Immigrants to the Calumet Region

“Though it may seem a generous gesture on our part to receive the unfortunate from other countries, we have profited a thousand-fold by what they have brought us.” Eleanor Roosevelt

 

Forty-five years ago, Ron Cohen and I published the second volume of Steel Shavings titled “Families of the Calumet Region.” Virtually every selection dealt with immigrants from many countries in Europe as well as Mexico, Puerto Rico, of the American South. Fred McColly and Elaine Skopelja wrote about Slovak relatives. Georgia Kollintzas wrote so movingly about Greek immigrants that the article was later re-published in an anthology titled “Nearby History” by David E. Kyvig and Myron A. Marty. Richard Dorson wrote about Hendrik and Cora Gerritsen, who arrived with their two children in 1951, lived briefly with an uncle in Chicago, and eventually moved to Munster, a community founded by fellow Dutchmen. Hendrik found work in an East Chicago foundry, riding a bike to work (an hour’s ride) before he branched out on his own doing carpentry work. Dorson wrote:

    The Gerritsen’s fluency in English facilitated their adjustment to American ways, but there were still uncertainties and surprises. Some experiences were comical – exploding baked potatoes, spraying aerosol whip cream all over the kitchen, and finding Halloweeners at their door. Other new experiences that were less pleasant were the Midwest winters, a polio epidemic, and the Cold War hysteria of the early 1950s. In 1956 the Gerritsens became American citizens. Because “McCarthyism" was at its peak at this time, the citizenship exam centered around the applicants’ avowed hatred of communism. The Gerritsens’ sponsors also had to make statements that they did not belong to any communist-affiliated group.

 

Richard Dawson was one of my first and most memorable students at IU Northwest. Intelligent and worldly-wise, he was less than three years my junior and after graduating from Hammond High School had seen combat in Vietnam in the First Infantry Division (the Big Red One) before attending IU and Loyola University Law School. Taking an evening course for graduate credit (or perhaps simply out of intellectual curiosity), he delivered a report to the class on Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” where he described packinghouse worker Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant, being treated as a pariah on a Chicago streetcar due to the way he smelled after a shift on the killing floor. Whenever I use the word pariah, I never fail to think of him. Prior to the George Foreman-Muhammad Ali fight in Zaire (“the rumble in the jungle”) he persuaded me to spend 20 dollars and accompany him to a grand old Hammond theater in order to watch the epic fight. Beforehand, the overflow audience was shown a soft core pornographic movie, generating much whistling, cheering and booing. Except for those who’d placed bets on Foreman, virtually the entire fight crowd – black, white, Latino - was rooting for Ali. 

 

An Obit informed me that Rick, as I called him, recently died of lung cancer surrounded by friends and family and the music of the Beach Boys and Frankie Valli, “entertaining those caring for him with his wit and sardonic one-liners until his last moments." His answer to “How are you?” was always, “Never better!” The author of the obit wrote that “he operated under the assumption that his cholesterol and nicotine levels were dangerously low and worked tirelessly to raise them to acceptable levels.” I’m so sorry we lost touch, I’m certain we’d have enjoyed each other’s company as we grew older.

 

For an IU Northwest class assignment 40 years ago, Warren Ellis wrote about a Hungarian immigrant named Stepen who emigrated to Canada in 1914 at age 19 and to the United States eight years later, finding work through an employment agency at Inland Steel Company in East Chicago.  Ellis wrote:

    Staying at the nearby Inland Hotel, Stepen had quite a few different roommates since there was a large turnover among steelworkers.  Stepen might come home from his shift to find he had a new roommate.  Once he came home from the day shift and discovered that his razor, some of his clothing, and his day-old roommate were missing.  Stepen decided it was time to find a new place to live, so he moved to the East Chicago Hotel on the south side of town, where he lived until 1930.

    In Inland Steel’s transportation department, Stepen generally worked as a fireman seven days a week and from 10 to 14 hours a day. His duties were to shovel coal, feed water to the engine, and make sure the engine did not build up too much steam. Then he became a hustler’s helper and, after a while, a hustler, servicing the engine before and after each use.  Before becoming an engineer, he had the job title of mechanic and had to check all the machinery and do any major repair that might be needed. He was also a boilermaker and a blacksmith.  

    One incident from the mid-1920s involved his working the job as fireman. He was working the “graveyard” or midnight shift.  The engineer that Stepen worked for 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 the engineer.  The route they used on this one run was rather complex.  First, 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.  Sometimes Stepen had problems keeping up enough steam and trying to watch the signal lights at the same time.  One night he decided to build  up the steam a little more than usual so he could watch the signal lights as the train entered the tunnel. He looked up, almost a second too late,  and noticed the lights were signaling the train to stop.  He had to put the brakes on 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 to 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 for some reason the man broke the habit of taking naps at the throttle.

 

IUN’s English Department launched its Dunes Literary Readings series by inviting Samuel Love and three contributors to his excellent “Gary Anthology” publication to make presentations. Unlike a half-century ago, immigration is no longer such a dominant theme, but newcomers from African, Central American, and the Middle East are still arriving, and a flavor of the American South is still strong in African-American neighborhoods. One “Anthology” contributor, Daniel Summers, recalled taking classes with me during the 1990s, and I published his interview with Eloise Dean in my Steel Shavings issue covering the 1970s (volume 29, 1999). Here is an excerpt:

    I came to Gary from Tennessee in the tenth grade. Like a lot of Southern blacks, my family had moved in search of a better life. In the early Seventies men either wore their hair slicked back or had these huge Afros. The really cool guys wore shirts with big lapels and starched collars. One of the braver girls on my street wore her hair in cornrows. Until it closed, I worked at Jerry Kay’s department store on Fifth Avenue. After working for the Adult Education Center, I decided to go to a catering school nearby. This led to a job catering conventions at the Sheraton. Big shots came from all across the country and left us big tips.

    The churches were a big part of community life. They were filled every Sunday. I was in Union Gospel Singers. We traveled the Midwest, especially in summer. We went south as far as Nashville, as far east as Baltimore, and as far west as St. Louis. We toured in two-week stints in a rented mobile home. Some members later found success with a group called the Belton Kings. The “religious police” in our church didn’t want us to mix secular and religious music, but we got around them. After engagements, we’d sneak back and go do the clubs, with nobody the wiser.

    One of my girlfriends in the singing group and I were on the toll road on the way to an engagement, and the driver’s pink and blue Buick convertible broke down and caught on fire. When we didn’t make the engagement, people came looking for us and found us holding up a “Help” sign at the side of the road in our expensive stage dresses. When we finally got to the club, my girlfriend was so shook up over the loss of her car that she cried throughout the song “Fever.”

 

When I mentioned the vibrancy of Glen Park’s commercial district in the Seventies (a pharmacy, Harvey’s department store, bars, nightclubs, steak shop and breakfast gathering spot, I learned that tattooist Roy Boy learned photography from the owner of Gary Camera Shop next door. I could have mentioned the trio of adult bookstores with peep show booths. When curmudgeon George Roberts retired from IUN, he lamented the decline of Glen Park, as evidenced by an adult bookstore closing. The Glen Theater showed XXX double features plus a half-dozen titillating previews. A Political Science professor who had escaped from a puritanical communist country was rumored to be a regular. My one foray, justified as in the guise of being a contemporary social historian, before the lights dimmed, I heard Seals and Crofts songs emanating from above and noticed a colleague across the way. We studiously avoided each other’s gaze. Whenever I hear "Hummingbird" or "Summer Breeze," I think of the Glen.