Homestead

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of comfortable living from a small piece of land.” Abraham Lincoln

When President Abraham Lincoln signed the 1862 Homestead Act as the Civil War raged, opening up a half-million square miles of western land offering 160 acres to citizens settling on the land and farming it for five years, the American myth of a country of independent farmers had not yet died.  Nonetheless, most of the free land was inhospitable to small farmers and America was becoming an industrialized nation.  Forty years later in Homestead, PA, site of a state-of-the-art steel mill owned by Robber Baron Andrew Carnegie, the crushing of a strike by military troops demonstrated that the egalitarian dream had turned into a nightmare for the working man.

Although the word homestead is defined as one’s residence and adjoining land (I sometimes use the word as a synonym for home, especially when we lived atop a sand dunes on Maple Place), the word is commonly associated with old farmhouses and their outbuildings, such as the Buckley Homestead southeast of Lowell in Lake County or the old Bailly Homestead in Porter, site of the area’s first permanent residents, Joseph and Marie Bailly, and now part of Indiana Dunes National Park. In “Rabbit Is Rich” John Updike described the fictitious Albrecht Stamm Homestead built in the mid-1820s in eastern Pennsylvania and restored by a historical society.  Updike wrote:

    Even though a young hippie couple lives upstairs and leads visitors through, to Harry the old Stamm place is full of ghosts, those old farmers lived weird lives, locking their crazy sisters in the attic and strangling the pregnant hired girl in a fit of demon rum and hiding the body in the potato bin so that 50 years later the skeleton comes to light.

 

An example of Updike’s propensity to poke fun of ministers is seen in the depiction of Episcopalian cleric Archie “Soupy” Campbell, officiating at Rabbit son Nelson’s shotgun wedding.  He writes

    In a black cassock and white surplice and stole “Soupy” flashes his “What? Me Worry” grin, those sudden seedy teeth [but] the voice welling up out of this little man is terrific.  Soupy bats the eyelids between phrases, his only flaw.

The NWI Times Saturday Stumper crossword puzzle seems impossible to anyone but Toni, but I was able to help her for once.  A clue asked for the Avenue next to Reading Railroad in eight letters.  The reference was to Monopoly and the first letter O since the word across was Sacco (1920 anarchist).  Aha – Ontario, one of the light blue properties six spaces beyond Go and next to the Reading (which some Hoosiers pronounce as if one was reading a book).

Final Jeopardy on the category Historical Names was looking for a Hungarian-born editor who in 1904 said that a free press was a prerequisite for representative government. It had to be Joseph Pulitzer, but only one contestant knew it.  Another said Hearst, the purveyor of slanted news or “Yellow Journalism.”

Having finished my latest Shavings, Paul Kern sent a long email discussing, among other things, old colleagues and students as well as region high school sports events and other memories. He attended the 1975 state championship football contest where Valparaiso defeated Carmel 14-13 with star single wing tailback Mark Allen, one of the few African-American families living in Valpo at that time.  Allen moved from Cabrini Green at age 12 and after a football career at Arizona and the USFL lived in Valpo working in construction until he died at age 51. In the late 1960s Paul lived in Glen Park and recalled an Italian neighbor complaining about black students being bussed to neighborhood schools. He wrote: “His dire predictions of decline came true even though bussing was not a cause of the economic woes of Gary.  Neither one of us had a premonition of the global and technological changes that would devastate Gary.”  Being a couple years my senior, Paul has a few World War II memories, including seeing his father in uniform and on VJ watching a kid bang on an upside-down wash tub.

 

Paul Kern, seeing my post on Terrence Malick, said they were classmates at a small Texas boarding school and that he was then considered a genius and good guy. The most intriguing guy in my high school class was Bob “Buck” Elliott, who was witty and seemingly fearless. I first encountered him in a ninth grade.  When a new teacher called the roll, after the guy behind him said his name was Vince Curll, he claimed his name was also Vince Curll.  The next guy said his name was also Vince Curll, and the teacher, a big former wrestler, was dumbfounded on what to do. Soon the class was totally out of control, with a few students trying to pay attention amidst the chaos.  The poor teacher was gone within a month. At a party Buck went into a bathroom with a girl and asked guys to guard the door until they came out. He left it to our imaginations to decide what might have transpired.  In high school he organized a squad of male cheerleaders and knew how to charm most teachers, as well as the girls. I never much noticed homeroom teacher Mrs. Davis until he said she had quite a nice trim figure. He had a really cool mother, and at a party in his house I recall the Father of eleventh grader Fern McCullough barging in when he got wind that a daughter was there and supposedly rescuing her from the den of iniquity.  Elliott became a school principal, of all things, in Hawaii.  I’m sure he was a good one. He was confident and comfortable around everyone. At a reunion he regaled us with wonderful memories.

Commenting on one of my nostalgic posts was a woman with the same name as a childhood friend’s mother.  It turned out to be his kid sister Teena, who recalled playing hide-and-seek at night in our two-story garage during which her cousin hit someone over the head with a hammer. Teena was three years younger than I; when she was in seventh grade I drove her and a 13-year-old friend somewhere.  In my flawed memory (I have no memory of the hide-and-seek game) the friend asked me if I knew what a soul kiss was and I gave her one. She was cute and alluring but considered back then too young to date, like robbing the cradle, in the parlance of the time.  Likewise, Teena, a cute redhead now 75, would have been off limits.

From an obit I learned that Angela “Gigi” Morgan Medved of Valpo died at age 57. She was born in Gary in 1963, the year Democratic machine candidate A. Martin Katz, hand-picked choice of jailed Boss George Chacharis, was elected mayor and attorney Richard Hatcher won a seat on the city council. By the time Gigi graduated from Andrean, most white students had left Gary or, if not, sought schooling elsewhere. A coach and volunteer, Gigi, the obit read, “had a passion for cooking, the Chicago Cubs, hosting pool parties, and vacations to Clearwater, Florida.” How sad to die so young, in these times when friends cannot gather to mourn her passing until, hopefully, a later date.

I played five-person Acquire online.  Dave, the winner, had talked me through have to use Google Chrome to get to the Facebook site. I could see and talk with the other players, and gamemaster Jef Halberstadt held up tiles for us while others didn’t watch.

“Glory Road” may not be a great movie, but it tells a great story of Texas Western, a team with five black starters, upsetting a favored all-white Kentucky squad coached by a legend, in the 1966 NCAA championship.  On the team were two players from Gary, co-captains Harry Flournoy, an Emerson grad, and former Froebel star Orsten Artis, who subsequently became a Gary police officer.

Area Chinese joints were closed for business, but Wagner’s Ribs was still serving carry-out, seven days a week, eight hours a day, at least for the time being. Sunday was a beautiful day, brisk and sunny and at night a full moon shining between a couple clouds above the roof looking east from our homestead.