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.