No Walls

“Strangers are exciting, their mystery never ends.  But there’s nothing like looking at your own history in the faces of your friends.” Ani DiFranco

 Ani DiFranco

Grammy-winning folk singer Ani Di Franco’s memoir, “No Walls and the Recurring Dream” has received rave reviews.  The title refers not only to the outspoken feminist’s candor about intimate thoughts and recurring dreams but to a Buffalo, New York, carriage house where she grew up with a suicidal brother and distant parents. Other than the bathroom, it literally had no walls, just single rooms on the first and second floors. At age 18 an angry, “anti-everything” punker craving human connection, Ani shaved her head, explaining in an NPR interview: “I didn't want to be a sex object and there I was playing in bars you know mostly surrounded by men with drinks in their hands. And I was getting attention for not the right reasons. I wanted a different kind of power, I think.”  Now married with two children, she wrote of being a nude model when a struggling artist in Manhattan and while hitchhiking with a female lover escaping from a driver intent on raping them.

Michael Jordan’s number 23, Walter Payton’s 34, and Bobby Hull’s number 9 were more famous, but my favorite Chicago ball player wore jersey number 22.  Bill Buckner, who died at age 69 after a struggle with dementia, unfortunately, will always be remembered for a grounder that went through his legs at first base in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series between the Red Sox and the Mets.  Previously, during eight seasons with the Cubs, Buckner was a pro’s pro, winning the batting title in 1980 with a .324 average and leading the league in doubles during his 1981 All-Star season. He never struck out more than two times in a game or as many as 40 in an entire season. In contrast, Cubs All-Star Javier Baez fanned five times against Houston on Memorial Day and sluggers commonly strike out 150 times in a season.  “Billy Buck” hammered out over 2,700 hits during a 22-year career.  During that time only Pete Rose had more.  Appearing in a 2012 episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Buckner endures pedestrians mocking him; nobody seesg his autograph while sitting next to popular Met Mookie Wilson. He muffs a ball Larry unexpectedly tossed at him but nobody but emerges the hero, catching a baby falling from a building that’s on fire.  Buckner’s successor on the Cubs, first baseman Leon Durham, misplayed a grounder in the final game of the 1984 National League playoffs against San Diego that cost them a chance to play in the World Series for the first time since 1945.

On Memorial Day 96-year-old Pete DuPré, rising from a wheelchair, played the National Anthem on harmonica at a women’s soccer exhibition between the United States and Mexico.  Very moving. The veteran had taken part in the D-Day landing at Normandy.  At Applebee’s with Dave’s family I paid tribute to Angie’s grandfather Tom, and Toni did the same for her dad Tony, both World War II veterans. In Japan Trump ridiculed potential Democratic rival Joe Biden and praised North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, He is considering pardoning a Navy SEAL accused of killing a young girl and an old man in Iraq, as well as an unarmed captive.  Shameful, as many decorated veterans have emphasized. My childhood friend Paul Curry, who died in Vietnam, would have liked Justin Moore’s “The Ones That Didn’t Make It Home.”  It begins:

Tour was up middle of June
She was plannin' a welcome home barbecue
Green bean casserole, grandma's recipe

There was a knock on the door around two o’clock

Two uniforms and her heart stopped
Yellow ribbon 'round an oak tree, blowin' in the breeze

Dean Bottorff vented his anger at Trump’s perversion of Memorial Day by posting comments by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez explaining that Trump is a symptom of a system desperately in need of repair and a New Yorkercover entitled “The Shining.” The latter depicts Republican toadies Mitch McConnell, William Barr, and Lindsey Graham shining their leader’s shoes.  On a happier note the dedication of Indiana Dunes National Park, Indiana’s first and only such place designated place took place at the Paul Douglas Center in Gary.

dedication photo by Steve Spicer

Curtis and Phil Reid

Haverford graduate Phil Reid, a student of Anne Balay’s whom I met at an oral history conference last October in Montreal, stopped by with his brother Curtis on their way home to Colorado.  At Craft House we discussed Phil’s plans to enter AmeriCorp s and teach inner city kids in Baton Rouge. I gave him a copy of Steel Shavingsthat describes our hanging out in Montreal at a Chinese joint for lunch and McKibben’s Irish Pub that evening. At our session, organized by Balay, moderated by Donald Ritchie, and titled “Teaching Ethical Oral History Methods to Undergraduates” Phil talked about interviewing Philadelphia neighborhood residents about graffiti works of art.  I wrote: “Phil announced he’d be reading his remarks since he was nervous and delivered them with breakneck speed but got a hearty round of applause.”

Though warned by Gaard Logan that Rohinton Mistry’s 599-page historical novel A Fine Balance” was incredibly heartbreaking, the characters were so compelling, I stuck with it till the very end.  Horrible things happen to the main characters as they live through the nightmare of India during the “Emergency” of the mid-1970s, when corrupt officials razed slums and forcibly sterilized innocent victims in the name of progress and efficiency. Student Maneck Kohlah briefly found contentment boarding with 42-year-old Dina Aunty, tailors Ishvar and Om, and a litter of kittens.  After spending eight years in Dubai, where his social life was as barren as the desert landscape and young female immigrants were often enslaved.  Maneck returns to Mumbai to find that Dina Aunty has lost her flat and aged beyond her years.  Living with her brother, she tells Maneck he should shave off his beard because “it makes you look like a toilet brush.”  It’s the closest she comes to exhibiting any emotion.  Ishvar has lost his legs and Om has been castrated; both have been reduced to beggary.  Ironically, just before Maneck decides to step in front of a speeding train, he is splattered with crow droppings, which his mother claimed was a sign of impending good fortune.

Alissa called from Ireland.  After Anthony enrolled in a Grand Valley State overseas course through her office of overseas programs, a chaperone couldn’t go, so Alissa took her place. What a great experience for both, Alissa the seasoned world traveler, Anthony on his first such adventure.

The Spring 2019 issue of Traces magazine arrived with boxer Joe Louis on the cover to go with my article “The Champ: Joe Louis and Race-Relations in Gary.” The only other time I made the cover, for Gary pugilist Tony Zale, it was also a bare-chested shot.  Describing the front cover photo editor Ray Boomhower used this quote by Langston Hughes asserting that after each Joe Louis victory, “thousands of black Americans would throng out into the streets across the land to march and cheer and yell and cry because of Joe’s one-man triumphs.”John C. Shively’s “Battle Stations: John Wooden, Fred Stalcup, Jr. and the Attack on the USS Franklin” dealt with a Hoosier Purdue grad who died aboard an aircraft carrier crippled by a Japanese air strike during World War II. A fellow Boilermaker, legendary basketball player and coach John Wooden, would have been aboard instead of Stalcup had he not come down with appendicitis right before it sailed for the Far East.

attack on U.S.S. Franklin, March 1945

At bridge I gave Sharon Snyder a copy of Traces and told her I mentioned her father-in-law, Post-Tribunepublisher H.B. Snyder’s role 70 years ago in making sure African Americans were not excluded from the newspaper’s annual tournament at previously segregated South Gleason Golf Course.  Alan Yngve said that when he lived in Dune Acres he used to compete in sailboat races with B.G. Snyder, whom Sharon married.  When I brought up bowling, I learned that Judy Selund’s 81-year-old partner Don Geidemann had a 210 average.  I asked if they had any interest in subbing on Thursday afternoons.  I told Judy that Bob Selund’s photo was in Barbara Walczak’s newsletter citing the bridge players who had passed away during the past ten years.

Bob Selund

History chair Jonathyne Briggs asked me to attend senior David Hill’s thesis defense about the legacy of U.S. expansionist policies in Central America. He broke his presentation down to the pre-Cold War, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods.  While our rationale for meddling in these countries’ affairs shifted over time, the end result remained the same, to the detriment of the people, many of whom are presently seeking asylum in America. Once companies such as United Fruit had a stranglehold on these countries’ economies; now it’s international banks.  Hill was impressive even though his thesis seemed overly broad.  I questioned him about the role of the Catholic Church in these countries and our training Central American police and military officers serving repressive regimes.  Chris Young recommended that Hill not concentrate exclusively on external factors, citing a legacy of corruption and gangsterism, and the absence of a large educated middle class as partly responsible for the current situation.