Lawyers, Guns and Money

“I'm stranded in Honduras
I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan”

         Warren Zevon, “Lawyers, Guns and Money”

 Warren Zevon in 1978

Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” a favorite of mine, is getting a bit of air play on WXRT.  I saw Zevon, most famous for “Werewolves of London,” twice in concert at the Star Plaza in Merrillville.  On neither occasion did he perform “Excitable Boy,” about a kid who killed his junior prom date and, released from a mental institution, “dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones.” Zevon’s “Boom Boom Mancini” is about a lightweight champion who suffered from depression after defeating challenger Duk Koo Kim, who died from brain injuries after the fight.  The protagonist in “Lawyers, Guns and Money” gets into troubling sleeping with a Russian waitress, gambling in Havana, and becoming caught up in Honduran intrigue.  One verse goes: 

I'm an innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck
Between a rock and a hard place
And I'm down on my luck

Michael McKnight’s Sports Illustrated article on the 1969 “Hundred Hour War,” often misnamed the “soccer war” erupted as Honduras and El Salvador faced off to determine which would qualify for the World Cup.  Hostilities erupted as a result of the Honduras government expelling Salvadoran migrants to their country. As newspapers spread falsehoods about rape, summary executions, and other “unspeakable” atrocities, El Salvador’s powerful landowners pressured President Fidel Sanchez Hernandez into attacking their neighbor with fighter planes flown in some cases by American mercenaries.  McKnight concluded:

 Over the last 50 years the region’s unchecked social imbalances and broken political machinery have allowed a new scourge, gangs, to take root.  Migration to surrounding countries has continued to skyrocket.  More than 2 million Salvadorans and Hondurans came to the United States in 2018 – almost 80 times the number that made the trip in 1970.

Favorite student Shannon Pontney called: fiancé Brian, an Iraq War veteran, needed a primary source for a paper due at midnight on the so-called “War on Drugs.”  Consequences include a skyrocketing prison, with the criminal justice system rigged against the poor and minorities. Brian was already familiar with Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” (2010).  I compared the phony war with the failed experiment of Prohibition a century ago, selectively enforced as a form of social control.  The lack of home rule cripples the ability of urban mayors such as Karen Freeman-Wilson in Gary to make guns and drugs.  The current opioid crisis, I pointed out, is a result of “Big Pharma” and unscrupulous distributors profiting from the sale of legal, over-the-counter drugs.

 Dave and tennis players at "Teachers of Excellence" Awards Night

Nayeli Arredondo and Dave Lane; photo by Andre Clay

Dave hosted a cookout for his league champion East Chicago Central girls tennis team. Several male players attended as well.  My son’s easy rapport with them was impressive. I chatted with valedictorian Nayeli Arredondo as well as two girls named Cecilia, a tenth-grade southpaw and a senior who will be attending IUN in the Fall. As senior class advisor, Dave also had weekend commencement duties. I stifled the urge to ask the two Cecilias whether they’d heard of the Simon and Garfunkel song with that title, which contains this verse:

Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia
Up in my bedroom (making love)
I got up to wash my face

          When I come back to bed someone's taken my place

Janet Flanner with Hemingway in Paris, 1944 and later in life

From Ray Boomhower’s “Indiana Originals” (2018) I learned that young Geneva Stratton’s playground “Limberlost,” named for someone nicknamed “Limber Jim” who literally got lost, was a swamp 25 miles wide and a hundred miles long later drained to make way for farmland.  Anne Balay’s PhD thesis was on Hoosier novelist Gene Stratton-Porter, famous for best sellers “A Girl of the Limberlost” (1909) and “Laddie: A True Blue Story” (1913).  Stratton-Porter died in Los Angeles at age 61 after her chauffeur-driven automobile colliding with a streetcar.  I also read that lesbian Janet Flanner wrote columns for the New Yorkerfrom Paris under the pen name Genet for 50 years starting in 1925. I recall watching the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 when 79-year-old Flanner was sitting between Gore Vidal and a drunken Norman Mailer making a fool of himself insulting his fellow novelist.

Boomhower’s chapters on Region World War II heroes Johnny “One-Shot” Bushemi and Alex Vraciu caught my eye.  I had profiled combat photographer Bushemi in my Gary book “City of the Century.” Vraciu’s name is on the Lake County Visitors Center Wall of Legends. Boomhower wrote enigmatically that the East Chicago native pulled a prank on a DePauw Psychology professor that received national attention, so I asked my Traceseditor to ask for an explanation.  He sent this excerpt from “Fighter Pilot: The World War II Career of Alex Vraciu” (2010:

     Vraciu’s mischievous sense of humor displayed itself during the spring of his sophomore year in a psychology class he took with Professor Paul J. Fay. Throughout the class Fay had attempted to show his students what poor observers they were by springing surprises on them and then making them describe what had happened. Vraciu had grown tired of these tests and one day, while walking back to the Delta Chi house on South Locust Street with a few of his fraternity brothers who were also in the class, he asked them: “Why don’t we pull one on him [Fay]?”His friends told him he was crazy, but Vraciu plotted his revenge, obtaining a tarpaulin from the Greencastle railway express office and telling the university’s public relations office in confidence what he planned on doing.

       The psychology class met on the second floor of a campus building. Students were seated in reverse alphabetical order, so Vraciu sat near the front of the classroom. Fay was talking near the blackboard when Vraciu began his stunt. He carefully took off his watch and placed it on one of the seats in front of him. (“I didn’t care about my neck,” Vraciu laughed. “I was worried about my wristwatch. Isn’t that silly?”) He lifted up the back part of the chair in front of him, and brought it down to make a sharp noise. With a wild look in his eye, Vraciu then announced to the class in a strong voice: “I can’t take this any longer!”

       The prankster must have been convincing, because many of the students in the class were urging him to stop as he began to climb into an open window in the front of the room near the blackboard. Vraciu took a look down to make sure that his fraternity brothers were below holding the tarpaulin (“I’m not stupid,”Vraciu said) and picked up an eraser from the blackboard to toss at anyone who might try and stop him. When the surprised Professor Fay starting walking toward him, Vraciu jumped from the window, causing one of the girls in the class whom he had recently taken on a date to shout: “Alex, come back!”

       A photographer captured Vraciu jumping from the window, and the stunt subsequently received nationwide media attention. When he landed safely in the waiting tarpaulin and looked up, Vraciu could see that his classmates had rushed to the windows with horrified expressions on their faces, expecting the worst. “My life was different from that point on,”he noted, as he received credit for every crazy stunt pulled on the campus. This continued to occur even when he was thousands of miles away as a navy pilot in the Pacific during World War II. When Vraciu returned to the psychology class after his successful practical joke, Fay had all the other students write down what they had witnessed. Vraciu had been maintaining a B grade for the class, but ended up with an A for the course.

Emma Boettcher, a 27-year-old Chicago librarian, defeated 32-game Jeopardy champ James Holzhauer as he was attempting to surpass Ken Jennings’s all-time record for winnings.  She had written a master’s thesis on the quiz show and beat Holzhauer at his own strategy, searching out “Double Jeopardy” clues among the harder clues and then betting large sums on them.  Boettcher had the lead going into Final Jeopardy and then bet enough so she couldn’t be caught when she answered correctly a question on a Shakespeare quote.

Dottie Hart brought delicious snickerdoodle cookies to duplicate bridge.  They were so good I had a second one at evening’s end. Charlie Halberstadt and I finished in the middle of the pack and each earned .22 of a master point.