Buffington Park

“The most successful attempts at industrial social betterment are those furthest removed from the suspicion of domination or control of the employer.” Illinois Steel Company President Eugene J. Buffington

 above, Sean O'Donnell and James Powell; below, Siblings Collin and Shawn Hendron; photos by Kale Wilk

Rich Reuth near splash pad

Both local dailies, the Post-Tribune and the Times, ran stories about two dozen members of IIAF (International Association of Fire Fighters) Local 359 undertaking a major project to spruce up Gary’s Buffington Park.  It had been neglected by the undermanned Parks Department, which has only 3 full-time maintenance workers and 8 seasonal employees to care for 57 parks under the city’s auspices.  In 2012 the Bridgette C. Kelly Foundation adopted Buffington Park and made considerable improvements; a month later vandals knocked down fences, ripped out plants, and set playground equipment on fire. Volunteers repaired the damage, but at present Buffington Park, in the words of Post-Trib correspondent Carole Carlson, was “down on its luck again.”Local 359 secretary Jimmy Siciliano told Times reporter Emily Schnipke: “This was going to start as lawn cutting and tree trimming and now it’s turned into a huge thing with landscaping companies [involved].” Local businesses have donated equipment and supplies to the firefighters.  In the park an impressive stone memorial contains the names of over a thousand residents who served in World War II. Plans are afoot to place mulch and plants around the memorial and sandblast the historic structure to remove dirt and other foreign substances.

 Eugene Buffington freighter in 1962

Few Gary residents have any memory of Eugene J. Buffington other than to recognize the name from the Gary harbor and park dedicated to him.  At the turn of the twentieth century, when United States Steel Corporation decided to build an integrated, state-of-the art plant (Gary Works) on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, Eugene Buffington played a central role during its planning stages. Determined to avoid pitfalls encountered by palace car magnate George M. Pullman after he established the company town of Pullman, Illinois, Buffington opted not to have the corporation provide housing for steelworkers, preferring to sell plots of land through a subsidiary, the Gary Land Company.  In 1909 Buffington asserted: “Gary is nothing more than the product of effort along practical line to secure right living conditions around a steel-manufacturing plant.” Unfortunately, Steel officials failed to pay the majority of its work force a living wage; hence, a home ownership on Gary’s northside was beyond the means of unskilled immigrant laborers. Furthermore, residents suffered from pollution from the mill and had very limited access to Lake Michigan or public recreational space.  Two exceptions were Buffington Park at Seventh and Connecticut east of Broadway and Jefferson Park on the westside – both rumored to attract gay men. 

 Jefferson Park

A near-record 13 couples turned out for bridge at Chesterton Y.  Competing against 12 others, Charlie and I finished fourth, behind three much more experienced pairs that play several times a week.  Seated near the door, we could hear Latin music emanating from the exercise room.  After finishing our two hands against Dottie Hart and Terry Bauer ahead of most other tables, I asked Dottie if she wanted to dance the Bossa Nova in honor of legendary Brazilian composer, singer, and guitarist Joao Gilberto, who recently died at age 88.  She was ready to take me up on it.  Gilberto’s most famous song was “The Girl from Ipanema.”  Summing up the results, director Alan Yngve wrote: “Dave Bigler and Trudi McKamey finished as the best with a nice 64.5% game; a lot of their success was from play of the hand, both declarer and in defense.” 

 above, Joao Gilberto; below, Dilma Rousseff

Brazil’s political situation is in shambles due to revelations that Justice Minister Sergio Moro had used heavy-handed, illegal methods while a magistrate overseeing a corruption investigation that resulted in former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva convicted of bribery and barred from running in the 2018 election at a time when he was heavily favored to win.  Previously, Da Silva’s Workers’ Party ally and successor Dilma Rousseff was impeached and removed from office by the ultra-partisan Brazilian Senate.  The scandal call into question the legitimacy of probes against prominent Workers’ Party members.  On the NPR’s “Democracy Now” Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of the investigative group Intercept, whose reportage unearthed the palpably unjudicial conduct of Sergio Moro, charged that the Justice Minister, in cahoots with the far-right regime currently in power, has launched an investigation intended to intimidate him. Greenwald has received numerous death threats. Moro’s heavy-handedness is reminiscent of Special Prosecutor Ken Starr relentless vendetta against Bill and Hillary Clinton. 

After a ticker tape parade for the victorious U.S. women’s soccer team, New York City mayor Bill De Blasio presented the World Cup champs with keys to the city as people chanted, “U-S-A! Equal Pay.”  Megan Rapinoe, a self-described proud lesbian (a Sports Illustrated cover story called her “a purple-haired lesbian goddess”),boasted,“This group is so resilient, is so tough, has such a sense of humor, is just so badass.  There is nothing that can faze this group. We’re chilling.  We’ve got pink hair and purple hair. We’ve got tattoos and dreadlocks. We’ve got white girls and black girls and everything in between. Straight girls and gay girls.”  No word yet about a White House invitation, which co-captain Megan Rapinoe has vowed to refuse.

 Christine Jorgensen in 1969

The May 2019 issue of The American Historian, a publication of the Organization of American Historians, is devoted to “Queer History.”  In “Queering the Classroom” Eric Gonzaba argues that introducing LGBTQ subject matter helps students understand the dynamics of power at play in a society and appreciate the struggles of people on the margins.  Gonzaba writes: “For those teaching gender and sexuality, it’s the story of male flight attendants at the dawn of the Jet Age . . . or about those entrepreneurs who ran sex-based businesses like porn cinemas.” Gonzaba glibly predicts: “Focus on the queerness in whatever you teach. Your students will love it.” An article on the history of Trans Activism begins with World War II veteran Christine Jorgensen’s 1952 sex reassignment surgery and celebrity status as a “blond bombshell.”I was disappointed to find that an article titled “We are what we eat” had nothing to do with food.  I did discover, however, an ad for a new book titled “Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America.”  

Missing from the special issue on Queer History was an article on LGBTQ laborers, such as steelworkers, long-haul truckers or sex workers, something former IUN scholar Anne Balay could have provided.  An open and outspoken lesbian denied tenure at my university, Balay’s fate exemplifies the perils of nontenured scholars coming out of the closet.  I am planning to present a paper next year in Singapore titled “A Queer History of Indiana University Northwest.”  In September as part of the IU Bicentennial celebration, IUN has scheduled a program featuring 8-minute faculty presentations about current research projects.  Here is an abstract of my proposal, which Toni predicts will be rejected.  I am more optimistic:

Fifteen years ago, Paul Kern and I published a history of IU Northwest entitled “Educating the Calumet Region.”  While it included material concerning campus policy regarding inappropriate faculty behavior toward students and information about LGBTQ (an acronym not in common use then) student groups on campus, we avoided probing deeply into sensitive areas regarding LGBTQ students and faculty. The latter, for the most part, were closeted, at least those without tenure.  My brief presentation, without mentioning names of specific people, will revisit the subject of ethical issues in handling same-sex matters in institutional histories in light of the fact that the study of what now is commonly called Queer History is a hot topic in academia.

In “The Woman Who Got Away,” originally published in the New Yorker and included in the 2000 anthology “Licks of Love,” John Updike, a keen observer of social norms, described faculty life fifty years ago at a small New England liberal arts college: 

 We survived by clustering together like a ball of snakes in a desert cave.  The Sixties had taught us the high moral value of copulation, and we were slow to give up on an activity so simultaneously pleasurable and healthy. Still, you couldn’t sleep with everybody; we were bourgeoisie, responsible, with jobs and children, and affairs demanded energy and extracted wear and tear.  We hadn’t learned yet to take the emotion out of sex. Looking back, the numbers don’t add up to what an average college student now manages in four years.  There were women you failed ever to sleep with; these, in retrospect, have a perverse vividness, perhaps the contacts, in the slithering ball of snakes, were so few that they have stayed distinct.