Madam C.J. Walker

 “Don’t sit and wait for opportunities to come.  Get up and make them.” Madam C.J. Walker 

The subject of the Winter 2020 Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History cover story, “Sheer Will,” is the Indiana Historical Society’s Madam C.J. Walker collection documenting the remarkable African American hair-care and cosmetics industry pioneer and the company she founded. Born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 on a Louisiana Delta cotton plantation, the daughter of slaves, the future entrepreneur was orphaned at seven, had virtually no formal education, and once worked as a washerwoman. Among the products her company developed and advertised in Black newspapers and magazines, offered by direct mail as well as from a sophisticated sales force, and utiized in countless beauty salons and households, were scalp ointment to stimulate hair growth, pomade, bath oil, liquid make-up, cologne, shampoo, and hair coloring. Madam Walker opened beauty colleges in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Harlem, and Indianapolis, where she relocated her permanent headquarters in 1910, nine years before her death at age 51 from hypertension and kidney failure. Philanthropist, patron of the arts, civil rights advocate, and worldly marketeer, Madam C.J. Walker, in the words of great-great granddaughter A’Lelia Bundles, “created career opportunities for thousands of African American women.”

Traces editor Ray E. Boomhower described an 1861 White House meeting between Abraham Lincoln and 61-year-old Hoosier William Jones, hopeful of securing a patronage position in the new administration. When Lincoln was just “a gangling youth” (Boomhower’s words), Jones had hired him to clerk in his Spencer County store, located in the Little Pigeon Creek community. Lincoln’s duties had included unpacking goods, carrying items up from the cellar, butchering and salting pork, and occasionally driving a team of horses. Jones had also recently participated in the sixteenth President’s successful campaign. Lincoln greeted Jones and a companion, Nathaniel Grigsby, warmly and ushered them into a room to introduce them to First Lady Mary Todd.  Boomhower wrote:

    Before the two men could stake their claims for government jobs, Lincoln, knowing full well what they were after, told his wife: “Mary, you know I’m pestered and bothered continually by people coming here on the score of old acquaintance, as almost all of them have an ax to grind.  They go on the theory that I’ve got offices to dispense with so numerous that I can give each one of them a place. Now here are two friends that have come to pay me a visit just because they are my friends and haven’t come to ask for any office or place.  It’s a relief to have this experience.

Needless to say, Jones and Grigsby went away without even bringing up the real purpose of their visit.

Before the year was out, Indiana governor Oliver Morton commissioned Jones as a lieutenant-colonel to command the 62nd Regiment of Indiana Volunteers. The unit saw action during the siege of Vicksburg, the assault at Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, and the battle for Atlanta.  On July 22, 1864, despite having been shot in both thighs, Jones remained on the battlefield.  While assisting in the guarding of Rebel prisoners, a cannonball decapitated him.

Politics Ain't Beanbad

“In Chicago we respect the sanctity of the fix.  When a bribe is accepted, you can usually expect to get your money’s worth, which is not something that can be said about most goods and services. Chicago is a city where a man’s fix is his bond. With rare exceptions, when you buy somebody, they stay bought.” Mike Royko

The phrase “Politics ain’t beanbag” is from a section in “For the Love of Mike,” an anthology featuring Chicago columnist Mike Royko (1932-1997), who labored most of his career for the Sun-Times and the Daily News.  In Chi-town politics was definitely of the hardball variety.  Royko first came to my attention upon the publication of his devastating 1971 skewering of Mayor Richard J. Daley titled “Boss,” which remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 26 weeks. First elected in 1955, the six-term mayor ruled the “Windy City” using strong-arm tactics against critics and exacting total loyalty from precinct captains, department heads, judges, and most aldermen. Known in retrospect as the last of the big city bosses, Daley had seen his reputation plummet as a result of the so-called police riot during the1968 Democratic National Convention, when he was caught on camera reacting to Senator Abraham Ribicoff’s expressions of outrage over the use of “Gestapo tactics” in the streets of Chicago by mouthing the words, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you motherfucker, go home.”  Even so, he remained a power broker widely feared, especially within his urban domain.

  Reviewing “Boss” for the New York Times, historian and radio personality Studs Terkel declared that Royko was Chicago’s “most incisive and independent journalist since Finlay Peter Dunne, who writes with a street wit, an elegant irony, and a cool, though far from detached, indignation.” His “stunning portrait,” Terkel concluded, “probes not only into the psyche of a neighborhood bully but into the city that has so honored him.”  My most vivid memory of reading “Boss” is the rampant cronyism that saturated City Hall, with loyalty valued over competence when it came to the qualifications of those in positions of authority As Royko wrote in one reprinted column: Hizzoner runs his city “like a small family business and keeps everybody on a short rein. They only do what they know is safe and that which he tells them to do.”  He added: “You can make money under the table and move ahead, but you are forbidden to make secretaries under the sheets.  He has dumped several party members for violating his moral code.”

One hilarious column dealt with over 200 Chicagoland National food stores banning “Boss” after Mrs. Richard J. Daley spotted copies on display while shopping at her neighborhood grocery.  Calling the book “trash” by an “underdeveloped underachiever,” Eleanor Daley first turned a promotional cardboard sign face down, then turned each book around so the title didn’t show, and finally informed the manager that she’d never shop at the store again unless he removed the offensive paperbacks.  Next day, National’s other outlets followed suit.  Royko joked, “National better damn well hope that Mrs. Daley doesn’t take a dislike to their milk or eggs.”

Because Daley was known for his malapropisms and frequent butchering of the king’s English, his press secretary Earl Bush once, according to Royko, told reporters, “Don’t print what the Mayor said, print what he meant.” Probably the most infamous verbal blunder was in defense of Chicago’s men in blue after they pummeled antiwar demonstrators during the Democratic convention: “The police are not here to create disorder; they’re here to preserve disorder.” Of his press adversaries, Daley complained, “They have vilified me; they have crucified me; they have even criticized me.”  Finally, this paean: “We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement.”

Day in a Life

  “Only a man in a funny red sheet

    Looking for special things inside of me.”

    “Superman (It’s Not East).” Five for Fighting

 

    Previous Steel Shavings focused on decades of the twentieth century and then one on the year 2000, featuring student journals as well as my own.  In 2003 I organized an issue around a single week-end, the Ides of March. That happened to be when the United States invaded Iraq on the false pretense that Saddam Hussein stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. I considered basing one on a single day but decided that was impractical, even though mundane journal entries might be of use to future historians. For that debatable reason, here are my activities for May 19 (sans several bathroom visits or morning and evening pill consumptions), beginning with brushing my teeth and splashing warm water on my face. With predictions of summery weather I picked out a red shirt, short-sleeved, for the first time this year.

 

While dressing I listened to “Mully and Haugh” on WSCR (The Score) excoriate White Sox manager Tony LaRussa, age 76 and a Hall of Famer, for criticizing rookie Yermin Mercedes. With Chicago leading 15-4, the Twins used infielder Williams Astudillo on the mound in the ninth inning.  When the count went to 3-0, LaRussa put on the take sign, but Mercedes hit a pitch thrown under 50 mph over the centerfield wall for a home run, then needlessly celebrated while rounding the bases. Obeying a manager’s signs is something players commonly learn as youngsters, and LaRussa called Mercedes clueless. Ageist radio jock Mike Mulligan, who has been on LaRussa all year for being out of touch with today’s player-driven game, claimed that Sox players might get demoralized and that LaRussa was inviting Minnesota to retaliate – as if they were looking for LaRussa’s permission. Despite all Mulligan’s moaning and groaning, the Sox, despite having lost two of their best players to possible season-ending injuries, have one of the best records in baseball.

 

As is my custom I watched the first 20 minutes of CBS Morning News co-hosted by Gayle King (who always refers to Wednesday as Humpday), Anthony Mason, and Vladimir Duthiers (substituting for Tony Dokoupil, on baby leave). Hostilities have erupted again between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, and Republican Congressional leaders are balking at the creation of a bipartisan commission to examine the January 6 attack of the Capitol.  Normally my breakfast on week days consists of fruit, cereal with blueberries and banana slices, a sausage link or bacon slices, and two cups of coffee. Because I’d be playing bridge at Banta Senior Center and not have lunch, save for a small cup of jello, I had bacon and two scrambled eggs plus an English muffin topped with strawberry preserves, a Christmas present from daughter-in-law Delia. 

 

For the past two weeks Banta Center volunteers took everyone’s temperature upon arrival and asked people to wear masks, but this week there were no restrictions. In duplicate I partnered with Naomi Goodman, first time she and I played together, and we finished around 50 percent, good for seventh out of 14 couples.  We started slowly, but near the end bid and made game two hands in a row, the only couple to do so, for high boards. 

 

When bridge ended, I gave a copy of my latest Steel Shavings, “Life in the Calumet Region during the Plague Year, 2020,” to life master Judy Kocemar, whom I mentioned in volume 50 because we won a game last January and she attended my Art in Focus talk in Munster on 1960 Rock and Roll Music on March 10, literally days before everything virtually shut down. Don Geidemann and Judy Selund have decided to host a bridge game at his place in June involving four couples, including Herb and Evelyn Passo, Charlie Halberstadt and Naomi, and us. We’ll first have lunch at Pesto’s and before the final round enjoy a homemade dessert (Don is a great cook). On the way out I noticed that someone had brought daffodil plants, so I took about eight of them to plant in our backyard garden.  It had rained earlier, so it didn’t take long.  The trip home took longer than usual because road construction (omnipresent this time of year) had without adequate warning blocked the entrance ramp to Indiana State Road 49, necessitating traveling south a few miles and turning around on Route 2.

 

Niece Lisa visited from Granger and had lunch with Toni at Lucrezia’s but left before I arrived. She brought Toni’s parents’ wedding picture, which had been in possession of her mother (Toni’s older sister), who died a couple months ago from pancreatic cancer, plus letters Toni and I had written to her parents, including one of mine to brother-in-law Sonny, a truck driver, on October 12, 1970, less than two months after we’d moved to Northwest Indiana and I’d begun my teaching career at IUN. I mentioning our playing golf and inquired about his becoming a Teamster union steward, noting, “It’s good that management has to contend with someone who will put them on their ass once in a while.” Then I mentioned how teaching was going:

 All my classes are on Monday and Thursday, so during the rest of the week I can prepare lectures and work on articles (necessary for tenure).  I teach three courses, one at 8:30 A.M., one at 2:30, and the third at 7. My afternoon class is small and has been exciting at times, with good discussions.  The evening class is in an auditorium, where 105 students sit above me (like Roman judges at a gladiator contest) while I teach at a stage-like area.  At first, I was nervous as I passed students on the way up front. After a minute, people in the back claimed they couldn’t hear me, even though I thought I was yelling.  Since then, however, that class is my favorite.  I use the same material as at 8:30 and leave out things that hadn’t gone well then.  In fact, the room transforms me into something of an actor and I have become somewhat of a ham.

    Toni is decorating curtains with peace signs and sayings.  Come out and see them sometime if you get a haul out our way. Fondly, Jim

 

Checking Facebook, IUN chancellor Keen Iwama announced that the university will be back to normal for the Fall semester and open for business on August 2. I noticed that, as usual, it’s been a busy week for Dave, a teacher, tennis coach, and senior class adviser at East Chicago Central.  He posted a photo of seniors honored at a sports banquet and a video of him playing the piano for English Arts teacher Aaron Duncil, a Portage H.S. and VU graduate, singing “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” that they performed at the Student Government banquet.  The 2002 hit was written and performed by Vladimir John Ondrasik III, a huge L.A. Kings hockey fan, who called his group Five for Fighting, a term for penalties meted out to pugilists on the ice. Among the Facebook friends Aaron and I have in common are Performing Arts instructors Kevin Giese and Mark Baer, so I surmised correctly that Aaron has remained active in theatrical productions. 

 

Upper Dublin classmates Connie Daemon and Pat Zollo mentioned that a mini-reunion took place at Guiseppe’s in Ambler with 16 people in attendance including a few spouses and siblings. The sad news: Jim Coombs suffered a stroke and is “recovering but not doing well,” whatever that means.  Susan McGrath’s husband Joe’s recovery from a stroke is painfully slow, causing him frustration and her much anguish over how costly a physical therapist is.  On Mother’s Day, she reported, the PT was helping a granddaughter with her Spanish.

 

While enjoying a couple 16-ounce Coors Lights, I read a few articles on the Cubs by Chicago Sun-Timescolumnist Mike Ryoko (1932-1997) that appear in the anthology “For the Love of Mike.” So-called “lovable losers” during Ryoko’s day, he wrote that the only pennant-winning team in his lifetime consisted of “a bunch of wartime 4-Fs, but at least we had the best 4-Fs” – at least until the 1945 Tigers beat them in the World Series, 4 games to 3. The star player of Ryoko’s youth, Stan Hack, was “always drunk or hung over.”  Due perhaps to a deformed middle finger, shortstop Roy Smalley would often “heave the ball completely over the first baseman’s head and the dugout.” During the 1950s a top prospect married starlet Mamie Van Doren and never made it out of spring training, as did a 38-year-old rookie with a gold earring. His favorite skipper, Leo Durocher, “could kick foul-ball powder on an umpire’s shoes better than any other manager.”

 

Having completed Bradford Pearson’s “The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War America,” I found a Washington Post review by Samuel G. Freedman, titled “At a shameful detention camp, an improbable football team.” Freedman compares the feats of the Heart Mountain football team, led by Tamotsu “Babe” Nomura and George “Horse” Yoshinaga (they met while their families were imprisoned at Santa Anita racetrack) to the Notre Dame teams of the 1920s as a counteracting force against anti-Catholicism and the Florida A & M squads of the 1960s promoting racial pride and equality. Despite losing their freedom due to Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, Japanese-Americans became subject to the draft, and 63 members of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, who insisted they were loyal Americans, were convicted and sentenced to three years in federal prison for demanding that their rights as citizens be restored as a condition of their serving in the military.

 

Switching to Coors regular as dinner approached, I sat down to a delicious pork roast meal with mashed potatoes, gravy, salad, and cooked vegetables. Toni has recently completed “Queen’s Gambit” by Walter Tevis, which I had gotten from the library just four days before, so after a few hands of bridge with Toni (we’d each bid two of the four hands and the person getting the bid would play the hand) and before retiring into the bedroom to watch the Cubbies, I read a few pages and see how so many readers got hooked.  Orphaned at age eight, young Beth is sent to a home where wards of the state were given two tranquilizer pills a day to “even their disposition.”  Beth’s life is transformed when she becomes fascinated with a chess board that she spots with a custodian in the basement of her new home.

"Better Angels"

 “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Abraham Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1861)

Delivered on the eve of the Civil War, at a time when seven slave states had already seceded from the Union, President Lincoln concluded his Inaugural speech in a spirit of reconciliation with a plea to Southerners: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”  Historians speculate that Lincoln’s use of “better angels” came from familiarity with William Shakespeare’s 1603 play “Othello” and a line uttered by Desdemona’s uncle, Gratiano, after Othello murdered his wife, accusing her of adultery. Gratiano declared that he was glad Desdemona’s father was dead; else the deed “would make him do a desperate turn, yea, curse his better angel from his side, and fall to reprobation.” Both Lincoln and Shakespeare used the phrase to mean the positive attributes of one’s character or temperament rather than referring to supernatural beings. In an early draft, incoming Secretary of State William Seward had suggested “guardian angel” but Lincoln scratched that out and substituted “better angels.”

Titling his talk “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” Saturday Evening Club (SEC) speaker Michael Baird discussed the pressing need for civility and compromise in order for the American political system to function. A former Republican Valparaiso city councilman, Baird described himself as a centrist and regretted that the Republican Party had, for the most part, abandoned its principles out of fealty to Trump. Those who reject the “Big Lie” concerning the 2020 election and blame the former President for the January 6 attack on the Capitol are being purged from leadership roles and face primary challenges by true believers. The politics of hope and respect for the loyal opposition, Baird feared, is in danger of being replaced by the politics of calumny. Baird read an original poem and even sang and played the guitar to another composition, leading several listeners to dub him SEC's "Renaissance Man."

Most commenters agreed with Baird’s assertions and bemoaned the current state of affairs in Washington, DC, where extremists have gained influence in both parties and the intransigence of Senate and House Republican leaders has stymied efforts at legislative compromise. One SEC member stated that compromise was impossible so long as Republicans fail to acknowledge Joe Biden’s legitimacy. Another cited Founding Father Benjamin Franklin’s reply when asked what type of government the new Constitution had laid out: “A republic if we can keep it.” Trying to stay optimistic in a trying time, one person referred to clerk Wilkins Micawber in Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield” who despite setback after setback remained hopeful that “something will turn up.” 

After describing the derivation of “Better Angels” and mentioning Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, delivered as the war was ending and assassins were plotting his death, that called for binding up the nation’s wounds “with malice toward none but charity for all,” I listed similar traits shared by Lincoln and Biden. Both were life-long politicians with knowledge and respect for political tradition; both kept their egos in check and resisted demagoguery; both were agents of change but not at the price of demonizing the opposition. Lincoln, for instance, distinguished between the institution of slavery, which he believed to be evil, and Southerners themselves. While careful not to claim greatness for Biden, the latter, I suggested, may prove to be the most suitable leader for our time.

Like me, retired VU Theology professor and Dean of Graduate Studies Jim Albers provided historical perspective to the country’s current political stalemate. He cited Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence” to make a plea for rationality as an antidote to extreme partisanship. Several people had noted that Trump’s methods had split families, sometimes irrevocably, a situation similar to the Civil War era. Albers brought up the rifleman’s dilemma in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “A Horseman in the Sky” (1889) and how for some, moral duty came before even family. Virginian Carter Druse, on sentry duty with a unit of the Union Army, spotted an enemy horseman who had become aware of their location. If Druse didn’t kill the man, it would imperil his comrades’ lives. His father had taught him to do his duty whatever the consequences, but just before he fires, he recognizes that it is his father.

Hippies

 “Be Here Now.” Ram Dass

    As often as not, the word “hippie” has been used pejoratively, as referring to one who is a pale imitation of a hipster or Beat, a naïve idealist or a burned-out druggie. Reactionary California governor Ronald Reagan categorized so-called flower children as people who dress like Tarzan, wear their hair like Jane, and smell like Cheetah. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”: “Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure.” In popular culture hippies are associated with 1967 Be-ins in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco or the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival.  Also, the slogans “Tune in, Turn on, Drop out” (Timothy Leary) or “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll (Janis Joplin).” In the 1983 movie “The Big Chill” disillusioned Sixties activist Sarah Cooper (Glenn Close) says, :”I’d hate to think it was all just fashion.”  Popular culture pundits suggested that hippies from this privileged “Boomer” generation often morphed into Yuppies as they shed their youthful illusions.

    Broadly speaking, hippies were part of a Sixties protest movement against rampant consumerism, the war in Vietnam, and puritanical beliefs regarding sex, manners, dress, and WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) values.  Some alienated young people were “week-end hippies,” working steady jobs or staying in school but using consciousness-raising substances and letting-it-all-hang-out on weekends. Others, dissatisfied with urban living and nostalgic for the pastoral ideal, attempted to form alternative communities.  Merry Prankster Ken Kesey claimed that you were either on the bus or uncool. Approximately two million “Back-to-the-Landers” relocated to rural areas, either forming communes or living as homesteaders.  One such experiment took place on Pocahontas County, West Virginia, the heart of Appalachia; commune founders called their experiment the Island of the Red Hood.  Locals were generally not hostile; some taught the newcomers practical survival skills.  Nonetheless, the Island of the Red Hood was short-lived, although some members paired off and remained nearby.

    Emma Copley Eisenberg’s “The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia” (2020) describes the violent death on June 25, 1980, in Pocahontas County of two hitchhikers, Vicki Durian (26) and Nancy Santomero (19) who were on their way to a month-long music festival and camp-out called the Rainbow Family World Peace Gathering taking place in an area of Monongahela National Forest known as Three Forks, which attracted up to 6,000 enthusiasts. Annual Rainbow Family gatherings had begun in 1972, but this was the first in the East.  Law enforcement authorities and the media believed a group of nine local men were responsible, either out of animus toward hippies or because the “girls” wouldn’t “put out.” One of them was found guilty but later freed when the actual murderer was a serial killer from elsewhere.  The victims came from good families and in some ways fit the stereotype of “hippie” in their taste in clothes, music, and love of adventure but in other ways not.  In fact, their outlook on life was not much different from the author’s or the bluegrass musicians Emma Eisenberg, who had been a VISTA worker in Pocahontas County, had hung out with.

    A University of Maryland grad student in the late 1960s, I had long hair and a beard, experimented with pot, loved psychedelic rock, took part in antiwar protests, and on the surface rejected many of my WASP parents’ values.  On the other hand, I was married with two children, content with a monogamous relationship with Toni, and worked diligently toward my PhD. My friends and I discussed communal living, but I had no skills translatable to an agrarian life and valued my privacy. When a friend decided to get rid of his “straight” clothes, I scarfed up a sports jacket that last me well into the 1980s. Teaching at IUN in the early 1970s, I felt sorry for students who dropped out of school due to drugs or misguided idealism.  On the other hand, I joined a softball team of “long hairs” who loved to party. Memories of those high times are among my very fondest, and I’m still friends with several former teammates. In fact, I feel sad for those who didn’t have a little “hippie” spark of rebellion in them.

Joseph E. Stiglitz

 “Rather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. The only true and sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity.” Joseph E. Stiglitz

In the Preface to his new book “People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent” 2001 Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz, born in 1943, wrote that he grew up in Gary on the southern shore of Lake Michigan during “the golden age of capitalism” only at the time it did not seem so golden: “I saw massive racial discrimination and segregation, great inequality, labor strife, and episodic recessions.” Stiglitz added that Gary had been founded in 1906 during a period of rapid industrialization but by the time he returned for his 55-year Horace Mann class reunion the city “had followed the country’s trajectory toward deindustrialization. It had become a filming location for Hollywood movies set in war zones or after the apocalypse.” Quite a few of his classmates had gone into the military and then become policemen. At the reunion, he wrote, “An argument broke out between a former policeman virulently criticizing the government and a former school teacher pointing out that the Social Security and disability payments the former policeman depended on came from the same government.”

Stiglitz’s mother was a teacher and his father an insurance salesman who worked out of an office in the Gary National Bank Building. In his Nobel Prize statement he declared, “There must have been something in the air of Gary that led me to economics: the first Nobel Prize winner [in Economics], Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary.” He added:

I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed and debated intensely. My mother’s family were New Deal Democrats – they worshipped FDR; and though my uncle was a highly successful lawyer and real estate entrepreneur, he was staunchly pro-labor. My father, on the other hand, was probably more aptly described as a Jeffersonian democrat; a small businessman (an independent insurance agent) himself, he repeatedly spoke of the virtues of self-employment, of being one’s own boss, of self-reliance. He worried about big business and valued our competition laws. I saw him, conservative by nature, buffeted by the marked changes in American society during the near-century of his life, and adapt to these changes. By the mid-seventies, he had become a strong advocate of civil rights. He had a deep sense of civic and moral responsibility. He was one of the few people I knew who insisted on paying social security contributions for household help – regardless of whether they wanted it or not; he knew they would need it when they were old.

In school all of us had to learn, for instance, two trades (mine were printing and being an electrician). I had the good fortune of having dedicated teachers, who in spite of relatively large classes, provided a high level of individual attention. The extra-curricular activity in which I was most engaged – debating – helped shape my interests in public policy. Every year, a national debating topic is chosen; one randomly was assigned to one side or the other. This had at least one virtue – it made one see that there was more than one side to these complex issues.

Valedictorian of his class, in 1960 Stiglitz gave a commencement address in which he spoke of his hope for cooperation between Gary’s largest employer, US Steel, and its work force. Afterwards, an uncle from Chicago, an avowed socialist, berated him for being naïve. When Stiglitz returned for his class reunion, he visited the Gary Public Library and Cultural Center and posed in front of his portrait within a mural by Felix Maldonado depicting the history of the city and some of its illustrious native sons and daughters.