Hot Hot Hot

“Me mind is on fire

Me soul is on fire

Feelin hot hot hot”

   “Hot Hot Hot,” Buster Poindexter 

David Johansen in middle

Written and first recorded in 1982 by Arrow (Alphonsus Celestine Edmund Cassell) from the Caribbean island of Monserrat as an upbeat calypso, “Hot Hot Hot” became a hit five years later for David Johansen, formerly with the New York Dolls, under the pseudonym Buster Poindexter. The music video caught on, and “Hot Hot Hot” became a karaoke favorite, with the word hot repeated a total of 137 times.  Toyota commercialized the tune (Toyota’s Hot Hot Hot”),and The Cure recorded a version with lyrics about being struck by lightning.  Jimmy Buffet opens most shows with “Hot Hot Hot,” which has been used in many TV and movie soundtracks, including “The Office” and “The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea” (2000).

I wrote my University of Hawaii master’s thesis on somebody named Poindexter, territorial governor Joseph Boyd Poindexter.  Appointed by FDR, Poindexter helped implement the New Deal in the Hawaiian islands and brought Asian-Americans into leadership roles in Hawaii’s Democratic Party.  Sadly, he is most remembered (and not fondly) for authorizing martial law during World War II, which lasted much longer than islanders thought necessary, even though the governor was ordered to do so by Franklin Roosevelt, leaving him no choice.  Had he refused the President’s direct order, Hawaii faced the prospect of a military takeover and loss of home rule. Nicknamed “Mahope Joe” for his rather plodding, uncharismatic personality, he nonetheless was notorious within Iolani Palace, I found out, for pinching women unfortunate to be behind him in the elevator.

A record heat wave is affecting most of the nation, including Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana.  At 8:30 the temperature was already 86 degrees with high humidity.  Yesterday was even hotter.  Numerous weekend outdoor events got cancelled but not the Porter County Fair. I used to work the IUN booth there in a building that at least had air conditioning.  A friend worked in a fried veggie truck that if still in operation must be insufferable in such weather. Midway through the Cibs game an huge cheer erupted even though nothing had transpired on the field.  The wind had shifted to the north, suddenly dropping the temperature ten to twenty degrees. With the wind blowing out the score had reached 6-5, Cubs, in the fifth.  No runs scored after that.

I’ve received several notices about my sixtieth high school reunion, scheduled for October 2020. Those less sentimental or still harboring traumatic memories from their teen years generally don’t come.  I’ve attended every one since my twentieth, enjoy the surprises they always provide, and retain vivid memories from each.  In 1980 I shared a smoke in the parking lot with Gaard and Chuck Logan and was surprised some people hardly recognized me because I’d grown a good six inches since high school; in 1990 Susan McGrath asked me to dance to “Proud Mary” by Ike and Tina Turner; in 1995 I got Wayne Wylie (who never dances, wife Fran warned) to boogie with me to the Ramones’ “I Wanna be Sedated.” Favorite math teacher Ed Taddei came to the fortieth, sexy Miss Polsky and Mr. Beck to the 45^th, and several first-timers to the fiftieth, including childhood pal Jay Bumm and Homecoming Queen Wendy Henry wearing, unbelievably, a tiara.  In 2015 traded baseball memories with old pal Eddie Piszak; classmate Fred Scott played hits from 1960, including “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, “Go Jimmy Go” by Jimmy Clanton, and “Save the Last Dance For Me” by the Drifters. Although I need the help of name tags for a few classmates, most I recognize almost immediately. One year, however I mistook Carolyn Aubel, who only attended Upper Dublin (U.D.) her senior year, for Carolyn Ott and blurted out that I’d had a crush on her in junior high.  Now I’m more careful.

In John Updike’s “Lunch Hour” first published in the New Yorker, David Kern attends his forty-fifth reunion in a small Pennsylvania community not unlike my home town of Fort Washington, PA, whose “underpopulated terrain,”Updike wrote, was now “filled with shopping centers, car lots, aluminum diners, and fast-food franchises.”The only such franchise I recall near us was a Dairy Queen (we called it a frozen custard stand) where Judy Jenkins and Alice Ottinger worked one summer.  Updike describes reunion attendees being greeted by displays of “photos from the happy days – duck tails, bobby sox, the smoke-filled luncheonette.”David observes that youthful personality traits were poor predictors of adult achievement:

 It was the comically tongue-tied yokel, invisible in class, who moved to Maryland and founded an empire of plant nurseries and parked a silver Jaguar in the lot of the reunion restaurant.  It was the forlorn, scorned daughter of a divorced mother – a monstrous thing in those days – who had become a glamorous merchandising executive out in Chicago.  The class cut-ups had become schoolteachers and policemen, solemn and ponderous with the responsibility of maintaining local order.   The prize for newest father – his bouncy fourth wife in a low-cut satin minidress, indistinguishable from his third, five years ago – went to a boy who had never, as far as anyone could recall, attended a dance or gone out on a date. The class wallflowers, an almost invisible backdrop of colorless femininity against which the star females had done their cheers and flaunted their charms, had acquired graceful manners and a pert suburban poise, while the queens of the class had succumbed to a lopsided overdevelopment of the qualities – bustiness, peppiness, recklessness, a cunning chiseled hardness – that had made them spectacular.

Updike’s last line is not true of U.D. stars Suzi Hummel, Susan Floyd, Judy Gradin, and Marianne Tambourino, all of whom aged gracefully.  Like David, I had grown up in a rural suburb where I was quite popular, moved away for a time, then returned to Upper Dublin school with former classmates.  We both felt insecure and initially didn’t fit into any one group until befriended by a girl, in David’s case Julia, in mine Mary Delp.  Mary taking a liking to me did wonders for my self-image. We first bonded her a school bus one afternoon when I was visiting Eddie Piszak; in David and Julia’s case, it was during their 55-minute lunch breaks when they jumped in a car with two others, drove around, and ended up at a burger joint. It was a time in our lives when, to paraphrase Updike, we were on the edge of those possibilities approaching to shape and limit our lives.

 Mary in 2015

Like Upper Dublin, David’s old school, “with its waxed oak hallways and wealth of hidden asbestos, had been razed” and at his next reunion “the door prizes had been yellow bricks salvaged from the rubble.”  In my case, it was an offer to tour the new facility, which I declined.  I preferred to remember the old junior-senior high building.  Shortly after graduating, Chuck Bahmueller, Vince Curll, and I, after consuming a few beers, paid a visit to “Old U.D.”  Stopping to see guidance counselor Mr. Dulfer, always good for a hall pass or excuse slip in a pinch, tactfully passed out mints after getting a whiff of us.  Dulfer’s advice to college-bound seniors never wavered: consider Muhlenberg College, his alma mater.  “Hot Hot Hot” French teacher Renee Polsky greeted us warmly and called me Jacques, which always got a rise out of me. Favorite teacher H.M. Jones was gone, however, summarily dismissed for indecent behavior toward a male student.

Jeanette Strong at Fair Housing rally

Archivist Steve McShane sent a researcher some photos of a Gary civil rights march that took place on September 9, 1963 organized by the Combined Citizens Committee on Open Occupancy (CCCOOO) to protest ghettoized housing conditions and rally support for an open housing ordinance. Thousands assembled at 25th and Broadway behind a coffin emblazoned with the words “Segregated Housing.”  Carrying banners and singing “We Shall Overcome,” the crowd paraded down Broadway to City Hall for a rousing rally.  

above, Gary Works in 1908; below, Allison Schuette

Allison Schuette has written numerous poems inspired by photos from Ron Cohen and my “Gary: A Pictorial History.” Accompanying “The Lakefront Changed from Sand to Steel” is a panoramic view of Gary Works, circa 1908, from the Calumet Regional Archives US Steel digital collection that one can access online.  Schuette wrote: 

Paul says as a younger man he believed racism would hold Gary 

back only a short while: close to Chicago, lots of infrastructure, 

national lakeshore. Liz and I drive up Indiana 49, 

exit on US 12, and drive west to Beverly Shores to avoid 

parking fees. At Kemil Beach, the shoreline sprawls northeast to Michigan, 

southwest to Burns Harbor then Gary: sand to steel. Industrialists

that first decade of the 20^thcentury hired men to dig 

into the dunes and drain the swamps. What did it feel like to jump in the 

lake at the end of a grimy day? How large did the labor leave one? 

What stature did one single worker inherit from the scope of the 

industrial imagination? Or did the lake have the power 

to minimize the enterprise, goading the entrepreneur to put in place

a black and white (and brown) world that Paul would have to witness far 

longer than he ever thought possible?

Al explained the concluding lines in this manner: “I was intending it to mean that the owners and management were creating and relying on segregation to keep workers opposed to seeing common cause. I also wanted to play on the concept of ‘black and white thinking’ and oversimplification in order to control outsized forces.”

 Kevin and Tina Horn

Juanita Mitchell

Tina Horn successfully pulled off a surprise fiftieth birthday party for hubby Kevin at AJ’s Pizza by pretending it was somebody else’s celebration.  “You got me,” Kevin admitted.  He’s a huge White Sox fan and a couple weeks earlier g Sox as his present.  As we were singing “Happy Birthday,” a Sox player hit a home run that was on the screen behind him, which Kevin didn’t fail to notice.  I talked Region politics with former newsman Robert Blaszkiewicz, who worked for the NWI Times and Chicago Tribune before landing a public-relation position with Franciscan Health.  He turned me on to an article in the Tribune about 107-year-old Juanita Mitchell, who remembered the 1919 Chicago Race Riot, which started when a black kid on a raft drifted close to the white beach, was struck by a rock, and drowned.  Juanita told the Tribune: “My uncle pulled out the biggest gun I’ve ever seen and stood at the window, and I heard him say ‘Here they come,’”Mitchell explained, “It meant the white folks was coming up 35th Street and that the riot was going to begin.”We both lamented the decline in quality of the Times’Sunday Forumsection since editor Doug Ross was bought out.  We agreed thatTimes reporter Joseph Pete is top notch.  Whenever he calls for information about a story, he calls me sir.  He’s that way with everyone, even me, Robert told me, a carryover from the military.Pete’s wife Meredith is an ace reporter for the Post-Tribune.

Meredith and Joseph Pete

 photos by Joseph Pete

For the past three weeks on the way to and from Banta Center for bridge I’ve passed striking machinists picketing the Regal Beloit plant in Valpo.  When I first waved, someone held up a sign asking me to honk if supportive, so that’s what I’ve been doing.  International Association of Machinists Local 2016 Business Representative David Gault, representing the 130 striking employees, told Joseph Pete that health insurance increases over the life of the past two contracts have eaten up workers’ wages.  Regal, which produces aerospace bearings, including parts for military helicopters, has been stonewalling rather than bargaining in good faith.