Halloween Eve

     “Its winds forced among overlapping branches sing softly as harps, roar and wail as great organs....” 

     Gene Stratton-Porter, “Music of the Wild”(1910)

Responding to my “Mayday 1971 post, author Lawrence Roberts (above) thanked me and added: “It was an emotional time, kinda like today.”  I wrote back: “The scene covering the VVAW vets hurling their service medals over the Capitol barrier reduced me to tears. I remember it well. Glad you mentioned David Dellinger, trying to be a moderating influence and ending totally exhausted and hospitalized. I heard him speak at Temple Israel in Gary, Indiana, and it was a thrill to be listening to a real American hero.”  Roberts replied: “Dellinger's theories and practices are certainly relevant to today's debates. He deserves more attention. Perhaps the new Chicago 7 film will bring him some.”

 

Former IUN colleague Don Coffin interjected: “I was in grad school in Morgantown, West Virginia. Even there, a march and speeches, with several thousand involved took place. No arrests, though” My response: “I'm reading mentor William H. Harbaugh's "Lawyer's Lawyer," a biography of West Virginian John W. Davis, 1924 Presidential candidate and a nineteenth-century Wilsonian liberal turned anti-New Dealer who argued 141 cases before the Supreme Court, ingloriously culminating in representing South Carolina in opposition to school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education.” 

(opposing counsel Davis and Thurgood Marshall, below, Wm. H. Harbaugh)

I decided to reread “Lawyer’s lawyer” for the first time since shortly after its publication in 1973 because IUN Sociologist Jack Bloom sought my advice on the degree to which racism was historically rooted to political conservatism.  Central to Davis’ political philosophy was his belief in the sanctity of property rights.  As the Washington and Lee graduate declared, “History finds no instance where the right of men to acquire and hold property has been taken away without the complete destruction of liberty in all its forms.”  A Democratic Congressman who served as Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. Solicitor General and Ambassador to the Court of St. James prior to becoming a corporate attorney, Davis was chosen to be the 1924 Democratic Presidential nominee as a compromise choice on the 103rd ballot. His issued a statement mildly critical of the Ku Klux Klan in an effort to forestall progressives in his party from supporting third party candidate Robert LaFollette. Yet, wrote Roberts, his candidacy was “doomed from the beginning”due President Calvin Coolidge’s (largely undeserved) reputation for integrity.  Coolidge received almost twice as many votes as Davis and garnered 382 electoral votes, compared with 136 for Davis (basically the Solid South) and 13 for LaFollette.

 

In the Preface to “Lawyer’s Lawyer,” Harbaugh, whose scintillating lectures at Bucknell turned me from a Political Science to a History major, wrote:

  Finally, it is my pleasure to acknowledge the contributions of my personal staff: Lyn Hartridge, William Talbot, and Henry Richmond.  They borrowed (permanently) scores of my pens and pencils; they claimed proprietary rights on my scissors, Scotch tape, and best bond paper; they broke my typewriter three, and probably, four times; they compelled me – always at the moment of an intellectual breakthrough -  to play ping-pong and or pass the football (Rick’s friends Charlie McClellan and Rufus Davis are implicated kin this); the oldest, and first named above, subjected me to those very large sounds which she and her circle denominate as music.  Had they not done these things, I can almost truthfully say, the manuscript would have been completed six months earlier.  But to what consequence?

I asked Harbaugh’s son Rick, an Economics professor at IU’s Kelly School of Business, to confirm that the “personal staff” were his three children. I added: “Making a colorless person like Davis interesting is proof what a great writer he was, in addition to a meticulous historian.” Rick confirmed what I suspected (he was Henry Richmond, hence “Rick”) and remembered meeting me years ago at an IU function.  I thanked him and added: “I met two of Bill’s kids (you and Lyn?) when toddlers at a Bucknell seminar held in your parents’ home.  Every year I’d send him my latest Steel Shavings issue and he’d mail back a complimentary note, usually adding that he was in apparently good health.  One year I got a note from your mother, saying, ‘Bill would have loved the magazine, but, alas, he died.’”

 

Halloween Eve when I was growing up in a Philadelphia suburb was dubbed “Mischief Night,” and I’d go out with Terry Jenkins and Sammy Corey and ring doorbells, set off firecrackers on front porches, then run away.  Our neighbor Mr. Illingworth, who worked at Wentz turkey farm, was known to hide in the bushes and scare would-be tricksters. One year, a friend who shall remain nameless had purchased some cherry bombs; at the home of a teacher whom he despised, he inserted paper inside a jack o’lantern lit by a candle and then threw a cherry bomb onto the porch as the pumpkin went up in flames. Less intrepid than the culprit, I was scared shitless, as the saying goes, and from a safe distance made sure someone came outside and doused the fire before it did any damage.  In Indiana, I learned, “tepeeing” was a favorite prank, and our place on the hill was victimized several times while the boys were in high school, no doubt in retaliation for some mischief of theirs.

Don Coffin’s latest Japanese haiku seems appropriate:

Long autumn night

A light passes along

The veranda

 

Feeling nostalgic, Eleanor Bailey wrote:
   Remembering those October days when our family would go for car rides on Sundays. We lived in Lake Village and we would drive up and down the country roads near Morocco. Dad would find the roads where the Black Walnut trees had dropped the green husks with the walnut seed inside to the ground. Gathering them in buckets, we would take them home, and spread them in a layer in the driveway. For a week or two, twice each day, the car would be driven over them and that would break away the husk. The tedious part of picking the nut out of the shell would begin. We learned a little about nature, family history, and geography on each of those trips.

Eleanor recalled a Halloween night in 1967 in the small Lake County, Indiana town of Schneider. 

    The three boys and their sister were out with their friends. It was Lori’s first time to go trick-or-treating. Her brothers had taught her to say “trick or treat – smell my feet.” They thought this was hilarious. A typical Northwest Indiana Halloween, it was a damp chilly night. The children were wearing costumes, jackets, and boots. Their treats bags were brown paper grocery sacks. Their friend Maggie ran up and down the streets with the others, dragging her bag through the wet leaves, needless to say, her treats left a trail behind as the bottom of the grocery sack disintegrated with each step she took. The dads of the gang of children would appear just about the time that the doorbell was rung at the Daun home. There the treat was always homemade fudge. The next year, Maggie had a pillowcase to carry her treats in. The dads were up to their old trick of hiding in the bushes waiting to steal the kids fudge.

 

Due to the pandemic, rather than greet trick or treaters at the door, as we very much enjoy, not having had a chance to do so while isolated for 35 years on Maple Place, Toni is preparing bags of candy to leave on our porch.  Cynic that I am, my thought is that some young folks will hog more than one.  But so what, such is life.