Curmudgeons

  “The first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy.” Fredrick Backman, “Beartown”

I just finished Fredrick Backman’s “A Man Called Ove,” about someone set in his ways who carried on feuds with neighbors, bullies, and authority figures set on restricting his freedom.  After his wife dies, Ove sets out to kill himself in four different ways because life for him, recently forced into early retirement, has lost all purpose.  Then an eccentric pregnant Iranian neighbor and her family enter his life, break down his defenses, prod Ove into being useful again, and make him more tolerant, although without changing his fundamental personality. Almost against his will, he begins caring for people who, in his words, aren’t total idiots after all. The pregnant neighbor’s kids come to adore him for his eccentric ways and loyalty and call him grandpa.  To their mother’s amazement he doesn’t mind at all.  When one draws a picture for him, it goes on Ove’s refrigerator door. I frequently teared up during the final 40 pages.

 

Grandpa Elwood Metzger had the reputation of being bad-tempered and ill-tempered (Rich and I sometimes referred to him as Grandpa Grump) and for years feuded with a sibling (over family possessions, including a “grandfather clock”).  Elwood and my mother’s Aunt Ida didn’t speak to each over something that had happened a quarter-century previously.  He’d visit Sundays when Aunt Ida lived with us, and the two studiously avoided each other except for occasional dirty looks.  At the end of the day Elwood would generally give Rich and me a fifty-cent-piece or a dollar.  For some insane, unconscious reason, I’d occasionally call him Aunt Ida, insuring that I’d get no money that day.  Some curmudgeons get worse as they age, but grandpa mellowed. We even took in a couple Phillies games together, and he showed me off at a bank where he’d been a security guard.

 

IU Northwest’s legendary curmudgeon was Political Science professor George Roberts.  He’d rail against administration “toadies” and Catholics and had nothing good to say about courses in Education, Gender Studies, Latino Studies or Black Studies. His feuds with certain professors went of for years, but in private could be caring and gracious.  Noticing that a colleague was grieving over the loss of a pet, he made tea for her and validated her mourning over its passing. In 1979, when I was adviser to the school newspaper, Northwest Phoenix, he demanded that the dean investigate me because of an article critical of statements he’d made recommending that the university move out of Gary. He’d take his pet dog to class with him, which he seemed to care about more than the students.  At his retirement, he vowed never to set foot on campus again.  Years later, I saw him at a function wearing a Purdue cap, IU’s rival.

Bodmer in Red Guard cap

At IUN Sociology professor Chuck Gallmeier’s retirement, I praised him as a great teacher and fair-minded Faculty Organization chair who followed a long line of distinguished predecessors whom I mentioned by name, including erudite Bill Neil and George Thoma and curmudgeons George Roberts and George Bodmer.  A delightful lunch companion with a wry, sarcastic sense of humor, English professor Bodmer did not suffer fools, whether in the classroom or in academia and was a formidable force as a department chair and division promotion and tenure committee chair.  I crossed swords with him over a university matter that I felt very strongly about, and he never forgave me. A year later, when I sat down at the cafeteria faculty table, he picked up his tray and moved elsewhere, followed by a colleague who’d been my friend (I thought) for 30 years. A year after that, finding myself alone on an elevator with George, I’d hardly opened my mouth when he unleashed a series of expletives at me, including using “bullshit’ both as a noun and an adjective. In “A man Called Ove” old enemies reconciled after a protagonist’s rival had Alzheimer’s. Sadly, such estrangements are common in academia and hence the joke that a sure sign of dementia is when a professor can’t recall why he hates his nemesis.

In the Journal of American History appeared a review by Jeffrey Melnick of John C. Hajduk’s “Music Wars: Money, Politics, and Race in the Construction of Rock and Roll Culture, 1940-1960.”  It deals with numerous issues of interest to me, including labor disputes, influential deejays, independent labels (including Gary’s Vee-Jay Records, and the blacklisting of musicians during the Red Scare. Hajduk revealed, for example, that the FBI played a large role in causing the Merle Travis song “Sixteen Tons” to disappear from the airwaves because it dealt with the exploitation of workers “who owed their soul to the company store.”  Evidently, with Red-baiter Joseph McCarthy having been exposed as a fraud in 1954, “Tennessee” Ernie Ford was able to top the Billboard charts with a 1956 rendition.  When Phil and Dave were young, I’d sing “Sixteen Tons” to them before bed, as well as their favorite, the Cheech and Chong song “Basketball Jones.”  Recently Dave played “Sixteen Tons” on guitar for Facebook with James, Becca, and Josh Sweet singing the lyrics: he dedicated it to me.

Some 20 years ago, I submitted a proposal for an Oral History Association (OHA) conference session on folk music and the Red Scare with speakers Ron Cohen and David Hajduk, who had recently published a book on Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie.  I even persuaded OHA founder Martha Ross and her husband to read lines from the autobiography of Broadside magazine editors Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, which Cohen had worked on.  To my amazement the proposal was rejected by committee members more interested in gender studies who probably had never heard of Martha Ross or Sis Cunningham.  I got my back up and boycotted OHA meetings until two years ago, when Anne Balay asked me to participate in a session in Montreal that she organized. 

Jim Spicer informed me of a new publication by Ed and Jean Fagan Yellin, “In Contempt, Defending Free Speech, Defeating HUAC.”  Cited in 1958 for contempt of Congress because of his refusal to testify about his past association with the Communist Party (CPUSA) on the basis of the First Amendment, Ed Yellin was ultimately vindicated by a 1963 Supreme Court decision.  Born in the Bronx in 1927 to Polish Jewish immigrants, Ed grew up in a communist housing cooperative and, after serving in the navy and a year of college, came to Gary, Indiana, in 1949 as a steel mill “colonizer.”  Seven years later, after being badly burned at work, Ed decided to leave Gary with his wife and three children and resume an academic career.  By then he had left the Communist Party in the wake of revelations about Joseph Stalin’s purges and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.  Nonetheless, in February 1958, he was subpoenaed to testify at HUAC hearings held in the Gary post office, along with 17 others, including 2 informants. In refusing to testify Yellin read this statement:

    I do not feel that this is the place for myself, as an individual and as a citizen, to discuss my beliefs, my associations, or whatever expression of opinion I have ever made.

Three other “unfriendly witnesses” were also cited for contempt – Robert Lehrer, Victor Malis, and Al Samter, who later became a good friend of mine.  In 1960 a Hammond court sentenced Yellin to four years in prison.  During the period prior to his ultimate vindication by the Supreme Court, Yellin (below) continued his post graduate studies, earning a PhD in mechanical Engineering, but due to FBI intervention was denied several fellowships. Wife Jean (below) became a prize-winning historian.