Walt and Lois Reiner

 "Show up.  Make change.  Have fun.” Lois Reiner motto

As a freshman at Valparaiso University in 1948, Lois Bertram Dau had little connection with the town other than Saturday movies at the Premier Theater. Soon after graduating four years later, Lois married VU football coach Walt Reiner, a World War II and Korean navy vet.  In 1962 VU’s president asked Reiner to start a Youth Leadership Training Program, and three years later, when Walt became director of the Prince of Peace Volunteers, the Reiner family moved to Chicago’s Near North Side to minister to the needs of Cabrini Green Homes residents.  An outspoken advocate for civil rights and opponent of the Vietnam War, Walt survived 1967 heresy charges levied against him by conservative Lutheran-Missouri Synod officials to which VU was affiliated. As the Reiners prepared to return to Valparaiso, Cabrini Green housing project resident Barbara Cotton lamented that her family was denied the same opportunity.  That plea became the motivation for the Reiners and other Lutheran activists affiliated with the university founding the Valparaiso Builders Association, whose stated mission was “to strengthen the community by addressing issues of race, class and poverty, and to build healthy families and neighborhoods whose diversity is welcomed and cherished.”  The initial agenda: construction of a home for the Cotton family in what at the time was considered a lily-white “Sundown” town, a prospect not necessarily welcomed by a majority of Valpo residents. Braving death threats and other forms of harassment, this goal ultimately became a reality.  Rob Cotton, just ten at the time, is now a city council member and one of approximately a thousand African-American residents in a city of 33,000.

volunteer (now exec. dir.) Paul Schreiner in 1987

Still going strong in its 51^st year, the volunteer organization now called Project Neighbors has provided homes for over 300 residents.  Walt Reiner led by example and often told others, “Don’t sweat the small stuff, caulk it.”  Viewing his mission as liberating, he once stated, “When you give up the need for power, reputation, and money, you have the whole world open to you.” In 1995 the Reiners led efforts to found Hilltop Neighborhood House, which offered health, child care, pre-school, and adult educational services to area residents.  When Walt died in 2006 at age 83, the city renamed a street in the Hilltop neighborhood in his honor.  Loie Reiner, now in her nineties, remains active in Project Neighbors and serves as secretary of the organization.  Currently, there are two Project Neighborhoods-sponsored facilities in operation that provide homes for 33 women and their children. Recently, the zoning board approved a 14-unit facility for men (with preference for veterans) but held up a second rental unit by labeling it a “homeless shelter” despite its opposite intent, to offer an affordable alternative becoming homeless.  After the tie vote Loie posted: “DREAM DASHED….NOT ERASED.  STAY TUNED.”

Liz Wuerffel at zoning board meeting

Through our friendship with Ron and Liz Cohen, Toni and I were supportive of the Reiners’ efforts a half-century ago to desegregate Valparaiso. I met Loie a few years ago at a house party Health and Thais Carter hosted for VU students that had taken Heath’s course on civil rights in Northwest Indiana.  She and I had both participated in the course as speakers and resource persons.  Not surprisingly, Loie was engaging and looking forward more than to the past; I’m honored to have become her friends.  On the eve of her 91^st birthday she wrote:

    My children and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren and all young people of every race, gender, religion, economic level are on my mind. I pray for their courage to fight evil and build their lives on caring and generosity and creativity. I pray that they have faith in a Greater Power; and if that gives them what mine does, they will celebrate each God-given day as opportunity to love their neighbor....someone very different from them but in need of them. I pray that they - that all of us - refuse to be dragged into the hate and despair streaming through our present situation. And I pray that they - we - are listening to those too long unheard for the salvation of our endangered moral fabric.

Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke, 2000

RIP: Funny man Carl Reiner, born in the Bronx in 1922, a year before Walt Reiner (no relation) and integral part of the classic Sid Caesar TV comedy shows of the 1950s.  He was the creator of the 1960s “Dick Van Dyke Show” and longtime film collaborator (and sometimes actor) with Mel Brooks and Steve Martin. Son Rob Reiner (“Meathead” to Archie Bunker in the “All in the Family” series), Carl brought lots of laughs to this fan over a 70-year career.