Right Place, Wrong Time

I been in the right place but it must have been the wrong time
I'd have said the right thing but I must have used the wrong line

    “Right Place, Wrong Time,” Dr. John

New Orleans legend Dr. John (Malcolm John Rebennack) succumbed to heart failure at age 77.  The piano man, keyboardist and guitar player combined blues and psychedelic rock with traces of voodoo mysticism and Mardi Gras jazz.  Dr. John toured with the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, the Band, and many others.  The Rock and Roll inductee had a 1973 Top Ten hit with “Right Place, Wrong Time.” “CBS Sunday Morning” paid tribute to the ultra-cool Dr. John and commemorated the 1969 Greenwich Village Stonewall riots with a feature on gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny (1925-2011), dismissed from the U.S. Army’s Map Service in 1957 for being openly gay. In 1965 Kameny and other members of the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis picketed the White House to protest discrimination based on sexual orientation.

 Frank Kameny at 2010 Gay Pride parade

After an ABC camera recorded a D-Day survivor finding his buddy’s gravesite at Normandy American Cemetery, the deceased G.I.s family in Syracuse, New York saw the feature on TV and was able to talk with him via Skype.

Among the many tributes to World War II veterans on the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day was a Post-Tribunearticle about Ernie Pyle’s dispatches from Normandy that contained an interview with Phil Hess of the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in Dana, Indiana, the war correspondent’s home town.  Pyle’s stories of those who fought, Hess stated, “are necessary to really understanding the magnitude of the invasion and the indescribable toll it took on America’s young men.”  In a dispatch titled “A Pure Miracle” Pyle wrote of the killing field

 For some of our units it [the landing] was easy, but in this [Omaha Beach] special sector where I am now our troops face such odds that our getting ashore was like whipping Joe Louis to a pulp. Our men simply could not get past the beach.  They were pinned down right on the water’s edge by an inhuman wall of fire from the bluff. Our first wave were on the beach for hours before they could begin working inland.

A subsequent dispatch described the terrible human toll in the immediate aftermath of the landing.  Walking along the beach, Pyle saw bodies washing out to sea and then in again.  He stepped over what he presumed to be driftwood until recognizing the foot of a soldier half-buried in the sand. Noting that “soldiers carry strange things with them,”he not only found packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes and photos of loved ones but, a banjo and a tennis racket, the latter lying “lonesomely in the sand, clamped in its rack, not a string broken.” A dog was whimpering pitifully “looking for his masters.”

 Ernie Pyle at Anzio with G.I.s

Captain Waskow

Ray Boomhower devoted two chapters to Ernie Pyle in “Indiana Originals,” the only Hoosier so honored.  The first described his years as a roving reporter for Scripps-Howard newspaper chain traveling all over the country (and Western hemisphere) between 1935 and 1942 by car, train, plane, and occasionally horseback in search of human-interest stories.  The second highlighted his most widely reprinted column, “The Death of Captain [Henry T.] Waskow” on Mount Sammurco in Italy in January 1944, five months before the D-Day landing.  I was already familiar with the piece, having read it in my World War II class.  A shell fragrant had pierced his heart while Waskow was trying to shield another soldier.  Waskow had been dead for four days before his body could be retrieved and brought back to camp lashed to the back of a mule on a moonlit night. Pyle wrote:

    Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road. You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

   The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

   One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, “God damn it.”    That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, “God damn it to hell anyway.”He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

   Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: “I’m sorry, old man.”

   Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: “I sure am sorry, sir.”

   Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

   And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

   After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

 Patrick O'Rourke of the Hammond Federation of Teachers

At Asparagus Restaurant in Merrillville I met lifelong Hammond resident and teachers union leader Patrick O’Rourke, who has taught Labor Studies and Education courses at IUN.  When he mentioned former Gary teachers union leader Charles Smith, I mentioned playing poker at his home and that Chas, as I called him, introduced a seven-card stud, high-low game that he called AFT, after the American Federation of Teachers. Charles would put out a sumptuous spread and we’d all chip in five bucks, hardly enough to cover it.  Lefty stalwarts Al Samter and Fred Gaboury were regulars. That evening Miranda arrived, and we celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday. 

Kaitlyn and Miranda

Lights

Saturday Toni and I attended a wedding at the Miller Aquatorium. Kaitlyn, a friend of Miranda’s from Grand Rapids, was marrying a Syrian Muslim named Albaraa.  They apparently met at a rave, and he was very friendly when we chatted briefly.  Before the ceremony began, a bunch of the groom’s friends came in singing, clapping, dancing, and making squealing sounds.  Impressive. Phil, Kaitlyn’s soccer coach for several years, attended with Delia, as did three young ladies – Samantha, Niki, and Ann (a Warren, Michigan, police officer) who stayed at the condo with Miranda. We sat with Albaraa’s friend Hassan, who had just arrived from Saskatchewan, Canada, grew up in Toronto, and was a big Raptors fan. I told him that the capital of Saskatchewan, Regina, was a recent “Final Jeopardy”answer.  

I asked a young, tattooed woman with multi-colored hair whose portrait was adorning her upper leg and found out it was a Canadian singer Lights Poxleitner-Bokan, who goes by the name Lights. Most of her videos seem to be about intimate relationships.  “Skydiving contains these lyrics:

You pull me in
I'm doing things I never would do
My pulse, racing
I'm coming alive with you

After enjoying a Middle eastern meal sans alcohol, we attended Mike Chirich’s seventy-fifth birthday bash at Miller’s Gardner Center.  At one table were Bobby, Henry, and Joe Farag as well as several other family members.  I chatted with Danna Conklin, whose late husband audited several of my classes after he retired and became a friend and whose son was killed by a random bullet fired from near the Miller South Shore station as he was in his car near Lake Stereet and Route 20.  I gave Mike and Celeste tie-dye t-shirts with “Miller Beachcomber” inscribed on the front and “CHIRICH” on the back.   

 Michael Chirich

Fred McColly and Jimbo

Former student Fred McColly posted a decade-old photo taken on the day I retired and Dave’s band, Voodoo Chili, put on a mini-concert in front of IUN’s Hawthorn Hall.  I have on a dress shirt that Clark Metz had outgrown.  I thought of my old partner in crime while at Mike Chirich’s party since it was Clark who first introduced us.  On the way to Marquette Park for the wedding we passed his house on Oak Avenue, where we spent many afternoons joking around and looking out onto the lake.

Junedale concession stand

Sunday prior to James’s graduation from Portage, there was a family party that Dave missed due to East Chicago Central’s commencement.  He was able to be at the Portage ceremony on time, however.  Tamiya’s friend Charles and I shared Little League stories.  He played on a Junedale field in Glen Park that a half-century ago hosted the Senior League World Series, thanks to Joe Eckert, known as “Mr. Little league.”  Learning Charles was a Thea Bowman grad, I brought up former boys basketball coach Marvin Ray, who guided his 2010 team to the 2010 Class A championship.  Charles said that Rea falsely accused him of stealing a pair of shorts similar to those worn by the players that he’d had permission to take from the Lost and Found.

Cedar Lake Museum curator Scott Bocock sent clippings about boxing and wrestling matches staged at Lassen’s Resort in 1935.  One featured Gary’s Jack Kranz, who the year before had gone the distance in an 8-rounder against Joe Louis at Marigold Gardens in Chicago. According to Eye on the Ring,Kranz won the first three rounds and Louis the final five.  A 1942 Post-Tribunearticle reported on a wrestling match between Cedar lake native Am (Ambrose) Rascher and a seven-foot Swede named Hans Steinke.  As yet, Bocock has found no tangible evidence that Louis appeared at Lassen’s resort, as commonly thought according to local lore.  Steve McShane located a May 4, 1953 Post-Tribune clipping announcing Rascher’s appointment as an Indiana AAU commissioner that included his photo (below).