Goodbye, Columbus

“I’m going home

I’m going to Palestine

Goodbye, Columbus.”

  1920s Yiddish song

The screenplay for the 1969 hit film “Goodbye Columbus” starring Ali McGraw and Richard Benjamin was based on a 1959 novella by Philip Roth that dealt with a romance between a young Jewish couple from different economic backgrounds.  The title comes from a ditty sung by graduating seniors at Ohio State, located in the largest of at least 20 American cities named for Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, whose mistreatment of indigenous people has caused a reconsideration of his place in history.  At Notre Dame, for example, university officials announced plans to cover up nineteenth-century murals by Italian Luigi Gregori depicting Indians and African Americans in submissive poses with the cruel conqueror.  They ultimately will be moved to a museum and exhibited for purposes of teaching and research.

In her Ayers Realtors Newsletter column “Home on the Range” Judy Ayers included a recipe for Apple Crisp that a friend gave her after they bought apples at Garwood Orchard in La Porte.  She recalled sharing the back seat of the family car with sister Jane during the 1950s in the days without navigation features, temperature control, and hand-held entertainment devices: 

  There was no air conditioning, and we traveled with all the windows rolled down.  Shouting was not only allowed but required.  Jane and I fiercely enforced with military precision a dividing line between her space and mine.  Even short trips required our mother to come up with activities to keep us occupied and less likely to bicker with one another.

Lane family trips from Fort Washington, PA, to visit relatives in Easton and McKeesport found brother Rich and I squabbling when not preoccupied with games involving passing vehicles’ license plates.  Sometimes, in a surprisingly low bass voice, Vic would sing multiple verses from a fraternity drinking song he learned at Pitt featuring a battle between a Russian and a Turk, Czarist warrior Ivan Skavinsky Skivar and Abdul Abulbul Amir (“The son of the desert, in battle aroused, could spit 20 men on his spear.  A terrible creature, both sober and soused, was Abdul Abulbul Amir”).  Vic would rest his left elbow on the open window (that part of his arm had a deeper summer tan) and have the vent window at an angle for increased ventilation, a feature now sadly unavailable on most automobile models. Whenever we approached a two-lane road, Vic would joke that two of us would have to get out.  Taking James to Liam’s house in Portage, we came upon a bridge on Samuelson Road that narrows to a single lane.  For old times’ sake, I quipped, “Looks like you’ll have to get out.”  He’d heard me use the line before but obligingly chuckled.

Ron Cohen showed me a new book by Penn State professor Gary S. Cross, “Machines of Youth: America’s Car Obsession,” that contains several references to my Fifties Steel Shavings, “Rah Rahs and Rebel ’Rousers,” published in 1994 and containing oral histories of Calumet Region residents who were teenagers during the era when Baby Boomers were becoming old enough to drive.  I got my license while still in tenth grade and picked up prom date Mary Delp in my parents’ yellow-and-white 1956 Buick. In the back seat were Vince Curll and Pam Henry. On bethleham Pike, a three-lane highway, I attempted to pass a slow-moving vehicle only to have the driver speed up and not let me in as a car bore down on me from the other direction.  I barely made it.  I’m not sure the three passengers realized how close we’d come to a head-on collision.  Weekends I’d cruise in Bob Reller, Pete Drake or Skip Pollard’s car; we’d often end up at a drive-in theater or diner hoping to hook up with girls.  

I emailed Gary Cross to tell him how delighted I was to be in the book and ask where he had come across “Rah Rahs and Rebel ’Rousers.”  He answered within the hour, informing me that Steel Shavings was at Penn State library and calling the interviews in it priceless and invaluable for his book.  Pretty cool!  Other books by Cross include “Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood” (1999) and “Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity” (2008).

A right-winger responded to Ray Smock’s indictment of Trump by claiming Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff were evil and that God would punish them, adding “How I miss the USA of the 50s.”  Smock replied sarcastically:

Yeah, I sure miss Joe McCarthy, hunting for communists behind every tree. I miss the duck and cover exercises while the world went mad with nuclear bombs tested in the atmosphere. I miss the old days of the colorful crime bosses who made murder seem so cool. And I sure miss Jim Crow America. But I was a kid then, and I lived in a kid world, oblivious to such things. I am not a kid anymore. I live in the present. I will oppose the corruption of Donald Trump because I love my country and want to see it do so much better than it is doing right now. He is killing the Constitution every day of his presidency. This is the worst crime of all. He insults everyone who has ever defended the Constitution and stood up for the rule of law. 

Liz Wuerffel (left) with Valpo candidates for mayor, council & clerk/treasurer; below, Pete Visclosky

My friend Liz Wuerffel lost a race for Valparaiso city council to the outgoing mayor’s son, as Republicans, running scared, outspent Democrats by a four-to-one margin.  Congressman Pete Visclosky, 70, announced he would not seek another term as Indiana’s First District Representative on the 35th anniversary of his upset win over incumbent Katie Hall and Lake County prosecutor Jack Crawford.  During that campaign Visclosky, son of Gary’s interim mayor after George Chacharis went to prison, solicited our votes in person at our remote Maple Place residence within the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  Roy Dominguez met Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg while in South Bend and wrote on Facebook: “We are so proud of his accomplishments, and he would make a great President of the U.S.A.!!!”

 Pete Buttigieg and Roy Dominguez

In “Amy and Isabelle” novelist Elizabeth Strout, so skilled at revealing the inner lives of everyday people, attributes office worker Bev’s addiction to cigarettes to loneliness.  Strout wrote:

  Bev knew why she smokes.  She smoked for the same reason she ate: it gave her something to look forward to.  It was as simple as that.  Life could get dull, and you had to glook forward to something.  When she was first married, she had looked forward to going to bed with her husband Bill, in that hot little apartment on Gangover Street. Boy, they used to have a good time.  It made up for everything, all their squabbles over money, dirty socks, drops of pee in front of the toilet – all those little things you had to get used to when you married someone.

  Funny how it could wear off, something that good.  But it did.  Bev kind of lost interest after the first baby was born.  She began to resent how night after night he’d still want to do it, that rigid thing always there.  It was because she was exhausted and the baby cried so much.  Her breasts were different too after that tiny angry baby had sucked them till the nipples cracked; and she had never lost the weight.  Her body seemed to stay swollen, and by God she was pregnant again.  So at a time when her house, her life, was filling up, she had experienced an irrepressible feeling of loss. They still did it once in a while, silently, and always in the dark.

The opening paragraph of Stroud’s new novel “Olive, Again” re-introduces a unique, unforgettable character, whom I came to love, nonjudgmental in matters of the heart but one who did not suffer fools - and played in an HBO mini-series by Frances McDormand:

  In the early afternoon on a Saturday in June, Jack Kennison (Bill Murray in the mini-series) put on his sunglasses, got into his sports car with the yop down, strapped the seatbelt over his shoulder and across hos large stomach, and drove top Portland – almost an hour away – to buy a gallon of whiskey rather than bump into Olive Kitteridge at the grocery store here in Crosby, Maine.

Chesterton bridge partner Joel Charpentier and I are on quite a roll, finishing first, third, and first in the three weeks since first pairing up. On Tuesday second-place finishers Chuck and Marcy Tomes cleaned our clock the final two hands, so edging them out came as a surprise.  I asked Terry Bauer, whose daughter is working in Hong Kong, whether she still is staying clear of the anti-government protests.  For all the publicity they’ve generated, he noted, not a single person has died.  It's more like street theater, with each side getting its point across.

This poignant letter from Ray Andersen of Newburgh, IN, appeared in the November 2019 Bridge Bulletin:

  My wife and I have participated in all of The Longest Day promotions to raise funds to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. About two years ago, she began to change.  Once a good bridge player, the last time we played bridge as partners (about four months ago) she could no longer recognize even simple things such as Jacoby transfers (responses to a 1 No Trump bid). I hope that ACBL (American Contract Bridge League) will continue The Longest Day promotions to fight this wicked disease, and that all of our members will participate and contribute.  Now it’s personal.

 Lucy Mercer

Leafing through Jean Edward Smith’s FDR biography that Jim Pratt will be discussing at my upcoming book club, I enjoyed the account of Roosevelt’s romance with Lucy Mercer that blossomed during World War I.  After giving birth to five children, Eleanor decided that they’d practice abstinence.  Acerbic cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth quipped, “Franklin deserved a good time.  He was married to Eleanor.”  On July 16, 1917, anxious to have Eleanor away from Washington, DC, for the rest of the summer, Roosevelt wrote her, “You were a goosy girl to think that I don’t want you here because you know I do.  But honestly you ought to have six straight weeks at Campobello.” In a chapter covering the emergence of 1940 Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, a Democrat until just months before the nominating convention, former Republican Senator James E. Watson said of his fellow Hoosier, “If a whore repented and wanted to join the church, I’d personally welcome her and lead her up the aisle to a pew.  But I’d not ask her to lead the choir the first night.”

  

Prior to the 1940 Democratic convention FDR had decided to seek an unprecedented third term due to the war in Europe but, according to Jean Edward Smith, only on the condition that Secretary of Agriculture be his running-mate.  He believed Wallace’s candidacy would help him carry farm states and that Wallace would support liberal programs in the event anything happened to him, in contrast to Vice President John Nance Garner or House Speaker William B. Bankhead of Alabama.  It took determined arm-twisting by Jim Farley and Jimmy Byrnes and a moving convention speech by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to carry the day.  

In July 1944 FDR traveled on the cruiser Baltimore to Hawaii to meet with military leaders Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz to finalize strategy for defeating Japan and to quiet rumors that his health was failing.  While in Honolulu the President toured military bases and requested that he be photographed with Nisei (Japanese-American) soldiers.  He also visited an amputee ward, his only public appearance ever in a wheelchair.  Jean Edward Smith wrote: “The President stopped at one bed after another, chatting briefly.  He wanted to show his useless legs to those who would face the same affliction.”