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.”