Love and Mercy

   “I was standin' in a bar and watchin' all the people there
Oh the loneliness in this world well it's just not fair

Hey love and mercy that's what you need tonight
So, love and mercy to you and your friends tonight”

    Brian Wilson, “Love and Mercy” 

The 2014 movie “Love and Mercy” about musical genius Brian Wilson’s struggles with mental illness starred John Cusack and Paul Dano, both portraying the Beach Boys troubled leader, with Paul Giamatti as Wilson’s tyrannical quack therapist. The flashbacks centers on the making of “Pet Sounds” (1966) after Wilson ceased touring with the band, which cousin Mike Love ridiculed as not having the Beach Boys sound.  Love had a point, but it was unrealistic to expect Wilson to write about being true to your school, long for surfer girls or ruminate about when he grew up to be a man. More realistic was “In My Room,” where “I lock out all my worries and my fears” – in fact, for several years to come Wilson would largely confine himself to his bedroom.  “Sloop John B” has the old Beach Boys sound but ends: “I want to go home, why don’t you let me go home.” “Pet Sounds” was a commercial failure in the U.S. but hailed in Europe. The track “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is one of my favorite songs and describes an ideal world where we could “live together in the kind of worlds where we belong”  -  a pipe dream in the Chinese sense of the word. Two decades later, Wilson meets his future wife, who helps him on the road toward getting his life back again.  As credits roll, there’s a concert performance of Wilson singing “Love and Mercy,” first recorded in 1988, which bemoans violence and pain in the world.  Bono called it “one of the great songs ever written.”   

At bridge Dee Browne and I finished with a 61.81 percent, normally enough to win, but George and Sally Will scored 67.36.  We took two high boards from them or they’d have had a rare 70 percent game.  On the other hand, Lila Cohen and Pam Missman, who finished third, cleaned our clock or we’d have prevailed. Terry Brendel spoke of meeting his wife of 50-plus years at a Purdue computer dance.  The date Terry got matched up with didn’t show and Terry’s wife information wasn’t  computed, so  he took the initiative upon spotting her.  

Bowling opponent Ami Luedke recently retired after delivering mail for 40 years in New Chicago and Hobart.  We took two games from Dorothy’s Darlings; I rolled a 189 in the second one.  Then they got hot, but we held on for series.  Gene Clifford intends to drive to New York City with Dorothy Peterson to visit the maritime history museum by the Hudson River to see the USS Intrepid, a navy aircraft carrier that his brother served on during World War II.  Commissioned in August 1943, the Intrepid participated in several Pacific Theater operations, including the Battle of Leyte Gulf. After being torpedoed and hit by four kamikaze planes, crew members nicknamed it the Decrepit.  Prior to being decommissioned in 1974, the Intrepid participated in rescue procedures for the Gemini 3 crew and several Vietnam deployments. 

Dave and Nicole; below, Traymon Ray

Toni and I were Dave’s special guests at two East Chicago Central Black History Month back-to-back programs, which he coordinated with the assistance of women’s basketball coach Nicole Ford-Moore and teacher Aaron Duncil, the latter, like Dave, mentored by John Bodnar at Portage High School.  When Taymon Ray and Arceli Timajero sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the “Negro National Anthem,” I turned to see if students were standing, as often happens at Gary events. Poetry selections, chosen by Dave, included Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again” and “What If I Am a Black Woman?” by an unknown author. The first show featured African dance (I recognized Taymon Ray from ”Lift Every Voice”) and hip hop in the second hour.  Dave played guitar with students A. Silvas, J. Gutierrez, and K. Sparks on numbers by the Temptations and Bill Withers that he selected and for the finale sang “Johnny B. Goode,” complete with Chuck Berry’s trademark strut, breaking a guitar string in the process but carrying on as if nothing were amiss.  I needlessly worried the broken string would hit him in the face.  In the program he thanked Toni and me for our support, as well as numerous colleagues, Malcolm X, and Randall P. McMurtry of Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” played by Jack Nicholson in the film.  Afterwards, we chatted with School Superintendent Dee-Etta Wright, whom I had met last summer at James’s graduation party.

EC Central students & chaperones

The night before, Dave had chaperoned a school trip to the Chicago Bears training facility.  Friday evening, he participated in a “Dancing with the Stars” fundraiser.  We had planned to watch James’s former teammates bowl next morning and then have lunch at Culver’s like old times, but Daveput it off a week because he was exhausted after three school events within 28 hours. 

At Chesterton library I picked up a double-CD of classic rock selections; most I hear as much as I want to on the radio; but it included, incongruously, Don McLean’s “American Pie,” which I plan to mention during my Munster talk on Rock and Roll, 1960 next week in reference to the plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper (“the day the music died,” as McLean put it). Other tracks that attracted me were the Allman Brothers Band’s “Midnight Rider” (bringing back ancient memories of getting high with late-great artist Larry Kaufman) and “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart (ubiquitous emanating from boom boxes on Wells Street Beach in the early Seventies with the pungent smell of coconut tanning oil in the air).

Tara Westover’s memoir “Educated” didn’t get less traumatic once she enrolled at BYU in Salt Lake City; family crises kept pulling her back into dangerous and humiliating situations that left her badly in need of therapy, as her bipolar father judged her to be a menace in need of redemption for straying from Mormon practices and not submitting to his complete domination.  I started Charles Kuralt’s autobiography, “A Life on the Road” (1990), which contained anecdotes from when he and his CBS Sunday Morning crew logged more than a million miles “on the road.” For example, in Dillon, Montana, he asked a barber sweeping the floor: “Are you free?” “Nope,” was the reply, “I charge seven dollars.” On an Iowa truck stop men’s room prophylactic machine was scratched: “This gum tastes like rubber.” A wizened North Dakota farmer married over 40 years told Kuralt: “Kissing don’t last, but good cooking does.” Roger Welsch explained that the wind blew so hard on the Great Plains that farmers didn’t need weathervanes, “They just look out the window to see which way the barn is leaning.”

Kate Elizabeth Russell received a million-dollar advance for her debut novel, “My Dark Vanessa,” about a high school student’s affair with an English teacher.  When Kate began writing 20 years ago, she thought of it as a romance.  Three years earlier, she had been at dinner with Wallflowers front man Jakob Dylon (her dad was a local deejay) and learned that his favorite book was Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.  She found a copy and for years was attracted to much older men.  When the Me Too movement arose, Kate reread Lolita and realized the exploitative nature of many such relationships.  Nabokov himself told a Paris interviewer who found the protagonist “touching: “Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear ‘touching.”  To New York magazine writer Lila Shapiro, Russell pointed out this passage from Lolita after Humbert first seduced his 12-year-old prey:

    Humbert fantasizes about painting a lavish mural to depict what happened in the hotel room. “There would have been a lake.  There would have been an arbor in flame-flower.  There would have been nature studies – a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat . . . There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday.  There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging, red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

Russell explained: “It’s just gorgeous prose and then the last image of a wincing child.  It’s so easy to skim over.”  How I wish I could discuss Lolita with former IUN English professor George Bodmer, once a good friend, who assigned the book in an upper division course but stopped speaking to me over a university matter.

In researching the history of Gary Roosevelt for a Post-Tribune feature, Carole Carlson discovered that its origins stemmed from the aftermath to the infamous 1927 Emerson School Strike.  After Superintendent William A. Wirt transferred 14 honors students seeking college prep courses from the non-accredited Virginia Street School, approximately half the white students boycotted classes.  The Gary school board subsequently voted to oust both the newly enrolled students and several African-Americans living in the Emerson neighborhood who had already been at the school.  The NAACP represented three students who protested their dismissal, but both local judge Grant Crumpacker and the Indiana Supreme Court ruled against them. Carlson consulted my “City of the Century” as well as publications by historian Ronald Cohen and Dolly Millender, plus interviewed DeLynne Exum, the granddaughter of ousted student Hazel Bratton, and Vernon Smith, the son of victim Julia Allen.  While some classmates traveled to Chicago to continue their education, Smith said that his mother never finished her schooling: “They were spit on, pushed, and called the “N’ word. We always tried to get her to go to night school, but she began a family.  I think the pain [of what happened] continued until death.” How awful.  

Before her death in 2009 at age 96 Hazel Bratton Sanders told a Post-Trib reporter:

    The white students would line upon both sides of the sidewalk and stretch their arms over us.  We had to walk under them like under an arch.  They yelled out, “Go away, darkies.  This isn’t your school.”

Granddaughter DeLynne Exum told Carlson: “It was the indignity of how they were dismissed.  It was inhumane.  These were bright students.  It traumatized her.  When she was dying, she had nightmares of going through that gauntlet; she would relive it.”

above, Laura Gorski & Jeremiah Mellen; below, Reagan Smedley, Gorski, Luke Housman, photo by Ray Gapinski

Toni and I saw the final, sold-out performance of “Mary Poppins” at Memorial Opera House with the Hagelbergs, followed by dinner at Pesto’s.  As always, the production was well done with an excellent cast that included several familiar actors, including Jeremiah Mellen (Quasimoto in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) as chimneysweep Bert, Thomas Olsen as the policeman, and talented seventh grader Reagan Smedley (Susan Waverly in “White Christmas”) as Jane Banks. In the program Smedley revealed that when not on stage she enjoys singing, playing the piano, and hanging out with her friends – and added that now, given that major role, she can cross playing Jane Banks off her bucket list.  When we first saw Reagan on stage, she’d to sob at the final performance curtain call. It was touching watching her bravely fighting to smile and hold back the tears.

Darrow & Bryan, below, Fats Waller

Nicole Anslover invited me to her class on the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial.  She first explained the rise of rural-urban tensions during the 1920s and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.  I brought out how strong the KKK became in Indiana, especially in small towns such as Crown Point and Valparaiso, and that it was anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, not just anti-black.  After she noted that the ACLU sought a test case and described what transpired in the aftermath of the Tennessee legislature passing a law forbidding the teaching of evolution, I noted that the 1920s being an age of urban boosterism, Dayton, Tennessee, business leaders hoped to draw large crowds  that would put Dayton on the map.  Crowds came, but the publicity wasn’t exactly what the city fathers had hoped for.  This was the heyday of daily newspapers whose publishers loved lengthy trials, continuing sagas that could be hyped over days and weeks.  Students gave brief reports on Harlem Renaissance celebrities Cab Calloway (a Cotton Club bandleader who wore zoot suits), Fats Waller (we were treated to a YouTube of “Honeysuckle Rose”), and Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, who played trumpet in Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago before moving on to Harlem.

Near our condo a car bore a license plate beginning with a 3-digit number ending in zero followed by ORV. It sure looked like ORGY.  Dave and Angie refused a plate ending in NRA, the initials of the National Rifle Association.