short sentences and paragraphs with strong verbs and using little or no adverbs and adjectives.

The father of “Cat’s Cradle character Mona Aamons Monzano, Vonnegut wrote, was Finnish architect, Nestor Aamons, whose implausible fictional background is consistent with historic possibility:

 Nestor was captured by the Russians, then liberated by the Germans during World War II. He was not returned home by his liberators but was forced to serve in a Wehrmacht engineer unit that was sent to fight the Yugoslav partisans.  He was captured by the Chetniks, royalist Serbian partisans and then by communist partisans who attacked the Chetniks.  He was liberated by Italian parachutists and shipped to Italy.  The Italians put him to work designing fortifications for Sicily.  He stole a fishing boat and reached neutral Portugal.

 Wanda and Bob Fox

Teammate Frank Shufran came down with the flu, but I was able to get bowler Bob Fox to sub for us, and his 600+ series helped the Engineers capture two games from Just Friends.  Bob related that in a more competitive league a bowler needed just four pins on his final ball after converting a spare for his team to win the game.  He picked up just one and was promptly kicked off the team. I thought that rather cruel, but another, less-compassionate bowler reacted in astonishment by saying, “All he had to do was throw the ball down the middle of the alley!”  Some years ago at Cressmoor Lanes, an excellent bowler needed just nine pins in his final frame to beat us.  He left the 4-7, threw the second ball exactly how he always did in those situations, but instead of veering left into the 4-7, it went straight as an arrow and missed both. Victory, engineers.

I’ve read the first ten pages of Kate Morton’s “The Secret Keeper” recommended by Gaard Murphy Logan and enjoyed the references to British teen culture in the early 1960s, including a band playing skiffle music, the sounds of rock and roll emanating from Radio Luxembourg, the BBC show “Juke Box Jury” (that both the Beatles and Rolling Stones appeared on), the Harold Pinter play “The Birthday Party,” and Alan Sillitoe’s proletarian novel “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.” I’m debating plunging further into the 481-page mystery novel, given that it would be a big investment of time.  Morton is from Brisbane, Australia, where in the early 1990s I enjoyed four days at an oral history conference.  The two things I remember most were being in a men’s room when feminists, no doubt displeased at the bathroom situation, yelled, “We’re coming in.”  Secondly, a guy I befriended invited me to a party where drinks were plentiful and the national Australian football championship was on TV.  About five years ago, the guy emailed me out of the blue that he was in Michigan on his way to Chicago and ended up spending the night with us.

The New Yorker’sJeffrey Toobin profiled sleazy political operator Roger Stone, under indictment for allegedly lying to the House Intelligence Committee, calling him the expositor of Trump’s world view, which includes conspiracy theories about the “Deep State” and believing that Barack Obama was born, all evidence to the contrary, in Kenya. A self-styled libertine who has Richard Nixon’s face tattooed on his back, Stone described himself as “a trysexual – I’ve tried everything.” Toobin wrote:

 Stone once took me to his favorite sex club in Miami, to show me where he once talked to a prostitute who he said had information on Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York.

In 2008 Governor Spitzer resigned after the New York Times revealed that he had patronized a high-price escort service.

Jim Spicer’s weekly witticism:

  A doctor and a lawyer were talking at a party, but their conversation was constantly being interrupted by people describing their ailments and asking the doctor for free medical advice. After an hour of this, the exasperated doctor asked the lawyer, “What do you do to stop people from asking you for legal advice when you're out of the office?”
 “I give it to them,” replied the lawyer, “and then I send them a bill.”
The doctor was shocked, but agreed to give it a try. The next day, still feeling slightly guilty, the doctor prepared the bills. When he went to place them in his mailbox, he found a bill from the lawyer.

 George Sladic

Although we haven’t seen much of the sun lately, Northwest Indiana has great sunsets, in part because of chemicals released by the steel mills.  Former IU Northwest student, steelworker, and photographer George Sladic produced a great shot of Indiana Dunes National Park at dusk recently, taken at Kemil Street Beach in Beverly Shores.  Forty years ago, we often partied together at our house on Maple Place, which was within what was then called the National Lakeshore.  One time I visited his place (in Hammond, I believe), and we listened to an album by the German heavy metal bands the Scorpions, probably either ”Blackout” or “Love at First Sting.”  Their “Rock You Like a Hurricane” single has collected over 28 million YouTube hits.  After I posted the above paragraph on Facebook, George Sladic recalled having many fond memories of those days and that I introduced him to New Wave music. I responded: “I was especially into the Romantics, Specials, and Graham Parker but appreciated the music George introduced me to as well.”  “The Candyman,” as I called him then, was often with a cool dude of indeterminate sex and a young Latina with whom I often danced.