Monkey Business

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.  H. L. Mencken

The phrase “monkey business” is an offshoot of the nineteenth-century word “monkeyshine” and suggests morally questionable or otherwise objectionable behavior.  A 1952 comedy of that name starred Cary Grant as scientist hoping to invent an elixir to keep people from aging and co-starred Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe.  In 1987 unprincipled reporters looking to bring down Democratic frontrunner Gary Hart discovered that the married Colorado senator had boarded a pleasure boat named the Monkey Business with his attractive paramour Donna Rice.

Front page NWI Times headline: “Meer’s charges dropped.”  Shortly before last November’s Michigan City election, LaPorte County prosecutor John Lake charged two-time Mayor Ron Meer with six felonies in connection with allegedly intervening on behalf of his step-son, who was arrested for drug possession following a traffic stop. After Meers requested that the arresting officers be reassigned, Police Chief Mark Swistek and two assistants resigned.  Meer, a Democrat, subsequently lost his bid for a third term by 79 votes to Duane Parry, the first Republican mayor of Michigan City in 40 years. Defense attorney Scott King, formerly mayor of Gary, had called the charges a “political hit job,” and greeted the dropped charges wit this statement: “Nothing has changed my mind that these were political considerations made in the bringing of these charges literally of the eve of an election.”

For the past year the Merrillville FBI office has evidently been seeking to gather dirt on former Gary officials who had worked for Gary mayor Karen Freeman Wilson.  While no grand jury indictments have as yet been forthcoming, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana Thomas L. Kirsch recently charged longtime Whiting mayor Joe Stahura with using political donations totaling over $200,000 to pay off personal debts stemming from gambling at casinos and race tracks. He and his wife also redirected large sums of money to settle debts incurred by their daughter.  Mayor since 2004 and a council member for 20 years before that, Stafura helped develop a lakefront park, an annual Pierogi Fest, and an interactive children’s museum and Mascot Hall of Fame. U.S. Attorney Kirsch dubbed the case “another black eye” for Northwest Indiana but is recommending leniency in return for the defendant’s cooperation with the federal investigation into his finances. As part of a plea bargain, Stafura agreed to resign and no charges were filed against his wife.

If the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office decide to target a politician, they have unlimited resources at their command and can browbeat officeholders into accepting plea bargains or face long the possibility of lengthy prison terms.  No wonder their conviction rate is well over 95 percent.  As longtime county officeholder John Petalas told Jerry Davich, author of “Crooked Politics in Northwest Indiana,” there is much less local corruption than in the mid-twentieth-century, but now U.S. attorneys have much more power and are much more aggressive in seeking convictions.  Petalas added:

    There are hundreds of elected and appointed officials who work in Lake County.  It is not fair to label everyone a crook because of a small minority who betray the public trust.  Every time one of these guys gets in trouble, they make bigger headlines than a double murder investigation.  The bigger the headlines, the bigger the perception that all politicians are crooks.  There are some elected officials in this part of the state who went to jail for things that are completely legal for state officials to commit.

Davich quoted me as saying, “It’s outrageous how U.S. Attorneys have gone after people like former Gary clerk Katie Hall and lake County surveyor George Van Til for petty things – such as their staff selling candy bars or picking up a tuxedo – while millions in so-called “legal graft” are siphoned into law firms for attorneys’ fees.”

 After violating the Hatch Act for making the White House the backdrop for his acceptance speech with a thousand guests sitting close together without masks, POTUS appeared at a New Hampshire rally where supporters booed upon hearing from a state official that masks were required.  Brenda Ann Love wrote: “My Grams has stopped going to church. It was really the only place she’s socialized since my grandfather died. Most of her friends are dead, and, as she says, “the Trump Idiots won’t wear masks. They think this is a hoax.”  She’s lived through the Depression, WWII, several other wars, and says she’s never been this scared.  And she called me Brenda Ann, so I know she was serious.”

photo by Ray Smock

Ray Smock wrote:

    I am sitting on our deck drinking coffee while reading the news of the aftermath Hurricane Laura, the fallout from the Republican convention, the latest police shooting in Kenosha, and the story of thousands gathered on the Mall in DC, just as they did 57 years ago, to call for racial justice in America.  Maybe the four-year-long hurricane that Trump unleashed on our country will be over soon and we will experience some calm and the sunlight of Truth. I desperately want the Trump storm to subside. I want political calm again, even though politics is never ever completely calm.

    Donald Trump has caused the belittling of government and the destruction of our Constitution. He weakened government just when we needed its help the most. His ineptness to lead us out of the pandemic, resulting in more American deaths than in all our recent wars, and throwing millions out of work with no federal lifeline, has done more harm than a century of hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis.  We can rebuild from nature’s disasters. But how do we rebuild a whole nation back from the terrible, cruel, soulless winds of Trump? How do we find again the domestic tranquility mentioned in our Constitution?

    We can do this. We can restore our damaged political system. We need it now more than ever to work for all of us. We do not need chainsaws and bulldozers for this job. We need our ballots. We need to use them. Neither of our political parties is perfect. No one of us has all the answers of how best to fix major problems. But it should be clear to enough of us that the political wreckage all around us must be fixed and fixed quickly to get us out of a leaderless pandemic and restore our economy.

    We can fix it together in November with our greatest source of power, a power stronger than the worst dictator. We are a republic. We are the people. The power is in our hands.

Wide World of Sports

  " Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports... the thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat... the human drama of athletic competition.” ABC’s Jim McKay, “Wide World of Sports”

 

The Milwaukee Bucks boycotted an NBA playoff game in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin city near Milwaukee.  A half dozen white cops responded to a domestic disturbance report from a Black neighborhood.  Blake was getting into his car when an officer who had ahold of him shot him seven times in the back.  The police report claimed that Blake had a knife, but cops have been known to carry knives for the purpose of making such an accusation. Three baseball games were also postponed at players’ insistence, as well as two ice hockey playoff contests.  The Cubs’ Jason Haywood received permission to sit out a contest with Detroit. A 17-year-old Trump supporter traveled from Illinois to Kenosha and shot three protestors, killing two of them.

 

Sports are normally on TV at all hours of the days, especially basketball and ice hockey. Though I follow the Cubs, I haven’t watched more than a few innings.  Because the 76ers sucked against Boston, I mostly watched the NHL playoffs, first the Black Hawks and, once they were eliminated, the Philadelphia Flyers, whose 23-year-old goalie Carter Hart enabled them to eliminate Montreal.  Since it’s been a while since I followed the team, the only players I recognized were Sean Couturier and captain Claude Giroux (above, after scoring a goal). Down a game to the Islanders, the Flyers took a 3-1 lead into the third period of game 2 only to see their lead vanish. They had to ward off a power play just to force overtime.  Then a deflected slap shot by Flyer Philippe Meyer proved the game winner. Whew, close call!

 

Toni and I fared well in bridge against two couples who play at least seven times a week. They both use the very latest bidding systems while we play stick with Charles Goren’s 60-year-old system.

A new, “Texas Women and Ranching,” notes many Latina land owners raised large herds of cattle as well as at least four African-American freedwoman.  More recently, between 1947 and 1953 Kathryn and Nancy Binford launched the Tri-State All Girl Rodeo. The following citation is from the Cowgirl Hall of Fame and Museum in Fort Worth: “Nancy Binford, one of the country’s premier horsewomen, won many horse shows, races, and cutting horse championships, but she is be best remembered as co-producer, with Thena Mae Farr, of the Tri-State All-Girl Rodeos. Really “all-girl” from the contestants down to the judges, clowns and staff, the organization created opportunities for rodeo women not found in any other venue. Nancy also helped organize the fledgling Girls Rodeo Association (GRA, now the Women's Professional Rodeo Association, and served one term as president.”

 

This from IUN Region botanist Spencer Cortwright, whose passion is appreciating the wonders of nature and sharing his knowledge and discoveries of plants native to the Calumet Region.  He wrote: “Most thistles one sees along roadways are native to Eurasia, not the Midwest.  But some are, such as pasture thistle.  This particular individual, besides being beautiful and adored for nectar by butterflies, also supported a bird’s nest earlier in the season!”

 

Granddaughter Alissa visited for three days, able to work on her computer at our condo. One evening Toni made surf and turf (steak and scallops) with baked potatoes and salad. Next day, when it proved too hot to dine outside at Craft House with bridge opponents Charlie Halberstadt and Naomi Goodman, she served cod, corn on the cob, and French fries. That evening Alissa introduced to “The Moth” podcast. Eight people gave five-minute talks on a true experience.  The evening’s theme was “enthusiasm,” and the winner was a Guatemalan who’d come to the U.S. in the 1980s with his mother. Upon learning that a local store would soon be selling pollo (chicken) pepian, the Guatemalan national dish, prepared in a spicy sauce with pumpkin seeds and sesame, he put in an order, even though the price was way over his budget, and eagerly awaited the delicacy. When he took some to his mother, she shared it with a granddaughter, who promptly smothered it in ketchup, to the man’s horror.  The matriarch calmed him, pointing out that their heritage was being passed on, albeit with an America twist. Toni and Alissa even won the viewer scavenger hunt, showing off the found items, including a seagull’s skull, via the wonders of the internet.

 

Gary native Roland “R.J.” Peterson passed away.  He grew up in Miller Beach and graduated from William A. Wirt an served in the navy during World War II. At Purdue Peterson majored in mechanical engineering and then went to work with his father, whose company designed and sold the “River Queen,” first all-steel house boats. Living in Saugatuck, Michigan, where the Peterson family had often visited during the 1930s, R.J. expanded his father’s business and operated Tower Marina and revived the Saugatuck Chain Ferry. He saved the S.S. Keewatin, the Great Lakes passenger liner, and converted it into a popular museum.  He was involved in numerous marine enterprises in the Douglas-Saugatuck area, including the Red Dock café.

Then and Now

“As albums go, Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” was probably my favorite of the year, with Ra Ra Riot’s “The Orchard,” The New Pornographers’ “Together” and Titus Andronicus’ “The Monitor” as close runners-up.” Robert Blaszkiewicz”

I put on Robert’s favorite songs of 2010 CD to see how the selections hold up a decade later. Most seem particularly fitting in this, our plague year.  Robert led off with “A More Perfect Union,” by Titus Andronicus, the Civil War theme hopefully not a harbinger of things to come with a sociopath in the White House sowing sedition.  Spoon’s “Trouble Comes Running” follows, then “Crash Years” by New Pornographers and, two tracks later, Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You,” served with a figurative raised middle finger. The middle verse goes:

Yeah I'm sorry, I can't afford a Ferrari,
But that don't mean I can't get you there.
I guess he's an Xbox and I'm more Atari,
About the way you play your game ain't fair.

 

Robert always broadens my musical horizons, and 2010 was no exception, with “Boyfriend” by Best Coast, “10 Mile Stereo” by Beach House, and “Glass Printer” by The Besnard Lakes. I hadn’t recalled that the 2010 Mix contained “The Weekenders” by The Hold Steady, one of my favorite bands since Alissa’s husband Josh introduced me to “South Town Girls,”; also, Arcade Fire, whose 2010 “The Suburbs” CD, which contains “Rococo,” I presently have on heavy rotation. The finale: “Talk on Indolence” by the Avett Brothers, whom Robert and I saw at Merrillville’s late, lamented Holiday Star with the Nitty Ditty Dirt Band opening for them. “Talk on Indolence” could be a lamentation for our current time

Well I've been lockin' myself up in my house for some time now

Readin' and writin' and readin' and thinkin'

And searching for reasons and missing the seasons.

The Autumn, the Spring, the Summer, the snow.

The record will stop and the record will go

John and Lorraine Shearer discovered numerous Petroskey stones during a recent expedition to Lake Michigan by Sleeping Bear Dunes. They live in Traverse City in one of the few areas where the pebble-shaped fossilized coral can be found.  According to Wikipedia, “Such stones were formed as a result of glaciation in which sheets of ice plucked stones from the bedrock, grinding off their rough edges and depositing them.” It is the state stone of Michigan.
Neil Goodman sculpture at IUN

On campus during Indiana University Northwest’s registration for Fall semester, I found my building and the library virtually deserted.  The process is apparently all automated.  In contrast, when I began my IUN teaching career, registration was a chaotic affair with heavy faculty participation; in order to successfully enroll for a particular course, a student had to maneuver in lines in order to pick up IBM computer card from department representatives situated in a huge room filled with students, faculty, and harried Admissions staff hoping to provide guidance to bewildered freshmen.  Working registration, I socialized with colleagues whom I might not otherwise have been with at any other function.

 

Numerous people identified with my description of past registration.  Janet French wrote: “That’s how it was at VU when I began in 1974.  In the gym heavy canvass was spread out on the floor.  If you didn’t get in line quick enough, for a class, you lost out. Chaos, but I miss that.”  IUN grad liked the socializing aspect of registration, adding: “It appears that part of the college experience has disappeared.”  Former IUN History professor Jerry Pierce recalled:

    Had something similar when I started at Oregon. We had to go to the basketball court in the arena, get cards, and stand in line. While waiting for a science class that was filling too fast, I struck up a conversation with a grad student at the Religious studies table and decided to register for Intro to the study of the Bible, which set me on my career trajectory. And it was a much better class than Physics of light and color.

 

First day of Fall semester at IU Northwest was unlike any I can remember. Normally the parking lots are filled to overflowing; not this year. No sign of student groups recruiting new members at tables set up near the student union. The cafeteria was almost devoid of customers.  With so many online offerings, less than 20 percent of courses are in classrooms, and the Zoom website was so overwhelmed, it crashed for a couple hours. Those students I encountered were wearing masks inside buildings but not always while outside. Only a few professors appeared to be around, but Philosopher Gianluca Di Muzio asked if I’d attend his freshman seminar next month to talk about the history of IUN, a course component. I agreed but am unsure whether I’ll need to keep a mask on during the entire 75 minutes.  I plan to give students my latest Steel Shavings beforehand, something that sparked discussion when I spoke in Jon Becker’ class last year. I’ll begin by mentioning that IU is celebrating its bicentennial, IUN its hundredth anniversary, and that I have been at the university exactly half that time - 50 years. In 1970 fully a third of the classes were in the evening, and most students were from steelworker families and first-generation college students whose parents or grandparents were immigrants.

My Oral History Association conference session is all set, chaired by Dr. Annette Henry of the University of British Columbia, who will also speak about two Black-Canadian women she interviewed.  Also on the panel is Izumi Niki, who will discuss Japanese-Canadian Kishizo Kimura, a west coast fisherman interned shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, similar to what happened in the United States.  Some 22,000 Japanese-Canadians, 90 percent of them Canadian citizens, were order to evacuate British Columbia and move inland into relocation camps.  The Canadian government also deported others and would not allow those relocated to return to the west coast until 1949, four years after World War II ended.  What is unique about Kimura is that he served on government bodies charged with disposing of the property holdings, including fishing vessels, of people he formerly had worked with and kept n extensive diary, which has been edited and published under the title “Witness to Loss.”  Were it not for the pandemic, I’d be looking forward to meeting Annette Henry and Izumi Niki.  As it is, we’ll be at home rather than in Baltimore.

 

David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” (1996) takes place at a future time when years will have a corporate sponsor similar to sports stadiums.  Thus, most of the action takes place in the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.”  Other years are named for the Whopper, Perdue Wonder chicken, and, my favorite, the Trial-sized Dove Bar.

The Republican convention is un-watchable.  Among the despicable things that has transpired is approving a platform branding the Southern Poverty Law Center, which catalogs the nation’s hate groups, a “radical organization.”  Co-founded by Julian Bond and dedicated to the rule of law and ideals of Martin Luther King, it is an organization that we have supported for decades.

The Republican convention is un-watchable.  Among the despicable things that has transpired is approving a platform branding the Southern Poverty Law Center, which catalogs the nation’s hate groups, a “radical organization.”  Co-founded by Julian Bond and dedicated to the rule of law and ideals of Martin Luther King, it is an organization that we have supported for decades.

Moving Around

   "What you’re trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You’re trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.” Robert Stone

For the past century Americans have enjoyed more social mobility than any other people in history.  In the 1960s, for example, it is estimated that one out of five families changed addresses every year. Robert Stone (1937-2015) grew up in Brooklyn and spent several years in a Catholic orphanage after his mother was institutionalized with schizophrenia.  Between 1960 and 1965 he moved from New York to New Orleans to various places in California and back to New York City again where he partied with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters when their hippie bus reached the Big Apple. Stone’s most famous novel, “Dog Soldiers” (1974), is about a Vietnam correspondent.  In his 2007 memoir, “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties,” Stone wrote that from being stoned, he began to everything as “a mystical process,” an insight that stayed with him.

2016 parade

Michael Puenti reported that the Mexican Independence Day parade in East Chicago has been cancelled due to Covid-19.  Sponsored by the Union Benefica Mexicana, the September 16 celebration began in 1926 and has only been cancelled twice previously, in 1942 during World War II and 2011 after the attack on the World Trade Center.

Emiliano Aguilar, 2nd from left

Professor Allison Schuette interviewed Emiliano Aguilar for the Valparaiso University Flight Paths project.  They both will be participating in a conference session with Liz Wuerffel, Kay Westhues, and myself originally scheduled to take place in Indianapolis but now, like the Democratic National Convention, to be conducted via zoom.  Emiliano, an East Chicago Central graduate, credits my son Dave with encouraging him to continue his studies.  The current Northwestern doctoral student recalled in an interview that I've taken the following excerpt from:

    Growing up in East Chicago, everyone wanted to know where you were from. And you always mentioned, you know, “I’m north side. I’m south side. I’m from the Harbor. I’m from Sunnyside.  I’m from West Cal.” All these neighborhoods came with their own history. And to this day, there’s still this mentality with the older generation of noting, no, they’re from East Chicago, not the Harbor. It’s called the Twin Cities because of the railroad yards that essentially divide these two chunks of the city. There is this divided-city mentality. 

    We lived across the street from a railroad yard, a train switching area. My great-grandfather came to East Chicago to work on the railroad. Inland Steel was right across the street as well, and they had trucks coming and going at all times. Everything was across the south end of the tracks, and we tended to get stuck and have to wait for a train to switch for half an hour, forty minutes, just to go, like, to the grocery store.  You had industry, a temple, a Presbyterian church as well as about ten, twelve houses all on one block.

    My paternal grandfather left Mexico from a border town, Nueva Rosita, to come to East Chicago to work at Inland Steel. He had to sleep in his pickup truck for seven, eight days until the company finally hired him; and then he was pretty much couch-surfing in friends’ houses as he saved up money to purchase a house and then bring up my grandmother, uncle, and aunt from Mexico.  My mother is Irish and Italian, adopted by a German and Polish couple. And I lived primarily with them: my grandparents and my mother.  My grandmother was heavily involved in the Methodist church.  I saw my father’s side normally on weekends and holidays. My grandfather loved telling stories. I’m not a native Spanish speaker aside from what I picked up over the years, so when I was with my father’s family, that became, I think, a barrier to understanding my family’s stories.  That’s definitely created, like, this boundary that I’ve tried to overcome.  I became one of those Mexicans who didn’t speak Spanish growing up at a time when East Chicago was becoming evenly split between Latino and African-American communities.

    I initially went to Wabash College with the mindset that I’d be a high school teacher. A visiting professor, Aminta Perez, from the University of Iowa, taught Borderlands Scholarship: History of the West, and it was the first time I had encountered history of Mexican-American communities. It really wasn’t taught in high school, so I took that as an opportunity to learn more about my heritage. Dr. Perez encouraged me to try out graduate school, to dip my toes in the water. I applied for a master’s program at Purdue University Northwest, loved it, and now I’m researching political history and union politics in Northwest Indiana as a Northwestern University doctoral student.  I’ve joked with my advisor that my dissertation project is me coming home literally and studying something denied to me. After spending four years in Crawfordsville away from East Chicago, I’ve moved back to the region and delved into its history in order to understand where my personal story fits, and hopefully leave something impactful for another generation.

 

If interviewed for the Flight Paths Project, I’d mention our four homes since I began teaching at IUN in 1970, beginning with moving into a rented house four blocks north of the Gary city limits in unincorporated Ross Township.  The following year, residents fearful of being annexed by the city of Gary incorporated as the Town of Merrillville despite the existence of a Buffer Zone statute making such a development illegal until the Indiana state legislature allowed it as a special exception. With two pre-schoolers, Toni and I had hoped to find a home in Glen Park closer to campus, but none were available that met our needs.  After a couple years, we rented a house on Jay Street in Miller, where several of our friends lived.  Within a year our Jay St. neighborhood went from nearly all-white to nearly all-black. One new neighbor spent thousands of dollars furnishing his basement only to see it flooded and the new furniture ruined the following spring. One evening I discovered a teenager rummaging through our car’s glove compartment; another time, we came home to find our bedroom drawers open and clothes scattered all over the floor.  

 

Knowing our landlord was looking to sell, we searched for a property near Lake Michigan. Every one realtor Gene Ayers showed us either was a fixer-upper or had no yard.  After two years, he finally took us to one in a wooded area not far from the lake located a block east of County Line Road within the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  Although it had a Gary address and phone prefix, it was in Porter County within the city of Portage. Among other things, that meant that our taxes and insurance rates were much less than in Gary.  Better yet, within a year, the federal government bought our house and offered us a 20-year leaseback for approximately the amount that we had profited from the sale.  In other words, a free house for 20 years with no mortgage to pay off. We eventually stayed over 30 years until forced to move, ultimately purchasing a condo in Chesterton.

After watching “The End of the Tour,” about novelist David Foster Wallace, I checked out Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” from Chesterton library, now closed against except for curbside service since two staff tested positive for Covid-19.  Wednesday after 18 bridge hands online with Charlie and Naomi, the four of us dined outside at Lucretia’s, it being a beautiful evening.  They loaned us Mary Trump’s scathing book about her Uncle Donald, “Too Much and never Enough,” was much more readable than the dense, thousand-page Wallace opus, which requires frequently looking up the meaning of words like agoraphobic (fear of crowded places) or phylacteryish (resembling a small leather box containing Hebrew texts).  Though a clinical psychologist, Dr. Trump never got too technical. Meanwhile the Democratic National Convention, on all week, has featured many eloquent speakers, none more telling than former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell.  Hope disgruntled Republicans had tuned in.

Dean Bottorff (above), who lives in South Dakota near Sturgis, scene of the annual motorcycle rally, checked out the scene while, unlike most of the thousands of helmet-less bikers, taking precautions against the coronavirus.  He wrote:

    I never got off my bike or took off my helmet, but I believe that qualifies aaaas this year’s attendance at the Rally and keeps my modern record of 24 consecutive years intact. I can still count some pre-1996 rallies beginning with the first time I went in 1967 and blended in with 3,000 other rally goers.  My fond memory of that year was walking into a bar called Dante’s Inferno that consisted of an abandoned mine stope on Chair Lift Road with five student nurses.  The bar is long gone and you can no longer find Chair Lift Road on any maps.  Back in those days we went to Deadwood because the town was “wide open” and anybody could buy booze, go to a gambling den or, something that was of little interest to us college students, visit one of five brothels openly doing business in town – some of which had been in continuous operation for a hundred years until they were shut down in 1987.

"I'll Have Watermelon"

“When you go out on the town, wear red and sit in the middle of the room.”  Hettie Abbott

 

left, Hettie in 1920

right, Aggie Bailey in 1960s by Robert Long

Eleanor Bailey related a story told to her by her Aunt Hettie. In 1928, when she was just eight years old and living on a farm in Lincoln Township near Roselawn, Indiana, Hettie’s father, Perry Bailey, had driven the family to the Gateway Inn restaurant in Gary, as guests of the owner, J.R. Charter:

    Mr. Charter was a customer who drove every week in the summer to buy watermelons and other produce from the 40-acre Bailey's truck farm. There the Baileys grew strawberries, a variety of vegetables, and an acre of melons.  After being seated, Perry ordered a steak and wife Aggie ordered a bowl of soup. The three children; Paul, Pauline, and Hettie, were told by their parents that they could each have one hot dog.

    The children who rarely ate away from home noticed everything. The wall calendar had a photo of Charles Lindbergh and his plane. Lindbergh had flown non-stop from New York to Paris in 1927. When it came time for dessert, Mr. Charter joined them and told the children, “You can have anything you want.” They looked at all of the beautiful and tempting desserts on display, looked at each other, and in unison, three voices said, “I’ll have watermelon!”  After dessert, Mr. Charter gave them a calendar to take home with the name of his restaurant below the photo of Charles Lindbergh. The calendar hung on the kitchen wall for several years.

left, Perry Bailey in 1960s 

Stella and Hettie, 1924

In 1929 the stock market crashed, marking the onset of the Great Depression.  In 2011, Hettie told Post-Tribune columnist Jeff Manes, “We lived off the land.  There were 12 of us kids – two died.  We were poor, but we didn’t know that we were poor.” For a Friday treat they’d order fish at Luke’s Restaurant. During Prohibition Hettie recalled that Annie Duchler ran a bootleg joint near Indiana 10 and 41. In 1938 Hettie graduated from Morocco High School. Her dad was a Republican, and Hettie, a Democrat, told Manes that the two of them “never saw eye to eye.” 

 

In 1960, the year John F. Kennedy was elected president, Hettie first ran for local office, ultimately serving as county chairman, district secretary, and justice of the peace.  One night she levied fines against two “waitresses” and 29 truckers for visiting a “house of ill fame” - a notorious Roselawn nudist colony.  In 1964 Hettie and second husband Bill Abbott opened a mom-and-pop store, The Farmer’s Market, in Sumava Resorts on Route 41.  Jeff Manes wrote:

    The Farmer’s Market was a place where you could buy a quart of blueberries, a can of yellow wax beans or a box of red worms.  And every riparian ragamuffin who stepped foot in that store always received a free piece of gum or candy from Hettie Abbott.  Later, when we got to be in our teens, The Farmer’s Market was where we’d pay our speeding tickets.  Most of the time, Hettie would let us off the hook.

 

Hettie told Manes of meeting future President Bill Clinton:

    My sister and I used to go down to Arkansas every year and bet the horses.  We had a lady friend who tended bar in the hotel.  She invited us for a couple of beers after the races.  It was Election Day.  All of a sudden about 15 men came in through the back door and ordered drinks.  Soon after, the Feds came in and asked what we were doing in the bar on Election Day.  I told them we were thirsty.  One of the Feds said, “I’m going to have to haul you all in.”  Well, one of those 15 guys drinking at the bar said, “I don’t think so; I’m running for governor of this state.  These are my friends and we’re going to have a few drinks.”  The Fed said, “What about these two women” Soon to be Governor Bill Clinton said, “They’re with us.”

Debbie and Ronnie Hammond recalled: “Hettie Abbott married us on September 5, 1970 in her living room. I saw her a few years ago, told her yes, we were still married, and she said, “I only marry people that I know will stay together.”  Then we all had a good laugh.

 

    “People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate. “ Maya Angelou, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”

Meant as grim joke, some writers have taken Maya Anglou’s statement literally that Southern Blacks were banned from eating vanilla ice cream during the Jim Crow era, except on the 4th of July, including a writer for The Guardian.  Segregation was horrifying enough without adding assertions that stretch credulity.  Just the other day, the hundredth anniversary of ratification of the Susan B. Anthony women’s suffrage amendment, I read an article about how it didn’t guarantee black women the vote because, it was alleged, that Southern statutes forbade the grandchildren of slaves from voting.  In truth, what the so-called ‘Grandfather Clause” did was exempt the grandchildren of whites from being bound by literacy test or poll tax laws intended to disfranchise African Americans.  It is true, however, as the article pointed out, that some suffragettes were racists and that black feminists wishing to participate in a 1913 suffragette march were relegated to the rear ranks.

 

Cicely Tyson as Jane Pittman

Misleading myths and harmful stereotypes are of special interest to historians.  In 1974, after the made-for-TV movie “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” aired, a poll revealed that Jane Pittman was better known than most real-life black women and that many viewers in fact did not realize that she was a composite, a fictional character.  I grew up hearing that black kids loved watermelon, a stereotype rooted in the fact that melons were one of the few treats available to poor rural folk.  When I worked summers at Boys Village of Maryland, a plantation-like setting for so-called teen delinquents, a common afternoon treat was freshly harvested watermelon, a thirst quencher that I thoroughly enjoyed probably more than the kids from Baltimore under my charge.

 

IU Northwest finally is open, though for how long is hard to predict. Being a commuter campus, the university is offering a flexible array of courses, most involving some degree of online learning. Several colleges, including Notre Dame, Michigan State, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have reversed course and halted classroom gatherings just days after students moved into dorms, blaming students for ignoring social distance guidelines when the original motivation for having students on campus was largely economic.

Looking Back

The river in summer

In midstream

I look back

    Japanese haiku

 

Matilda and daughter Iona, 1920

Eleanor Bailey wrote:

   Recently while going through some old postcards, I found one postmarked April 8, 1925, from Matilda Cox to her five-year old grand-daughter, Hettie Bailey. The Cox and Bailey families lived just a mile or two from each other. They didn’t have telephones, so postcards were a common mode of communication be it near or far. It read: “Dear Grand Daughter you are invited to come out Friday night or Saturday Morning and bring papa mama Charles Chester and the twins and stay for Easter be Sure to come. grand Mo and Po to Hettie.” How thrilled the five-year-old must have been when she received the card from her grandmother.

I came across an article about queer activist Sarah Schulman, above, in New York magazine and realized I had seen her speak at IU Northwest about “Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community responsibility, and the Duty of Repair.”  She seemed particularly eager to hear students’ opinions of her book and what, in their opinion, constituted harassment.  Author Molly Fischer identified the book’s central insight:

    People experiencing the inevitable discomfort of human misunderstanding often overstate the harm that has been done to them – they describe themselves as victims rather than as participants in a shared situation.

The key distinction between conflict and abuse: the nature of the power relationships.  For example, what might be simply a disagreement among colleagues or associates might constitute harassment if a superior in a position of dominance is the source of the discomfort. In the classroom Schulman has a “no censorship” rule and students are encouraged to debate and critique one another in any language they feel appropriate without the need for “trigger warnings” that the forthcoming subject matter may be disturbing to some. Needless to say, Schulman believes universities college campuses should be forums for open debate on controversial subjects.

 

I knew about novelist David Foster Wallace’s thousand-page tome “Infinite Jest” but little else until viewing “The End of the Tour” (2015), about Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky spending a week with the troubled novelist who later hanged himself. As portrayed by Segal, Wallace was a rather pathetic, albeit talented, figure most comfortable with his dogs or, his one social outlet, dancing at a Bloomington, Illinois, Baptist church.  Part of a “New Sincerity” school that regarded banality as truth, Wallace during a Minneapolis stop admired the Mary Tyler Moore statue, visited the Mall of America, and took in a “Die Hard” movie.  Throughout Wallace is wary that Rolling Stone will portray him as ambitious or a sell-out.  When asked if wearing a kerchief on his head were an affectation, he replied defensively that it kept sweat out of his eyes. He didn’t want a TV in the house not because he was a snob but out of fear he’d never turn it off.  He wrote: “What TV is extremely good at—and realize that this is "all it does"—is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. TV’s “real” agenda is to be “liked,” because if you like what you’re seeing, you’ll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it’s its sole raison.”

David Foster Wallace gave a memorable commencement speech at Kenyon College titled “Thoughts on Living a Compassionate Life.”  It opened with a parable about two young goldfish being asked, “How’s the water?” and replying, “What is water?” Wallace left us this introspective insight:

    The so-called ‘psychotically depressed” person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote “hopelessness” or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.

Alexandria, right; MaryAnn below

Alexandria Quinn wrote that Toni’s sister MaryAnn, who is battling cancer, was the strongest women, with the biggest, most passionate heart, that she’s ever known. She wrote:

    I cannot begin to express how much her passion and heart has fed my soul and the woman I have grown proud to be. She is unstoppable and relentless, beautiful and educated, loving and driven, passionate and stubborn. Times are hard: no one could deny that cancer is one hell of a battle. Even being exhausted and in pain, I had to tell her not to make us breakfast this week and to stop worrying about taking care of everyone else. She has still been making jokes and laughing at herself instead of getting down on herself and asking “why me,” blaming everyone and everything else.  She’s a fighter and is proving that through the toughest battle imaginable.  I love her to the moon and back. Lanes and Okomskis, 2019

Toni’s older sister was a risk taker who eloped while a senior at Little Flower High School and kept the marriage secret until she graduated.  She had four kids in quick order before a doctor warned her to cease or risk dying.  She waited a few years and then gave birth to two more daughters.  The first time I met her while dating Toni MaryAnn’s daughter Andrea cut herself trying some daredevil feat in the backyard; Sonny wasn’t home, so I drove them to the ER.  I was so freaked out by the bloody wound that MaryAnn had to calm me down.  MaryAnn’s kids, no surprise, turned out passionate and opinionated.  Family was everything to MaryAnn, and she loved nothing better at the end of the day than to tell or listen to family stories accompanied by much laughter.  In her sixties she roughed it in Thailand with her daughters.  Two years ago, she participated in the Eagles Superbowl celebration in downtown Philadelphia. Sonny, not one to give out compliments, admitted not long before he died, that he had hit a grand slam when he married MaryAnn.

This from Anne Koehler: “With my 98-year-old friend Babe Poparad who is still a crossing guard in Porter. Has a beautiful garden and shares her produce.  We are both of German descent and know how to milk cows but don't have any!!!!”