Food For Dissent

“Industry don't pay a price that's fair
All the common people breathing filthy air
Roof caved in on all the simple dreams
And to get ahead your heart starts pumping schemes”

    “Neutron Dance,” Pointer Sisters

“Food for Dissent: Natural Foods and the Consumer Counterculture since the 1960s” by Maria McGrath is now in print.  At the Oral History Association meeting in Montreal last October McGrath spoke about the feminist Bloodroot Restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the subject of one of the chapters.  Tracing the natural food movement by focusing on vegetarian cookbooks, food co-ops, and health advocates, Maria explores, according to a University of Massachusetts Press announcement, efforts to harness principled shopping, principled eating, and cooperative entrepreneurship as tools for civic activism. Historian David Farber, author of “The Age of Great Dreams, wrote: “Well researched and intellectually rich, Food for Dissent joins an emerging literature that rethinks the counter-culture in American life, especially how it intersected with capitalism in the 1970s and reimagined whole sectors of the economy over the last fifty years.”  I congratulated Maria on the awesome accomplishment and suggested she submit a proposal about Bloodroot Restaurant for the International Oral History Association conference in Singapore next June. She replied, “Food for thought,” adding: “us food historians have to constantly watch out for food idiom/ catch phrase land mines.”

In a recent email Maria McGrath’s mother, former Upper Dublin High School classmate Susan Floyd employed the old saying, “Looks like the cat that swallowed the mouse.” I replied that in Northwest Indiana steel mills rats got to be so large and formidable, according to steelworker lore, that the expression was,“The rat that swallowed the cat.”  Management evidently released cats to deal with the rat menace, and they were never seen again.

Jeff Manes held a fish fry at his place by the Kankakee River on the same day as grandson James’s graduation party at the Portage Legion hall.  I was familiar with James’s bowling buddies and talked to several thespians who were in plays with him.  Dave’s friend Matt Simmons, who spent 19 days in a coma after a motorcycle crash, amazingly looked to be fully recovered.  He was tattooed and muscular, and I first thought he was former Voodoo Chili keyboardist Bob Heckler, who also once taught at Central and sometimes got mistaken for Matt. Simmons spoke highly of an IUN graduate class taught by Education professor Vernon Smith, who kept a jar of Jolly Rancher candy bars on the desk. If someone made a particularly salient comment, he’d toss the student a Jolly Rancher, something Matt started doing in class.   I initially thought Matt had said Jolly Rogers, the nickname for pirate ship flags that often bore a skull-and-crossbones.  The name has been used by many eateries, and a navy aviation unit and may have been an inspiration for Jolly Rancher Company in Golden, Colorado, which originally marketed hard candy, jelly beans, gum, and ice cream.

 pirate Paul Jones

I enjoyed chatting with East Chicago Central principal Dee Etta Wright, an IU Northwest grad who was with her cute two-year-old grandchild.  She recalled being at a 2013 semi-state playoff game when East Chicago upset football power New Prairie when Martayveous Carter scored on a fourth down play in overtime after New Prairie’s normally dependable kicker missed a last-second field goal.  Earlier QB Carlos Fernandez avoided a near-sack and threw a pass to TreQuan Burnet for a 64-yard TD. I was in the press box with Dave, who was announcing the game.  At the open house I pigged out on fried chicken, salad chip, salsa, and a delicious grape concoction that is Angie’s Aunt Linda’s specialty.  Brenden Bayer brought his family and told me that Revolution Brewing Company in Chicago has a robust porter named after labor radical Eugene V. Debs.  Brenden bought some cans for Michael, his dad, whose father was named Eugene. People were coming and going throughout the afternoon, and James was pleased with the large turnout

The last major league baseball player to bat over .400 was Ted Williams in 1941.  Born the following year in segregated Little Rock, Arkansas, Aaron Pointer accomplished the feat 20 years later while with the Salisbury, (N.C.) Braves of the South Atlantic League.  Pointer, whose sisters were Grammy winners in 1985 for the hit song “Jump (For My Love),” grew up in Oakland, California, competing on the playground against basketball great Bill Russell and major leaguers Joe Morgan, Vada Pinson, and Kurt Flood.  The Pointers shared a duplex with the family of cousin Paul Silas, who became an NBA all-star and coach.  During his .400 season, Pointer could not stay at the same hotels as white teammates and frequently had to eat meals on the team bus. Pointer had a brief major league career with the Houston Astros and then played in Japan and Venezuela. After becoming the first African-American Pacific-10 football referee, he served as an NFL head linesman while living in Tacoma, Washington, and enjoying a 29-year career serving Pierce County Parks and Recreation.

Anthony is N. Ireland

Phil, Beth, and Alissa stayed overnight at the condo and Delia and Anthony nearby at Delia’s brother’s place.  Toni showed Anthony a photo album she was putting together that included shots of when he was in Northern Ireland for a summer class arranged by the Grand Valley State overseas program of which Alissa is a coordinator.  Retiring to bed while Toni and guests were still going strong, I made blueberry pancakes and kielbasa one morning and scrambled eggs the next.  Alissa had a great story about my mother, whom she called Nana Midge, leaving her a piece of jewelry whose purpose was unclear but that is now known among some of her and Josh’s friends as Nana Midge’s roach clip. I’d like to think that would put a smile on her face if she were alive rather than, as the saying goes, make her turn over in her grave.

A photo of Ladies Aid Society members belonging to the Methodist Episcopal Church taken in March of 1907, less than a year after Gary’s founding, inspired Allison Schuette to compose a poem about these urban pioneers, no doubt wives of some of the fledgling steel town’s movers and shakers.  Who were these club women, one wonders, were they motivated by a social consciousness toward the poor or a desire to impose their Victorian values, including temperance, the less fortunate?  Ladies Aid societies formed during the Civil War to provide supplies to soldiers in combat, including medical care for the wounded.  After the war some functioned in a nursing capacity and worked to improve sanitary conditions for the poor. Gary’s society formed shortly after the arrival of the church’s first pastor, Reverend George E. Deuel and his wife.  Schuette wrote:

Ten women pose on the corner of 3^rdand Broadway, members 

of the Ladies Aid Society, Gary, Indiana’s first. It looks to be a cold

March day, trees barren, snow pack on the sidewalk. The women

are bloused and skirted, one slips her hands into her pockets, two wear hats 

(Sunday-best). I cast the women into roles: moralist, sassy wit,

caretaker, loyalist, agitator, heavy lifter, tender heart, 

mediator, backbone, force of nature. They stand not in front 

of the Binzenhof, one block over, where Methodist Episcopal meets

in a hall above the social club, but in front of Dr. Chester W. Packard’s

office. Happenstance? Optics? Patronage? The surgeon stands 

in the photo, tall and dour, black overcoat, black bowler, hands fisted in

pockets, apart and above, looking off camera. Why is he here?

Against the white blouses of the women, he draws my eye. I don’t want 

to make him the rooster that I have.

If we knew where our efforts landed, would we ever make the effort? 

In 1907, the Ladies Aid Society could not see that twenty 

some years later, City Methodist would dedicate a million-dollar 

gothic cathedral at 6^thand Washington, though maybe some of them

over the course of those twenty years worked very hard to ensure

it (and maybe some of them thought the money would be better

spent serving the poor). City Methodist at its height counted more

than 3000 members, the largest Methodist congregation in the Midwest,

a church built in large part through steel money, fate knit to the city’s.

Even Elbert Gary, that founding father, felt moved to leave his mark,

every organ note played beholden to him, until the notes foundered

into silence only fifty years after their first sounding. 

Listen, dear Ladies, to the voice of the future: as Gary's social 

makeup altered and better-off inhabitants moved away, the church 

fell into ruin, a disused church, abandoned, rotting away, cut

from the budget, closed for good, a casualty of the Indiana 

steel industry crash, a haunting piece of urban ruin.  There are truths 

and half-truths here, interpretations of documented facts—it did 

close in 1975; there were only three hundred and twenty

members left—but the whys and wherefores sit unpacked in the “altering” 

of the “social makeup” and the “casualty” of the steel “crash.” We need 

a surgeon, dear Ladies, to slice through that muscle.

I’ve been enjoying John Updike’s final collection “Licks of Love” (2000).  Like fiction writer Richard Russo, Updike is brilliant at brief descriptions of minor characters.  In “Cats” a Rutgers professor’s son-in-law Hiram is “unctuous and prematurely balding with a Princetonian complacency that makes one want to kick him.”  When Dave offers to pick up doughnuts while at the market, Hiram says, “We don’t believe in doughnuts.” Dave retorts,“Anybody here who doesn’t believe in pretzels?”  Common Updike themes are sex, aging, and religion.  In “Natural Color” a reference to a former lover’s red hair, Updike compared the social turmoil in a small new England town caused by exposure of the affair to a Unitarian-Congregationalist schism of the 1820s.

Trump responded to efforts by Congressman Elijah Cummings to investigate his administration by tweeting that the Baltimore legislator should spend more time cleaning up his rat-infested district, a racist insult previously levied against Georgia Representative John Lewis.  Cummings replied: “Mr. President, I go home to my district daily.  Each morning I wake up and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch.  But it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.” Robert Blaszkiewicz commented: “Better to have a few rats than to be one.”  The Baltimore Suneditorialized: 

  The most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin, and the guy who insists there are good people among murderous neo-Nazis is still attempting to fool most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his present post.

Dean Bottorff reported: “News from Keystone: This just in. The outcrop on Mt. Rushmore formerly known as Clinton Rock has been renamed Trump Rock.” I replied,“He’s a dickhead.”  

Interlopers

We fight this quarrel out to the death, you and I and our foresters, with no cursed interlopers to come between us. Death and damnation to you, Ulrich von Gradwitz,” Saki (H.H. Munro), “The Interlopers”

 Saki (H H Munro)

Short story writer Hector Hugh Munro was born in 1870 in Burma where his father, an army officer from Scotland, was stationed.  Munro died at age 46 when killed by a German sniper during World War I. During a productive and often controversial writing career his witty parodies often poked fun at Edwardian society. Assuming a pen-name in Munro’s time was not uncommon.  Saki probably came from a cupbearer in Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyatalthough it might refer to a breed of South American monkey or, conceivably, Japanese rice wine that goes down with a bite.  Like Oscar Wilde, whose writing technique and lifestyle he emulated, Munro was gay during a time when same-sex sexual conduct was a crime. “The Interlopers” (1919), published posthumously in “The Toys of Peace and Other Papers,” is about the denouement of a feud between two clans fighting over forest land. Georg Znaeym and Ulrich von Gradwitz are about to come to blows when a giant tree branch pins them both.  They bury the hatchet, call for help, and, as the story ends, spot ten figures coming over a hill, not compatriots but famished wolves, the true owners of the forest about to turn the tables on the human interlopers.

I met with Valparaiso University professors Allison Schuette and Elizabeth Wuerrfel at Hunter’s Brewery in Chesterton to discuss our upcoming Oral History Association (OHA) conference session on their humanities initiative “Flight Paths: Mapping Our Changing Neighborhoods.”  Two years ago, they spoke at the OHA meeting in Minneapolis and interacted with many supportive scholars.  I told them about the paper Maria McGrath delivered last year in Montreal on Bloodroot Restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, begun a half-century before as a radical feminist collective by lesbians Noel Furie and Selma Miriam. Al had visited Bloodroot Restaurant when in her 20s and addressed women onside as “guys,” something I often say, in fact, when greeting them.  The Bloodroot greeter promptly shot back, “There aren’t any guys here.”  

I asked Liz, running as a Democrat for an at-large seat on Valparaiso City Council, about the prospects. She is hopeful but not over-confident.  Voters will choose two of four candidates on the ballot.  One Republican is an incumbent; the other, a newcomer, is Evan Costas, son of Mayor Jon Costas, who is not seeking re-election. Republican fat cats and their minions, fearing loss of City Hall, are outspending the Democrats by a wide margin.  The race will come down to voter turnout.  Liz, a former VU graduate and Peace Corps worker, earned an MFA degree from Columbia College in Chicago; she presently teaches digital media art and several interdisciplinary courses.  She and Allison co-founded the VU Welcome Project, of which Flight Paths is an offshoot.

 

Allison has been writing poems based on photos in Ron Cohen and my “Gary: A Pictorial History.”  “Squatters” was inspired by one entitled “Old Carr’s Beach.”  The caption reads: In the mid-1870s, when Robert and Drusilla Carr moved into a two-room pine cabin near the Lake Michigan beachfront area, which later became known as Carr’s Beach, their only neighbors were a boat builder named Allen Dutcher, a hunter-trapper named Jacques Beaubien, and a former slave named Davy Crockett.  The area remained virtually unchanged until the early twentieth-century. Here is “Squatters”:

Let your mind loosen its notion of private property. Stand atop a dune,

far enough back that beach dwarfs lake, the size of Michigan’s waters

hidden from view. The waves are long, roughing up the shore, white-

capped. 

Why have you come to stand here? What do you see in the three domiciles below? 

    Robert and Drusilla’s cabin is pinched behind a swale

of dune. Two other shacks perch near the shore: Allen Dutcher, boat builder,

Jacques Beaubien, hunter-trapper, and Davy Crockett, former slave, 

reside nearby. 

                                                            Someone watches you from below,

          halfway up the dune. Is it Robert calling Drusilla home? Is it Allen or Jacques

             worrying over your intentions because, blast it, the neighborhood is already crowded

   (though no one has seen the Pottawotomie hunt these trails for fifteen years)? 

These are the days of white and blue cranes, of an eagle on every hill, of wolves     

back in the dunes crying like a woman, of Octave Chanute’s experimental flight.  

And what would you see                  

if you could glide like an eagle?   The expanse of Lake Michigan,          

    still free of the mills’ waste, of BP’s oil spills.  The stretch of shore and the ambition                   

of the dunes, not yet carried away by the Ball Brothers   for their glass fruit jars. 

          The feel of loss lapping   at the sense of freedom,     a geography                     

that never needed to know parceling        

except for the limits of the human imagination.                                      

In 1874, Drusilla Benn married fisherman Robert Carr and for years was the lone women living at lake’s edge near the mouth of the Grand Calumet.  In those days before erosion and man-made impediments Drusilla often assisted Robert and became adept at pulling in the nets and winding up the windlasses used to haul them on shore. She picked cranberries to sell in Miller, connected to their homestead by a rough, mile-long towpath, until a man sold the dune moss that had protected the bushes from frost for use in packing fruit trees.  The Carrs also traded at Clark Station, a settlement to the west reached by boat. They’d bring sturgeon, whitefish, waterfowl, mink, and muskrat pelts, and honey from Robert’s bee colony.

In “City of the Century” I wrote about Drusilla Carr standing her ground during a decades-long legal battle against interloper US Steel.  The giant corporation used a variety of legal maneuvers in attempts to acquire her property.  The courts upheld her claim of squatter sovereignty, defined as at least 20 years of peaceful, uninterrupted and undisputed possession.  During the 1920s Drusilla resided in alakeside cottage and collected hundred dollar yearly rentals on a hundred beach houses.  At her death in 1930, she had lost about half of the disputed 89-acre tract in order to pay lawyers.  A decade later, the land became the property of Gary parks department.  Armand Prete eulogized Drusilla as a forceful, determined pioneer whose main concern was that the lakefront ecology “not be desecrated by huge industrial smokestacks.”

Very few summer courses being taught on campus.  In the fall most IU Northwest introductory surveys in History and Philosophy will be on-line. Students seem to prefer them.  The demand for American History offerings has drop due to the proliferation of high school AP (Advnaced Placement) classes that allow them to earn college credit and forego them. At least, thanks to a requirement pushed by David Parnell and Mark Baer, who developed the course content, all Arts and Sciences freshmen will take seminars designed to ease the transition into college. Jonathyne Briggs wants my involvement in one he’s scheduled to teach.  IU President Tom Ehrlich pioneered the concept a quarter-century ago, as well as capstone seminars for graduating seniors; like many of his innovative ideas, these met stiff resistance from an entrenched “Old Boys network” that regarded the bow-tied Ivy League intellectual as an interloper.

 IU President Tom Ehrlich

I fear that IUN’s five full-time historians, all brilliant classroom teachers, will seek a more compelling campus environment.  Each would be a good scholarly catch.  Two, Jonathyne Briggs and Chris Young, have assumed administrative duties that reduce their course load to one a semester. From time to time I lamented not being at residential campus.  I applied for a job at my alma mater, Bucknell, after noticing an advertisement for a position in my field.  Along with my credentials, I sent my Jacob A. Riis and the city of Gary books with instructions to eventually donate them to the university library.  I never heard back from the History search committee, but six months later, Bucknell’s librarian wrote thanking me for the books.

 Edgar Shields in middle with camera

In 1908, seven years after earning an undergraduate degree from Bucknell, Baptist missionary physician Edgar Shields embarked on a 138-day journey to remote Yachow (now Ya’an), in southwestern China. The final leg upstream on the Qingyi River against strong currents on a houseboat outfitted with sedan chairs took two entire months. With him were wife Frances Elizabeth, called “Bessie,” infant son William, and a nurse from Philadelphia.  Shields’s diary recorded impressions of bamboo groves and rice fields and a population density that the doctor compared to “attending County Fair every day of the week.” According to Bucknell magazine author Jennifer Lin, during six years in China as a Christian interloper in a Buddhist province Shields witnessed the collapse of the Qing dynasty and “the chaotic transition to a fledgling Republic of China.”During the turmoil, his family and other missionaries fled to the city of Shanghai before assigned to a Red Cross hospital in Nanjing. In one diary entry Shields described cutting off the queues of two Chinese doctors, which Manchu rulers had demanded of all men.  

 Bessie and Edgar Shields with William, Ruth, and Edgar's sister Esther

During Dr. Shields’s first home leave Bessie died, and Edgar decided to remain in America for the sake of his young children.  While in China, however, Shields not only kept an extensive diary but took over 800 photographs that captured, in Jennifer Lin’s words, “everything from the quotidian toil of peasants to the grandeur of the landscape.”   The treasure trove got passed on to his sister Charlotte upon Edgar’s death in 1926 of appendicitis.  In 1964 Shields’s sons found the valuable cache in a shed while looking for chairs. The diaries, mementos, and photos, including 177 glass-plate images, have been earmarked for the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies.

Roberta Woolens and Jennifer Lin

Shields’s sister Esther did missionary work in Korea. Roberta Wollons’s scholarly article “Traveling for God and Adventure” examines such a career as an outlet for nineteenth-century women dissatisfied with the strictures of domestic life.  In “Shanghai Faithful: Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family” (2017) Jennifer Lin sheds light on the cultural clash wrought by missionaries. Here is publisher Rowman and Littlefield’s synopsis:

Through the 150-year saga of a single family, this book vividly dramatizes the remarkable religious evolution of the world’s most populous nation. Shanghai Faithful is both a touching family memoir and a chronicle of the astonishing spread of Christianity in China. Five generations of the Lin family - buffeted by history’s crosscurrents and personal strife - bring to life an epoch that is still unfolding.  A compelling cast - a poor fisherman, a doctor who treated opium addicts, an Ivy League–educated priest, and the charismatic preacher Watchman Nee - sets the book in motion. Veteran journalist Jennifer Lin takes readers from remote nineteenth-century mission outposts to the thriving house churches and cathedrals of today’s China. The Lin family - and the book’s central figure, the Reverend Lin Pu-chi - offer witness to China’s tumultuous past, up to and beyond the betrayals and madness of the Cultural Revolution, when the family’s resolute faith led to years of suffering. Forgiveness and redemption bring the story full circle. With its sweep of history and the intimacy of long-hidden family stories, Shanghai Faithful offers a fresh look at Christianity in China - past, present, and future.

 Trudi McKamey

Trudi McKamey achieved the rank of Ruby Life Master, having accumulated 1500 masterpoints.  When she started out, very few games for 299ers (those with fewer than 300 master points) existed, and she felt like an interloper competing against accomplished area players, but they were very welcoming and mentored her.   Trudi thanked the many partners who encouraged her to participate in tournaments and concluded, “I love the game.  I try to improve and I love my bridge family.”  In Barbara Walczak’s Newsletter Yuan Hsu offered congratulations and wrote: “Playing bridge with such a nice and pretty lady like Trudi is truly a joyful experience.  She is not only a good bridge player but also a very kind and wonderful human being.  Trudi and I are partners twice a month, and I want to thank her for being so nice to me all these times and never complaining about my bridge playing or behavior.”

At Banta Senior Center Charlie Halberstadt and I, sitting North-South, finished third in duplicate, earning each of us .35 of a master point.  When we finished early, Dee Browne said her PCACS (Porter County Aging and Community Services) bus wouldn’t soon be arriving, so Fred Green, Ric Friedman, and I stayed for another eight hands.  All afternoon I had weak hands, but now I opened almost every time.  Dee’s driver had long white hair, a summer tan, a friendly demeanor, and reminded me of a mellow version of unforgettable student and Vietnam vet L.T. Wolf, a pizza deliveryman last time I saw him.  Allison Schuette and Elizabeth Wuerffel live just blocks away and vote at Banta Center. When I told them that they’d be eligible to join at 50, Al joked: “That’s not so far off.”

In John Updike’s “My Father on the Verge of Disgrace” the son related that the old man, a high school science teacher, was from New Jersey and therefore an interloper.  For one thing, Updike wrote, “He was not Pennsylvania-German enough, and took too little pleasure in silence and order.”The primary cause of the son’s concern: he borrowed money from what he’d collected working at sports events until the next pay period.  The son lived in fear that his father would become the object of ridicule. It reminded me of how much I hated Midge subbing at Fort Washington, especially in my classroom, given the hard time students commonly give substitute teachers and the ever-present danger of embarrassment.

 Anne Balay (on left) with family

Anne Balay moved to St. Louis to be near Emma and Avi after tiring of the uncertainty of her visiting professorship status at Haverford College and an unsuccessful job search despite having published two pathbreaking books on LGBT steelworkers and transgender long-haul truckers. She’s hoping to latch on part-time at an area university.  Having begun researching sex workers, Anne recently posted this lament on Facebook that got over a hundred sympathetic replies within 24 hours (but no job offer as yet):“Irony: I write about people who are invisible and despised AND queer or otherwise marginal. Yet I'm surprised that nobody hires me and values the work. OF COURSE THEY DON'T and THAT's HOW YOU KNOW IT'S IMPORTANT. Also, I'm collecting Oral Histories for a new book and Holy Goddammit these people are amazing and redefine creativity and heroism. Foodstamps scholar, that's me.”

None of the Jeopardy contestants could answer the final question in the category 70s album reviews. From the clue: “Rolling Stone stated that the album showcases both the best and worst tendencies of Los Angeles-situated rock, but more strikingly its lyrics present a convincing and unflattering portrait of the milieu itself.”  I knew it was “Hotel California” by the Eagles.  One contestant drew a blank, another wrote Rumours by Fleetwood Mac(a good guess), and the third scribbled “Exile on Main Street” by the Rolling Stones.

Returning Morrissey’s “California Son” CD a day late cost me a nickel.  It opens with a cover of Jobraith’s “Morning Starship” and closes with “Lady Willpower,” first recorded by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, a band (above) that often wore replicas of Civil War uniforms. Both deal with love lost and appear to be nonpolitical, in contrast to cuts of Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game” about the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and “Days of Decision” written by Phil Ochs in reaction to the 1964 abduction and murder of SNCC Freedom Fighters Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. Here are the final verses:

There's been warnin's of fire, warnin's of flood,
Now there's the warnin' of the bullet and the blood,
From the three bodies buried in the mississippi mud,
Sayin' these are the days of decision.

There's a change in the wind, and a split in the road,
You can do what's right or you can do what you are told,
And the prize of the victory will belong to the bold,
Yes, these are the days of decision.

Huge crowds of demonstrators forced Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rosello to resign after internet messages revealed him to be petty and corrupt. The clincher: ridiculing Hurricane Maria victims.  Rosello made the sudden announcement on Facebook.  TV cameras captured the mood shift of the crowd from righteous anger to dead quiet as thousands of iPhones carried the speech, then unabashed jubilation.

Wishlist

“I wish I was a messenger and all the news was good,

I wish I was the full moon shining off a Camaro’s hood.”

    “Wishlist,” Pearl Jam

 59-year veteran steelworker John Gold; photos by Jerry Davich

Jerry Davich wrote a Post-Tribunecolumn on steelworkers who put in 50 years at the mill, despite the dirty, unhealthy, dangerous environment, forced overtime, and constant shift work that, as one veteran exclaimed, took ten years out of your life. Why would someone do that, he wondered. Some feared they’d soon die if they retired.  Others, proud to be called steelworkers, claimed to like the workplace camaraderie and being productive.  Others didn’t have much of a home life and preferred not to be in the house all high wages that paid for maintaining a middle-class lifestyle, including the ability to send children and grandchildren to college.  Replying the Davich’s column, Carla Waters Spencer stressed the economic security a mill job provided her family: “My dad worked at US Steel for 52 years in the coke plant, retiring after my mom was diagnosed with cancer because she needed his help at home. Mom and Dad were able to raise the four of us kids, pretty much on his income, and we wanted for nothing.”Valerie Dixon commented:

  My dad worked at USS for 46 years! He started out in a dirty section and moved to an overhead crane in shipping at the sheet and tin mill; loading coils. He had health problems for as long as I can remember; one being thyroid problems. They didn’t use hearing protection back then either and the damage was done by the time he started wearing ear plugs. The shifts they had them work were stressful: 1 week days,1 week 4 to 12’s, 1 week midnights; alternating until a vacation. They did have great vacation benefits back then; 13 weeks every so many years. Traveling the country during those paid weeks off were the best childhood memories.

Cindy C. Bean posted a photo of hubby Larry posing with Jerry Davich’s “Lost Gary” at Sam’s Club and one she took of a window in an abandoned church. 

 Cubs fan Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam

I’m approaching my golden anniversary being associated with IU Northwest.  I still go in to the office four days a week and keep active intellectually guest lecturing and writing a blog.  I am vain enough to believe that my Steel Shavingsmagazine and work with the Calumet Regional Archives has lasting value. There are no exotic vacation spots or adventurous feats on my wish or bucket list beyond continuing what I do now, including travel to scholarly conferences.  Like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, in 2016 I witnessed the Chicago Cubs win the World Series for the first time in our lifetimes, near the top of both our wish lists. Recently, Vedder talked about his love affair with the Cubbies:

  It probably started because my grandpa took me to Wrigley Field. The first day I was about 4 and a half or 5, we saw the Pirates play the Cubs. When we came up the bleachers, you could smell the stench of one of those white capsules in the piss thing. That was the smell, mix it with hot dog, and walking up the ramp and I could hear the pop of the gloves, it was a Wizard of Oz moment to see that field for the first time.  It was the greenest green I ever, the whitest white, Jose Cardenal, the coolest afro. That moment I feel something inside changed, and a fire was lit. 

 Brandy Halladay at Hall of fame ceremony

Inducted into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, were six worthy candidates, including Cub reliever Lee Smith, White Sox clutch hitter Harold Baines, and Phillies ace Ray “Doc” Holladay, who died two years ago when his small plane crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.  He’d been suffering from depression and addiction to pain medication and may have taken his own life.  Joining Philadelphia in 2010, Holladay pitched a perfect game that May and won postseason contests against Cincinnati and San Francisco, the eventual World Series champs.  Lee Smith thanked his Castor, Louisiana, school principal for buying equipment his family couldn’t afford, enabling him to play baseball. Yankee closer Mariano Rivera, the Hall of Fame’s first unanimous selection and final speaker, joked that he’s always the last one called on.

 army troops march down Broadway in Gary during 1919 steel strike

Robert Blaszkiewicz’s mention of the 1919 Chicago Race Riot reminded me that I taught an entire course about that fateful year and used William M. Tuttle’s “Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919.”  Racial disturbances also erupted in Washington, D.C., Omaha, Nebraska, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and throughout the South.  Required reading included Robert K. Murray’s “Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria” and David Brody’s “Labor in Crisis,” about a nationwide steel strike during which army troops invaded Gary at pro-business Mayor William Hodges’s invitation, jailing union leaders, and crushing the strike.   The class read the coming-of-age novel “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson and Gene Smith’s “When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson,” which details the President’s incapacitation during the Versailles Treaty ratification fight. I offered the course 55 years after these events, which seemed like ancient history – about the same number of years past as the March on Washington and John F. Kennedy’s assassination. An older student recalled listening to news of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic.

Momma Mia! cast: Kolsch front, middle; Romersberger back, third from left

Toni and I thoroughly enjoyed “Momma Mia!” at Memorial Opera House.  We first saw the play in Las Vegas and enjoyed both the movie starring Meryl Streep and its sequel, featuring an iconic cameo by Cher singing “Fernando.”  The best numbers were the upbeat ones involving the entire cast, including lively dancers led by long-legged Jordyn Romersberger (an instructor at Mirror Image Studio) and athletic, blond-wigged VU grad Carley Kolsch.  Bobbie Sue Kvachkoff shined as Tanya and Mark Williams as rich Englishman Harry, one of momma Donna’s three former lovers.  That fling was his last heterosexual affair, Harry confided.

“We lived poor as dump dogs,”a character declares in John Updike’s “My Father on the Vege of Disgrace,” a great expression I’d never heard before. The short story, from “Licks of Love” (2000), takes place in a town west of Philadelphia not unlike my hometown, Fort Washington, six decades before:

    In this present day of strip malls and towns that are mere boundaries on a developer’s map, it is hard to imagine the core of authority that existed then in small towns, at least in the view of a child – the power of righteousness and enforcement that radiated from the humorless miens of the central men.  They were not necessarily officials; our town was too small to have many of them.  But certain local merchants, a clergyman or two, the undertaker whose green-awninged mansion dominated the main intersection, across from a tavern and a drugstore, not to mention the druggist and the supervising principal of the school, projected a potential for condemnation and banishment.

One of Midge’s chief concerns concerning my aberrant youthful behavior could be summed up by the warning, “What would neighbors think?”  When I came home from college, she’d always drag me to church until I showed up with a beard.  That Sunday, church was never mentioned. Unlike Toni, whose Catholic upbringing fostered feelings of guilt, for me the emotion was shame, not so much what I did but how it would look.

Time’s Lucy Feldman interviewed Richard Russo, about his new novel, “Chances Are.” Responding to a critic who unfairly called him a misogynist, Russo said, “I have to admit, having been raised a Catholic, my first instinct when anybody says anything bad about me is always to say, ‘God, is that true?’”   Attending the University of Arizona in 1969 at the time of the first draft lottery, he recalled joking around with friends initially and then everyone drifting away to call home. His number was 332, which he gave to a character that also inherited some of his idiosyncrasies.  Ruminating over his own fate, Russo stated: “There are certain times when it’s good to be industrious, but that night it was good to be lucky.”  He elaborated:

 There are certain things that are fated, that no matter how hard we try are beyond our ability to alter or shape. There are certain things over which we do have agency.  And then of course there is dumb luck.  But suppose you put me in the exact same place where I started, with the same parents, living on the same street and you give me 99 more tries.  There would be 99 different outcomes.

 

The town of Highlight’s Pride Day celebration featured entertainment (including Eve Bottando playing accordion), interesting displays of all sorts, and spontaneous outbursts of enthusiasm among the LGBTQ participants and supporters. One couple getting married changed in a dressing room along with drag queen who made a big fuss over them.

Dave is attending a conference for teachers in San Antonio, a place I wouldn’t mind visiting that’s evidently been well-governed by Henry Cisneros during the 1980s and, between 2009 and 2014, Julian Castro, whom I hope is on the 2020 Democratic Presidential ticket. 

 

On Jeopardy nobody knew what Kurt Vonnegut novel time traveler Billy Pilgrim was in (easy, “Slaughterhouse Five”) or, on Final Jeopardy, which landmark African explorer David Livingston discovered. I figured it was either Mount Kilimanjaro or Victoria Falls and correctly guessed the latter. The guesses included Mount Kilimanjaro, sources of the Nile, and Timbuctoo.