In the City

I was born here in the city
With my back against the wall
Nothing grows, and life ain't very pretty
No one's there to catch you when you fall

“In the City,” Eagles

Canned Heat at Woodstock; below, Hanif Abdurraqib

When the Eagles formed in 1971 in Los Angeles, the counter-culture back-to-the-land fantasy of independent rural communes still was potent. At Woodstock two years before Canned Heat performed their iconic “Going Up the County,” which contains these lines:

I'm gonna leave this city, got to get away
All this fussin' and fightin' man, you know I sure can't stay
So baby pack your leavin' trunk
You know we've got to leave today
Just exactly where we're goin' I cannot say
But we might even leave the U.S.A.

“In the City” by the Eagles follows in a long antiurban American tradition, glorifying rural life and, more recently, what historian Kenneth T. Jackson called the “Crabgrass Frontier” of suburbia, whose allure was the promise of home ownership with garage and ample yards in a safe community with good schools.  Ibn “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” Black essayist Hanif Abdurraqib captured the misleading image as seen by a teenage interloper:

  The sidewalks were more even underneath our bike tires, and the silence was a gift to a group of reckless and noisy boys, spilling in from a place where everything rattled with the bass kicking out of some car’s trunk.  We would ride our bikes with our dirty and torn jeans and look at the manicured lawns and grand entrances and the playgrounds with no broken glass stretched across the landscape. . . . It allowed me to fantasize, imagine a world where everyone was happy and no one ever hurt.

Thomas Hart Benton, "America Today" city and steelmaking panels

Anti-urbanism, in part was a reaction to rapid industrialization and the subsequent influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants to our shores, demonized cities as centers of sin and crime, corruption and radicalism, poverty and wage slavery.  Thomas Hart Benton’s century-old 10-panel mural “America Today,” for example, depicts burlesque dancers, subway muggers, and bloodthirsty fans at a prizefight as well as muscular, overworked steelworkers tending ladles of molten steel and guiding red hot ingots along an assembly line.   

Allison Schuette wrote this poem based on 1907 stereographs depicting the construction of Gary Works and found in “Gary: A Pictorial History”:

    The scale of the enterprise is immense. 

I fear it cannot be communicated; it must be experienced. 

The historians’ illustrated history introduces the scope: 

the ragged landscape of dunes and the marshy swamps not yet dredged;

the size of the labor force, the conditions under which they labored 

(snakes, yellow jackets, hornets and dune fleas); 

the clearing of the land, grading of the land, 

digging of the land, constructing upon the land; 

the relocation of the Grand Calumet River 1000 miles south of its original bed; 

the immensity of the machines and the scaffolding, 

dwarfing the size of any labor force, exposing us for the ants we are. 

But scope is to scale as smell is to taste, 

a whiff of what is to come if you are allowed to eat at the table. 

Which makes the stereographs all the more tantalizing. 

Printed on the historians’ page, they tease but refuse to do their job. 

The unified, three-dimensional world split, duplicated, flattened. 

Not one set of foundations for the traveling cranes, but two. 

Not one array of the great blast furnaces, but two.

Not one crew of workers unloading the long steel beams for the open hearth mill, but two. 

Not one length of the machine shop interior under construction, but two. 

Duplication draws the mind to the surface, to comparison and contrast, right and left. 

The stereographs confirm the eagerness of the industrial age, 

the enthusiastic ego, multiplying the moment to drive the point home. 

Look, look. Look at what we’ve done. But all I can do is look.

I cannot see, as Oliver Wendell Holmes did, the “scraggy branches of a tree”

running out at me “as if they would scratch our eyes out.”

The present refuses me complete access to the past. 

When I ask, it says, the stereoscope has been packed away

     and no one remembers where to find it. 

Nobel laureate in literature Toni Morrison died at age 88.  She once said, “If there is a book that you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.”  She was born in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio. At the age of two she was inside a house that the landlord set on fire because her family could not afford to pay the rent.  Her parents laughed at the fool and moved on. Thus, Morrison learned early that, in her words, “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”  Morrison was a 2016 recipient of Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her novel “Jazz” (1992), set in Harlem during the 1920s, deals with a married salesman, Joe Trace, murdering Dorcas, his young lover whose corpse Joe’s wife Violet (“Violent”) assaults with a knife at the funeral. Danger and excitement stimulation all the senses: that was Harlem during its Renaissance.

The topic in Steve McShane’s Senior College class on the history of the Calumet Region was “Steelmakers and Steeltowns.” It covered the founding and industrial growth of Gary and East Chicago with emphasis on the steel mills that dominated almost every aspect of life.  I distributedSteel Shavings, volume 46, with Vivian Carter on the cover and promised to be back in 10 days to talk about her launching Vee-Jay Records and to play doo wop and rock and roll hits produced and released by the record label.  In class was Beatrice Petties, whom Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette interviewed for the VU Flight Paths project. Here are some of Beatrice’s recollections about her Gary work experiences:  

   My mother said, “Always leave a job to where maybe you could go back to it.”And that was how I tried to leave. Any job I left I tried to leave that way. Gave them notice and let them know I was leaving. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do that.

   I went to the Gary National Bank, worked in there for about five years.  Mr. Horn, my supervisor, promised that once I learned the job they would promote me.  I went through the training and did the job for a year but never got the promotion. So I walked in the office and I said, “Mr. Horn, it’s been a year since I finished my training. When am I going to get a promotion?”He said, “Let me get back to you.”I said, okay. About a week later, I stood there in the door and said, “Mr. Horn, what did you promise me?”He said, “Well, we can’t do this right now.” I said, “Why?”And he gave me some long reason. I said, “Okay.”I never argue with anybody about a job. I went around the corner, and put in an application for Gary Housing Authority. About a month later, I went in and I told Mr. Horn, “Mr. Horn, I’m handing in my resignation.”And he said, “Don’t do that. Wait I’ll get back to you.” I said, “Okay.”He came back the next day, and said, “We’re going to promote you.”I said, “No, thank you, Mr. Horn. I’m taking the job, and I can leave today if you would like.”He did not like it at all. They were paying me almost $1,500 more than what I was getting at the bank, so I naturally was not going to turn that job down.

   I worked in the purchasing department at Gary Housing Authority, and the lady that was over the purchasing department left. When they put the job up on the board, I asked for it, but because I hadn’t been there very long, they put someone else in the position. Mr. Bosak, he said the wrong thing to me. He said, “Will you show her how to do the job?” And I said, “Okay. Fine.” I did not make it any better or any worse. I went and applied at Methodist Hospital. And I left not just because he didn’t give me that promotion, I left because there was some political shenanigans going on. They had a fund going, “Flower Fund,” for people who worked there, but I found out through talking to some other people that it was really a political fund for whomever was in office at the time. I said, “Don’t take any money out of my salary for that.” That’s when I said, “Thank you,” left, and  got to Methodist Hospital. I worked in the engineering department for almost 18 years. I was the only lady in the department, and the guys were great. I had a good time. We even see each other and talk to each other now. But that was a good time. A very good time.

Miller mainstay and retired Purdue Calumet professor of Electrical Engineering Rich Gonzales passed away.  I’d see him at Joe Petras’s annual Marquette Park playground fundraiser and other local functions, such as Ed Asner’s one-man show as FDR.  We both were guests at a dinner party Tom Eaton threw and a house party for Indiana gubernatorial candidate John Gregg. Rich was a good guy.

Commission for Higher Education member Jon Costas

The Commission for Higher Education met at IUN, first time in eight years.  Since its creation in 1971, the state-mandated policy-making group, much ridiculed by a long line of administrators, has issued welcome, albeit sometimes ignored, mission statements stressing the need for Regional campuses to serve its local constituencies in terms of research, community service, and teaching goals and practices. When I arrived at the Arts and Sciences Building, the adjacent parking lots were blocked off for use by the university’s guests.  Inside I spotted a bunch of white men in suits (actually, I discovered later, 3 of the 14 members are women and one African American).  The only person I knew was Valparaiso mayor Jon Costas, who grew up in Gary’s Horace Mann district during the 1960s.  I told Chancellor Lowe’s administrative assistant Kathy Malone that I was under-dressed, then thought better of it since I was wearing an IU polo shirt.  One is never under-dressed wearing IU apparel.

The Chesterton Tribune often has more (and better) news coverage than the two major Region papers.  For instance, a recent issue contained a lengthy analysis of Trump freezing all Venezuelan assets, which the Russians (correctly in my opinion) labeled economically motivated “international banditry.” The Tribuneis owned and edited by David Canright, who graduated from IU and was active in anti-Vietnam War protests and the antinuke Bailly Alliance.  The daily has a long tradition of support for the working man and ecology.  In fact, it was founded in 1882 as a Greenback Party weekly.  During the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan was a force to be feared in Indiana small towns, the Tribune refused to print any articles about Klan activities.  It remains a vital source of community doings. 

 Kevin Nevers and Jeff Trout

I’ve long admired the work of Tribunereporter Kevin Nevers, who with Betty Canright also puts together “Echoes of the Past,” scouring files from 10, 15, 25, 50, and 75 years ago.  In August of 1944, for example, “two rattlesnakes were killed in Henry Grieger’s garden at Furnessville (an unincorporated community in Porter County along Route 20 near Beverly Shores).  One had four rattles and the other five and a half.” For the first time civilians were permitted to tour a few areas of the the Kingsbury Ordinance Plant. Also the Chesterton Merchants Association promised to build a band shell in the town park because passing New York Central trains made so much noise during concerts.  Presented with the Chamber of Commerce Community Service Award, Nevers credited David Canright with emphasizing that the Tribunewas a “newspaper of record.”  He said: “My editor doesn’t ask me what my lead is, he asks me how many stories I have and how much space I need. He winds me up and points me in the right direction."

On this date in 1974 Nixon resigned and in 1988 the Chicago Cubs turned on recently installed lights for the first ever Wrigley Field night game.  Exactly four year later, Metallica band member James Hetfield was badly burned due to a pyrotechnics explosion on stage at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium.  In 1995 Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead breathed his last.

At Banta Center my bridge partner was feisty Dottie Hart.  Ten years my senior, she is moving in with her daughter, who joked that Dottie could have men over so long as they were gone when she got home for work. I quipped, “What time does she get home for work?”  Among the treats: Don Giedemann’s delicious cherry cobbler, resembling what once was my Thanksgiving specialty.  Norm and Mary Ann Filipiak offered blue bearded iris bulbs to any takers. I took several that Toni appreciated in view of the fact that I never followed through on promises to dig up iris bulbs from our Maple Place residence when our National Lakeshore leaseback expired.  Pam Missman, whose husband was playing ping pong nearby, has an endearing smile that reminds me of seventh grade girlfriend Pam Tucker, a great kisser who, years later, told me that when my family moved to Michigan, it nearly broke her heart.  Sigh! Puppy love.

Regal Beloit workers in Valpo 130 strong are in the sixth week of their strike.  I pass the pickets to and from bridge.  Journeyman carpenter Ryan Higgins toldTimescorrespondent Joseph Pete that medical insurance eats up a huge chunk of workers’ salaries and asserted:

  My dad has worked here for 42 years. Raised my sister and I on fair wages and benefits. I remember when I was a kid and McGills (the original owner) would have company picnics and would personally man the grill and drink beer with his employees! Those days are long gone! My dad makes less than he did 25 years ago. How is that fair? Stand up for what is right people!

Ryan Higgins

photo by Liz Wuerffel