Roundabout

 "I’ll be the roundabout

The words will make you go out ‘n’ out”

 YES from 1971 “Fragile” album

A British progressive rock group known to be a drug band, members of YES, including frontman Jon Anderson, may well have been high on LSD when recording “Roundabout,” whose lyrics make no sense unless high.  I wasn’t much into progressive rock bands other than Steely Dan until Terry Jenkins turned me on to YES.  At a fantastic Holiday Star concert YES played for almost three hours without a break except for individual musicians exiting the stage during drum, guitar and keyboard solos.  They kicked ass on “Roundabout.”  Both George Sladic and Fred McColly recalled memorable YES concerts they attended, Freddy at Hawthorne Raceway with Peter Frampton and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Roundabouts are proliferating in Valparaiso and other region suburbs.  When first introduced the Post-Tribune’s Quickly column was filled with criticisms.  Once experienced a few times, however, I found they are easy to maneuver and highly efficient. East Coast roundabouts, called traffic circles, have been around for at least three generations. On the way to the Jersey shore vacationers encountered at least a half-dozen.  When Toni and I visited New Zealand 30 years ago, we drove on counter-clockwise roundabouts, as New Zealanders, like Brits, drive on the left (in common parlance, “wrong”) side of the road.

In “A Fist Full of Fig Newtons” Region Rat Jean Shepherd wrote about first encountering a New Jersey roundabout:

    After a lifetime of driving in other parts of the country with conventional staid overpasses, viaducts, crossroads, stop-lights, etc., etc., suddenly I found myself going round and round, surrounded by hordes of blue-haired ladies piloting violet-colored Gremlins.  In and out they wove.  I passed my turnoff four times before I got control of my mind and was hurled out of the traffic circle by centrifugal force, back in the direction I had come.  Good grief!

Liz Wuerffel, who ran for Valpo city council, noted that so many people complained about roundabouts that she probably would have won the election had she gone on record against them.

George Van Til, surprised to read of my long softball career, wrote that he played for a team in the Bethlehem Steel Chesterton league and that teammates often gathered afterwards in a Chesterton watering hole across from the gazebo.  He was so impressed that when on the Highland Town Board, he pressed for the park department to construct one on land that came under its control when Main School was torn down.  The gazebo has been a popular success, site of concerts, weddings, and theatrical productions such as “Music Man” starring longtime clerk/treasurer Michael Griffin, an IUN grad.  I told George that son Dave was in a production of “Music through the Ages.”  One performance was curtailed shortly after one of Dave’s solos by a severe thunder and lightning storm. On Facebook yesterday Dave performed Simon and Garfunkel’s “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard” and “The Boxer.”

I got a call from Gary native Jim Muldoon (Lew Wallace, Class of 1956), like me a Maryland grad and CEO of METCOR.  A subscriber, he praised my latest Steel Shavings and mentioned how his school raised $2,000 in a single day selling peanuts in a campaign to fight polio, a postwar scourge.  We reminisced about the day we spend together at the Archives and touring Gary, and he invited Toni and me to his estate on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Philip Potempa’s Post-Tribune column dealt with the history of Valparaiso, mentioning a virtual audio tour Porter County Museum director Kevin Pazour put together from a 1987 architectural guide developed by members of VU’s Art department. Sites include the courthouse, jail, opera house, two banks, and Lowenstine’s Department Store, in existence between 1916 and 1988, which included a vacuum tube system. Since World War II Valpo’s downtown flourished for 30 years, then suffered downturns during the 1980s and twenty years later followed by resurgences, primarily due to restaurants.  In addition to Lowenstine’s, Potempa lamented other retail casualties such as Linkimer’s Shoes, shuttered in 1994 after 45 years, David’s Men’s haberdashery, closed in 2014 after three decades, and Piper’s Children’s Boutique, which recently went out of business after 37 years.

An obit for Fae Elaine Wewe, 92, who lived in Gary’s Miller Beach neighborhood most her life, noted her culinary skills and that she donated baked goods and homemade jellies and jams to Lutheran church fundraisers.  She and husband Dick, a steelworker, adopted daughter Jeanette in 1959. Fae Wewe’s obit concluded: “Though she grew up in a time that relegated women and others to second-class status, Fae understood that all people deserved equal treatment, no matter their gender, race, ethnicity or ability. Those values formed the core of her life. Though she lacked much formal education, she taught her daughter to read before she started kindergarten.” Jeanette McVicker is presently a professor of English and Women’s Studies at SUNY Fredonia and an expert on Virginia Woolf. 

The Old Man

“The old man had his high point every Wednesday at George’s Bowling Alley, where he once bowled a historic game in which he got three consecutive strikes.” Jean Shepherd, “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash”

Jean Shepherd

The old man of Jean Shepherd’s best sellers was a cranky but somewhat endearing middle-aged curmudgeon, while his real father felt trapped in a drudge existence and deserted the family when Shep’s younger brother turned 18. From such experiences came the bard’s sardonic humor, what he labeled not nostalgia but anti-nostalgia.  In 1995, thanks largely to IUN archivist Steve McShane’s efforts, Shepherd received an IU honorary degree at age 74.  At a banquet beforehand, Shep had unsuspecting invitees rolling in the aisles as he described returning to the Region from Korea and taking an aptitude test at IU’s East Chicago extension center. Prior to his enrolling for classes, administrators revealed that the tests indicated that he should go into dentistry.  With a twinkle in his eye, Shep concluded his 20-minute bit by saying, “I walked out of that building and never looked back.”  What a tribute to a Region university, making it the butt of a brilliant comedy bit.  It was his way of acknowledging how honored he was to be receiving an honorary doctorate.  Four years later, Shep was dead, estranged from all blood relatives, unable to excise ghosts from the past or forgive old hurts.

In “A Fistful of Fig Newtons,” a unique blend of fiction and memoir, Jean Shepherd writes from the point of view of an urban sophisticate born in Northwest Indiana.  From a high-rise apartment, Shepherd wrote, he ripped the cover off New York magazine and “with smooth, adept, practiced skill quickly folded the cover into a paper airplane, an art not used in many years, perfected grade after grade at the Warren G. Harding School.”  He described the Midwestern public university he attended on the G.I. Bill as the result of a “charitable outpouring of public monies which has led to the psychic downfall of multitudes of erstwhile worthy garage mechanics and plumbers helpers.” Shepherd wrote of returning to Hammond and passing by his old high school:

       It was all there, even the weedy athletic field with its paint-peeling goal posts where I had once played the role of an intrepid defensive lineman and I had irrevocably shattered the ligaments of my left knee, which now began to throb sympathetically as we passed the old battlefield. Ghostly voices of my teachers of that golden time moaned in my subconscious: Miss Bryfogel, her high, thin bleat intoning facts about Bull Run and Appomattox, Miss McCullough’s birdlike chip squeaking something about gerunds or whatever they were, old red-faced Huffine, our coach, barking, “I don’t want to kick no asses but . . .”

        The long winters I had spent in this red brick mausoleum, its echoing halls, clanging lockers, its aromatic gym and cafeteria, scented forever with the aroma of salmon loaf and canned peas.  The roar of thousands of students surging up and down the stairways.

In my 1990s Steel Shavings, “Shards and Midden Heaps” (volume 31, 2001) I eulogize Jean Shepherd and reflect on in my 50s celebrating a twentieth-fifth wedding anniversary with my first grandchild (Alissa) and seeing sons Phil and Dave graduate from IU, commence productive careers as TV producer/director and teacher, and marry (in Dave’s case during the Blizzard of ’98).  I bragged about softball and bowling feats and winning tennis trophies in father-son and Senior tournaments. I still had a full had of hair, but it was turned grey.  Twenty years ago, a vicious home invader kept calling me an old man.  Now at age 78 I feel my age in my right knee, rotator cup, left ankle and need for frequent bathroom trips and nine hours of sleep.  Homebound during the pandemic, my main exercise comes from getting the mail and picking dandelions from the front garden in 10-minute intervals, stopping when the knee starts aching.

In this time of social distancing, when millions of young people are missing out on commencement ceremonies, Jean Shepherd wrote this account of graduating from Warren G. Harding School in Hammond:

      The despised glee club sang the Warren G. Harding fight song, accompanied by Miss Bundy, her crinkly straw-colored hair bobbing up and down, her huge bottom enveloping the piano stool. Then an undertaker and Chevrolet dealer delivered a mind-numbing oration on how his generation was passing the torch of civilization from its faltering hands into our youthful energetic and idealistic hands.

       But I got my diploma.  Clasping the sacred scroll there on the stage I felt myself growing wise and dignified, a person of substance, well equipped to carry torches, best foes, to identify the parts of speech, including gerunds, to draw from memory the sinister confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates.  And that Bolivia exports tin.

      At last we were free.  Warren G. Harding and its warm embrace, its easy ways, stood forever behind us.  On the way home the old man, his clean shirt cracklng with starch, said: “Whaddaya say we celebrate by pickin’ up some ice cream at the Igloo.  Ecstatic, I sat in the back seat of the Olds with my kid brother, clutching the precious document on which my name had been misspelled, in Old English lettering.

Casey King passed his IU Northwest senior review with flying colors, exhibiting drawing having to do with a long abandoned Miller drive-in, the Frank-N-Stein.  I’m pretty certain I’d convinced him to attend his commencement ceremony that won’t happen due to the pandemic.

The coronavirus outbreak is wreaking havoc at Westville prison, as well as Porter County jail and other area correctional facilities.  The Chesterton Tribune published the transcript of a phone call from a Westville inmate provided by Indiana Prison Advocates.  It stated:

      The inmates here, including myself, man, are very sick.  A lot of people have tried to get medical attention but are refused.  Things are getting worse, there was a riot.  If my 56-year-old roommate doesn’t get medical attention, then he’s probably not going to live.  Staff are coming in sick and inmates have been asked to keep an eye on these guys the minute they quit breathing to let somebody know. I don’t know how to describe the misery that has taken place here.  People are moaning in pain and some are hoping to die to relieve the suffering.  Commissary’s been taken away.  Governor Holcomb claims there’s a strike team here at Westville, but I haven’t seen anyone offering to help anyone do anything.

Doughface

    "We are all docile dough-faces,

They knead us with their fist

They the dashing southern lord

We labor as they list"

    Walt Whitman

“Doughface” originally referred to masks made out of dough but came to be used disparagingly referring to politicians who were pliable and easily manipulated.  During the 1850s Northerners, including poet Walt Whitman and antislavery newspaper editors, employed the insult against Northern politicians with Southern sympathies, such as presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan (above), who believed appeasing the South on the slavery issue was essential to keeping the Union together and that slavery would eventually go away when it proved economically unprofitable. Examples of “Doughface” policies included support for pro-South forces in “Bleeding Kansas” and acceptance of the Dred Scott decision and enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act

My cousin Tommie (Thomasine) Adelizzi, who is enamored over our family being James Buchanan’s closest relatives of our generation, recently appeared in a BBC documentary about America’s fifteenth president, commonly considered one of our worst.  A staunch defender of someone whose name would have been hers had she not been born a girl (instead that some would say dubious honor fell to me), Tommie wrote:

    He was not the worst President.  He was not a person who wanted slavery. ln fact he freed several slaves that he was given by friends.  His story is really about trying to save the fragile United States at the time.  It’s a story of a President who fought the press and how the writers of that time rewrote history.  He was possibly the best or one of the best educated gentlemen to hold the office.  He was not only a member of Congress, he was Secretary of State, Ambassador to Russia and England, and a successful lawyer, which the writers say he was a pauper.  They claimed he was gay.  He was very interested in ladies, especially Southern ladies.

I emailed back, “JB’s poor reputation as worst President is undeserved.  The main rap against him – that he dithered while Southern states seceded – is inconsequential in view of the fact that the Civil War, given the existence of slavery and Southern intransigence, was inevitable, even desirable. Regarding rumors that JB was gay, unsubstantiated though they are, if true, more power to him for finding a measure of happiness after his true love committed suicide.” I could have added that the bachelor President’s niece, Harriet Lane, was the greatest First Lady of the nineteenth century, Dolley Madison having been given undue credit for saving the portrait of George Washington and a slaveowner to boot, who sold a loyal servant of 30 years so her waistrel son could purchase a suit.

When Harriet Lane was just 25 years old, she served as Buchanan’s hostess when he was appointed Minister to Great Britain. In a short biography Ginger Shelley and Sandie Munro wrote that Harriet accompanied her uncle when he received an honorary degree from Oxford University, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  They wrote: “When the students at Oxford saw Harriet, they greeted this fashionable [and well-endowed] woman with cheers and much whistling.  She became the center of attention at an event which was supposed to be for her uncle and the English poet!”

“Never on Sunday” (1960), with a “Pygmalion plot about a whore with a heart of gold, takes place on the Greek coastal town of Piraeus with actress Melina Mercouri played a free-hearted soul whom an American name Homer attempts to woo by convincing her to give up her profession in favor of a classical education. Unlike the other town prostitutes, one of whom’s fantasy is to marry a rich 84-year-old uninterest in sex, she is not beholden to a pimp and only takes clients she likes.  It earned a PG rating and many Oscar nominations after censors demanded that nude and sex scene be cut.  It comes off as tame, mild entertainment, interesting primarily for the dinging, dancing, and Melina Mercouri’s performance.

After reading positive reviews of the Starz series “Vida,” about to begin its third and final season, I binge-watched season one, then learned that the cable station wanted me to pay for season two.  No thanks.  Two Latinas (Lyn, an upwardly mobile snob, and Emma, a total narcissist) reunite in East L.A. after their mother dies and learn that she had married a lesbian named Eddie, who like them inherited one third of the family-owned neighborhood bar. The most compelling characters are Mari, a militant community activist fighting gentrification still subservient to men, and Eddie, whom the sisters first resent and gradually begin to appreciate and warm to.

Archives

    "University archives are spots of wonder filled with artifacts that are mesmerizing, quirky, priceless and surprising.” Sherri Kimmel

   When archivist/curator Steve McShane is unable to answer his phone, his taped message includes the remark that he is likely out of the office collecting more treasures for the Calumet Regional Archives (CRA). Among the “treasures” already housed on the third floor of the IU Northwest library are diaries, minute books, land records, photographs, collections of environmental groups and labor unions, dunes posters, political buttons and fliers, an extensive collection of books about Northwest Indiana, and much, much more – including artifacts that are mesmerizing, quirky, priceless, and surprising, to reinforce the statement of Sherri Kimmel.

                           George Washington Carver, 1906, by Francis Benjamin Johnston

   In Bucknell magazine Sherri Kimmel wrote about a collection of 80 letters written between 1927 and 1942 that Bucknell YMCA secretary Forrest D. Brown exchanged with African-American scientist George Washington Carver, who developed over 300 products derived from peanuts. Similar to scenes from “Green Book,” Brown sometimes chauffeured Carver to appearances at Southern white universities and arranged for Carver to speak at Bucknell in November 1930 on the subject “The Inside of a Peanut.”  Brown’s daughter Carolyn Brown Chaapel, who donated the letters at my alma mater in Lewisburg, PA, told Kimmel: “Our home was an open door; Dad had so many people of color and nationalities from all over the world come to our house.” Brown retired in 1966, so he would have been on campus during my years at Bucknell, but I have no recollection of him. I do recall Bucknell-Burma Week, which he had a hand in arranging.

   George Washington Carver’s accomplishments became widely known in part because to the white establishment he, like Booker T. Washington and Crispus Attucks (killed during the Boston Massacre), represented a non-threatening Negro role model.  Segregated schools throughout the nation were named for them while, on the other hand, the accomplishments of freedom fighters such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells received less publicity and acclaim.  Unfortunately, the recent backlash against this practice has sometimes resulted in Carver and Washington unfairly branded as “Uncle Toms.”

    Until the pandemic, thanks in part to the persistence of co-directors Ron Cohen and me, procedures were in place and pretty much on schedule for the hiring of a replacement for Calumet Regional Archives mainstay Steve McShane (above), our archivist since operations opened in what’s now IUN’s John Will Anderson Library, who will soon retire after four decades of service. Librarian Latrice Booker, Vice Chancellor Vickie Lagunas, and Chancellor William Lowe were all on board for a search to commence. Two distinguished archivists whom Steve knew personally had expressed interest in applying for the position.  Then the proverbial shit hit the fan. With the university closed, hiring frozen, IU President McRobbie mandating five percent budget cuts for regional campuses, and Lowe retiring in two months, it appears clear that nobody will be hired before Steve leaves and uncertainty looms on how soon we can get the process moving again.

   After posting the above paragraph, I received a dozen comments on Facebook from friends of Steve, students who took his Indiana History course, researchers, and former colleagues.  Sculptor Neil Goodman wrote: “Steve has always been a treasure to the campus.  I hope that his position will be replaced, as history is long and memory short.”  Feminist author Anne Balay added: “Steve was such a vital resource when I wrote ‘Steel Closets’ and a good friend.  The Archives is his legacy and should be continued and supported.”  Connie Mack-Ward said it would be a disgrace not to staff the Archives, and community activist Lois Reiner mentioned that Steve helped rescue “troves of history including the minutes from our little Valparaiso Builders Association.”

Oxymandias

My name is OzymandiasOzymandias Pharaoh Rameses II (reigned 1279-1213 BCE). According to the OED, the statue was once 57 feet tall., King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Percy Shelley (1818)

A column by playwright David Mamet about our present crisis mentions his Jewish grandparents and uncle who emigrated to America a century ago and overcame numerous calamities.  Mamet references Percy Shelley’s “Oxymandias,” about the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, whose statue was taken from a temple in Thebes and the torso and head eventually brought to London. The column refers to rock pecked by daws, and I found out that a daw, short for jackdaw, is a bird similar to a crow.  “Oxymandias” was also the title of a “Breaking Bad” episode during which Bryan Cranston recited the entire poem to make the point about collapse following greatness, hopefully not the fate of America burdened by a total incompetent at the helm during the present pandemic.

Ray Smock has characterized the Trump presidency as the Era of Pandemonium and his most recent daily briefing as a defining moment. In a wacky, dangerous, and all too typical display, DT “wondered out loud if maybe disinfectants could be a cure. Maybe we could get UV light inside of people. Maybe injecting the right kind of disinfectant might kill this thing. Maybe we should look into these things. He wondered if anybody ever thought of this before. It was as if he just discovered the answer to the pandemic.”  Smock added facetiously: “I certainly hope that no one goes out and tries to drink bleach or inject some household disinfectant into their veins. But maybe we will see a run on UV lighting. And people on beaches this summer may get sunburned tongues trying to follow the leadership of our president.”

With 50,000 Americans having died from Covid-19 in little more than a month – more than perished during the Vietnam war – I’m more aware of obits than ever before.  Claudia Wright, 79, of Valparaiso passed away, and as usual there was no clarification as to the cause of death.  Her relatives enjoyed her wacky expressions, such as “Do you want me to stand on my head and spit golden nickels?”  Or, “Your ass sucks buttermilk through a straw.”  The obit stated that one of Claudia’s last requests was “for the sake of mankind, to make sure that the ‘idiot’ is not re-elected as U.S. president.  For those who knew her, you could probably hear her voice saying this.”

 Anthony Mallozzi

Upper Dublin classmate Anthony Mallozzi passed away, John Jacobsen informed me.  I had to think briefly which Mallozzi that was because Bill Mallozzi, another cool dude, was also in our class.  Anthony was a tall, handsome Italian-American born in Ambler and in retirement lived in Sellersville, PA, not far from where we spent our formidable years, just down Bethlehem Pike a ways. We were casual friends with buddies in common – Bob Elliott, Pat Zollo, Dick Garretson, John Magyar – but didn’t have any classes together since he was in Industrial Arts and I in College Prep.  He signed my yearbook: “Jimmy, to a real nice guy.  Don’t forget intramurals. Best of everything in what you do.  Ant.”  I have no recollection of intramurals but it must have been basketball a sport I was quite good at despite my diminutive size.  The yearbook gives Ant’s nickname as Lazard and contains these notes: “Let’s go down to Gert’s – always seen with his ’54 Mercury – prefers a certain blond – heading West first chance he gets – tries to be serious when it’s impossible.” His friends Carol and Joe Paulino wrote, “Barbara and his family meant the world to him, and he talked about his grandchildren all the time.”  I hope he made it out West before he settled down.

John Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest” ended similarly to how “Rabbit Run” opened, with Harry playing hoops with someone younger, in this case a one-on-one game of 21 with a black guy he nicknames Tiger. He had observed playground games in the slum neighborhood during walks and, despite a bad heart, had worn shorts and sneakers in case he got into a game. As the contest intensified, Harry was aware “of a watery weariness entering into his knees, but adrenaline and nostalgia overrule.”  At 18 apiece Tiger says, “You puffin’ pretty bad.  How about coolin’ it? No big deal.”  Harry declines, they trade buckets, and needing a basket for the win, the 58-year-old, Updike writes, “takes one slam of a dribble, carrying his foe on his side like a bumping sack of coal, and leaps up for the peeper.  The hoop fills his circle of vision, it descends to kiss his lips, he can’t miss.  Up he goes, way up toward the torn clouds.  His torso is ripped by a terrific pain.  He bursts from within; he feels something immense persistently fumble at him, and he falls unconscious to the dirt.”  In the hospital Rabbit’s last words to son Nelson: “All I can tell you, it isn’t so bad.”

At Rest

"Teaching is the greatest act of optimism," Colleen Wilcox

Former Gary educator Carmen Cammarata passed away at age 89.  After graduating from Froebel, Carmen served in the army for two years before earning degrees in Education from IU and Roosevelt University and taking a teaching job at Webster Elementary in Glen Park.  Former Webster student Robin Shannon recalled:

    He was the nicest guy.  I ran into him as an adult. It took a minute but once it came back to him he remembered this skinny little kid who transferred from private school.  He said I cried for two days until he gave me a lollipop.  He was an Italian guy in a school full of brown kids. He was super protective of us, never allowing racism of the 60s to gain traction within our hallways.

Using his student experiences at Froebel as a model, Cammarata took a multicultural approach to learning. After serving as assistant principal at Emerson, he became principal at Washington and later at Aetna and Kennedy-King in Miller. Alicia Skinner Kelley wrote, “He was an awesome person, teacher, and leader.  He was my principal at Washington Elementary at my first teaching assignment.  I was his assistant principal at Spaulding, and he taught me everything that I would ever need to know about Elementary Administration. All the principals considered Mr. C the very best.”  Natalie Stewart added: “He loved his job, loved talking about Froebel School, and Gary, the city where he was raised.” As caring as he was, Cammarata kept a tight reign on discipline during a time of rapid racial upheaval.  On Burns-Kish Funeral Home “Share a Memory” website Chip wrote: “Mr. C!  His sternness, bullhorn, and paddle helped make me the success that I am.”  Self-described problem child Ricky Ammons noted, “He taught us structure and respect.” T. Myricks summarized: “He had a non-nonsense approach that you appreciated because you knew it truly came from a place of love.”

Cammarata (right) is survived by wife of 68 years Mary Ann, two siblings, five children, 11 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.  The Cammarata family, according to the Northwest Indiana Times obit, “enjoyed numerous trips touring the western states in their pop-up camper.  Upon retirement, Carmen and Mary Ann enjoyed trips to Italy, Russia, and Alaska.  He especially enjoyed his trip to Sicily to meet his cousins for the first time.  His summers were filled with the meticulous care of his house, yard, and cars.” R.I.P.
When Phil and Dave started school at Marquette Elementary in Miller, the principal, a Mr. Svetkoff, paddled kids, in fact made a public spectacle of it in front of other students.  It    so traumatized Dave that he once at age six walked all the way home, crossing a major artery.  We scheduled an appointment with Svetkoff, and he claimed that the teachers union contract gave him the right to paddle, that black parents wanted him to use the power (this was a time of rapid racial transition), and that we didn’t have to worry about Dave getting paddled.  We suggested that at the least he could carry out disciplinary action away from other kids, but he refused and actually seemed proud of what he was doing.  Not long afterwards, Phil and Dave started going to an alternative school in Glen Park.

In John Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest” Harry is watching the news in August 1989 when reports came on of Voyager II discovering volcanoes on Triton, one of Neptune’s 13 moons, and two Congressman dying in a small plane crash within a week, Lankin Smith of Mississippi and African-American Mickey Leland of Texas in Ethiopia. Other lawmakers, small plane travel being an occupational hazard, who similarly perished were Hale Boggs over Alaska (presumably, the crash site was never found) and Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, whose widow, heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune, married Senator John Kerry.  Fleeing to Florida after his daughter-in-law confessed to sleeping with him (her idea, her husband being a cokehead at the time), Harry found an Oldies radio station that played songs from his youth: “Mule Train” by Frankie Laine, “It’s Magic” by Doris Day, “Vaya con Dios” by Les Paul and Mary Ford, and “Just a Giggolo” by Louis Prima – fitting in Rabbit’s circumstance.  Updike observes: “We’re all just bodies with brains at one end and the rest just plumbing.”

I re-watched the 1973 John Lucas-Francis Ford Coppola classic “American Graffiti” (1973) and discovered that Harrison Ford played a greaser who races John, the Fonzi-like character. Richard Dreyfuss, then 26, plays high school graduating senior Curt, as does Ron Howard (identifies as Ronny in the credits) as Steve.  Set in the year 1962, the film features Wolfman Jack spinning songs from my youth such as “Sixteen Candles” by the Crests and “Goodnight, Sweetheart” by the Spaniels from Gary, Indiana. The thin plot, such as it is, centers on whether Curt and Steve will go away to college or attend a local junior college. After Steve’s girlfriend leaves him and almost dies when Harrison Ford’s car flips over and explodes in flames, she begs him never to leave her and wimpy Steve forgoes his chance to attend a prestigious university (Boo!). As the credits roll, we learn that Curt becomes a writer, Steve an insurance salesman, and that John gets killed by a drink driver – pretty bogus and annoying since these are fictional characters.

Wobblies

"The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.” Helen Keller, IWW member, 1911

Wobblies was a nickname for members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical union founded in Chicago in 1905 whose leaders included Eugene Victor Debs and Big Bill Haywood.  Believing in “One Big Union” and organizing industry-wide rather than by trades or crafts, the IWW had considerable success in western states, signing up farmworkers, lumberjacks, miners, and unskilled workers ignored, for the most part, by the cautious American Federation of Labor. The Wobblies used songs (“Solidarity Forever”) and colorful slogans (“Get the Bosses Off Your Backs”) to spread their mass appeal.  It had an estimated 150,000 members in 1917 before its members were persecuted and its leaders jailed, deported or murdered during World War I and the Red Scare. Its spirit lived on, inspiring many New Leftists during the 1970s including David Ranney, who belonged to the socialist groups New American Movement and the Sojourner Truth Organization.

In 1976 David Ranney hired in at FAROC, a small job shop in East Chicago, Indiana, that rebuilt centrifuge machines, used in rendering plants processing carcasses of pigs, cows, and horses into solids and liquids converted to other uses. Ranney found the listing in the Daily Calumet and drove to the plant from South Chicago via the Chicago Skyway.  In “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor” Ranney recorded his first impressions:

    From the Skyway I can see miles of bungalow homes, smaller and larger factories, and two steel mills, all going full tilt. As I get near East Chicago the acrid smell of steel production gets even stronger than it is in South Chicago.  Smoke fills the air and visibility is limited.  Massive integrated steel mills, including Inland Steel and U.S. Steel Gary Works, run around the clock. One of the operations in these mills is burning coal to make a product called coke that burns hot enough to combine limestone and iron into steel.  There are also huge mills that use the raw steel to produce sheets, beams, tubes, and rails. Other factories nearby use steel to make blast furnaces and giant ladles that are needed for the steelmaking process. At one point, five steel mills in the area employed over one hundred thousand workers.

At FAROC, which employed between 15 and 20 workers, there were many hazards, caused in part by the fact that there never seemed to be adequate time to clean up after a job was finished. Ranney wrote: “There are pallets of parts and motors lying in the aisleways.  Tools are sitting around everywhere, and the place is filthy.”  Ranney is injured twice in five months, once in the hand while using a drill bit and then when he tripped over a small ball bearing on the slippery floor, opening a large gash in his head when he fell into a piece of metal on a pallet and necessitating a trip to the ER.  The following Monday the boss fired him. Ranney objected saying, “That’s illegal, you know – to fire a guy because he is hurt on the job?”  The boss responded, “I’m firing you because you are not worth a shit.  Sue me!”

Seeking work, Ranney learned that Inland Steel was hiring. Arriving at the plant, he joined a line estimated to be a mile long only to be told that the positions had been filled. Over the next six years he worked at another half-dozen small plants, sometimes terminated when companies learned of his leftist background, other times penalized for trying to bring together white, Latino, and black workers.  He discovered that in most cases the unions supposedly representing the labor force seemed in cahoots with management and a common theme at all the plants was, in his words, “exploitation of backbreaking and dangerous labor and the often unhealthy and unsafe working conditions.” In a concluding chapter Ranney reflected on lessons learned and beliefs reinforced by his years working as an industrial worker. Labor in a capitalist society, he believed, is reduced to a commodity, and progress for workers is the result of militant labor struggle.  The precipitous decline in American manufacturing job was the result of a corporate strategy to relocate overseas and to replace its work force with robots and computers who don’t demand decent wages or complain about health and safety concerns.

While at the University of Maryland, I played on a softball team composed of History grad students; we called ourselves the Wobblies in honor of our kindred labor activists.

During my three-year career as pitcher (it wasn’t slow pitch but no windmill deliveries were permitted) we were one of the best teams, the others being Physical Plant and Upward Bound, the latter composed of incoming African-American students.  One year I took teammates to Boys Village of Maryland, where I worked teaching kids ages 13-15 who were either delinquents or foster children who had run away from where they’d been sent.  Most weren’t bad kids, and they were impressed that my teammates had come to play ball with them and quite good at hitting up my friends for money and in one case his glove.

Soon after I started teaching at IUN, several students (Ivan Jasper, Dave Serynek, Tom Orr) asked me to pitch for their softball team, Porter Acres, named for a former motel where many of them lived, enjoying a counter-culture lifestyle that my family became part of, at least on weekends and after games. We weren’t very good at first but enjoyed one glorious championship season where we even won a tournament against more highly ranked A and B division squads.  The team disbanded after Ivan Jasper and Tom Wade moved to the Bahamas, but I still get together a least once a year with several old teammates and reminisce.  Phil and Dave were bat boys for Porter Acres, and a decade later while they were IU students Dave and his friend Kevin Horn started a team (it had various names depending on who’d sponsor us and pay for our shirts) and needed a reliable pitcher. In slow pitch softball control is the chief requisite and I hardly ever issued walks. One game I hit a line drive down the first base line.  The rightfielder dove for the ball but missed and it kept rolling and rolling.  I was chugging into third base intending to stop, but Dave, coaching third, waved me in.  A good throw would have nailed me, but the surprised second baseman who took the cutoff, heaved the ball over the catcher’s head. Voila, my lone career home run.

Our team often finished first during the regular season but faltered in post-season tournaments when rival teams often brought in ringers. In 1996, however, we won it all. In the semi-final we were clinging to a one-run lead in the bottom of the seventh when a batter hit a little nubber in front of the plate.  I was known for making throws to first underhand because I had a sore shoulder and better control than if I threw overhand.  Knowing that I’d have no chance to beat the runner underhand, I whipped the ball overhand and nailed the guy by a half-step.  My teammates couldn’t believe what I’d done.  In the final game we had a five-run lead after our final at-bats, but our opponents got four runs and had men on first and second with two out and a feared home run hitter, Jim Wilkie, at the plate (a ringer whom I knew from coaching Little League). Pitching him inside, I gave up two colossal foul balls, then pitched one with at least a 12-inch arc. Had he hot swung, it would have been called an illegal pitch, but Wilkie, fearful of taking strike 3, hit the highest fly ball I’d ever seen to short leftfield.  Kevin Horn camped under it, squeezed his glove around it, and we were champs.  I still have the t-shirt from Portage Park Department, inscribed in letters now fading, 1996 Imagination Glen Men’s Champions.

During this time former student and Porter Acres teammate Terry Hunt, a Vietnam vet, asked me and son Dave to play for a Glen Park Eagles team. Terry and I shared pitching duties and normally one of us would play second base when the other pitched.  One evening in the last inning Terry asked me to play first base, which I’d never done before.  I objected, and he insisted, claiming it was as easy as sitting in a rocking chair. With darkness fast approaching and two outs he fielded a grounder and threw to me.  I muffed the throw, putting the winning run on.  The next batter hit a grounder to our shortstop, who had a rifle of an arm.  His throw to me seemed like a speeding bullet, but miraculously it landed in my glove; otherwise it could have done serious harm to me.  Game over.  I told Terry never to ask me to play that position again. My teammates loved to party, but I rarely visited their clubhouse (“Aerie”) because so members smoked and it had a low roof. I occasionally still wear my “uniform,” a shirt with my nickname “Doc” on the back and the number 55, my age at the time.  Two years later, I retired after getting hit by two balls, a line drive at my ankle and a grounder that took a bad hop and got me in the face. With the mound just 15 yards from home plate and realizing my reaction time may have slowed down, I reluctantly gave up the sport that had given me so many cherished memories.

Night Watchman

 "If you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.”  Louise Erdrich, "The Night Watchman"

Liz Wuerffel participated in a YouTube initiative called “Q Read” in which Valpo residents shared information on books that they were reading.  Liz said she normally reads just one book at a time, but being at home during the pandemic, she’s reading one during the day and another at night. She just finished a new novel, “The Night Watchman,” by Louise Erdrich, whose mother was from a Chippewa tribe.  Its about the Turtle Mountain People who during the 1950s fought against government attempts to terminate their tribal lands, a practice the Trump administration is currently pursuing against the Mashpee Wampanoag People whose plans for a casino evidently irked some of the President’s wealthy donors. Erdrich wrote: “The government acted like Indians owed them something, but wasn’t it the other way around?”

Wuerffel also recommended “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor” by David Ranney, an Urban Planning professor who spent seven years (1976-1982) working in industrial factories in Northwest Indiana and the South Side of Chicago.  A union electrician friend turned Liz on to the book.  During the 1970s Ranney left his tenured position at the University of Iowa because he was a committed socialist who believed, in his words, that “a new society could be built from the initiatives of mass organizations at the workplace.”  Many leftists whose views were similar to Ranney’s moved to Gary at that time and worked to make the steelworkers locals more democratic, inclusive to women and minorities, and environmentally conscious.  Several became close friends.  After watching Liz on YouTube, I expressed a desire to read” Living and Dying on the Factory Floor.”  It arrived in the mail the following day, along with a nice note.

During our present crisis when poor people living from paycheck to paycheck have been especially hard hit and the executive branch of government is seemingly unconcerned over the fate of common people, Liz Wuerffel also posted interviews with homeless people in Valpo that appear on the Welcome Project.  In “We Were Them” a victim recalled:

    When we were living out of our vehicle, necessity drove us to have to go here and go there.  We would park in the Walmart parking lot through the night for sleeping, because we knew they had restroom facilities we could use. And when you live like that, you start meeting other people in a similar circumstance. And I was astounded at the number of people; typically, if you saw them, you wouldn’t even know that they’re suffering in this way. And they’re all around us. We were them, you know, and I never understood any of this. But I got a pretty good grasp of it now.

    What I’ve learned is that life is not a straight line. There’s curves, turns, and you even go back upon yourself many times. And it’s easy to get lost, to take one misstep, to take one wrong turn: left, when you should’ve gone right. And, so, to stereotype all these people, and say they’re this, this, or this — I can’t tell you how wrong that is. Bad things happen to good people, and it ain’t through no fault of their own. It’s life. And I’ll never hesitate to help somebody up after this.

ESPN moved up the date of the first two parts of its 10-hour documentary on Michael Jordan to Sunday due to popular demand during a sports-starved time. I watched a four-hour “30 on 30” show about Michael Vick, who revolutionized the NFL quarterback position by rushing for a thousand yards starring for the Atlanta Falcons for six years after being drafted in 2001 but then was imprisoned for having a dog-fighting ring on his property.  Coming from the Newport News, Virginia projects (like NBA star Alan Iverson), Vick was unwilling to break from childhood friends who took advantage of his generosity and did not have his best interests at heart. The documentary explains that betting on dog fights was common in his old neighborhood tolerated by the police and comparable to cockfighting among Latinos and horse racing for the elite (at least in the eyes of some African Americans).  When police caught one of Vick’s “posse” with marijuana who gave his address as Vick’s estate, law enforcement authorities used that as an excuse to search the entire property.  After serving most of his 23-month sentence, Vick hired crisis manager Judy A. Smith (role model for the main character in the TV show “Scandal”) to help convince society that he was truly contrite.  Ever since he has worked diligently with the Humane Society and community groups. With the help of coach Tony Dungy and Philadelphia quarterback Donavan McNabb, he returned to the NFL and was Comeback Player of the Year with the Eagles.

I’ve been enjoying Acquire games on line and with Charlie Halberstadt’s patient help trying to master playing bridge.  I watched “Bull Durham” (1988) for the first time in 30 years.  Sexy Susan Sarandon plays Annie, a minor league baseball groupie who loves season-long romantic flings and quotes Walt Whitman and William Blake (she teaches English at a local college). The film opens with shots of photos in Annie’s home of slum kids playing stickball, Jackie Robinson stealing home and Pete Rose sliding head first, Babe Ruth at the twilight of his career, Fernando Valenzuela’s eyes almost disappearing upward as he winds up, and 3 foot, 7-inch Eddie Gaebel at the plate in his only major league appearance (he walked on four pitches for Bill Veeck’s St. Louis Browns).

In the wake of Trump refusing to keep funding the World Health Organization all three major networks aired a show featuring big name musicians to raise money and awareness of the need for cooperation during the Covid-19 pandemic.  On piano Lady Gaga led off with the classic ballad “Smile.” Other inspirational numbers included “Lean on Me” by Stevie Wonder” and “Stand By Me” by John Legend. Elton John ("I'm Still Standing"), Jennifer Lopez ("People"), and the Rolling Stones (connected by Zoom) did "You Can't Always Get What You Want"); my favorite performance was Shawn Mendez and Camila Cabello doing “What a Wonderful World.” Paul McCartney chose to do “Lady Madonna, appropriate in view of poor people hurt particularly hard by the economy grinding to almost a halt:

    Lady Madonna, children at your feet
    Wonder how you manage to make ends meet
    Who finds the money when you pay the rent?
    Did you think that money was heaven sent?

    Friday night arrives without a suitcase
    Sunday morning creeping like a nun
    Monday's child has learned to tie his bootlace
    See how they run

    Lady Madonna, baby at your breast
    Wonders how you manage to feed the rest

Squeeze Inn

“The hourglass has no more grains of sand 

Little red grains of sand

My watch has stopped no more turning hands

Little green neon hands”

    “Hourglass,” Squeeze

Steve Spicer posted a photo of a century-old cottage at Miller Beach known as Squeeze Inn that Chicagoans used in the summer. “When the original Squeeze Inn was cobbled together is unknown,” Spicer wrote, “but it was located somewhere between the mouth of the Grand Calumet, quite possibly where the Aquatorium is today.” When the City of Gary began developing Marquette Park, the building was ordered razed, but a sorority purchased a lot further east for 500 dollars and a New Squeeze Inn opened on July 4, 1921. Spicer found a hundred-year-old article by Edith Heilman in the Forest Park Review, written upon returning from chaperoning sorority sisters for two weeks during the final summer of the original shack’s existence.  Here is an excerpt, thanks to Miller historian Spicer:

 “Squeeze Inn,” in cold, geographical terms, is a shack-and-porch a mile from Millers Beach, Millers, Ind.

Practically speaking, it’s a little bit of heaven dropped from out the skies. Sunny days and star dotted nights and the lake breeze make it so. Sand flies and a giant species of mosquito are the rift in the lute. But let us dismiss them!

As before stated, they call this place “Squeeze Inn.” But whoever presided over the christening rites missed his guess. It should have been called “Squeeze Out!” We are heaps more out than in, and some of us bubble over even from off the porch and sleep on the sand with the stars for our canopy.

Picture if you can a shack 18 by 10 feet with a complement of a porch 18 by 18 feet; porch bigger than the house, you will note. The house proper holds cooking utensils and clothing and at present is so crammed with both that a human being hasn’t room to more than wiggle into and out of her bathing suit.

The cooking is done out of doors on an improvised stove, and I want to say right here that if you are finicky or “set” in your ways, stay away from the “Squeeze Inn!” Sand and charcoal is the basis of most of the menus, but what cares youth for such trifles?

And the girls themselves! Tall, short, black heads and blond – with a charming red head thrown in for spice! And when they all line up in their gayly colored bathing suits they’re a sight for sore eyes.

Fifty weeks out of the year they are stenographers, bookkeepers and general office girls. Out here for two carefree weeks that are Dryads of the Woods and Belles of the Beach!

Spicer discovered that the origin of the unofficial sorority Tau Omega Tau Sigma (TOTS) was an organization the young women joined during World War I, the Girls Patriotic Service League and that Edith Heilman had been their sponsor. The TOTS girls, as they called themselves, and their families used the second Squeeze Inn until the 1950s.

 

Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb, the main places to vacation were the Jersey shore and the Poconos. My parents preferred the Poconos; and after two bad experiences using a tent began renting a cabin at Lake Minneola along with the Jenkins family. It wasn’t a shack, but it was not very luxurious either. What I recall most vividly was the open porch where we’d play cards and flypaper hanging up to which were attached its victims. Most of our excursions to the shore were day trips, but after my freshman year at Bucknell, my fraternity rented a place for a week that became as crowded as Squeeze Inn. I recall sleeping on a couch with a coed I had met earlier in the day. We were both pretty drunk and didn’t do any heavy petting. I saw her once after that but otherwise we went our separate ways.

 

In “Rabbit at Rest” Harry drove by his childhood neighborhood (something Terry Jenkins and I did the last time we were together) and recalled his bedroom, with tinker toys, rubber soldiers, lead airplanes, and stuffed teddy bears lined up on a shelf. I shared a bedroom with my younger brother and recall that on one shelf were adventure books on cowboys and the wild west by someone with the strange name of Holling C. Holling. We also had numerous board games, including Parcheesi and Chutes and Ladders, and sometimes we’d combine them so you’d have to have your tokens go onto the second one after completing the route on the first.  Updike wrote:

 On the radio Harry hears that Mike Schmidt, who exactly two years ago, on April 18, 1987, slugged his five hundredth home rum against the Pittsburgh Pirates, is closing in on Richie Ashburn’s total of 2,217 hits to become the hittingest Phillie ever. Rabbit remembers Ashburn.  One of the 1950 Whiz Kids who beat the Dodgers the fall Rabbit became a high school senior.  Curt Simmons, Del Ennis, Dick Sisler, Andy Seminick behind the plate.  Beat the Dodgers the last game of the season, then lost to the Yankees four straight.

I was in third grade when the Phillies played the Yankees in the 1950 World Series. The games took place in the afternoon, and Miss Worthington let us listen to them on the radio.  My dad had tickets for game 5, which never took place because the Yankees swept all four games.  I watched the final one on a Saturday at the Jenkins house; we didn’t have a TV until a year later.

 

Final Jeopardy in one of the college tournament semi-final rounds was impossibly hard.  The category was Presidential geography and the clue was, birth place of a nineteenth-century president named for another president.  All three contestants wrote Lincoln, Nebraska, but the answer was Cleveland, where James Garfield is buried.  The two leading players bet almost everything, enabling someone far behind them to win.  An IU student also made the finals.

 

Chancellor Bill Lowe announced that there would be no annual “Years of Service” luncheon due to the university being closed due to Covid-19.  Even though my name was not on the list of honorees, I emailed that I had planned to attend since I’d been associated with IUN for 50 years (having been hired, along with Ron Cohen in 1970) and that I had hoped to congratulate my friends Kathy Malone, Suzanne Green, and Tim Johnson, on their 40 years of service. Bill emailed back, congratulating me on 50 years of service and lamenting all the campus events that faculty and students are missing.