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.