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.