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.