Heavy Fuel

“If you wanna run cool

You got to run on heavy fuel.”

    Dire Straits, “Heavy Fuel”

 Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits

Heavy Fuel” is a track on the 1991 Dire Straits album “On Every Street,” the band’s final studio effort.  I frequently play “Brothers in Arms” (1985) and the greatest hits CD “Money for Nothing,” but rarely listen to “On Every Street,” so it was a pleasant surprise discovering unfamiliar tracks. One “Heavy Fuel” couplet (“When my ugly big car won’t climb this hill/ I’ll write a suicide note on a hundred-dollar bill”) could have been the epitaph for self-destructive gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.  Mark Knopfler wrote several topical numbers for Dire Straits.  One with relevance for Gary steelworkers, “Industrial Disease,” is from “Love Over Gold” (1982)  Here is the first verse:

Warning lights are flashing down at Quality Control
Somebody threw a spanner and they threw him in the hole
There's rumors in the loading bay and anger in the town
Somebody blew the whistle and the walls came down
There's a meeting in the boardroom they're trying to trace the smell
There's leaking in the washroom there's a sneak in personnel
Somewhere in the corridors someone was heard to sneeze
'goodness me could this be Industrial Disease?

When IUN Business and economic History professor threw a farewell party before moving to Indy, I gave him mark Knopfler’s solo album “Sailing to Philadelphia” (2000), on which he sand duets with James Taylor and Van Morrison.

On Jeopardy, in the category “Second largest cities,” with the help of clues I came up with Baton Rouge (LA), New Haven (CT), and Jacksonville (FL) but not Worcester (MA) even though the hint indicated it was pronounced differently than spelled.  A famous blunder occurred two years ago in Final Jeopardy of the IBM Challenge when the supercomputer Watson answered Toronto in the category “U.S. Cities” to this clue: “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest for a World War II battle.”  The answer, of course, is Chicago, with O’Hare and Midway airports.   The computer still prevailed.  Current champion Jennifer Quail’s 8-day winnings are well over $200,000.  On Final Jeopardy only she knew what “Woman Author” testified before Congress that “Song of Russia” (1944), directed by Gregory Ratoff and starring Robert Taylor, was allegedly Soviet propaganda.  Answer: ultra-conservative fanatic Ayn Rand.

In 1824 Revolutionary War general Lafayette (Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette) commenced a grand tour of America as guest of the nation.  Congress paid Lafayette’s expenses for two years and sent a ship to France to bring him to New York, where 50,000 well-wishers, a magnificent flotilla, and the West Point band greeted him at Castle Garden. The hero of Yorktown, according to Holly Jackson’s “American Radicals,” was a robust 67 and an unabashed womanizer The French writer Stendhal described the Marquis as “solely occupied in spite of his age in fumbling at pretty girls’ plackets, not occasionally but constantly, not much caring who saw.”  He carried on an intimate relationship with notorious freethinker Fanny Wright, his frequent grand tour companion.  At Monticello Wright’s mannish attire and comportment scandalized former President Thomas Jefferson’s cousin Jane Cary.  Nonetheless, Lafayette remains enshrined in the pantheon of War for Independence heroes.  Named in his honor are cities (i.e., Lafayette, IN, Fayetteville, NC), townships (more than 50), parks (Washington, DC), and Lafayette College in my hometown of Easton.  We lived literally across the street from campus, and I recall homecoming parades passing by our house on the corner of High and McCartney.

Bette Roberts passed away at age 73, George Van Til informed me.  The daughter of Ann and Joe Domagalski, Bette was active in several IU Northwest campus organizations during the turbulent 1960s, including the Humanist Society.  She married Political Science professor George Roberts 52 years ago and became active in the Crown Point Historical Society. For an event celebrating the fortieth anniversary of IUN’s move to Glen Park, I persuaded Bette to be a panelist. In a retirement tirade Dr. Roberts had vowed never again to set foot on campus but relented then and when former student Congressman Pete Visclosky presented him with the Sagamore of the Wabash Award. Few present faculty knew George and Bette, but I called former colleagues Fred Chary, Paul Kern, and Ron Cohen to report the sad news.  The obit read in part:

    Bette and George worked tirelessly to elect Rep. Peter Visclosky, as well as candidate George McGovern when he ran for President.  One of the highlights of Bette’s life was serving dinner to Mr. McGovern in her home.

    Bette and George travelled extensively, but her true love was Paris, where they visited annually for over 30 years.  Bette was a generous, witty, loving soul who cared deeply about her family, friends, and animals.  She was a tried and true liberal, who always said “If George even thinks about a Republican, he’ll find a pair of socks and underwear on the front lawn.”

I started re-watching the seven 30-minute episodes of “Mrs. Fletcher,” concentrating on Eve’s college-bound son Brenden.  While she struggles to pack his things, he is on his cell phone making plans for the evening.  He cuts short Eve’s farewell dinner, skipping the special dessert, to attend a wild party.  Spotting Julian, whom he has bullied throughout high school, he tosses candy at him, pretends to apologize, then sticks Julian’s phone in a drink. With keen insight Julian accurately predicts that at college Brenden will by seen for what he is, a jerk.  Back home, he sends a nude photo to an ex-girlfriend, who arrives next morning to give him a blow job send-off. At the bedroom door Eve hears him moaning and calling the girl a filthy slut, a scene that will repeat itself in college with humiliating consequences. In his dorm room, as Eve makes the bed and unpacks for him, Brenden is back on his phone and impatient for her to leave.

No Billy Foster piano stylings nor choir performance enlivened IUN’s annual Holiday celebration; hence no group singing of “12 Days of Christmas.”  I spoke with Zoran Kilibarda (Geosciences), Joe Gomeztagle and Suzanne Green (SPEA), historian Chris Young (whose oldest son will start at Bloomington next year), and former Health Information Technology chair Margaret Skurka, so far as I could tell the only other emeritus faculty present.  Health and Human Services dean Pat Bankston, whose Christmas sweater lit up, thanked me for DVDs of our interview that Samantha Gauer had prepared. I also brought along free ten copies of Steel Shavings, volume 48, which were gone by the time I left with a plate of delicious buffet fare for Toni.

From nephew Beamer Pickert:  

    So, while making pierogi, I can't help but wonder what my Grandma Blanche would think of the adaptions I've made to the process. I think she'd like most of them. She did introduce me to Star Trek after all. But I use the pasta roller attachment to my kitchen-aid for rolling out my rounds, I use the mixer for making the dough, I color code my dough to indicate what filling is inside. I like to think she'd think these were good improvements.

Liz Wuerffel, Allison Schuette, and I met to discuss the VU Flight Paths interactive website grant project. When we arrived at Hunter’s Brewery in Chesterton around 4 p.m., it was inexplicably closed.  Liz Googled Hunter’s website and discovered that they’d open at 5:30, so we checked out Chesterton Brewery, owned and operated by veterans and located in a century-old former glass factory. After ordering craft beers and fried pickles, we got down to business.  One of eight scholars selected to document Gary neighborhoods and interview former and present residents, I was assigned Brunswick on the far northwest side, south of the Gary airport and bordering Hammond and East Chicago.  It was a mostly white ethnic community until 50 years ago, when massive flight transformed the district.  According to the 2000 census, the Brunswick population of 4,400 was 84.6% African American and the rest white or Hispanic.  Longtime IUN stalwart Ruth Nelson grew up in Brunswick.  In “Gary’s First Hundred Years” I wrote:

In 1928 Carl and Lydia Nelson sought to escape Indiana Harbor’s noxious pollution.  They bought a lot just north of the 5200 block of West Fifth Avenue, across from an Italian neighborhood and in a sandy new settlement populated mainly by Swedes, Irish, and Poles.  Selecting their house from a Sears catalogue, they paid 1,800 hundred dollars for a model that contained an attic, a basement, a front and back porch, and six rooms.

In “Valor: The American Odyssey of Rogelio “Roy” Dominguez” (2012) the former Lake County sheriff wrote about moving in 1962 from Mercedes, Texas, to a two-bedroom ranch house in the blue-collar Ivanhoe neighborhood of Brunswick that his father rented from a friend.  They arrived just as the weather turned cold and a couple months after school had started (Roy was in the third grade at Ivanhoe School), so, Dominguez wrote, “it was a difficult transition for all of us.” Three years later, the family moved to a three-bedroom Brunswick residence north of the Eighth Avenue railroad tracks. Dominguez recalled:

The girls had a bedroom and we five boys shared another.  Jesse and Eloy had bunk beds, and the other three of us slept in a single full-sized bed.  At the time we were the only Hispanics on the block, surrounded mostly by Southern whites. By the time we moved to Glen Park in the summer of 1970, we were still the only Hispanics on the block but had African-American neighbors. We didn’t understand the “white flight” mindset of those who did not want to live in an integrated neighborhood; but because gangs and drugs made our schools and neighborhood unsafe, we subsequently moved.

Morning fog was so thick I could barely see ten feet ahead.  Home from college 57 years ago, I visited Sig Ep fraternity brother Jack Nesbitt and came within inches of crashing into a tree on a winding country road.  In the Seventies Toni and I were on Ridge Road returning from a New Year’s Eve party at Ron and Liz Cohen’s in Valpo when I literally couldn’t see on a stretch near present-day Portage H.S.

The IUN Lady Redhawks coasted to victory against Judson University, located in Elgin, IL, thanks to deadly 3-point shooting by Michaela Schmidt and dominant inside play by six-footers Breanna Boles and Jocelyn Colburn.  In the bleachers I met Coach Ryan Shelton’s Uncle Bill Bednar, a 1963 Hammond Tech grad and, like me, a big “Hoosier Hysteria” basketball fan. We discovered that we’d both attended the 1975 and 1991 Regionals, first when Gary Emerson defeated a Hammond High squad with Rich Valavicius on a last-second shot by Emmet Lewis and 16 years later, when Glenn Robinson scored 40 points in a double overtime, one-point thriller over East Chicago Central, including a game-winning, 16-foot, turnaround jump shot.

Saturday Evening Club host Valpo doctor David Kenis, whose specialty in psychology, argued that the best film biographies, in addition to seeking to entertain and make money, strive for authenticity – what Terry Brendel called verisimilitude -  rather than complete factual accuracy as documentaries would be expected to do.  He cited complaints about “Green Book” (2018) exaggerating the degree that gay classical pianist Donald Shirley was estranged from his family and the current brouhaha over “Richard Jewell,” director Clint Eastwood’s depiction of the security guard who discovered a pipe bomb during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and went from being a hero to a suspect. The film implies that an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter got her scoop from an FBI agent whom she slept with. Even if that is not true, it is undeniable that the press unfairly tarnished Jewell’s reputation. Kenis noted that in “Hurricane” (1999), about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a black pugilist framed for murder, the villain is a single racist cop rather than, more accurately, the entire law enforcement system.  The film also claimed inaccurately that Carter was robbed when judges ruled that Joey Giardello had won a 1964 middleweight title fight, which can be viewed on YouTube.

My remarks concentrated on sports flicks, which rarely match the authenticity of real events.  Kenis brought up “Rudy” (1993), an undersized Notre Dame practice squad senior who, with less than 30 seconds remaining, gets into the final home game and is carried off the field after supposedly sacking the quarterback.  For dramatic effect the directors invented a scene where players threaten to revolt if Rudy is not allowed to dress for the game. Coach Dan Devine, unfairly made the heavy, was not pleased.  In “42” (2013), about Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier, the film needlessly embellished events to add emotion when the truth is dramatic enough.  There is no evidence, for example, that Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese put his arm around Robinson in Cincinnati to quiet the crowd from shouting racial taunts.  The first movie 94-year-old Mel Bohlman could remember was “Steamboat Willie” (1928), the animated Walt Disney cartoon about Mickey and Minnie Mouse. His rural elementary school required those attending to get tuberculosis shots.  Mel also loved Charlie Chaplin movies, especially “Modern Times “ (1936), a critique of industrial capitalism.