Hairy Gertz and the 47 Crappies

“Crappies are a special breed of Midwestern fish, created by God for the express purpose of surviving in waters that would kill a bubonic-plague bacillus. They have never been known to fight, or even faintly struggle. I guess when you’re a crappie, you figure it’s no use anyway.” Jean Shepherd, “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash” The title character in Jean Shepherd’s “Hairy Gertz and the 47 Crappies,” about 12-year-old Ralph fishing on Cedar Lake with his dad and a half-dozen of the Old Man’s drinking and bowling buddies, is a notorious dirty joke teller, often involving men of the cloth, wanton women, and Eastern European bartenders. Out on the lake Gertz had plenty of time to spin one after another that were “rotten to the core,” with the Old Man vainly cautioning that there was a kid in the boat. One, for instance, about a Hungarian who had a cross-legged daughter and a bowlegged dachshund, Ralph couldn’t understand, but he knew it was pretty disgusting from his companions’ reaction. Vic (my Old Man) had a friend who seemingly an endless supply of jokes, most of them not fit for mixed company, as the saying went in my youth. Vic always feigned embarrassment when the guy launched into one in my presence. While I rarely hear raunchy jokes anymore, having retired from my bowling league, they appear to be, according to steel mill folklore, a staple of daily life at work and in Region taprooms. A few years ago, I was keynote speaker at a one-day conference in Cedar Lake and chose to discuss the various vicissitudes the community has undergone from its pioneer days, through the tourist boom of a century ago, followed by the Great Depression, the emigration of industrial workers from Kentucky and Tennessee during the war, and the resultant pollution of the lake from a variety of waste products, and the more recent gentrification following incorporation. I spoke about the many famous bands that performed at the Midway Ballroom and quoted from “Hairy Gertz and the 47 Crappies,” first published in Playboy, which Shepherd introduces with this exchange between Ralph and childhood friend Flick, now a bar owner, reminiscing about a girl who moved out to Cedar Lake: Ralph: “Cedar Lake! I haven’t heard of Cedar Lake for years! The Dance Hall! The roller rink! The Smell! Is it still out there, Flick? How is Cedar Lake?” Flick paused meaningfully in his swabbing, savoring to the full his next statement. “Cedar Lake. It’s the first time I heard of ‘em doing it to a lake. It’s Condemned!” Acknowledging Shepherd’s tendency toward hyperbole, I got laughs when I read this passage describing the water where 17,000 Region fishermen had gathered: “It is composed of roughly ten percent waste glop spewed out by Shell, Sinclair, Phillips, and the Grasseli Chemical Corporation; twelve percent used detergent; thirty-five percent thick gruel composed of decayed garter snakes, deceased toads, fermented crappies, and a strange, unidentifiable liquid that holds it all together. No one is quite sure what that is, because everybody is afraid to admit what it really is. They don’t want to look at it too closely. So this melange lays there under the sun, and about August it is slowly simmering like a rich mulligatawny stew. The natives, in their superstitious way, believe that it is highly inflammable. They take no chances.” About a decade ago, Greg Reising asked me to participate in a Miller Beach Aquatorium fundraiser: members would read selections by their favorite authors. Naturally, I chose “Hairy Gertz and the 47 Crappies.” It went over so well that I was asked to do an encore the following month, enabling me to finish the memorable story, where the men arrive home with their catch and celebrate their “primal victory over the Elements” by smoking cigars and drinking yet more Blatz beer, as Ralph cleans the 47 crappies. Here’s the final paragraph: “Somewhere off in the dark the Monon Louisville Limited wails as it snakes through the Gibson Hump on its way to the outside world. The giant Indiana moths, at least five pounds apiece, are banging against the window screens next to my bed. The cats are fighting in the backyard over crappie heads, and fish scales are itching in my hair as I joyfully, ecstatically slide off into the great world beyond.” When I first read “Hairy Gertz and the 47 Crappies,” I had no idea what the Gibson Hump was. It turned out to be a Region railroad yard, roundhouse, and coaling station where locomotives are serviced, repaired, and stored. While less than 200 roundhouses are still in use in the United States, the Gibson yard is still active. The Monon railroad once ran trains back and forth from Chicago to Indianapolis with a stop in Cedar Lake, enabling people from those cities to spend a day, weekend or longer at one of the town’s resort hotels or cottages.

Acceptable Men

Acceptable Men “Gary Works is situated on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, with hardly a single elevation to break the wind between it and the North Pole. In January, working out-of-doors much of the time as motor inspectors, we feel the cold to our bones, no matter how many layers of silk, wool, and down we wear.” Noel Ignatiev, “Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World” An idealistic “Red Diaper Baby,” who as a youth helped his father before breakfast seven days a week deliver copies of a Yiddish-language Communist Party newspaper, Freheit, Noel Ignatiev quit college after his junior year and, a member of the ultra-leftist Sojourner Truth Organization, became a factory worker, hoping to convince Black workers to rise up against a capitalist system that exploited and oppressed them. His unfinished memoir (he died two years ago) describes working at U.S. Steel, beginning in 1972, the year Gary mayor Richard Hatcher convened the Black National Political Convention at West Side High School. He trained under a Black motor Inspector named Jackson, who showed him the ropes, including how to minimize the chances of serious injury under truly dangerous conditions, and, incidentally, taught him to play duplicate bridge; the two of them competed in games against Black social workers and teachers that included the Mayor’s wife Ruthellyn Hatcher. Wary of industrial unionism as a path to progress, Ignatiev learned that Blacks members were confined to the worst jobs due to the principles of division seniority and separate tracks for production and maintenance workers. He wrote: “Gary Works ran seven miles long and two miles deep. Moving from east to west, the divisions ran from crude (the coke plant) to finish (the rolling mills), from dirty to comparatively clean, and from black to white.” Ignatiev’s descriptions of mill culture reminded me of folklorist Richard Dorson’s “Land of the Millrats,” as he relates stories of pilfering, sleeping on the job, nicknames (Big Cat, Polecat, Roto-Rooter, Slick, Big Hickey, and Little Hickey), and Old Timers, such as a Greek immigrant who talked about growing olives and cooked pigeons he captured on the rafters of the repair barn. “Acceptable Men” concludes with the author taking advantage of an opportunity - denied to his co-workers – to transition into academia, followed by this paragraph: “On the 200th anniversary of the Republic, Gary Works management decided to clean up some areas, build walkways, and throw open the gates to public tours. People from all over the world came to wonder at the ‘Industry that made America great.’” I recall how those Bicentennial tours were extremely popular- and how misleading they were. There was little resemblance to the description of Charles Dickens, quoted by Ignatiev, that it was “hell with the lid off.” I went on guided tours of Inland and Bethlehem Steel’s facilities that were similarly sanitized. Michael Goldfield, author of “The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s,” wrote: “Noel Ignatiev’s combining of the technical details of steel making, irreverent comradery, accounts of racism both in the plant and in the country as a whole, with damning matter-of-fact indictments of the company’s total lack of concern for the safety of its workers, makes this a must read for all who want deeper insights into U.S. society and capitalism in general.”

Steel Shavings

Steel Shavings “As a result of grinding, drilling, filing, and boring, all day, every day, the steel manufacturing process generates scrap metal shavings that can be recycled and used in many ways, including in filters and cleaning agents.” Gardner Metal Recycling the early 1970s, when Ron Cohen and I started Steel Shaving magazine with the intention of publishing IUN student family histories, the steel industry was still labor intensive and a source of good paying union jobs. Most of our students, many the children of immigrants, came from steel-working families, so “Steel Shavings” seemed an appropriate title for our venture – and still does as I am preparing volume 51. Representative of our early efforts was Margene Milisavljevich’s account of her Serbian-born parents Stanoje and Eleonore. Stanoje arrived first in 1952, working at a crap job in Chicago until a distant cousin found an opening for him at Gary Works. A year later, he was able to send for his family. Margene wrote: “Stanoje’s job at the mill enabled him to provide for his family very comfortably. They lived in a nice home, owned a car, and, perhaps most important, always had enough to eat. They all had known what it meant to be hungry, and Stanoje vowed never to let his family go hungry again.” From time to time, I get requests for back Shavings issues. Many are officially out of print; but with one exception (“Steelworkers Fight Back: Rank and File Insurgency in the Calumet Region during the 1970s,” several hundred of which were purchased at discount by Eddie Sadlowski, who shared the cover with fellow union leader Jim Balanoff) I can usually scrounge one up for somebody whose loved one or relative is in it. I recently mailed off the Cedar Lake issue to California. Jesse Salomon generally wants several copies of “Froebel Daughters of Penelope” every few years. The other day I received a request from the husband of Jennifer Borkowski for “Tales of Lake Michigan and the Indiana Dunelands” and decided, reluctantly, to part with one of my four personal copies. Jennifer had interviewed Joe Demkowicz about pier fishing and wrote, “Fishing began at the age of four or five for Joe, first at Buffington Pier and the Edison plant and then at the Whiting lakefront and the barge canal. Joe and his friends would spear carp with archery equipment or use them for target shooting. No one minded; they ate trash and were sometimes referred to as “garbage fish.” He claims the carp sometimes weighed 30 or 40 pounds and looked like great sharks coming at you.” Perch were also plentiful then, gathering in schools attracted to the warmer water near shore. Joe Demkowicz recalled catching two or three hundred perch in a full day. Some people used double hooks and would pull out a pair at a time. Demkowicz told Jennifer: “We would go early in the morning, fish all day, and by the time we were through, have enough fish for the winter.” I was shocked to read in the Post-Tribune that Wirt graduate and Miller mainstay Eric Reaves died at age 59. Recently a member of Gary mayor Jerome Prince’s administration, Reaves, along with Bill and Karren Lee, cofounded the Miller Beach Art and Creative District along Lake Street and helped acquire through a donation the old Miller Drugstore and then convert it into the Michael J. Gardner Center. A eulogy honoring Reaves from that organization called Reaves a visionary and iconoclast who “was able to eject disruptors [and] in his own way was a disruptor himself, but he was a happy disruptor and he was our disruptor.” George Rogge, whom Reaves succeeded as head of the Miller Citizens Corporation, told reporter Carole Carlson: “He was smart, and he never saw color in any way, shape or form. He was a wild horse that had to be tamed, an earth mover. He made people work and he made things happen. If you’re in his way and don’t want to work, he mows you over.” Four years ago, I published a piece in Steel Shavings that Eric Reaves wrote after Philandro Castile was shot to death in a St. Paul suburb after police pulled him over for a broken taillight. Asked for his identification, the 32-year-old was mortally injured while reaching for his wallet as his horrified girlfriend recorded the scene. Minnesota governor Mark Dayton stated flatly that such a scenario would not have happened had the driver not been Black. Reaves observed: ANY life that is lost as a result of terrorism, racism, sexism, gay bashing or for any reason is one too many. I fear for my son and young nephews and secondarily myself on a daily basis. I pray that they are never stopped and the incident escalates into death. I cannot count the times I have been stopped for DWB, Driving While Black. Having a gun drawn on me is one of the most unnerving experiences of my life, one that I will never forget. My proclivity to date outside my race only exacerbated the stops, as the officers generally asked, “Ma’am, are you OK?” Many officers asked the young lady to step out of the car for a verbal scolding for dating a black man (when I was younger, they always threatened to take them home to their parents to ensure that the daughter would stop this behavior). It also never helped that I was driving a Mercedes Benz (mom’s) that clearly had to be stolen. I am 50+ and I am tired of racism on any level.

The Borrowed Years

“In May of 1941 the war had just begun The Germans has the biggest ships, they had the biggest guns The Bismarck was the fastest ship that ever sailed the sea On her deck were guns as big as steers and shells as big as trees” Johnny Horton, “Sink the Bismarck” In 1960, my senior year at Upper Dublin High School, country singer Johnny Horton’s hit reached number 3 on Billboard’s Top 50. Never mind historical inconsistencies (the war in Europe had begun in 1939) and the fact that many Americans mistakenly believed that U.S. vessels had downed the battleship (spoofed by Homer and Jethro in “We Didn’t Sink the Bismarck”), it was a successful follow-up to Horton’s 1959 saga “The Battle of New Orleans.” In the Banta Center library I found Richard M. Ketchum’s 900-page tome “The Borrowed Years, 1938-1941: America on the Way to War” (1989). I decided I’d skip the chapters on foreign policy and just read ones on domestic life. The author, like my dad Vic, grew up in the Pittsburgh area, hard hit by the depression but during the late 1930s such a soot-darkened place that cars and trolleys kept their lights on during the day. Bingo, invented in 1929 by Edwin S. Lowe, was a popular diversion employed by churches and charities as a fund-raising tool. Ketchum mentions Black blues singer Bessie Smith bleeding to death in Tennessee after an auto accident because a hospital available to Black patients was so far away. Ketchum’s mother wouldn’t allow Richard’s fourth-grade friend, Sylvan Jubeliver, to come to their home because he was a Jew; and the author describes how the passenger ship St. Louis carrying a thousand Jewish refugees, some of whom later died at the hands of the Nazis, wasn’t permitted to land in a U.S. port. Unlike my father’s family, that was hard-hit by the Great Depression, Ketchum’s father’s advertising agency, Ketchum, McLeod, and Grove, managed to survive, enabling Richard, 16 in 1938 to attend Shady Side Academy and then Yale (Vic would have turned 22 in October 1938, and graduated from Pitt after securing part-time work in the steel mills). George Ketchum remained a rock-ribbed Republican, and his son was invited to several debutante parties in June of 1940 before taking a summer job on the TAT ranch in Wyoming. In a chapter titled “’the finest party I ever attended,’” Echoing the opening lines of “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens, Ketchum wrote: Ah, but those were grand times – maybe even the best of times if you were lucky enough to have been born at the right moment, in the right place, in the right circumstances. Europe was ravaged by barbarians, America’s underprivileged were jobless and hungry, much of the world was at war, but a Pittsburgh boy whose family had managed to survive the Depression more or less intact could drive through a mill town’s silent slums, en route to the country club to play tennis and swim, and scarcely notice the lines of gray figures patiently shuffling toward the soup kitchens, or the shabby houses where women and children sat on rotting doorsteps, staring at an alien world with eyes that knew no hope. I know, because I was one of the lucky few. Ketchum recalled nights dancing to big bands, most memorably to Benny Goodman’s swing music at Kennywood Park and debutante parties lasting well past midnight. One night around 3 a.m. he and four buddies in a two-toned Buick convertible pulled into a White Tower on North Craig Street, and Richard ordered two hamburgers costing five cents apiece and a milkshake. Ketchum speculated that the man who served them had learned to expect “just about anything - the drunk, the panhandler, the stick-up man, the pre-dawn visits by prep-school boys in dress suits” and whose chief concern “was whether the customers paid before leaving.” On December 7, 1941, Ketchum was in New York City staying at the apartment of his girlfriend Barbara “Bobs” bray and her sister Louise. He was working on a Yale senior thesis about the history of the new Yorker. He heard about Pearl Harbor on the radio while drinking a hot chocolate at a soda fountain. Ketchum wrote: “As in millions of homes tat night, we talked the hours away, for the first time contemplating a future in which the two of us might be separated for long periods, though we would not admit to the unspoken fear beneath the surface – the possibility that I might go off to war and not come back. It never occurred to us that what lay ahead would prove to be the great divide for our generation – not only a chasm that would swallow up some of our closest friends, but the demarcation line against which we would measure time and change ever afterward, as the Civil War and the First World War marked them off for our great grandfathers’ and fathers’ generations.” Using information gleaned in “The Borrowed Years,” I sent this email to Susan McGrath: “Having been born Feb. 24, 1942, which I have to repeat every time I pick up pills at CVS Pharmacy, I figure I was conceived in May 1941, the month “Citizen Kane” opened in theaters, Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was number 1, and the British sank the Bismarck after it had sunk the British cruiser HMS Hood, killing over 1,400 on board. Fifteen-minute radio daytime serials (dubbed soup operas because so many sponsors made products aimed at housewives) were the rage (‘The Goldbergs’, ‘Just Plain Bill,’ ‘The Road to Life,’ ‘Big Sister,’ Myrt and Marge,’ and many more). In the afternoon they gave way to kids’ shows such as “Little Orphan Annie’ and ‘Jack Armstrong – All-American Boy.’ At 7 o’clock came the top-rated comedy ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy,’ with white actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll posing a Black folks. In sports Joe DiMaggio began his 56-game hitting streak and Ted Williams’ batting average reached .400.” Susan replied: “I have a number of friends who remember our fathers ‘going to war.’ Gayle Jenkins lived over a bakery with her two sisters. We all talked of writing a book about how things were for us war babies. We were all born 9 months after our fathers left. My brothers, mother, and I moved into what became the Rising Sun Hotel in Telford PA. It was not an Inn when we either rented it or bought it. My aunt who had an enormous influence on our lives, lived with us and probably bought the place. I was about one year old but have very fond memories of that time. My aunt taught school in Philadelphia and had many interesting leftist friends stay with us. The women really took over our feminist household. My father was sent to Hawaii to make relief maps for the war effort.” I wrote back: “My dad, Vic, was a chemist and his work was deemed vital to the war effort. I think he regretted not serving. Hawaii would have been an ideal place (after Pearl Harbor, that is) to be stationed. A friend, John Haller, who is a couple years older than I, recalls being at an army base ceremony at war’s end when all the adults closed their eyes during a prayer. When his parents opened their eyes, they discovered to their horror that little Johnny must have discovered wads of gum on the bottoms of folding chairs and had about a half-dozen of them in his mouth.” At Banta Center Chris Prohl and I finished in the middle of the pack at duplicate bridge but had one memorable hand against the winning East-West pair, Wayne Carpenter and Dave Bilger. Carpenter, a former steelworker, is a ruby life master, having earned over 1,500 master points (in contrast I have about 70). After they had a top board against us for being the only pair to bid and make game, Chris and I bid 4 Spades, vulnerable. Because they weren’t vulnerable and had both been biding Diamonds, Dave bid 5 Diamonds, figuring they could go down 3 Doubled and still lose fewer points than if we made game. Chris, however, bid 5 Spades, Dave doubled, and I made all but one trick. I held the Ace of Diamonds, got trump out, and then set up four Club tricks after losing the Ace. Bigler recalled that I had interviewed him three years ago and mentioned him in a subsequent Steel Shavings. He was a student at IUN and got stuck there during the blizzard of 1967. He was working at the mill and had a student deferment because he was carrying 12 credit hours. His second semester an instructor had such a heavy accent, Dave couldn’t understand him. His adviser said he could drop the class and take it later. After he followed suit, he got drafted since he no longer was a full-time student. He when into the air force, something he doesn’t regret, and completed his degree decades later after a career with U.S. Steel. He became a special education teacher at Hobart, and from his sunny personality and self-confidence, I’m certain he was a good one. Here what I wrote about his bridge career: Bigler learned bridge at a young age from his parents and played related games in college, including euchre, bid whist, and a similar Serbin version, but he didn’t again take up the card game seriously until invited to join a Bridge O Rama in Portage. Henceforth, in retirement, he and Chuck Briggs formed a successful partnership. Dave enjoys teaching bridge to beginners and introducing them to area games. He’s been involved in Little league baseball for 30 years and on the Hobart school board since 2003. I gave Bigler a DVD of our interview, deposited a second one in the Calumet Regional Archives, and at his request burned one for his grandson.

Town and Gown

“I occasionally daydream about winning the lottery and using the money to shore up support for international students and contribute to other worthy causes crippled by the pandemic.” Hugh McGuigan

With VU professor Liz Wuerffel and Welcome Project assistant and filmmaker Carmen Vincent videotaping, I interviewed Hugh McGuigan at his Valparaiso home. For a quarter-century McGuigan directed Valparaiso University’s Global Education program, both for VU students seeking to study overseas and international students from all over the world, including Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Namibia, Bolivia, China, Mexico, and elsewhere. A large proportion enrolled in the VU’s Engineering program and, almost without exception, excelled academically.

Hugh grew up in Minnesota and after graduating from college and a stint in the army, he continued his education while working in international programs. He came to VU from Lake Land College in Mattoon, Illinois, after meeting future wife Sandy, who worked at the university. He built up the program to such an extent that when he semi-retired (he still helps out and occasionally teaches a course), it took two full-time administrators to replace him. McGuigan was particularly proud of international programs that involved the community, including an annual celebration of diverse cultures that involved entertainment and exotic cuisine to which local schools and civic groups were welcome. Hugh often spoke to clubs such as the Rotary and Kiwanis about global education opportunities and involved local eateries such as Don Quijote in providing food for special occasions. He was particularly passionate in arguing that we all are global citizens and that cultural exchange is invaluable for promoting international understanding and civility. Afterwards we enjoyed blueberry muffins that wife Sandy had made, and they told us about a Thanksgiving dinner where they hosted 18 international faculty and their families, including young children, giving rides to those without cars, picking up dinners at Strongbow’s Restaurant, and explaining the various traditional holiday foods, such as turkey (most guests favored the dark meat) and cranberries (one guest poured gravy on his and seemed to enjoy it – I like turkey gravy on anything). Afterwards, Liz and I commiserated that the anecdote wasn’t on tape, but we plan on interviewing Sandy at a later date.

Hugh McGuigan and I both attended Saturday Evening Club (me via zoom since Alissa and Beth were visiting for the weekend). Speaking from Florida was former IUN medical school director Pat Bankston on the need for humility, civility, and reason in our present polarized age of rampant tribalism. He began with the Charles Dickens quote from “A Tale of Two Cities,” that this was the best of times (i.e., rapid development of the anti—COVID vaccine) and the worst of times (some Republicans making vaccine and mask mandates a partisan issue). Bankston quoted a former SEC member who repeatedly claimed that we were going to hell in a hand basket. He used the phrase “exhausted majority” to describe those like himself tired of the vulgar and overheated political rhetoric. The phrase reminded me of Nixon’s use of “silent majority” a half—century ago, but when it came my time to speak I noted that despite efforts by Trump and his minions to demonize anyone who disagrees with them, more unites Americans than divides us. I concluded, “Count me among the exhausted majority.”

Gary Chamber meeting

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” James Baldwin I was asked to participate in a meeting at the Gary Chamber of Commerce at the Centier Bank Building, located at 504 Broadway in downtown Gary. The purpose was to suggest content for a talk local representative Ben Clement would be giving on “Black Excellence” at the annual conference of the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority (IHCDA). Jená Bellezza, COO of the Indiana Parenting Institute, had arranged for a Gary speaker to be on the agenda, and Chamber director Chuck Hughes had organized the meeting. As a Gary historian, I was to come up with names of people who might be highlighted. Prior to the meeting, I made a list of possibilities in the categories, of officeholders (A.B. Whitlock, Richard Hatcher), clergymen active in civil rights (Julius James, L.K. Jackson), athletes (Olympian champ Lee Calhoun, gridiron star George Taliaferro), entrepreneurs (Andrew Means, Vivian Carter), educators (Roosevelt teachers Ida B. King, Anne Thompson), social workers (John Stewart, Thelma Marshall), actors (William Marshall, Avery Brooks), labor leaders (George Kimbley, Curtis String), and singers (Michael Jackson, Deniece Williams). One of Gary’s first “skyscrapers, built in the 1920s, the bank building hadn’t changed much since I last paid a visit to meet former student Jacqueline Gipson for lunch when the VU Law School graduate was working for the Legal Aid Society, only I was told to park, not in the multi-story garage evidently no longer in use, but in a lot next to the building and north of the Housing Authority headquarters that once was the grand Hotel Gary and now housed seniors. In the mid-1970s, while researching Gary’s history at the public library on Fifth Avenue, I’d often have lunch across the street at the YMCA cafeteria in a building now belonging to the Boys and Girls Club. Oldtimers would eat at a large round table; I’d join them and ask them about the Prohibition Era, when Capone mobsters cooled their heels at the Hotel Gary and the town was wide open when it came to speakeasies and brothels. A dentist named E.C. Doering had his office at what was then the Gary National Bank Building and once cleaned my teeth there. I arrived early, and Chuck Hughes explained photos lining the walls, including one of a champion Biddy Basketball team, circa 1960, containing both Hughes and Region native Gregg Popovich (the two are still close friends) and a collage of a reunion Hughes organized honoring the two all-Black teams that vied for the 1955 IHSAA championship, Indianapolis Crispus Attucks and Gary Roosevelt. Among the honorees were former foes Oscar Robertson and Dick Barnett, who both went on the star in the NBA. A group shot Hughes was particularly proud of brought together boxing legends Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Muhammad Ali. Once the meeting began, it became obvious, given the 20 minutes allotted for the talk, there’d only be time to highlight a few people. I suggested the theme “On Their Shoulders” and that Ben Clement might mention how African Americans during the Great Migration came to Gary to work in the mills and, despite facing school segregation, many of their children and grandchildren went on to productive lives, including Vee-Jay Records cofounder Vivian Carter, the daughter of steelworkers and restauranteurs, whose success with hitmakers such as the Spaniels and Jimmy Reed inspired the Jacksons and other local performers. I also brought up Thelma Marshall, a teacher and social workers who ran the Children’s Home for orphans and whose son William, a beneficiary of the Roosevelt School auditorium curriculum, became a Shakespearean actor. Finally, I brought up the Taliaferro brothers, Claude and George, products of Gary Roosevelt, one a longtime local teacher and coach, the other a football legend at IU and the NFL, who in retirement moved back to Bloomington and was active both in campus and civic affairs. Jená recorded the meeting for Ben’s benefit, and I told him he was welcome to run his remarks by me if he so desired. Today I visited Jonathan Briggs’ freshman seminar to distribute Steel Shavings magazines (volume 49) that I will be discussing next week when I speak to the class about the history of IUN. I told students that colleague Ron Cohen and I founded the magazine almost 50 years ago in order to publish student’s family history articles, that most of our students came from steelworker families who’d emigrated to the Calumet Region within the past two generations, mostly from Europe, Mexican, and the American South. Both Ron and I believed in the validity of regional history “from the bottom up,” as the phrase went, that is, emphasizing marginalized groups such as women, Latinos, African Americans, and union workers under-represented in traditional textbooks. I noted that while the content of the magazine has fluctuated over the years, volume 49, for example, being basically my journal for 2019, it still contains student work and is committed to social history from the bottom up, in short capturing “Life in the Calumet Region” as it has changed over time.

"Legendary Lloyd" McClendon

“It was an almost out-of-body experience as a youngster to be able to do that, and now I’ve learned to appreciate it more as an adult.” Lloyd McClendon

Fifty years ago, my first summer in Gary, Lloyd McClendon led a team from the “Steel City” to the Little League finals in Williamsport, PA, against a squad of suspiciously mature players from Taiwan. Leading up to the championship game, the 12-year-old had hit two home runs against teams both from Kentucky and Madrid, Spain. In an interview the Taiwan manager claimed that his pitcher, Chin-mu Hsu would pitch to McClendon because it would be dishonorable to walk him intentionally. In the first inning Hsu walked the Basemore brothers, Ralph and Vincent; then on the first pitch McClendon hit his fifth straight round tripper. His next four at bats in what proved to be the longest game in Little League history at 9 innings, he was issued intentional walks. Hsu, who was taller than the five-foot four McClendon with a high leg kick that resembled Juan Marichal, went on to strike out 22 batters as his team notched the score in the sixth and won it going away, 12-3, in the ninth.

McClendon went on to play for Gary Roosevelt, whose coach, Benny Dorsey, named him team captain his freshman year. After an all-state career, he obtained a scholarship to Valparaiso University, where he was a league MVP. He ultimately enjoyed an eight-year career as a major league player, his most productive season being in 1989 with the Chicago Cubs, with whom he hit 12 home runs; in the NL championship against San Francisco, he went 2 for 3 as a pinch hitter. McClendon then had a long career as a coach and manager. In 2013, after Seattle named him their skipper for the upcoming season, Seattle Times reporter Geoff Baker looked back on the 1971 exploits of “Legendary Lloyd,” interviewing teammate Carl Weatherspoon, who told him that there were more than a half-dozen Little League organizations in Gary back then, including their Anderson Field league, and that steelworkers such as his and Lloyd’s dad encouraged kids to get into baseball and let them stay outside after dinner because neighborhoods were safer then. “We all played in the streets until dark,” Weatherspoon recalled. Sunday’s NWI Times front page article by David P. Funk emphasized that Gary’s 1971 squad was the first all-black team to play in the championship. McClendon told him, “You’re 12 years old. You don’t think about economics or racial factors, what it does for a city on so many fronts. You just strap it on and go out and have fun.” Prior to the game, TV announcer Tim McKay and Yankee great Micky Mantle interviewed him. McClendon said, “That’s one of my most cherished memories of everything that happened there. I was terrified. I tried to run past them. I was like, ‘My God, that’s Mickey Mantle.’” Third baseman Roy Lawson, whose father Jesse was the head coach, recalled that few balls were hit to him because opponents couldn’t catch up to Lloyd’s fastballs. After Lloyd weakened in the ninth and left the game, his father and Coach Lawson told him how proud they were of him. McClendon remembered: “What they did for me in that moment defined who I was to become, not only as a baseball player but as a human being and a man of character.”

Second baseman Marcus Hubbard, who batted clean-up behind McClendon, saw himself as a second lead-off batter because Lloyd’s drives generally cleared the bases ahead of him. One thing that impressed Hubbard is how boisterously all-white teams they’d defeated from Maine and Kentucky and their fans cheered for them. When the team returned to Gary, the city arranged a parade in their honor, and the celebrities rode on top of a firetruck down Broadway and were greeted by Mayor Hatcher and Governor Edgar Whitcomb. Said Hubbard, “We didn’t realize until on our way back how proud the city was.”

Explosions

“In an instant [on July 4, 1921], the day of fun became the most deadly and gruesome day in the Standard Oil refinery’s history.” John Hmurovic

Thirteen American servicemen, including Marine sergeant Nicole Gee, died as a result of an ISIS terrorist attack near an entrance to the Kabul airport. The explosion also killed over a hundred Afghans attempting to flee Taliban rule. President Joe Biden and other dignitaries honored the brave victims as their coffins arrived back in America. Most Republicans are feigning outrage at the “debacle” while remaining mostly silent on Trump’s policies that led directly to pulling the plug on a 20-year doomed effort.

On the front page of the NWI Times was a lengthy article by Joseph S. Pete about a 1921 explosion at a Whiting, Indiana, oil refinery that killed eight people and injured 44. Using the writings and an interview with historian and Whiting-Robertsdale Historical Society mainstay John Hmurovic, who for many years has volunteered his time at IUN’s Calumet Regional Archives, the article noted that a 1955 refinery explosion is more famous and caused more property damage, wiping out the entire Stiglitz Park neighborhood, but the hundred-year-old blast took more lives. Shortly after 8:15 in the morning, as the midnight shift ended and the day shift reported for duty, an overheated battery exploded and set off a chain reaction that turned the lakefront plant into an inferno. Most of the incinerated victims were immigrants from Slovakia, Sweden, Germany, and England. One victim was firefighter Joseph Paylo, a World War I veteran, who helped get survivors to safety but inhaled so much super-heated fumes that it burned his lungs. Hnurovic noted: It was a sad scene. The refinery didn’t allow people inside. There was no social media, no telephones, no way of communication. Bodies were being carried out, and no one knew who it was or what was going on. Women were begging workers to tell them if they saw their husbands because they didn’t know if they were still alive. They could only identify the dead from watches, jewelry or clothing. The bodies were unrecognizable. A Fourth of July parade had been scheduled to begin about 45 minutes after the blast occurred. After a delay of several hours, it went ahead, followed, incredibly, by a fireworks celebration. Hmurovic offered this explanation, “Back then, people experienced hardship in a different way. People were used to having to deal with hard conditions and just rolled with the punches.” The final indignity to those foreign-born workers who had hoped, as Hmurovic put it, “to make a new life for themselves,” was that even though the tragedy was determined to have been caused by a leak, pro-business inspectors ruled that it was “an act of God” rather than the result of company negligence, a ruling, Joseph Pete wrote, that “minimized Standard Oil’s legal liability.”

Several spectacular explosions occurred at the Aetna Powder Company, built in the early 1880s in a then remote location that later became part of Gary. The nitroglycerine was first used primarily to remove famers’ tree stumps and shortly before its closure provided explosives for use in World War I. An 1888 blast killed three workers and could be heard 120 miles away in Fort Wayne. Another in 1912 killed eight people; two years later an explosion rattled windows in downtown Gary. John Hmurovic’s four-hour documentary on the “City of the Century,” based in part on my book, mentioned this miniature company town. By 1921, with the rapid expansion of the city’s population the dangerous facility’s days were numbered.

A.B. Whitlock

“Arthur Brown Whitlock became Gary’s first Black city council member who pioneered civil rights inside the city.”Korry Shepard

I was delighted to find Gary Historical Collective director Korry Shepard’s column on A.B. Whitlock in the NWI Times. Whitlock played a critical role in protesting segregationist policies that the school board adopted. Shepard notes that Whitlock was born in 1886 in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of Lucila Dickerson and white Methodist minister, harness maker, and Civil War veteran William Henry Whitlock. A.B. Whitlock and wife Almyra moved to Alabama, to attend Tuskegee Institute and then to Mississippi for further schooling at Rust University before joining his father in Gary in 1917, part of the Great Migration of southern Blacks to northern industrial cities. Whitlock found work as a motor inspector and before long took an interest in politics as a means of furthering Black advancement. Joining the Republican party, Whitlock was elected to the city council in November 1921, after his Democratic opponent withdrew due to a scandal. During the 1920s he opened a grocery at 2200 Broadway, six years later founded the Gary American, and also invested money in beachfront property near Pine Station. At a time when Blacks were forbidden to use Miller beaches, Pine Beach, which had bathhouses, fishing facilities, and concession stands, was the only place where African Americans had access to lake Michigan.

  In the Fall of 1927 approximately half the white students at Emerson boycotted classes after 18 Black students seeking college preparatory classes were transferred there from Virginia Street School. Over the objection of School Superintendent William A. Wirt, who, according to Korry Shepard, believed the Ku Klux Klan was behind the strike, the school board on Mayor Floyd Williams’ recommendation voted to oust the transfer students. At Wirt’s urging, the board agreed to construct a K-12 facility equal in quality to Emerson that eventually became Gary Roosevelt. During a city council meeting Whitlock denounced the surrender to “mob rule,” claimed that “poor white trash” had fomented the trouble, and argued that the segregationist policy was a signal from the city’s white power structure that members of his race were unwelcome. As I wrote in “Gary’s First Hundred Years”: “African Americans were forced to make the best of a bad situation. They took pride in Roosevelt School, but as NAACP leader Joseph Pitts noted, it took 40 years to complete all the promised facilities. Some Blacks continued to attend Froebel, but they were put in separate classrooms, could not join the band or most clubs, and could only use the swimming pool on the day before it was cleaned. They could participate in sports but not shower with white athletes. These practices, some felt, were designed to encourage Blacks to transfer voluntarily to Roosevelt.”

Shepard mentioned that in 1929 Whitlock lost his council seat to William J. Hardaway after political opponents spread rumors that he was involved in bootlegging during an era of Prohibition. He lived a productive life, editing the Gary American for 20 years, speaking out against police brutality and segregation, before turning the reins over to his son and daughter-in-law. He died in in 1967, ten months before another civil rights pioneer, Richard Gordon Hatcher, was elected mayor.

Old Days

“The movie wasn’t so hot It didn’t have much of a plot We fell asleep, our goose is cooked Our reputation is shot” “Wake Up Little Susie,” Everly Brothers Don Everly passed away at age 84, part of a duo that profoundly affected pop music. Born into a coal mining family, Don and Phil sang with their parents before recording a string of teen melodramas during the 1950s, such as “Wake Up Little Susie,” “Bird Dog” and “Cathy’s Clown” that were about falling asleep as a drive-in, worrying about a rival stealing your girl or having such a crush that you’d do anything that pleased her. Rumor was, the Everly Brothers grew to despise one another, but they made beautiful harmony and influenced countless successors, including Paul McCartney and John Lennon and Seals and Crofts. My favorite live band at Bucknell fraternity parties covered Everly Brothers songs, sometimes substituting dirty words, such as “Stick it in me, baby” for “Stick with me baby.” Toni and I saw Don and Phil live opening for the Beach Boys about 30 years ago, and they still had it. Warren Ellis, who wrote an article that I published in my 1920s Steel Shavings (volume 8, 1982) commented on a Facebook post about the magazine. I responded: “I remember you as an A+ student and the article, “Asleep at the Throttle,’ about Hungarian-born railroad worker Stepen and an accident he averted while employed at Inland Steel Co. as a locomotive fireman.” He came to America from Canada in 1922 at age 27 after his entire family had perished during World War I. An employment agency found him a job in Indiana Harbor. Initially he shared a room at the Inland Hotel but moved after a roommate stole his razor and clothes before vanishing. Before becoming an engineer, initially Stepen worked 72 hours a week as a locomotive fireman tending the engine, shoveling coal, feeding water to the engine, and making sure the engine didn’t get overheated. Ellis described an incident that occurred during the mid-1920s while Stepen was on the “graveyard” shift: The engineer had a very peculiar habit of taking little naps while driving the train. Stepen not only took care of his fireman’s duties but also kept a close eye on the signal lights. If any change occurred, he would have to wake up the engineer. On this one run they were hauling limestone, which became rather smelly and dusty after a while; there were times when you could not even see in front of you. Furthermore, the train had to enter a tunnel at a curve in the tracks at an angle because the tracks were on a hill. A very, very tricky run, as Stepen put it. Even so, the engineer fell asleep. One night, Stepen looked up, almost a second too late, and noticed the lights were signaling the train to stop. He had to put on the brakes himself because there was no time to wake up the engineer. The train jerked quickly to a standstill with a loud bang. The engineer awoke just as the train started to lean on one side. One of the cars was half hanging off the track and had been pushed into the wall of the tunnel, creating a rather large hole. The limestone had to be reloaded onto another car. For the next few hours while repairs were being made, not much limestone was hauled through the tunnel. Stepen very rarely had to watch the signal lights when working again with this engineer. He said that for some reason the man broke the habit of taking naps at the throttle. I recall my surprise when I first started teaching and a student probably in her early 50s stated that she had listened to a radio broadcast of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight over the Atlantic Ocean. No wonder to current students, events of the 1960s and 1970s seem like ancient history. Probably most former students who remember me are of retirement age. One of them, Vickie Voller, I play duplicate bridge with. The other day, I repeated something I recall that IUN Psychology professor Herman Feldman told me a half-century ago: if you’re early to appointments, you’re compulsive, always right on time you’re obsessive, and if habitually late, passive-aggressive.

Tributes

“Jean Shepherd gets compared to Mark Twain a lot.  He was an American icon and a philosopher in many ways who realized the best medicine is humor.” Nick Mantis”

 

Hammond native Nick Mantis donated items to the Hammond library’s Local History room in tribute to Jean Shepherd, including a plaque the Hoosier bard received in 1981 from the city of Hammond and the academic gown Shep wore when awarded an honorary IU degree in 1995 from Indiana University Northwest. Mantis repeated this famous quote by Shepherd to NWI Times correspondent Joseph S. Pete: “Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you’re not even a memory?  Think about it, friends.  It’s not just a possibility.  It is a certainty.”  Then Mantis added, “In his mind, he didn’t want to be forgotten . . . in the city where he came from. He’s going to be remembered in Hammond.”

 

I used to make fun of Readers Digest volumes containing multiple condensed books. I recall my Bucknell professor, William Harbaugh, admitting that his truncated biography of Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t bad but that he hoped it would encourage readers to peruse the original.  At the Banta Center library I found a volume of “World’s Greatest Biographies” that contained “select editions” by A. Scott Berg on Charles Lindbergh, Stefan Zweig on Marie Antoinette, and “The Autobiography of Mark Twain,” edited by Charles Neider.  I’m glad I found it because Twain’s memoirs are humorous and incisive and I’d never read the original. Twain’s paternal ancestors allegedly included a pirate and a Member of Parliament who helped sentence Charles I to death. His father hired slaves from neighboring farmers ($25 a year for a female house servant, $75 yearly for an able-bodied man).  His mother championed abused people and animals; at one time, Twain claimed, “We had 19 cats.” Twain was a practical jokester and put garter snakes in his Aunt Patsy’s work basket: “When she took the basket in her lap and they began to climb out of it, it disordered her mind; she never could seem to get used to them.”

 

Time magazine published a list claiming to be the hundred best Young Adult books of all-time in the order in which they were published.  The first seven – “Little Women,” “Anne of Green Gables,” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “Catcher in the Rye,” “Lord of the Flies,” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” - were classics enjoyed by readers of all ages. Almost all of the others, save for “The House on Mango Street” and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” so far as I could tell (only a handful were familiar to me) seemed to be specifically aimed at young readers, often minority, disabled, and queer groups. Shockingly absent were “The Hobbit” and any Harry Potter books.

 

 Toni and I hosted our monthly bridge group after enjoying an excellent experience at Abbiocco Italian restaurant in Chesterton. We had planned to meet there at 2 but received a call Saturday morning that, due to insufficient staff (a common phenomenon at eateries), they weren’t opening until 3.  I called the other couples and got their OK.  None had been there before, and both the entrees and service were great.  I had a wedge salad with skirt steak added on (plus several pieces of homemade bread) and Toni the lobster tortelloni with lemon cream, roasted tomatoes, and Stracciatella.  In fact, Chuck and Marcy Tomes decided we’d go there again next month at 3 even if we could probably get in earlier. For the second time in three months Toni emerged the winner.

 

Paul Studebaker died, fellow Saturday Evening Club member Jim Wise informed me.  Last year Paul and his son Ben gave an inspiring presentation on the consequences of global warming.  Before they began, Paul said they would not deal with those who deny this is a man-made problem because the facts are incontrovertible.  Here’s what Jim Wise wrote his dear friend: 

    I am saddened to tell everyone that Paul Studebaker passed away Saturday
evening at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. As I was reading the
lyrics of the Doc Watson song "Your Long Journey," Betty Ann texted Michele
to tell her that Paul had died.  Paul and I were friends since 1978 (maybe
1979) when he was recruited from IU Champaign - Urbana for IG Technologies
by Mel Bohlmann. I was on the recruiting trip and thought it was a great
idea. Later in the 1980's, we were colleagues energized by the rapid developments we were experiencing in our work with magnets. We had become good friends quickly outside of work as we were solo acts while
Michele did her internship in Indianapolis. He surprised me in the kitchen
one night dropping a large peanut butter jar intentionally. I had not yet
noticed that the jars were plastic. He was a great fishing buddy - I was
never bitten by a mosquito when Paul was in the boat. One of my great
memories is our foursome white water rafting on the Arkansas River. It was
July 3 and 46 degrees Fahrenheit. We were in front of the raft. No two guys from the Midwest were ever colder.  I wrote cowboy poetry for him to celebrate an important birthday. There was no one better to share work or discuss ideas - or, occasionally to remind you that there might be a more sensible way to do things. I will miss him greatly. 

Here are the lyrics to “Your Long Journey” by Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson (1923-2012), mentioned by Jim Wise.  Blind since a young age, Watson performed folk, country, blues, and gospel music:

God's given us years of happiness here
Now we must part
And as the angels come and call for you
The pangs of grief tug at my heart

Oh my darling my darling
My heart breaks as you take
Your lone journey

Oh the days will be empty the nights so long
Without you my love
And as God calls for you I'm left alone
But we will meet in heaven above

Fond memories I'll keep of the happy days
That on earth we trod
And when I come we will walk hand in hand
As one in heaven in the family of God

 

I just received a booklet titled “A Celebration of IU Northwest Faculty Research and Creative Activity, 2019-2020,” published as part of the IU Bicentennial.  The 15 faculty honored spoke at a program that I attended which took place right before the campus shut down due to the pandemic. Especially stimulating were the 7-minute talks by poet William Allegrezza, theater actor, director, and producer Mark Baer, and Criminal Justice professor Monica Solinas-Saunders, who focuses, she wrote, “on issues associated with incarceration and re-entry.  I am also interested in interpersonal violence and the consequences of abuse among youth and young adults.” In a photo of Steve McShane speaking at a ceremony unveiling a historic marker for Tamarack Hall I am in the audience.  Paul Kern and my history of IUN, “Educating the Calumet Region,” is cited in a section highlighting the role of research at IUN.

 

In the Forum section of the Sunday NWI Times was a column by Korry Shepard, founder of the Gary Historical Collective, titled “A redlining tragedy: Gary’s vacant lots a legacy of 80 years of elite segregation.” The nefarious practice by banks and government agencies graded areas where blacks lived to be at risk of decline, making it practically impossible for African American to obtain home loans or have mortgages insured. Another insidious practice by mortgage lenders leading to the proliferation of abandoned homes is a “bank walkway” or “stalled foreclosure,” where a decision is made not to foreclose on a defaulted mortgage when the property is deemed to have little value – “leaving the structure,” wrote Shepard, “to the elements.”  Shepard concludes:

    Redlining, so-called “white flight,” bank walking, panic peddling, arson, and block busting all took a toll on the City of Gary and elsewhere in the nation.  Sadly, financial institutions are just as much at fault for Gary’s demise as the politicians and criminals who make the papers every day. Apparently, the Region [alite] spent the better part of 50 years dismantling Gary, moving its pieces to other towns, then turning around to wag their fingers when they finished.

Merrillville is presently celebrating its Golden anniversary as an incorporated town with nary a mention of the racist motives or maneuvers that allowed such a thing to happen. 

Resistance

    “Marie Equi was the most interesting woman that ever lived in this state, certainly the most fascinating, colorful, and flamboyant,” Oregon contemporary of Marie Equi

Labeled as “a stormy petrel of the Pacific Northwest” and “a whiskey-loving firebrand,” Dr. Marie Diana Equi (1872-1952) was clubbed by police as she went to the aid of a pregnant cannery worker on strike, physically assaulted by a mob when protesting America’s push into World War I, and imprisoned in San Quentin two years after the Armistice for supposedly having violated the 1918 Sedition Act. The daughter of Italian and Irish immigrants who grew up in the mill town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Marie dropped out of school at a young age to work in a textile factory. She eventually received schooling in Italy and was able to secure a medical license and open a practice in Portland, Oregon.  She mainly ministered to the poor but also performed abortions for rich women to support her work, which included dispensing birth control information at a time when that was illegal. A lifelong lesbian, she and lover Harriet Frances Speckart raised a daughter Mary. An avowed socialist, suffragette, and free thinker, Marie engaged in an affair with Margaret Sanger and lived for ten years with radical labor activist and feminist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the so-called “Rebel Girl” of Joe Hill’s Wobbly anthem.  In 2019 Marie Equi’s contributions were recognized at the San Francisco Rainbow Honor Walk.  Some 113 years before, Marie was among the medical corps volunteers who treated victims of the Golden City’s devastating earthquake.

I first learned about the remarkable Marie Equi from a book Cory Hagelberg lent me, “Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition” by Jeff Biggers, the author of several volumes about the Appalachian labor wars. A legacy as old as the nation’s birth, resistance has taken many forms: fights against British oppression, slavery, Indian removal, the exploitation of workers; and on behalf of free speech, environmentalism, and civil rights for women, minority groups, and the poor. Author Biggers (below) described himself as “the grandson of a black lung-afflicted coal miner in southern Illinois who lost his family’s ancestral homestead and farm to strip-mining.” In 1984, at age 21 Biggers was a cellmate of Reverend William Sloane Coffin after both were arrested in Washington, DC, for protesting apartheid in South Africa at that government’s embassy. “Resistance” contains colorful quotes by activists Mary “Mother” Jones (“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”) and Fannie Lou Hamer (“If I fall, I will fall five-feet-four forward in the fight for freedom”), as well as this banner seen during the January 2017 Women’s March: “A Woman’s Place Is in the Resistance.”  A 2015 biography by Michael Helquist is subtitled “Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions.”

Corey Hagelberg (below) came to know Jeff Biggers when the author was an artist in residence at Corey’s duneland cottage in Miller. During that time he worked on the script for a dramatic production, “Ecopolis Southshore,” about the potential to transform Gary into a veritable urban utopia through the development of community gardens. It was performed at the Community Progressive Church, located in the shadow of the abandoned Gary Emerson School, whose pastor, Curtis Whittaker, was involving the community in efforts to reclaim the land for sustainable use. Biggers has recently written a play with similar themes that will be performed at Indiana University Northwest and other locations in connection with an ambitious project in the works known as the Midtown Resilience Tour.  “Ecopolis Southshore” contained these lines, uttered in the church production by Walter Jones and Sam Love:

    Walter: The Region gave us so much, has so much to offer. It reminds us that hope dies last, that hope resists.  Tough, resilient, steely.  You wind up being people who make things work, because that’s all you’ve got.

    Sam: Sure, we’re polluted, poisoned, and there’s nowhere to run. But this is my home. We want to do the immediate planting of tiny acorns, rather than blathering beneath a decaying tree about all the good things that could be done.  Just do it.

Town and Gown

    “With their exotic culture, strange ways of behaving, and general arrogance, students did not make many friends with townspeople.” Matthew Harris, “The Divide: Town versus Gown”

During the Middle Ages students in English towns such as Oxford often wore gowns for comfort and warmth in poorly heated buildings, clothing that set them apart from local residents. Disturbances at local pubs sometimes escalated into full-scale riots, as students had a tendency to look down on “townies,” who in turn resented the snobbish interlopers.  This “divide” between town and gown continued into modern times although experts have found evidence that divisions are fading as higher education has become available to larger percentages of the populace.

When I attended Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA, in the 1960s, some students referred to local residents as townies and retained a condescending attitude toward them. Though the fraternity I joined and the house where I boarded junior year were off campus, I had little contact with neighborhood residents.  The only time I visited a local bar was to buy a six-pack to carry out. Sundays at the Bucknell Women’s cafeteria where I worked, numerous townspeople would arrive in their Sunday best for the dinner served at midday.  I certainly didn’t look down on them, I just didn’t think much about them.

Meeting with Valparaiso University professors Liz Wuerffl and Allison Schuette at Hunter’s brewery in Chesterton, I offered to interview seniors living at the Pines retirement village as part of their Welcome Project. Since several emeritus VU professors reside there, as well as other longtime Valpo residents, I suggested that the project be called Town and Gown. I added that the oral histories might also pertain to the Flight Paths initiative that I have been a part of for the past couple years and that I could publish excerpts in a forthcoming Steel Shavings issue. In the Editor’s Note to my volume on “Life in Northwest Indiana during the Plague Year, 2020,” I wrote that the year began with high hopes for interviewing Valpo residents that wer e soon dashed by the pandemic.  Since then, I have been itching to get back to doing oral histories.  Liz and Allison liked the idea, so I plan to scout out a room at the Pines where we could videotape the interviews. I noted that during the 1970s I was oral history interviewer for Sandy Appleby’s Tri-Cities Mental Health Center grant funded project on active seniors and that, with so many Baby Boomers reaching retirement age, gerontology has become a hot topic, and there could well be grant possibilities for funding. I often refer to my Life Review interview with Texas Slim, which I had to do a second time due to a videotape breakdown. It was nowhere as rich as the first time because he knew I already had heard the stories. Object lesson: never talk in detail beforehand to interviewees.

It was great seeing Liz and Allison after many long months.  I ordered a pale ale evidently brewed on site by Hunter’s, advertised as made with flaked oats, cascade, amarillo, and mosaic hops, and named “Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps,”  which Allison found appropriate, given the uncertainty of the coming months, given the Delta variant. We sat at a table outside until it started raining.  Inside, we thought the rain had died down but when we make a break to our cars, it came down full force.  As I emailed Liz and Allison afterwards, I was really hoofing it and hadn’t moved that quickly in months, if not years. They replied that I should give them a couple weeks to get ready for Fall semester but then we could set up shop at the Pines, perhaps in the residents’ apartments if no common room was available.

Among those who replied to my Facebook post about “Town and Gown” was Sandy Appleby, who offered to help with the project, and Anne Balay, whose books about gay and lesbian steelworkes and transgender long haul truckers are oral history classics.  Former IUN professor Don Coffin wrote:     

    Interestingly, when I was a student at DePauw, I had a fair amount of contact with a couple of locals—Terry and Eddie, who ran Romilda Printing. And did the typesetting for the student-run newspaper.(This was, obviously, before offset printing took over.). Those of us who worked on the paper knew how crucial they were to our work, and they got a kick out of us. Had the aspiring journalists pursued other interests, things might have been much less interesting.

I replied to Coffin: “Stereotypes about townies tend to break down if one gets to know the community where the college is located.”

Belt magazine editor Sandi Wisenberg belatedly mailed my review copy of Samuel Love’s “The Gary Anthology,” which contained these nice words in the editor’s introduction by my former student: “Since 1975, the Steel Shavings oral history series, the lifework of Indiana University Northwest emeritus professor of history “Jimbo” Lane, has chronicled the everyday life of Gary and Calumet Region residents.” Belt’s latest online memoir is “My Summer of Steel” by Bob Zeni. In 1972, before his son started a summer job at his old man’s plant, Bruno Zeni (below) told him, “Remember two things, lift with your legs and steel don’t bleed.” After day one, still in his work clothes, Bob (left, in 1971) fell asleep on the front stoop; after day 2 he conked out at the kitchen table, most of his beer still undrunk. Referring to the “debilitating grind of manual labor,” Zeni had a new appreciation for his father, “caught in its maelstrom for three decades . . . so our family would have a better life.”

Haven of Bliss

 “For 14 straight years, our vacations were spent in southern Michigan on the shores of colorful Clear Lake.  Clear Lake – it was many things, but one thing it wasn’t was clear.”  Jean Shepherd

In the short story “Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss,” found in “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters” and made into a 1988 TV comedy film, Shepherd notes, “It was never very clear why we went there, but we did. Such are the vacations of the humble.” Haven of Bliss was the name of the green cabin the old man reserved in Marcellus, Michigan, for the two weeks.  Others bore the names Dew Drop Inn, Rest-a Spell, Bide-a Wee, Neva-Care, and Sun-N-Fun.  Ollie had upgraded the grounds, he informed the old man on the phone when he confirmed the reservation, by putting two more holes in the outhouse.

In anticipation of the trip the old man took the “goat-vomit green” Oldsmobile to Paswinski’s Garage for a “cabalistic ritual” – a tune-up.  Setting the alarm for 4:30 a.m. in hopes of beating the Sunday traffic, the old man overslept and then began the morning as he “had begun every day since the age of four with a Lucky [Strike] and a cup of black coffee.” Then it was off to the bathroom from which he emerged “with a wad of toilet paper plastered to a nasty gash on his chin.” Hardly moving once they reached the highway, the old man cursed out the “lousy Chicago drivers” and unleashed a “vast catalog of invective learned in the field, so to speak, the back of the stockyards on the South Side of Chicago.” Once traffic thinned out in Michigan “the Olds had a habit of thrumming, resonant vibration at about 50 that jiggled the bones, loosened the molars, rattled the eyeballs, and made all talk totally impossible.” Finally, after a flat tire and other misadventures, the family reached their destination only to find the cabin – their Haven of Bliss – without electricity. The saga concludes:

    The rain roared steadily on the roof – as it would for the next two weeks – and drummed metronomically onto the bare wooden floor beside my bed. . . . My kid brother tossed and whimpered softly from beneath his pillow; and across the room, my father’s low, muttering snores thrummed quietly in the night. We were on vacation.

When I was a kid, it seemed inevitably to rain whenever our family went camping in the Poconos.  Midge referred to the phenomenon sarcastically as “Lane weather.” Perhaps because of those experiences, I’ve never been a fan of “roughing it” in the outdoors.  Fortunately, when Phil and Dave attended Alternative Public School up to seventh and eighth grades, on the agenda, thanks to teacher Del Meyers, were annual fall and spring three-day camping trip, relieving me of any guilt over denying my sons that experience. 

In her eighties Midge, along with my 92-year-old stepfather Howie, joined us for a week in Saugatuck, one the main highlights being a Dunes buggy ride; the following week, we rented a cabin in southern Michigan with Phil’s family near a small lake resembling the locale described by Shepherd [a small town named Marcellus actually exists near a body of water called Fish Lake]. I recall evening campfires, days spent swimming and boating, and not being cursed by “Lane weather.” We looked into repeating the adventure a couple years later only to discover that the area had been gentrified and the rentals were no longer available.

For the 85-year-old protagonist of Kathleen Rooney’s “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk” (2017), recommended to me by Gaard Logan, New York City remained her “haven of bliss” in the mid-1980s despite signs of decay and social unrest.  On New Year’s Eve Lillian walks its streets to dine at Delmonico’s and attend a party in Chelsea. Born near the end of the 19th century (although she lies about her age), she was a nonconformist who preferred a career in advertising at Macy’s to getting married and raising a family in the suburbs. Though she did eventually wed and bear a son, Lillian only lasted two months in the suburbs. growing up, her role model was an Aunt Sadie, a nurse at St. Vincent Hospital (poet Edna St. Vincent Millay got her middle name because doctors at St. Vincent saved his life shortly before  Edna was born), taught Lillian to have a social conscious, and died at age 50 during the wartime flu epidemic. Once the highest paid woman in her field, a poet, and a published author, Lillian was forced to retire from Macy’s when pregnant and in her old age has been largely forgotten but still vibrant.  When she meets a woman from Garrettsville, Ohio, she notes that it was the hometown of poet Hart Crane, who committed suicide by diving from an ocean liner.  

County Fair

 “We were so close now that the sounds of the fair began to drift over the roar of motors: calliopes bleating, whistles, merry-go-round music, bells ringing, barkers.” Jean Shepherd

As the Porter County Fair prepares to open, I decided to reread Region bard Jean Shepherd’s account of “the Indiana county fairs I have known” in “Wandy Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories.”  Setting the stage, he described the scene the previous evening in Hammond as he and his friends debated whether the monster ride, called the Rocket Whip, addled one’s brains or stunted one’s growth: “The rain drizzled down steadily, carrying with it its full load of blast furnace dust and other by-products of the steel mills and oil refineries that ringed the town like iron dinosaurs.” His “Old Man” loved the dirt track races (“as much a part of Indiana county fairs as applesauce, pumpkins, and pig judging”), while his kid brother favored the Ferris Wheel and his long-suffering mother the quilt exhibit. After surviving a near-gridlocked traffic jam, the family observed a 2-ton prize-winning pumpkin that bore a resemblance to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a pig named “Big Horace” who had tiny red eyes and had eaten half his blue ribbon. A White Sox fan, the “Old Man” was awestruck by a quilt bearing the likeness of shortstop Luke Appling, “the foul ball king.”  

Approaching the thrill ride area, they passed “guys with leather jackets and great mops of carefully groomed, greasy hair ranging through the crowd, looking for fights and girls.” The “Old Man” insisted on taking the boys on the Rocket Whip, “a classic of its kind.”  Shepherd elaborated:

    It consisted of two bullet-shaped cars, one yellow, one red, attached to the ends of rotating arms.  It revolved simultaneously clockwise and up and down. At the same time, the individual cars rotated in their own orbits.  

Trapped in their wire mesh cage, the “Old Man” lost all his change and a prized fountain pen given to him by the bowling team.  Once the operator turned the power on full, his hat flew off and kid brother Randy puked all over him. Passing through the turnstile afterwards with “a bent cigarette hanging from his lips,” he told the operator it was great. Shepherd wrote: “He always judged a ride by how sick it made him. The nausea quotient of the Rocket Whip was about as high as they come.”

My initial Indiana fair experience came as a result of manning the Indiana University Northwest booth at the Lake County fair for several hours in a sweltering exhibition hall lacking air conditioning.  Leaving after dark, I had trouble locating our car since I’d had to park on a winding road rather than in a lot. 

Once I heard that the Porter County fair’s exhibition hall had air conditioning, I volunteered for it for about ten years during the time Phil and Dave were growing up.  It was a good way to socialize with and sometimes meet for the first time professors and staff working the same shift as I. Various displays were giving away pens, bottle openers, fans, and other stuff, and I could sample free Culligan water whenever I got thirsty.  The only drawback was that a Republican booth was almost always located straight across from us.  The kids’ favorite attraction was the pig races; you could bet on a pig and get a small prize if your entry won. A Religious Studies adjunct operated a food truck with his family and would always give me a generous assortment of fried vegetables. Though no longer tempted to patronize the fair, which was cancelled last year due to Covid, I look back fondly at the memories, especially of those pig races.

Jill Semko Underly shared her many memories of the Lake County Fair. “As a 10 year 4H member, I practically lived there. Jr. leaders ran a food stand too. Hopefully those exhibition halls are now air conditioned. They had a great pie stand run by a ladies sorority or maybe it was the homemakers association.” 

Maryland grad school buddy Ray Smock, who gave me Shepherd’s “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash” when I was hired to teach at IUN in Gary, wrote: “Thanks for a taste of Jean Shepherd. No matter how many times I read him, I laugh like I did the first time I read him. I laugh because his stories speak universal truths about everyday life, and hearing the truth is always a liberating thing.”

Connie Mack-Ward recalled attending county fairs in Sullivan County while at her grandmother’s in the tiny town of Hymera: “We could see the lights and the ferris wheel looming and hear the merry-go-round music from her house, at the picnic grounds behind the high school on a road that started every summer with fresh gravel but eventually was mostly red clay as the gravel was flung into the roadside ditches by passing vehicles. Every night of the three glorious days the small traveling carnival was there.  When desk approached, we were finally told that we could go now.  We four kids would run and speedwalk all the way there, earnestly discussing which rides we would pick for the three tickets we were allowed to buy each night. My favorites were the chair swings, the Octopus, and the absolute best, the Tilt-A-Whirl. As we approached our destination, we could smell the lubricating oil from the rides, the cotton candy, popcorn, as wellas the fryng chicken  and boiling corn-on-the-cob of the dinners in the Methodist food tent.”

Albert Einstein and Civil Rights

    “America’s worst disease is its treatment of the Negro.” Albert Einstein

When German physicist Albert Einstein arrived in the United States, Isabel Wilkerson wrote in “Caste,” he was saddened to discover “that he had landed in yet another caste system, one with a different scapegoat caste and different methods but with embedded hatreds that were not so unlike the one he had fled.” Even before he’d left his homeland, Einstein had spoken out on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, railroaded on false rape charges in Alabama, and written in “The Crisis,” edited by W.E.B. DuBois, encouraging African Americans not to let racists drag down their self-worth.  Living in Princeton, New Jersey, most of whose public facilities were segregated and whose African Americans were forced to live in ghetto slums, he and wife Elsa invited famed contralto Marion Anderson to stay with them following a 1937 sell-out performance McCarter Theater because she was unable to stay at the local Nassau Inn. He wrote, “Being a Jew myself, I can understand and empathize with how black people feel as victims of discrimination.”

After World War II Einstein was spurred to action when returning Black G.I. were subjected to torture and even death for refusing to act deferentially toward the dominant caste.  He agreed to chair the NAACP anti-lynching committee and delivered the commencement address at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the oldest Black college in America. While there, Einstein discussed the theory of relativity with Physics students, played with faculty kids, including Julian Bond, son of the university president, and accepted an honorary degree.

During the Red Scare, Southern demagogues in Congress focused their wrath on civil rights activists. W.E. B. DuBois was one victim, actor and old friend Paul Robeson another.  Einstein offered to be a character witness for DuBois and invited Robeson to Princeton University. In 1952, in an article for “Pageant” magazine, Einstein addressed those questioning the motives of civil rights activists: “Your ancestors dragged the black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and the easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is a result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.”

Dan Rather

     “I was tagged as too intense to be an anchor man, too bull-headed.” Dan Rather

Born in Texas in December of 1931, the son of a ditch digger, Dan Rather grew up in Houston, did play-by play for the city’s minor league baseball team, the Buffs, and established a national reputation as a television reporter with his coverage of Hurricane Carla in 1961, when 350,000 Texas residents had to be evacuated.  At one point Rather offered to chain himself to a tree to demonstrate nature’s powerful clout.  He covered the assassination of JFK in 1963, was a foreign correspondent in Vietnam in 1966, and served as White House correspondent during the Richard M. Nixon administration (see below), frequently annoying the President with persistent questions about the Watergate scandal. For an unprecedented 24 years beginning in 1981, Rather anchored the CBS Evening News but was terminated after airing a segment on “60 Minutes” based on questionable documents claiming that President George W. Bush’s service with the Air National Guard was virtually nonexistent. In his ninetieth year, Rather still has not retired and retains an edginess that came to be his trademark.

Rather’s 1994 book “The Camera Never Blinks Twice” discusses his harrowing on-the-ground adventures and coverage of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s and such breaking stories as Chinese student protest in Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf War, the Branch Davidian conflagration in Waco, Texas, starvation in Somalia, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and the 1993 Mississippi River flood. That year, he returned to Vietnam, where he still had reoccurring nightmares from seeing a soldier’s legs blown off by a land mine and visiting a room full of amputees on a hospital ship.  At a Da Nang hotel lighters taken off dead G.I.s were for sale.  He interviewed General Norman Schwarzkopf on the roof of the former American embassy, where cameras had captured helicopters rescuing Americans 18 years before.  Schwarzkopf told Rather he’d been stationed in Alaska at the time and after observing the humiliating end to America’s longest war (at the time) went out and got drunk.

Rather’s two journalistic role models were Edward R. Murrow and Eric Severeid, whom he described as “a man’s man when that was still something you said.”  Though he began with a self-deprecating anecdote about a fan informing him the his fly was unzipped, Rather was very much a macho Texan who admired personal bravery and for a time signed off the air with the single word “courage.”  In “The Camera Never Blinks Twice” he lets us know his fondness for Red Man chewing tobacco, that he hunted quail with Severeid, fly-fishes for trout, and likes to be where the action is. As he wrote, “The best stories do not make office calls.” He has survived being, as Walter Cronkite once said, “waist deep in water moccasins,” been “maced, mugged, and arrested,” and had his sleep in an Afghanistan barn interrupted by scorpions. Rather carried with him a Cuban cigar given him by Fidel Castro.  He bragged about drinking in Dubrovnik till dawn and missing the press plane as well as his “undiminished” respect for Marshall Josip Broz Tito, who well into his 80s spent days in Dubrovnik’s ancient mud baths with his mistress.

Like all great reporters Dan Rather had an eye for the human dimension of cataclysmic events. In Sarajevo in August 1993, where I had visited a decade before, prior to the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, Rather met 9-year-old Malik, a victim of an artillery shell that had landed in his home while he was eating breakfast during a siege that killed 9,000 civilians and maimed countless others. Rushed to a hospital that had been struck 14 times and lacked water or electricity, doctors operated on him by candlelight. Writing that because Malik and his parents were of the “wrong” race and religion, he was a paraplegic, Rather concluded: “Malik was excited to have visitors from America, and he mustered a weak smile in the sunlight of midmorning. It was a welcome I won’t forget.”

    “That’s all folks,” epitaph on tombstone of Mel Blanc, voice of Porky Pig and other Disney animated characters

Filmmaker Chris Robinson chose “Looted” as a fitting epitaph for his documentary of Gary, his hometown.  While the word is commonly associated with lawlessness that takes place in the aftermath of protest, it can also refer to illicit gains by public officials or private companies.  In “Looted” former mayor Dozier T. Allen points the finger at big business, while Karen Freeman-Wilson mentions the steel mills, which profited from being in Gary but did not repay the city commensurately.   Robinson told the Gary Crusader, prior to a screening of “Looted” at the ArtHouse:

    I love my city!  It’s a place that raised me, and I felt compelled to do the research and tell this story.  Once my generation learn the true history of Gary, we will be armed with knowledge and hopefully motivated to do our part to effect change. 

A recent NWI Times obit for Andrea “Conchita” Olivares, who died at age 90 and once co-owned and operated Sam and Conchita’s Bakery in East Chicago, ran photos of her both as a younger and elderly woman.  That makes ma lot of sense. Obits for Jean De Young and Sandra Schaefer included the fact that Jean was a gifted oil and china painter, while Sandra “will always be re-membered for her luck playing the slot machines on the casino boat.”

At Charlie and Naomi’s for four-couple bridge, Chuck Tomes mentioned hearing from a Gary Emerson grad that during Ted Karras’ pro football career, linemen were so poorly paid that he started teaching at a Gary school in the off season and was assigned a notoriously tough class.  On the first day, when a kid acted up, Karras picked up both him and the desk he was sitting in and tossed him out the door, along with the desk.  Nobody gave him trouble after that.  I told of interviewing Ted Karras at his home in Miller and being told by his wife that we needed to be done by 11 because that was when reruns of the sitcom Webster, starring brother Alex, came on.