Educated

“I believe, finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience: that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing,” John Dewey

At bridge in Valpo Vickie Voller and I finished in a tie for first with Dee Browne and Sharon Snyder.  Opponent Jim Bell sometimes bangs on the table when he’s uncertain what to bid.  Vickie jokingly asked if he was signaling to partner Fred Green.  On the final hand Fred opened 4 Diamonds; after two passes I bid 4 Hearts.  Jim raised to 5 Diamonds and I doubled.  We set them 2 vulnerable for 500 points and high board.

 Tara Westover at Cambridge U., 2018

Lila Cohen loaned me Tara Westover’s “Educated: A Memoir,” a 2016 best-seller that she had reported on at her AAUW book club. It’s a harrowing coming-of-age account of breaking away from Mormon survivalists in southeastern Idaho and, specifically, a paranoid, despotic father preparing for the end of the world, who kept Tara from attending school or seeking medical help when needed.  New York Times reviewer Alec MacGillis wrote:

    She learned to read from the Bible, the Book of Mormon and the speeches of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The only science book in the house was for young children, full of glossy illustrations. The bulk of her time was spent helping her parents at work. Barely into her teens, Westover graduated from helping her mom mix remedies and birth babies to sorting scrap with her dad, who had the unnerving habit of inadvertently hitting her with pieces he’d tossed.

In the Prologue Westover introduces herself:

    I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn.  The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt.  The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling.  On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping.  I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.  We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom.

Emboldened by the example of a brother, who read whatever books he could lay his hands on and left for college, Tara did well enough on an ACT test to be admitted to Brigham Young at age 16.  MacGillis wrote:

    There, she is shocked by the profane habits of her classmates, like the roommate who wears pink plush pajamas with “Juicy” emblazoned on the rear, and in turn shocks her classmates with her ignorance, never more so than when she asks blithely in art history class what the Holocaust was. (Other new discoveries for her: Napoleon, Martin Luther King Jr., the fact that Europe is not a country.) Such excruciating moments do not keep professors from recognizing her talent and voracious hunger to learn; soon enough, she’s off to a fellowship at Cambridge University, where a renowned professor — a Holocaust expert, no less — can’t help exclaiming when he meets her: “How marvelous. It’s as if I’ve stepped into Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion.’”

 The 1913 George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion was the inspiration for My Fair Lady. 

Miller's Sullivan St. lakefront illustrating beach erosion and mild winter, by Paul Kaczocha

Bob Seeger’s “Roll Me Away” came on the car radio and I just had to turn the volume way up and sing along.  On the surface it’s such a celebratory “on the road” anthem that the wistful final verse, not unusual in Seeger compositions, always comes as a sobering reality:

I'm gonna roll me away tonight
Gotta keep rollin', gotta keep ridin'
Keep searchin' till I find what's right
And as the sunset faded I spoke
To the faintest first starlight
And I said next time
Next time
We'll get it right

I attended Valparaiso University professor Allison Schuette’s interactive workshop at IUN sponsored by the Center for Urban and Regional Excellence (CURE) and titled “Flight Paths: Mapping our Changing Neighborhoods.”  Allison acknowledged my participation in the Indiana Humanities project and since the featured interactive map was on Gary’s Tolleston neighborhood, she passed out a brief history of Tolleston that I had written for Flight Paths. Allison played excerpts of interviews with three people who grew up in Tolleston.  One man described the ethnic mix prior to the 1960s as a blend of Slovak, Polish, Czech, and German.  His father had black friends; when he drafted Jimmy Scott, a black kid, for his Little League team, people phoned to complain and called him a “nigger lover.”  He recalled:

    Realtors would come into a neighborhood, say to the whites, “Better move now while your property is still worth something because when this neighborhood starts changing, property values will decrease and you’ll lose out on a lot of money.” And that eventually became illegal, but for quite a while these white folks just felt, “Well, I’d better do as they say and turn my house over to the realtor and get rid of it while I move elsewhere.”

    So many people just heard about these problems or these issues; they didn’t really experience them. They were watching television, seeing all kinds of marches and rebellions across the country, and they just got the impression that the black culture was antisocial, and they were a people that just didn’t understand the needs of the white person.

    When we watched on television the funeral of Martin Luther King, my uncles in particular would say, “Oh, man, we can’t have this, what is going on here? What’s happening to our society?” All they saw was the violence. They did not see the peace. They did not see the change. And the violence, they thought, was going to be widespread. It was going to come into Gary.

And I guess the whole idea of being in the same neighborhood, in the same church, in the same organization with black people was just something that they could not understand or tolerate.

When Karen Freeman-Wilson’s parents moved to Tolleston, it was rapidly becoming a black neighborhood, due to white flight.  Her father was a steelworker and her mother worked for Neighborhood Settlement House, which became Gary Neighborhood Services.  The building housed recent migrants from the South and helped integrate them into the community.  It also offered child day care and activities for teenagers and seniors. Freeman-Wilson recalled:

  I was a 4-H member there. We had a very vibrant program. I learned how to cook and to sew.  I can probably still do a pretty good hem with a sewing machine, and I still slipstitch.  We skated on a floor that was really wobbly, but it made you a good skater.  When you went to a real nice rink, you were a pro because if you could make it through the wobbles and the buckles in the floor at the neighborhood House, you could skate anywhere.

Councilwoman Mary Brown praised the resilience of Tolleston residents:

Just look around at people in my community. Retired doctors, retired teachers, retired professionals who have stayed. They’ve continued to pay taxes and pay into the city because they still believe that we can come back. They believe in the city and believe that it can work.

To illustrate Tolleston’s rapid racial transformation, Allison opened a section on St. John’s Lutheran Church, which predated the Gary’s founding by a half-century.  In 1962 Reverend Norman Brandt became pastor and visited the homes of new African-American residents, urging them to come to St. John’s.  A succession of church confirmation photos dramatically illustrated the rapid transition from all-white to all-black.  Reverend Brandt founded an alternative school in Glen Park that Phil and Dave attended for six years.  Rebecca Brandt was a classmate, as were good friends Clark and Gloria Metz’s girls.

(left; below, confirmation classes: 1962, 1964 & 1974) 

The large crowd included IUN colleagues Joseph Gomeztagle, Kathy Arfken, Lanette Mullin-Gonzales, Chris Young (with son Robert), Ellen Szarleta, Suzanne Green, Sue Zinner (with students from her Ethics class, including Munster clerk/treasurer Wendy Mis), Kay Westhues (from IU South Bend), and people from the community.  Allison posed questions that prompted small group discussions.  When the entire group shared insights, I remained quiet except to note the redlining by banks and government agencies not only prevented minorities from owning homes but also discriminated against black entrepreneurs.  African Americans in the audience shared experiences of growing up in segregated neighborhoods and encountering institutional racism.

Seeking more information about St. John’s Lutheran Church on Google led me to Michelle McGill-Vargas’s website, where I was cited in an article about Gary during the Prohibition era.  McGill-Vargas wrote:

    James Lane’s City of the Century led me to real-life gangster Gasperi (or Gaspari) Monti who ruled the city’s Little Italy section until his violent death in 1923. According to local newspaper reports, Monti is best known as the government’s star witness in a corruption case against more than sixty judges, prosecutors, policemen, and even then-Gary mayor Roswell Johnson, all for violating Prohibition laws. At the time, the Gary Police Department had a special enforcement arm called the Sponge Squad that arrested bootleggers, and then would sell liquor confiscated in the arrests to line their pockets and the pockets of everyone else up the law enforcement chain in Lake County. Monti made a deal with federal prosecutors to expose the corruption, but was gunned down in broad daylight by two unknown assailants on March 13, 1923, just days before he was scheduled to testify.

    Monti was no stranger to violence and attempts on his life. In 1922, he’d been shot through the mouth by a man who’d shot him a year prior. He owned and operated the Black and Tan Club in the 1700 block of Adams Street where shooting deaths were commonplace. Even Monti’s wife, Mary, was into the rackets. After her husband was killed, police found illegal liquor and several pounds of explosives in her home.

So-called “Black and Tan” establishments were saloons where African-American and Caucasian clientele intermingled. Scandalous to blue-blood Northsiders, the Gary “dive” was known for “debauched” activities such as interracial dancing and prostitution.

On a mute TV screen at Hobart Lanes was an ad for Lawless Auto Repair in Valpo.  Love the name.  Terry Kegebein will be attending a sixth family funeral within a year.  Since the price of obits in local newspapers has skyrocketed, many only use funeral home websites.  My great-aunt Ida Gordon, who lived with us when I was growing up, subscribed to the Easton (PA) Express for the obits about people she may have known.  I scan obits for personages of local significance or that illustrate Gary’s former ethnic diversity.  For example, from February 20 obits in the NWI Times I learned that Alice Geraldine Kiefer, 82, worked at USS Gary Sheet and Tin, met husband Carl at the Midway Ballroom, and the two were married at Holy Angels.  Robert Joseph, 96, played tackle for Gary Emerson and at IU, was a member of the 1945 Big Ten champions, and met wife Mabel at Calumet High School, where he taught for many years and founded its football team.  Here’s an excerpt from the obit for Mihailo Kostur, 77, like Robert Joseph a Gary Emerson grad:

    Mihailo was born in Vrlika Dalmatia Croatia.  He immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 15.  He worked as an operator for Arcelor Mittal for37 years. Mihailo enjoyed being outdoors, gardening playing bocce ball, many different card games, making homemade wine following Serbian traditions, and spending time with his grandchildren. Mihailo was a member of St. Elijah Cathedral in Merrillville as well as the Chetnik organization.  He was preceded in death by parents Bozo and Andja Kostur.

Historian Jerry Pierce found a humorous cartoon on Facebook, and Ray Gapinski posted photos of an abandoned asylum near Terre Haute. Larry Bean, who like wife Cindy pseeks out historic ruins, responded, “Looks like it’s worth the trip.”