“You say you want to change the world
Well, do you believe in magic?
But you can only change yourself
Don’t sit around and complain about it.”
“Complainer,” Cold War Kids
Cold War Kids formed 15 years ago. Charter member Matt Maust thought up the name when visiting a park in Budapest and noticing that statues were missing. They were of Socialist Workers Party leaders such as János Kádár and had been removed after the fall of communism. “I am a Cold War kid, too,”Maust claimed, having been born in 1979. After releasing a compilation CD in 2018 titled “This Will Blow Over in Time,” their newest album, featuring “Complainer” and “Fourth of July,” is “New Age Norms.” I also consider myself a Cold War kid. Because of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, at Fort Washington school we got under our desks during air raid drills in case the Russians dropped a hydrogen bomb in our midst. Our Weekly Readertold of “human wave” attacks by “Red Chinese” hordes fighting Americans in Korea. The Red Scare infected politics and produced such rancid demagogies as Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican from Wisconsin. Vestiges of Cold War rhetoric remain in Trump’s latest attempts to brand leading Democratic Presidential contenders as communists.
Having helped write the inscription, I was invited to a historic marker dedication ceremony honoring the legacy of City Methodist Church. Reverend Curtis Whittaker (on right) of Gary’s Progressive Community Church, a leader of the Legacy Foundation urban revitalization group, was familiar with my portrait of Reverend William Graham Seaman in “Gary’s First Hundred Years” and according to the Post-Tribune’sCarole Carlson, stated:
This was a church that fought against the evils of the time. It wasn’t popular to speak on behalf of immigrants and blacks. This church took a stand. If these crumbling walls could talk, they would tell you it wasn’t an easy decision to get involved in change. Others in the church didn’t see the vision.
Lay criticism, racial polarization, and the onset of the Great Depression torpedoed Seaman’s dream of an inner-city church bringing together Gary’s fragmented community under the banners of faith and brotherhood and ultimately led to his being summarily transferred to a parish in Lancaster, Ohio.
Pastor Whittaker’s hopefulness in the face of formidable obstacles facing his Emerson district neighborhood brings to mind Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay “Searching for a New Kind of Optimism,” written on Cape Cod as 2016 concluded with Trump poised to enter the White House. Abdurraqib was listening to “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids, which contains the line, “It’s such a gamble when you get a face”and pondered what lay ahead for people of color and himself in particular:
I have been thinking about the value of optimism while cities burn, while people are fearing for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, while discourse is reduced to laughing through a chorus of anxiety. A woman in a Cape Cod diner the day after Christmas saw me eyeing the news and shaking my head. She told me that “things will get better,”and I wasn’t sure they would but I nodded and said, “They surely can’t get any worse,”which is a lie we all tell, the one that we want to believe, even as there are jaws opening before us.
A half-century earlier, writer Norman Mailer pondered similar concerns as the tumultuous Sixties culminated with Richard Nixon in the White House and an American flag planted on the moon, presaging, Mailer feared, the jaws of technology and Big Brother opening before us.
A Saturday Evening Club (SEC) presentation by Jim Albers dealt with William E. Pinney, one of the organization’s charter members. The event took place at Pinney-Purdue Agricultural Center in Wanatah and began with a tour conducted by Superintendent Gary Tragesser of the 486 acres of farmland that Pinney and daughter Myra donated “for the use and benefit of the trustees of Purdue University.” According to the booklet “Celebrating 100 Years, 1919-2019,” the crops produced, mainly corn and soybeans, were connected to research projects pertaining to “hybrid and variety evaluation, agronomic practices, organic and conventional vegetable production, weed science, insect and plant disease management, climatology, and forestry.” Superintendent Tragesser offered free watermelons to those on the tour. Mine proved to be delicious.
Born in 1847 in a La Porte County log cabin to Horace and Nancy Pinney, William E. Pinney attended Valparaiso Male and Female College, VU’s predecessor, and became a successful lawyer, banker, and real estate investor. He originally offered the 486 acres, approximately a tenth of his farm holdings, to his alma mater(being one of its trustees), but the school lacked the resources to manage it properly. Albers’s talk focused on Pinney’s civic activities. I learned that that the Saturday Evening Club (SEC), founded in 1903, was an all-male spinoff of the Mathesis Club, which began in 1897 with members of both sexes, and whose records, Albers noted, are housed in IUN’s Calumet Regional Archives (CRA), which he visited several times researching his talk. Women members of the Mathesis Club tended to favor literary matters, while the men preferred political discourse and debate about subjects deemed unsuitable for the opposite sex. The two groups initially met on alternative Saturdays in members’ homes, which after SEC meetings, wives complained, stunk of cigar smoke for days afterwards.
The town of Wanatah, Albers noted, was named for a Potawatomi Indian whose name meant “knee deep in muck”– a fit description for much of the soil. That elicited a joke about a fire breaking out in a Wanatah farmer’s bathroom that fortunately did not spread to the house. The two times I recall being in Wanatah were to buy inexpensive furniture in the 1970s and to attend a memorial service for Kevin Horn’s father.
Around 20 years ago, member Pat Bankston advocated that SEC membership be open to women, but the consensus among others back then was that wives wouldn’t be comfortable with their husbands meeting on Saturday night with other women that might be unattached and potential rivals for their spouse’s affection. As a compromise, once each year a Ladies Night takes place featuring an outside speaker. Next April, for example, it will be Keith Gambil, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association. There is precedent, someone interjected, for inviting women to regular monthly meetings when the subject is germane to their field. From the discussion I sense a general sentiment for going coed.
Each person was expected to comment on the presentation. I praised the inclusion of historical background on the Pinney family, much of which came from Pinney’s 1923 presentation called “The Pioneers,” based largely on his Aunt Mary’s recollections. During the taxing seven-week journey from Virginia, some days the wagons became so mired in northwest Ohio’s “Great Black Swamp” that the party could literally see the site where they had camped the evening before. I noted that when Valparaiso University acquired the Pinney property, its financial hardships had intensified to the point where bankruptcy was a distinct possibility, and trustees even considered selling the institution to the Ku Klux Klan. In 1925 the Lutheran University Association came to the rescue and took control of the college.
The carrier pigeons, now extinct, came in wonderfully great flocks and were so numerous that at times of sowing wheat it became necessary to guard the wheat fields. An old German neighbor of ours was an expert in catching these wild pigeons with a net, and he kept what he called “stool pigeons” which he used as decoys to which he attached a net of some kind in which the wild pigeons became entangled. In this way he caught pigeons by the bag full.
A remember sand hill cranes made annual visits, and when they took their flight from the ground about mid-day, they circled round and round each time getting higher and higher in the direction of the sun, nearly straight upwards, until they were mere specs and then disappeared among dazzling sunbeams.
IUN’s Theater Department put on free weekend performances of a modern version of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” set during Desert Storm. The play, directed by students Stephanie Naumoff and Jay-Lan Halliburton, was staged at various Region outdoor venues during the summer. Professor Mark Baer played Brabantio while recent alumnus Brandon Hearne had the title role. Melissa Downs played evil Desdemona
2017 PBS documentary
Nicole showed a film clip designed for Cold War-era schoolchildren called “Duck and Cover” on instructions how to react to a sudden nuclear attack. An animated turtle demonstrated by ducking into its shell when Air Raid sirens went off.
Myriam and Chris Young in 2016; photo by Erika Rose
Arriving at Gino’s with wife Myriam, colleague Chris Young spoke to book club members about Jim DeFelice’s “West Like Lightning,” covering the short-lived but legendary Pony Express. In my introduction I noted that the book dealt with the social history of the American West as well as technological advances and business entrepreneurship. Chris provided an interesting analysis of how history intersects with memory, myth, and folklore. He contrasted the Congressional support for expanding the postal service during the Early National period with late 1850sgovernment torpor at a time when sectional differences were coming to a head. Those who hadn’t read the book were amazed that the Pony Express lasted barely more than a year. It was celebrated in dime novels and Wild West shows by those looking back with nostalgia to a vanishing era, similar, I noted, to present interest in rodeos. Brian Barnes, who always reads the bimonthly selection, joked that in school he played a game called Pony Express, adding that it was similar to Post Office but with more horsing around.
The Cars’ front man Ric Ocasek died, evidently from a heart condition exacerbated by emphysema. WXRT’s Lin Brehmer credited him with being a true innovator respected by both purists and the general public. I put on “Heartbeat City” in tribute – just what I needed. Brandon Flowers of the Killers called Ocasek “my first king”and shared an email he once sent Ric to express his gratitude for enriching his life:
My family was visiting my sister Amy in Layton, Utah, when I was 13 or so. Her husband Kenny was stationed there at the air force base. While we were out one day, my mother Jeannie gave me 10 bucks to but a cassette for the ride home. It was a rite of passage! All my buddies at that to me were listening to grunge or gangster rap. I didn’t feel much like a gangster and was too tender for the heavy stuff. My brother Shane was 12 years older than me and would play me bits and pieces from his record collection when I’d stay with him on occasional weekends. Independence and adrenaline rushed through me on my way to the register to purchase The Cars Greatest Hits. It set me on a path towards the adult I would become, towards the job I have, even towards the woman that I was blessed to marry.
I talked on the phone to Gaard Logan about Ocasek and legendary journalist Cokie Roberts, who succumbed to cancer, and put the Cars Greatest Hits CD on heavy rotation - just what I needed - along with the Avett Brothers, The Beths, Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” and “Copper Blue” by Sugar.
Ray Smock with Cokie and Steve Roberts
Ray Smock wrote this tribute:
The passing of Cokie Roberts has left a void in American journalism and in my heart, since she and her husband Steve, were friends of long standing, going back to the 1980s when my mentor in Congress was Cokie’s mother, Congresswoman Lindy Boggs.
One of Cokie’s last public appearances was this past July, when she and Steve came to the Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education in Shepherdstown, WV at my invitation to help us raise funds for our student intern program. The evening was a resounding success and everyone in attendance was treated to some of the best and most inciteful political discourse imaginable.
Cokie was a pioneer among women in journalism and she wrote best-selling books about women in politics and in the life of the nation whose stories are often left out of the history books. She took seriously the admonition of Abigail Adams, who wrote to her husband John in 1776, when the new nation was being formed, “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”
I will always remember Cokie as the kind of woman Abigail Adams had in mind to take this country forward.
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