Teach Your Children

"You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye."

    “Teach Your Children,” Crosby, Stills and Nash

 

Post-Trib columnist Jerry Davich quoted from the David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash classic “Teach Your Children” in a column on the importance of family history, citing a 75-year-old Chesterton resident, Marvin Zelkowitz, whose Jewish parents did not want to talk about the horrendous situation in Europe that they escaped from.  Zelkowitz told Davich:

   After seeing Alex Haley’s TV mini-series “Roots,” I asked my father about our family history.  He told me he was not interested in his roots.  My mother said nothing.

In Zelkowitz’s possession, nonetheless, is a photo taken in 1911 of his then one-year-old mother Rachel Gorbaty, taken in Bialistok, Poland.

 

“Feed them on your dreams” seems apt parental advice from the trio who combined with Neil Young and performed at Woodstock 51 years ago.  When Ron Cohen and I launched Steel Shavings magazine, the purpose was to publish student family histories. Back in 1970, almost all IU Northwest students had parents or grandparents who emigrated to the Calumet Region from Europe, Mexico, Puerto Rico or the American South, mostly due to employment opportunities in heavy industry, mainly the steel mills.  While no longer able to make such assignments, I continue to publish family histories through interviewing IUN alumni and soliciting such information from Facebook friends such as Anne Koehler and Eleanor Bailey.

 

Being a resource person for the Valparaiso University Flight Paths project has also put me in touch with professors Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette, who have been conducting interviews about race, ethnicity, and migration from the industrial cities of Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago to the suburbs.  Nicole Martinez-LeGrand, for example, who is Multicultural Collections Coordinator for Indiana Historical Society, described growing up in a Mexican household, being introduced to a myriad of ethnic influences, and the initial culture shock of going to college downstate:

    When I was growing up, ethnicity was kind of static. And I didn’t really come to understand what “ethnicity” meant until I went to college, till I came down here in Indianapolis. A lot of people here in Indianapolis have German heritage. So, I went to a small Catholic college here in the city and so a lot of people at that time were from Indianapolis, surrounding Indianapolis, or rural areas. And so, the roll call, when they would say their names! Going to, you know, high school and hearing the roll call, you know, you have, you know, “Cichocki,” “Szczepanski,” “Ramirez,” “Gonzalez,” “Hernandez.” I mean, just like a mix of Eastern European and Latino last names. And so, I just kind of realized, like, “I am – Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” And then, also, it didn’t really help that the summer before my twin sister and I started college the Latin explosion happened. J.Lo and Ricky Martin became mainstream. A lot of those folks that I went to school with, their entry point in understanding Latino culture. So everybody would say, “Oh, you look like J.Lo!” No, I don’t. And at the time – my natural hair is very curly – and so, I’m like, “One, I have curly hair. Two, I look nothing like her. Three, I’m Mexican; I’m not Puerto Rican.” And so, people just didn’t understand that, so that didn’t really help things. But I think it made people more curious and able to talk about it, so that’s when I kind of understood culture.

    I was born in 1980. I was born at Munster Community Hospital but I grew up in Hessville in Hammond, Indiana – that neighborhood in Hammond. I actually grew up right across the street from what is now Purdue Northwest. Back then it was Purdue University Calumet. I have a twin sister so I wasn’t born alone, so I always had a playmate. So, I just remember running up and down the block and then actually, like, riding my bike through Purdue’s campus before they closed in the streets on, I think, Wicker and I can’t remember what the other side street was. So, terrorizing the students there in the late 80s as well as – there’s a street called Knickerbocker and it’s just, like, this one continuous loop. I think it’s about two miles and so that was always kind of a thrill to roller skate or, later, roller blade in the 90s and ride my bike around. So just a lot of just being outside and playing. And then there was a deli a couple blocks down. I remember going there and buying candy, getting in trouble. I stole my mother’s checkbook once and wrote, like, 000.1 and tried to buy some candy, and it had my mother’s telephone number on it, and they called her. So, we were very sneaky and very imaginative children.

    In terms of, like, the ethnicity of my neighborhood, mostly at that time – mostly white. And there was another Latino family that lived down the street, somebody that my parents went to high school with.  They went to East Chicago Washington. And so, there was the Morales family, so there was Maria, Jose, and Pablo. Jose and Pablo were the younger brothers and Maria and I were the same age. So, we played with her but I mostly played with this Polish family, the Cichockis who lived just across the alley. And so, my backyard and their backyard kind of looked at each other. We both had sisters named “Kelly.” So, she had a little sister named Kelly so it was “Baby Kelly.” So, I grew up before going to school thinking everybody had a sister, and everybody had a sister named Kelly.

    So now that I look at it as an adult, a lot of Eastern European: tight-knit groups, always affiliated with church. I went to Catholic schools. Like, food events. A lot of food. I used to hate sauerkraut. I love sauerkraut now. And I used to always think sauerkraut was a Polish dish, but it’s all Eastern European. It’s, you know, German. You know, pierogies? Like, pierogies are, you know, the Eastern European version of empanadas, you know? So, there’s a lot of, like, cross-connect and shared heritage in a lot of these ethnic communities that I think about but I’ve only come to understand and appreciate when I was, you know, becoming of age as a young adult.

Teach your children has taken on new meaning during the pandemic. With schools delaying when they’ll open or keeping kids home to learn online, parents are being asked to be even more involved in the learning process than previously.  All types of so-called hybrid offerings are the “new norm” at IUN. The number of parents choosing to home school their children is also on the rise. Colleges, too, are being forced to develop and amend policies on the fly. Meanwhile, no leadership in forthcoming from the federal government, as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos prioritizes for-profit charter schools.

 

“The Eye Has to Travel,” is a fascinating 2012 documentary about the life of fashion designer Diana Vreeland (1903-1989), born in Paris the daughter of an American socialite and a British stockbroker. Beginning in 1936, Diana worked for Harper’s Bazaar and then Vogue. Rather than retire when her extravagance proved too much for her superiors, she seized an opportunity to design shows for the Metropolitan Museum of Art; her grand openings became the social highlights of the season – eye candy for sophisticates and social histories.

 

Kiley Reid’s “Such a Fun Age,” about an African-American (Emira) sitter employed by a rich couple (Alix and Peter Chamberlain), takes place in Philadelphia.  Emira lives in the Kensington neighborhood, near where Toni grew up; when Toni worked in Center City, she’d take a trolley to Kensington and Allegheny (the intersection was nicknamed “K and A”), get on the elevated, which became a subway as it neared the downtown.  Her boyfriend lived in Fishtown, not far from her North Philadelphia home. The Chamberlains resided in the fashionable Rittenhouse Square area close to where my stepfather Howard’s law book publishing business had its headquarters. I checked out “Such a Fun Age” after reading that it was a Booker Prize finalist, as was my previous novel, Anne Tyler’s “Redhead by the Side of the Road.” Both Emira and Alix lean heavily on a small group of intimates, who sometimes lead them astray.

Chuck Logan told me about “Pit Bulls and Parolees,” a reality show on Animal Planet network that’s beginning its sixteenth season.  It stars Tia Torres, who founded Villalobos Rescue Center for pit bulls and other supposedly aggressive dogs.  One of the show’s purposes is to demonstrate that pit bulls don’t deserve the bad reputation often attributed to them as result of disreputable owners.  Even so, I am always wary when I come across one, especially if kids or other animals are around, because their jaws can be deadly.

 

Thanks to classmate Pat Zollo, I came across the Upper Dublin Class of 1960 Facebook site and photos of our 50^th reunion a decade ago.  In one I was with childhood buddies Pete Drake, Jay Bumm, and Chris Koch, while in another cool dude Donald Stroup is flanked by LeeLee Minehart, my tenth-grade girlfriend Mary Delp, with friends Connie Heard Eleanor Smith and Flossie Worster nearby.  Biggest find: Mary Dinkins, the only African American in my college prep classes, whom I had a crush on, with Myna Pinkett.