Gary Anthology

 “We may have a lot of cleaning up to do, but we are hopeful, not miserable.”  Latrice Young, from “Not Miserable in Gary.”

below, Jimbo and Sam with Jesse Johnson triptych in background

At a Gardner Center book signing in Miller, Samuel Love gave me a copy of  his edited volume “The Gary Anthology,” which he signed, “To Jimbo, a true master of history from below.”  Nice.  I was particularly interested in reading “The Spring at Small Farms” by folklorist Kay Westhues as an illustration, in her words, “of how people of color and those with few economic resources are disproportionately burdened with the cost of pollution.”  On hand were a representative from Belt Publishing and at nearby tables authors Tyrell Anderson of the Decay Devils and former IUN student Jesse Johnson, now studying at Valparaiso University, whose work reminds me of Midwestern muralist Thomas Hart Benton. A couple days earlier, Brenda Love had posted a photo of their cat Captain Andy with a bookcase in the background containing Steel Shavings magazines. It reminded me I hadn’t given Sam my latest issue, so I had one with me, as well as another copy for Tyrell Anderson, both of whom are in it.

 

In the “Anthology” introduction Love noted that outsiders using various economic data recently pronounced Gary to be America’s “Most Miserable City.”  To counteract that specious conclusion Love wrote: “There is a love of loyalty and place that Gary inspires, intimately connected to the love of self-determination.  Miserable is not a word any of these writers would use to describe Gary, Indiana. And they know this place well.” Typical of this sentiment is this untitled poem by Tynlvae Taylor:

king drive 

huntington

king drive 

virginia

7th Av

my early life 

revolves around the east side

yellow buses to the west side

midtown

miller

tarrytown

surrounded by folks 

who looked 

talked

thought

like me.

the powers that be 

were black like me.

blight violence 

the negative press 

stays intact

but

i won’t let it distract

from the amazing life it gave

the beauty it has raised

i proudly claim Gary

sweet home always

Several contributors wrote about their parents’ civic-mindedness influencing their values.  In tenth grade Dena Holland-Neal, whose father became deputy mayor for Richard Hatcher, organized a walkout at Baily School in Glen Park, where she and other black students had been bussed, when the administration refused to honor Dr. Martin Luther King after he was assassinated.  Kym Mazelle wrote about her father, John Grisby, whose parents Harrison and Rosie (later Hassan and Rasheeda Shakir) arrived from Athens, Alabama, when John was a small child.  A steelworker who collected hundreds of signatures encouraging Hatcher to run for mayor, Grisby became a precinct committeeman and, according to Kym, worked tirelessly for his neighborhood and city:

   We would get calls in the middle of the night to help clear roads on cold winter nights.  I would hear my Dad take a call and say, “I’m on my way,” while getting dressed.  We got calls to help someone’s child get out of jail, calls to help feed and clothe people.  He would make sure people had their lights.  I remember how everyone loved and respected my dad.  He was a gentleman., he was kind, and never raised his voice.

Gardner Center photo by Joseph S. Pete

Joseph S. Pete wrote about the death in September 2016 of U.S. Steel maintenance worker Jonathan Arizola, electrocuted while trouble-shooting a crane in the slab storage yard.  Just a week before, Arizola had suffered an electric shock, and he told wife Whitney that things were getting perilous and that he had observed several close calls. As Pete concluded, “You have to work at the mill to appreciate how dangerous it truly is.” Previously, despite protests by union officials, steel officials had laid off maintenance workers, shut down safety training, and put off preventive maintenance, causing a backlog of work orders, and, wrote Pete, “forcing steelworkers into roving bare-bones crews to do maintenance in the areas of the sprawling mill they were unfamiliar with.” Following his death, the company almost immediately cut off Arizola’s family insurance and ultimately paid a paltry fine of $42,000 for safety violations that contributed to the fatal accident.  Pete concluded:  “Gary Works, the steam-plume-shrouded steel mill that’s all rust and rumbling semi-trucks hauling off heavy steel coils to points unknown, remains a place where there’s so guarantee you’ll return home when you start your shift.”

Lydia Johnson

Lydia Johnson’s “I Am From: Gary, Indiana” begins, “I am from a place where we say ‘pop’ instead of soda, from the North but the South slips out in our accents and hospitality.”  Lydia wrote of growing tomato plants in tire pots among mill pollution and of aunties and grandmothers who knew their neighbors by street or nickname.  Here is how the poem concluded:

I am from warm welcomes and hugs – not handshakes

from black Baptist hymns and the Quiet Storm on Chicago radio, 

I am from a city with black history and white flight, a place where crickets

sing in the grass of abandoned buildings all night.

 

Returning home, I complimented neighbor Cecilia on her Halloween decorations, and her friend Carl asked about the buttons on my vest.  When I noted that one represented the official seal of the city of Gary and that I was a regional historian, Carl said he was related to Northwest Indiana’s first permanent residents Joseph and Marie Bailly, who established a trading post near the Little Calumet River in present-day Porter County.  I told him my history, “Gary’s First Hundred Years” contained a section on them titled “Between Two Cultures” and gave him a copy.  During the 1830s Joseph Bailly acquired property at the mouth of the Grand Calumet River in present-day Gary where Marquette Park is located, in the hope of founding a “Town of Bailly.”  He laid out the site, naming future streets after family members. After his death a court-appointed trustee cheated Marie and their children out of the property. Raised by Ottawa tribal relatives, Marie dressed in Native American clothing and in widowhood seldom socialized with whites.  After the Potawatomi were forcibly removed from Indiana, she had few visitors, but her granddaughter Frances Howe wrote that on occasion a group of Potawatomi “came up from central Illinois to make maple sugar in a fine forest of hard maple nearby.”  I concluded:

    Years later, local residents honored her memory, but during her lifetime she was maligned and misunderstood.  Insensitive settlers regarded the elderly widow  as a half-caste whose Catholic religion was heretical and whose Indian habits were barbaric.  As a missionary, she had hoped that white settlers and Indians could coexist in harmony and that man’s capacity for love could overcome his immorality and greed., but her dreams collapsed in the 1830s.  The disillusionment of her remaining years was softened only by her enduring religious faith.

In 1962 Bailly Homestead became a National Historic Landmark and , located within Indiana Dunes national Park, in preserved by the park service.

Notorious RBG

 “To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that's what I think a meaningful life is. One lives not just for oneself but for one's community.”  Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had hoped to survive cancer long enough for the winner of the 2020 election, hopefully Joe Biden, to nominate her successor.  One of her final wishes was for the Senate to hold off confirming a nominee until the electorate decided that contest in November.  In 2016 Senate Republicans held up confirmation hearings for almost a year, using that rationale.  Now with obscene haste they hope to confirm someone surely hostile to Obamacare and Roe v. Wade.  Ginsburg’s elevation to the Supreme Court over 25 years ago was one of the final noncontroversial selections, remarkable given her long career as a champion of women’s rights and battling for those, as she said, less fortunate than herself. She once noted, “My mother told me to be a lady.  And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.”  And this: “Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.”

 

Just the second woman to serve on the court, Ginsburg realized that judicial robes were designed for men, so she and Sandra Day O’Connor included collars on theirs, and over the years, admirers have sent her hundreds of different designs.  When Ginsburg was announcing a majority decision, she’d generally wear a gold crocheted one given to her by her clerks.  When announcing a dissent, for which she was famous, she’d wear a black one.  She once wrote that only an ostrich could fail to foresee the consequences of the majority’s ruling.  When in Shelby County V. Holder (2013) a 5-4 majority emasculated the 1965 Voting Rights Acts, allowing for all sorts of future mischief by Southern states, Ginsburg wrote:

    Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

 

The nickname “Notorious R.B.G. dates from 2013 when New York University law student Shana Knizhnik gave her that moniker as a take-off on Brooklyn-born rapper Biggie Smalls, who went by “Notorious B.I.G.”  Ginsburg gave this explanation in a 2017 NBC interview:

    [It was] a second-year student at NYU Law School who started the Notorious RBG as a Tumblr. This young woman was, to put it mildly, disappointed by the Supreme Court's decision in the Shelby County case — the decision that held a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 no longer constitutional. She was angry, and then it came to her that anger is a useless emotion. It doesn't win any friends or make any changes. So, instead of being angry, she would do something positive. And the positive thing she did was to put on that blog the announcement of my dissenting opinion in the Shelby County case, and then it took off from there.The 2017 film “Marshall,” starring recently deceased Chadwick Boseman, is about another towering judicial pathbreaker, Thurgood Marshall. Rather than deal with his becoming the first African-American Supreme Court justice, it centers on a 1941 case in Bridgeport, Connecticut, involving a black chauffeur, Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown), accused of raping his employer, a white woman.  Sent to Bridgeport by the NAACP to defend Spell, Marshall was forbidden to speak in court but allowed counsel inexperienced white attorney Sam Friedman (Josh Gad). It turns out that the woman and the defendant had had consensual sex.  The most dramatic scene was when Spell, asked why he didn’t originally tell the truth about what happened, replied that where he came from, Louisiana, black men got tortured and lynched for having sex with white women.

I’ve been listening frequently to the Soundtrack of “Reality Bites” (1993), one of my favorite movies starring Winona Rider and Ethan Hawke (above), about young, Generation X adults trying to find meaning in life. It opens with the Seventies rocker “My Sharona” by The Knack, which Rider (as Lelaina, a film documentarian, and her friends dance to in a Seven Eleven store).  My favorite tracks are “Spinning Over You” by Lenny Kravitz, “Stay (I Miss You)" by Lisa Loeb, and “I’m Nuthin’" by Ethan Hawke.

 

Amitav Ghosh

IU Northwest “One Book.  One Campus … One Community selection is “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable” by Amitav Ghosh. In view of the West Coast wildfires and Gulf Coast floods, it is especially relevant, especially since a global warming denier occupies the White House and is seeking re-election.  I loved last year’s choice, Hanif Abdurraqib’s “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.” Reviewer Alexandre Leskanich of the London School of Economics wrote:

  Climate change, as his title recognizes, only too clearly demonstrates the systemic lunacy inherent in our present world arrangements. We are compelled to become the wardens of our own prison, guardians of an empty future. Devoid of ethical purpose, the future is forfeited to the whims of the market, ceded to the nihilism of economic growth. Instead of exhibiting an unfolding sequence of delimited events that function in the service of a progressive ‘universal history’, the planet is the stage on which the spectacle of human incoherence is playing out.

 Philosophy professor Gianluca DiMuzio asked me to speak with his freshmen seminar students on the History of IUN. The course is required of Arts and Sciences students and designed to acclimate them to the campus and such skills as power points and essay writing. The first time I did so, in David Parnell’s class, I lectured too much, so the second time in Jon Becker’s seminar, I made sure to be interactive from the very beginning. I invited Chancellor Ken Iwama to attend, joking that he was also a freshman, having taken over for Bill Lowe just last month. Despite having to wear a mask and the room being quite large due to social distancing guidelines, I believe it went well.  The first day I gave students my latest Steel Shavings and earmarked a half-dozen pages where I discussed various pertinent things. I dropped a copy off with Chancellor Iwama’s secretary, along with the relevant pages, joking, “This is his assignment.”  The Wednesday class went great, with plenty of questions and discussion.  One student noticed a photo of singer Billie Eilish in the magazine and asked if I was into her music. Another asked what campus was like when I came 50 years ago, compared to today.  Someone couldn’t believe I had written the entire volume myself. I called it a labor of love. Professor Gianluca DiMuzio asked if I thought it were possible to write about current history with perspective.  I replied that I regarded my blog more as a first draft of history that future scholars could make use of as a primary source.  I also pointed out pitfalls of doing oral history in regarding to reliability and the tendency for narrators to view the past nostalgically. 

When I introduced Chancellor Iwama (above), who was an English major at the University of New Hampshire and has an MA in Labor Relations from Rutgers and a law degree from Seton Hall, he brought up his New Jersey background in Asbury Park, home of Bruce Springsteen and that he comes from an urban university similar to IUN, City University of New York in Staten Island.  I mentioned Jersey shore rockers Jon Bon Jovi and Southside Johnny, whom I saw on a Holiday Star Bill with the Asbury Jukes backing him and Steppenwolf with Bachman Turner Overdrive as opening acts. The Chancellor seemed particularly interested when I discussed IUN’s relationship with the mother campus in Bloomington.  In the 1960s faculty had to get syllabi approved by IU departments and go in person when their “betters” reviewed whether they deserved promotion and tenure.  After former Regional Campus Director John Ryan became president in 1971, he abolished his old bureaucracy and granted regional campuses home rule except – and this, of course, was a big if – in matters of budget. Current President Michael McRobbie has resurrected the regional campus post, and some fear Bloomington administrators will devalue faculty research and treat our campus like a glorified community college.

 

Because the freshmen seminar students have an upcoming assignment to interview someone on why they went to college, I interjected my own experience, that my parents expected it of me and started saving for my college tuition soon after I was born.  Growing to maturity during the Great depression, Midge had been able to attend Grove City teachers College in Erie, PA, only because an aunt was married to a dentist there, while Vic worked his way through Pitt in a steel mill. They were not happy when I dropped out of Virginia Law School to pursue an advanced degree in History.  Chancellor Iwama told the class that he had no choice because his parents, like mine, expected it.  They had emigrated from Japan shortly in the late 1940s after his father secured a grant at Berkeley. He added, however, that at one point he had wanted to drop out and be a guitarist in a rock band.  While his parents would not hear of it, he was able to get them to accept his getting a motorcycle. He offered to be interviewed by a student who needed a subject.

 

After class Chancellor Iwama was very complimentary and said that he has been meaning to interview his parents, now in their nineties, about their past experiences. His father was evidently a naïve teenager during the 1940s eager to fight for the Japanese emperor, even if the assignment was as a kamikaze pilot. The Chancellor’s grandfather arranged for the school headmaster to talk him out of it, saying that his potential as a great scholar war outweighed sacrificing his life.  As I was leaving, the Chancellor was questioning DiMuzio about the nature of the seminar, the last eight weeks are devoted to the professor’s field of study, in Gianluca’s case, Philosophy and in particular ethics.

"Blue Moon" and "Charlie O."

 “I always wanted to be a player, but I never had the talent to make the big leagues. So I did the next best thing. I bought a team,” Charlie O. Finley

Ron Cohen loaned me Larry Colton’s “Southern League: A True Story of Baseball, Civil Rights, and the Deep South’s Most Compelling Pennant Race.” The author (above) pitched at the University of California when Cohen was a student there and went on to play for the Macon Peaches in the Southern League. The book opens in a tiny duplex in Macon, Georgia with Kansas City A's owner and super-salesman Charlie O. Finley wooing 19-year-old baseball phenom Johnny “Blue Moon” Odom, who had starred at the same segregated high school, Ballard-Hudson, that musicians Little Richard and Otis Redding had attended. “To seal the deal,” Colton wrote, "Finley helped cook dinner - fried chicken, okra, corn bread, and black-eyed peas." The bonus, worth an unprecedented $75,000, included a new Ford Galaxy. Odom signed the contract and would be playing for the Birmingham Barons, a Southern League A's affiliate, in a city known as "Bombingham." The previous year, Eugene "Bull" Connor had used fire hoses and police dogs against peaceful demonstrators during Martin Luther King's Birmingham Crusade, and segregationists connected to the Ku Klux Klan had bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, staging ground for civil rights activities, on a Sunday morning, killing four young girls. On June 18, 1964, shortly after the season began, a cop pulled Odom over, questioned whether the car was his, and began threatening him, saying, "Are you trying to be a smart-ass?" until he realized Odom was the Barons’ new bonus baby. Then he said: "This is your lucky day. I’m going to let you go, but let me give you some advice. This is Birmingham. It’s real important you stay in the nigger part of town.”

John "Blue Moon" Odom

Finley had grown poor up in Birmingham, the son of a steelworker, had once been a batboy for the Barons, and moved to Gary, Indiana, as a teenager when his father, out of a job, found work at one of United States Steel Corporation's mills. He graduated from Horace Mann High School, took classes at Gary College while working in the steel mill and playing first base for an industrial league team, and during World War II, after an ulcer kept him out of the marines, got a job in an ordnance plant, moonlighting, at his father-in-law's suggestion, as an insurance salesman. In 1946 he contracted tuberculosis and spent a year in a sanitorium fighting to breathe. He lost a hundred pounds but began selling disability insurance to doctors he came into contact with. Colson wrote:

Within two years of his release, he'd sold policies to 92 percent of the doctors in the Chicago area. He soon expanded nationally, and within a few years he was a multimillionaire, with a 21-room farmhouse on 260 acres near LaPorte.

In September of 1964,, with his A’s destined to lose 100 games that season, the flamboyant Finley paid the Beatles $150,000, three times what their normally fee, to perform at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium before a crowd of almost 40,000. As an encore, the Fab Four played “Going to Kansas City.” Finley hired a mule named “Charlie O” as the team mascot, advocated for orange baseballs, hired sexy ball-girls, installed a mechanical rabbit to pop up and deliver balls to the home plate umpire, and dressed players in colorful green-and-gold uniforms. In 1968 Finlay would move the Athletics to Oakland and assemble a cast of characters that included Colton’s teammate, Cuban escapee Bert Campaneris, as well as “Catfish” Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers, and "Blue Moon" Odom. The colorful A’s, who played in Philadelphia when I was a kid, won three straight World Series championships beginning in 1972. Author Colton retired with a sore arm in 1968 after a brief stint with the Phillies.

Migrations

  "Many years later, people would forget about the quiet successes of everyday people like Ida Mae. In the debates to come over welfare and pathology, American would overlook people like her in its fixation with the underclass." Isabelle Wilkerson

Isabelle Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns” is an oral historian's delight - based on literally hundreds of interviews with folk who left the South for greater freedom and opportunity between 1915 and 1970, but it concentrates on three main African Americans – Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster. Most had no clear idea what awaited them. Ida Mae, for example, had never been out of Chickasaw County, Mississippi. While some had relatives who had proceeded them, others had family urging them not to leave. Most everyone knew about victims of lynching and feared that one misstep could be fatal. As Laura Arnold said two weeks before leaving North Carolina for Washington, D.C.: “You sleep over a volcano which may erupt at any moment.” Families often worked for farmers or employers who did not pay them adequately and kept them in debt as a means of control. Typical was the experience of George’s sharecropper grandfather, who at harvest’s end would be told, “Boy, we had a good year. We broke even. You don’t owe me nothing. And I don’t owe you nothing.” Pershing Foster, whose father had been a principal in Monroe, Louisiana, and became a physician, ministered to black soldiers while in the army and wasn’t properly respected within his profession until he took an assignment in Austria after World War II.

 

Pershing Foster

Ida Mae Gladney

Mahalia Jackson

Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who grew up in a segregated ward in New Orleans, wrote in “Movin’ On Up”: “Our mattresses were made of corn shucks and soft gray Spanish moss that hung from the trees. From the woods we got raccoon, rabbit, and possum. And I’d whisper to myself that someday the sun was going to shine down on me way up north, in Chicago or Kansas City or one of those other faraway places that my cousin always talked about.”

 

Lewis Hine, Ellis Island

During the 35 years prior to 1915, the year of the onset of the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the American South, nearly six times as many Southern, Eastern, and Central Europeans, approximately 28 million, spilled into industrial metropolises and burgeoning cities in Northwest Indiana such as Gary, East Chicago, Hammond, and Whiting in search of a better life and to escape Old World hardships and discrimination. In Gary many shared a cot with a fellow laborer working the other 12-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week shift at United States Steel’s Gary Works. Though the integrated mill was located adjacent to Lake Michigan, most newcomers never got to swim in its waters or relax on its beaches.

 

The original residents of Miller Beach were a motley mix of squatters, fugitives from the law, nature lovers seeking escape from smokestack America, and affluent Chicagoans looking for weekend retreats. With the coming of a South Shore commuter rail line linking Gary to Chicago and South Bend and mass production of automobiles, Gary officeholders, recognizing its vacation and tourist potential, annexed Miller in 1918. This led to a rapid growth spurt in the following decade, as historian Steve Spicer noted on his Miller website:

The first five years of the 1920s were an exciting time in the newly annexed town of Miller: Marquette Park was built, telephone service was established, Gay Mill Garden was operating at full tilt, and the population was rapidly expanding onto new streets north and south and east of “old town” Miller.

South Shore train in 1920s

These items appeared in the September 16, 1920 issue of the Chesterton Tribune:

George O’Malley of Chicago lost his life when his canoe capsized east of the Lake Ave. bridge while he was paddling in the Miller lagoon. Scores of people witnessed the drowning. A mile away from the boardwalk at Miller Beach, between two monster sand dunes, three Gary policemen uncovered the first real “moonshine” still ever operated in Gary [since Prohibition went into effect]. The “moonshiners” evidently took their cue from their brotherhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains, for a hut, ingeniously contrived, furnished the shelter for their operation. Inside, a 25-gallon still was leaking white mule at the rate of 30 gallons a day.

 

Not until the mid-1960s could African Americans use Marquette Park beach without fear of harassment nor purchase homes in Miller, many whose deeds contained restrictive covenants not officially outlawed until 1968. In 1973, when my family rented a Hoosier home in Miller, within a year the neighborhood racial composition had almost completely changed from white to black.

Electrical Storms

 “The lofty pine is oftenest shaken by the winds; High towers fall with a heavier crash; And the lightning strikes the highest mountain.” Horace, Roman poet during the reign of Augustus

One hundred years ago, according to the Chesterton Tribune’s “Echoes of the Past” column, a severe electrical storm struck Northwest Indiana. Hawley Olmstead, President of the Prairie Club, was struck by lightning near his group’s clubhouse in the Lake Michigan dunes and died instantly. His friend Kenneth Ross, was caught in an undertow and drowned. A bolt of lightning struck a horse belonging to Chesterton resident Mrs. Joseph Wozniak, knocking it to the ground and rendering it unable to walk for some time. Mail service aviator Frederick Robinson took off from Gary, but the dire weather conditions forced him to make an emergency landing in a field near the Porter Swedish Lutheran Church.

When we lived atop a sand dune within the Indiana National Lakeshore, now a national park, we frequently observed lightning storms nearby over Lake Michigan. If they were accompanied by loud thunderclaps, we grew apprehensive. Usually, the worst consequence was losing power, though sometimes we’d be without electricity for hours or even days. Once, however, a bolt of lightning hit our house. While in the kitchen we smelled a worrisome odor emanating from the fireplace room. Our record player had been damaged; the smell was an electrical fire, and sparks were coming from the appliance. Toni quickly unplugged the device from the power source (the socket) and, except for the foul odor, averted greater damage. Later we found evidence out back that our house had been struck.

Golden Gate Bridge and orange sky

Thunderstorms are causing hundreds of wildfires throughout the west coast that have burned millions of acres, forced the evacuation of thousands of residents, and left the air quality in cities such as San Francisco so poor that breathing it into one’s lungs for a sustained length of time is the equivalent to smoking a carton of cigarettes. Fierce winds, draught conditions, and intense heat due to global warming have created near-apocalyptic conditions. As California governor Gavin Newsom declared, the future climatologists warned us about is upon us.

Oregon blaze

Jerry Pierce wrote that his mother in Oregon is living less than 30 miles from one of the many out-of-control fires.   Ray Smock recalled:

    I can remember when the skies in Gary, IN and Pittsburgh, PA looked forest-fire orange most of the time, sometimes depending on the wind, or when a stagnant inversion layer held smokestack emissions low. And the smell was awful. We got rid of a lot of the industrial pollution, only to succumb to our global failure to keep the planet's atmosphere from carbon dioxide pollution. Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, but burning forests make it all too visible in other ways.

    As the physicist George Feynman reminds us, trees come from the air. They take in carbon dioxide from the air. They take in water that falls from the air. They convert carbon dioxide into a carbon-based thing called wood. They exhale some of the oxygen. When they burn, they release all their carbon dioxide, all their wood, and return to the air and leave a residue of ash.

    The fires will get worse. The skies will be orange more often. The CO2 in the air will increase. Nature is out of balance already. Not from the old industrial pollution, which helped, but from our current disregard over the last 30 years to stop the imbalance. This is so far beyond the old industrial pollution. Humans have just about changed the planet enough that we have basically ruined it for future generations. Even the trees, from which our species evolved, have turned on us because we have made it too hot for them to keep helping us.

When a teenager living on Third and Fillmore in Gary, Dorothy Mokry recalled trying to cross Fourth Avenue when it started storming and having her hands upright when she got a shock on her left hand and actually noticed sparks coming off her fingers.  It freaked her out and ever since, she worries about being outside during a lightning storm. She added: “Plus, now I have hardware in my ankle and always worry that it’s like an electrical conductor.” 

Before delivering a talk on “Novels as Social History” to my Saturday Evening Club (SEC) colleagues via zoom, Dave helped me get set up so the lighting and background were adequate.  After mentioning books I read on my own, such as “Peyton Place,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Advise and Consent,” “Hawaii,” and “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash,” plus so-called nonfiction novels by “New Journalists” Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer, I cited novels I assigned in twentieth-century American history courses, such a “The Jungle,” “Babbitt,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Native Son,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Breakfast of Champions,” and “Rabbit Is Rich.” Finally, I read excerpts from my three favorite current favorite writers: Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth Strout.

Larry Galler and Pat Bankston; below Vonnegut self-portrait 

As customary, each SEC member reacted to the talk for 5-10 minutes.  Most were complimentary.  Former IUN colleague Pat Bankston, now living in Florida, brought up having read the nineteenth-century William Thackeray novel “Vanity Fair” in college.  VU emeritus professor Hugh McGuigan noted that Charles Dickens and other English novelists first published their works in serialized form in magazines. Ben Studebaker brought up the current vogue for fantasy novels such as the Harry Potter series.  Larry Galler quipped that I was the first SEC speaker to use the utter the phrases mother fucker and blow job.  I had observed that many libraries banned Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” (1969), supposedly because it contained dirty words.  In one scene in question G.I. Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s alter ego, froze under fire, prompting Roland Weary to yell, “Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker!”  Then Vonnegut added: “The last word was still a novelty in the speech of white people in 1944. It was fresh and astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked anybody – and it did its job. It woke him up and got him off the road.” I also quoted from John Updike’s  novella “Rabbit Remembered” where grandson Roy joked about Bill Clinton’s sexual proclivities during the Senate impeachment trial:

   One wisecrack went: “President Clinton was visiting Oklahoma City after the May 3rd tornado and a man whose house was demolished put up a sign: HEY BILL HOWS THIS FOR A BLOW JOB.” His father thought to himself, “After this Lewinsky business, even kindergarten kids know about blow jobs.”  

The Sit-In

“You can cage the singer but not the song.” Harry Belafonte

A new documentary titled “The Sit-In” discusses a week in February 1968, when Harry Belafonte substituted for Johnny Carson (at Carson’s suggestion, a brave gesture) as host of the “Tonight Show.” Belafonte had made numerous guest appearances on the “Tonight Show,” as had black performers Sammy Davis, Jr., Bill Cosby, and many others. In the 1950s Jamaican-American Belafonte, born in Harlem in 1927, was known as the “King of Calypso” and had scored huge hits with “Matilda” and “The Banana Boat Song.” Growing up, Belafonte lived eight years with his grandmother in Kingston and knew the work songs well. In the early 1960s, at the height of the folk music craze on campuses and in coffeehouses, Belafonte was a bigger star than Bob Dylan. Handsome, articulate, and comfortable on camera, Belafonte not only hosted but secured the distinguished guests for five shows that combined entertainment and serious discussion of race-relations and world events. This was a time when the Tet Offensive was undermining American confidence in the Vietnam war and urban unrest was calling into question the efficacy of LBJ-style liberal reform. Among Belafonte’s “Tonight Show” guests were Dr. Martin Luther King, New York senator Robert F. Kennedy, comedians Nipsy Russell and Bill Cosby, singers Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, and Lena Horne, actors Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman, and formerly blacklisted performer Leon Bibb, once good friends with Paul Robeson. Both Bibb and Belafonte had recorded “Rocks and Gravel,” a traditional black work song first recorded in 1928 by Peg Leg Howell. The chorus goes: “It takes rocks and gravel, baby, to make a solid road.” Sadly, copies of the Belafonte “Sit-In” shows do not exist, as in those days tapes were commonly reused.

Producer Norman Lear recalled: “Only Belafonte could have pulled that off. He was an ambassador in both directions – to his own people and to the Caucasian community. There wasn’t anyone else like him.”Belafonte was a deeply committed civil rights activist who had attended marches and rallies and was friends with movement leaders, not only King but Julian Bond and other veterans of Freedom Summer. In fact, in 1964, after the murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, Belafonte and Sidney Poitier flew to Alabama with $76,000 to provide funding for the movement. The Nation’s Joan Walsh wrote: “Chased by armed Klansmen leaving the Greenwood airport, they almost didn’t make it our of the South alive.”

In 1968 blacks on TV was a rare event, other than in subservient positions, such as Jack Benny’s servant Rochester or “Amos and Andy.” Just three years before, Bill Cosby had broken TV’s racial glass ceiling by co-starring with Robert Culp in “I Spy.” Not until the Fall of 1969 would a black woman have a starring role – Diahann Carroll in “Julia.” My favorite that Fall season was “Room 222,” about a high school with a diverse student body and two black middle-class role models a male teacher (Lloyd Haynes) and female counselor (Denise Nicholas). Historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., had just turned 18 when he learned that Belafonte would be sitting in for Johnny. He later recalled: “Night after night, my father and I stayed up late to watch a black man host the highest-rated show in its time slot – history in the making.”Belafonte, alive and kicking at 93, is still keeping the faith and contributing toward getting that arc to bend toward justice.

State Representative Vernon Smith (on left with Tracy Lewis and Charlie Brown) is one of the most principled people I know and a great champion of Gary and IU Northwest, where he is a professor of education.  Four years ago, he was at the Glen Theater, which he was renovating, when a 20-year-old armed robber named Keith Sanders forced him onto the floor and stole his wallet, keys, and cellphone.  Smith had almost no money with because, as he told Sanders, he’d given it to a woman in church who needed help. When a roofer arrived, Sanders stole possessions from him, too. Apprehended not long after the incident, Sanders has been in jail since 2017 awaiting trial, which finally took place in Lake Criminal Court in front of Judge Samuel Cappas.  Speaking directly to the defendant Vernon Smith told him he believed God has work for him to do, adding, as reported by Times correspondent Sarah Reese:

    Things do not happen by chance or happenchance.  Everything happens for a reason.  Some of us have to go to the school of hard knocks before we see the light.  It doesn’t matter where you came from, it matters where you’re going.

As part of a plea bargain, Judge Cappas sentenced Sanders (below) to eight years in prison but ordered that he receive credit for the three-plus years already served.  Sanders vowed to obtain a GED while incarcerated.