Exceedances

“Another sad day for Lake Michigan.  Industry still using the lake as its own dumping grounds!” Jim Brown

 IDEM officials checkoff dead fish near Portage marina, NWI Times photo by John Luke

A malfunction at ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor plant has resulted in thousands of fish dying in the East Branch of the Little Calumet River and in nearby Lake Michigan. Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) officials have used the euphemism “exceedances” to characterize the chemical spill of cyanide and ammonia-nitrogen.  Indiana Dunes National Park superintendent Paul Labovitz closed the Portage beach area and told Kevin Nevers of the Chesterton Tribune, “It was a broad-spectrum kill.  It was not species-specific.  Anything close to the source was killed.  It even killed catfish, and catfish are pretty hard to kill.”  Labovitz was rather cavalier in concluding, “I put this in the category of ‘Shit Happens in an industrial community.’”  He praised Arcelor-Mittal for accepting blame for the environmental disaster and communicating results of their ongoing investigation far faster than was the case with U.S. Steel when a deadly carcinogen spilled into Burns Ditch from its Portage facility 30 months ago with dire consequences. Republicans being in control of state and federal regulatory commissions, it is doubtful that Arcelor-Mittal will receive more than a slap on the wrist.

Post-Tribune photo byZbigniew Bzdak

Cha Meyer reacted to Portage Beach being closed until further notice: “We are canaries in the coal mine of the world that our society has polluted and squandered away.”

Portage officials contradicted Superintendent Labovitz’s charitable assessment.  A spokesman noted: “While reports show many, including IDEM, knew of the concerns as early as August 12th, the City of Portage was not informed of this concern until August 15th.” Commenting on the Portage Indiana Municipal Facebook site, Diana Dempsey Bartkus wrote: “It’s cheaper for them to pay the fine than dispose of properly, I’m sure. Throw down! Make an example out of them! There should be zero tolerance! Beach goers were not turned away from any of these beaches on Thursday! They already knew of the situation for more than 24 hours! This is awful and infuriating!!!” Tammie Klym added:“How is any level of these deadly chemicals allowed to be near our water supply? How are these companies allowed to have any vessel that allows anything to be dumped into water? I can see intake. This is why our ecosystem is failing. This company makes millions if not billions of dollars. Put in a filtration system and make sure it works.” This from Jonathan Fronczak: “Forget a fine, some people need to be locked up. You can get a felony and jail for hunting and fishing unlawfully. The only way to stop future events is criminal prosecution. Make an example!!!”

George Takei at Rowher and at present

Rohwer Internment Camp

Veteran actor George Takei, best known as Hikaru Sulu in the “Star Trek” series, is in AMC’s “The Terror: Infamy,” which takes place in an internment camp where Japanese-Americans were consigned during World War II. In a Timeinterview Takei tells of his family being interned when he was just five. Soldiers showed up at their home in Los Angeles and took them to Santa Anita racetrack, where a chain-link fence surrounded the entire facility.  Takei recalled:

  We were unloaded and herded over to the stable area. Each family was assigned to a horse stall.  For my parents, it was a degrading, humiliating, enraging experience to take their three kids to sleep in a smelly horse stall.  But to me, it was fun to sleep where the horses slept.

One stall had been home to the famous racehorse Seabiscuit, winner of the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap less than two years before. From Santa Anita the Takei family was sent to Rohwer internment camp in Desha County, Arkansas.  Takei recalled: 

  We were plunked down in the swamps of southeastern Arkansas.  To me, it was an exotic, alien planet.  Trees grew out of the water of the bayou that was right next to the barbed-wire fence. I remember catching pollywogs and putting them in a jar. Dragonflies, which I’ve never seen before.  The first winter, it snowed. I was a Southern California kid.  To wake up one morning and see everything covered in white, it was a magical place.

  For my parents, it was a series of goading terrors, one after the other.  But children are amazingly adaptable.  We adjusted, and we got used to what would have been a grotesque thing – lining up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall, or going with my father to bathe in a mass shower.  When I made the night runs to the latrine, searchlights followed me.  I thought it was nice that they lit the way for me to pee. It wasn’t until later that I learned about the reality, the horror, the terror, and the injustice of the incarceration.

Toni and I attended a RailCats baseball contest against the Milwaukee Milkmen.  While the game itself was rather boring, afterwards there was a spectacular fireworks display, like a grand finale that lasted a good 10-15 minutes.  In“They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” essayist Hanif Abdurraqib admitted to being a fan of his hometown Triple-A Columbus (Ohio) Clippers, and watching a Fourth of July fireworks display at Huntington Park:Over the weekend:

  You’ll roll your eyes when “Born in the U.S.A.” plays while the fireworks fly screaming into the sky, tucking all its darkness into their pockets.  I still go to watch the brief burst of brightness glow on the faces of black children, some of them have made it downtown, miles away from the forgotten corners of the city they’ve been pushed to. Some of them smiling and pointing upwards, still too young to know of America’s hunt for their flesh.  How it wears the blood of their ancestors on its teeth.

Music critic Abdurraqib, it turns out, is a big Bruce Springsteen fan.  He has attended several of The Boss’s concerts and is particularly fond of “The River” album, which celebrates the small pleasures of blue-collar culture and, as Abdurraqib put it, “the ability to make the most of your life, because it’s the only life you have.”  Catching Bruce and the E Street Band at a sold-out show in Newark, New Jersey’s Prudential Center, Abdurraqib observed:

  As I looked around the swelling arena, the only other black people I saw were performing labor in some capacity.  As the band launched into a killer extended version of “Cadillac Ranch,” I looked over to the steps and saw a young black man who had been vending popcorn and candy.  He was sitting on a step covered in sweat and rubbing his right ankle.  A man, presumably attempting to get back to his seat, yelled at him to move.

  In Bruce Springsteen’s music, I think about the romanticization of work and how that is reflected in America.  Rather, for whom work is romantic, and for whom work is a necessary and sometimes painful burden of survival. In my decade-plus of loving Bruce Springsteen’s music, I have always known and accepted that the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal will come from.

I woke up disoriented, then realized; no electricity.  Most of Chesterton suffered the same fate.  Dave took us to breakfast.  After encountering long waits at Round the Clock and Bob Evans, we were about to settle for Culver’s when Dave noticed that, it being 11 o’clock, AJ’s Pizza Company was just opening.  They served great coffee, and the lunch menu included a tasty steak sandwich and homemade chips. I called Ron Cohen on Dave’s cellphone, and, back at the condo, he and Nancy picked me up for Fred Chary’s 80th birthday celebration just as our power returned.   

EllaRose

As always, Diane Chary prepared a bountiful buffet.  Having recently eaten, I was pleased to discover a vegetable plate and chunks of mangoes in a salad.  Later I went back for other delicacies.  Fred’s daughter EllaRose, a playwright, came from New York City.  Missing were regulars Karen Rake and Milan Andrejevich, as well as recently retired English professors Alan Barr and George Bodmer. Both attended ten years ago but not for Fred’s 75th, by which time they were shunning me – a case of letting academic differences take priority over friendship.  Not surprisingly, right-winger Jean Poulard and lefty Jack Bloom, both still teaching despite being well past retirement age, argued over Trump separating immigrant families.  Bloom is teaching a Fall course on the Vietnam War and is eager to see my old syllabus.  Its reading list included Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Ronald J. Glasser’s 365 Days,Michael Herr’s Dispatches,and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk. I talked with Fred about the Phillies’ recent sweep of the Cubs and told him that the Steel ShavingsI gave him contained descriptions of the Eagles’ Superbowl victory and the raucous celebrations afterwards. EllaRose opened a bottle of champagne Poulard had brought from his home village in France, and we toasted the guest of honor and vowed to gather again five years hence.  Diane insisted I take food home for Toni, so I opted for slices of vegetarian lasagna and chocolate cake.  On the birthday cake were figurines depicting a Phillies pitcher and catcher and a Cubs batter striking out.

Like Fred, I am a loyal Philadelphia sports fan with a couple all-time favorite players in each major sport – Richie Ashburn and Dick Allen in baseball, Eagles Chuck Bednarick and Sonny Jorgensen, Flyers Bobby Clarke and Bernie “Kid” Parent, and 76ers Julius “Dr. J” Irving and Allen “AI” Iverson.  Iverson is also a favorite of Hanif Abdurraqib, who wrote an essay titled “It Rained on Ohio On the Night when Allen Iverson Hit Michael Jordan with a Crossover.” The memorable event took place in 1996, AI’s rookie season, when “he hadn’t yet grown out his soon-to-be signature cornrows and was several tattoos short of where he would end his career.”  At the top of the key facing his idol, AI pulled off a double crossover, then nailed an easy jump shot.  While in high school, Iverson had been incarcerated in the aftermath of an interracial bowling alley brawl in Hampton, Virginia (only black kids were arrested). Accused of throwing a chair, Iverson told the judge, “What kind of man would I be to hit a woman in the head with a damn chair?”  Sent to a correctional farm, Iverson couldn’t play basketball his senior year and scholarship offers dried up.  Only Georgetown’s coach John Thompson took a chance on him.

Beloved by 76er fans and self-described “punk kids” like Abdurraqib, Iverson gave his all on the court, “throwing his body all over the place for the city of Philadelphia and dragging lackluster teams to the playoffs and then [in 2002] to the finals.”  The day after watching AI fake out Jordan, Abdurraqib was on a still-slick playground in Columbus “in baggy jeans that dragged the ground until the bottoms of them split into small white flags of surrender”dreaming “of having enough money to buy my way into the kind of infamy that came with surviving any kind of proximity to poverty.”  Of Iverson Abdurraqib concluded:

  He was a 6-foot wrecking ball, who wouldn’t practice hurt, but who would play hurt for what felt like half of the season.  The era of witnessing Allen Iverson was the era of learning a language for your limits and how to push beyond them.

 Ray Smock in Nebraska

I heard from old friend Ray Smock from Maryland days, traveling through the Great Plains states, and Paul Turk, whom I met when my family moved to the Detroit area in the mid-50s.  He’s a Cleveland Indians fan and, to a lesser degree, the Washington Nationals, now that he’s living in the DC area.  Daughter Kat, a grad student in archeology at Vanderbilt, “spent much of the summer in the Fish River Canyon in Namibia, scratching for the fossil record of the very earliest animals in the Ediacaran Period, 450+ million years ago.  Dinosaurs are SO nouveau and come-lately.” According to the online Encyclopedia Britannicathis was the latest of three periods of the Neoproterozoic Era marked by considerable tectonic activity and the rapid retreat of ice sheets associated with the Marinoan glaciation.

                            Kat Turk; fossil from Ediacaran period found in Australia                                                                           

The Answer

“It was just the greatest feeling in the world to see a kid with your shoes on.” Basketball great Allen Iverson

On the cover of Sports Illustrated’s annual “Where are they now” issue is Allen Iverson, whose nickname was “The Answer” or simply AI.  He once said, “A jump shot can get you a shoe deal, a big house, a supermodel, fancy cars, a bunch of yes men, a Swiss bank account. But none of these things can get you a jump shot.”  One of my favorite players, Iverson starred for the Philadelphia 76ers for ten years, beginning in 1996, and virtually single-handedly propelled them to the NBA finals in 2001; despite being less than six feet tall, AI scored 48 points in game one against the heavily favored Lakers, led by Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal.  Iverson feuded with commissioner David Stern over his instituting a dress code, drawing this retort from AI: “They’re targeting guys who dress like me— guys who dress hip-hop. Put a murderer in a suit, and he’s still a murderer. It sends a bad message to the kids.”  He had run-ins with coaches due to his dislike of onerous practice sessions, once telling a reporter: “I would never want to coach.  Why? “We would never practice.”  At present, Iverson is player-coach for a 3-man team of former NBA players.  Like 76er Charles Barkley a decade earlier, AI bonded with Philly fans because he always went all-out in games.

Sports Illustrated also profiled Philadelphia hockey great Eric Lindros. A dominating presence on the ice for the Flyers for ten years starting in 1992, Lindros anchored a line with John LeClair and Mikael Renberg nicknamed the “Legion of Doom.”  He was the sixth fastest player in NHL history to record 600 points.  Lindros feuded with general manager Bobby Clarke, who underestimated the debilitating effects of head injuries and questioned his toughness.  In the 2000 Eastern Conference finals, New Jersey Devils defenseman Scott Stevens lowered a shoulder into Lindros and knocked him unconscious. Upon his premature retirement, he donated $5 million to the London Health Science Center to study sports related injuries, including concussions, which shortened his stellar career.

Over the weekend, Phil and Delia arrived for a pool party hosted by John and Chris English on Saturday and Becca’s fifteenth birthday party on Sunday.  At the former Amy Kilgore recalled being at Maple Place for a party as a teenager.  In the water were lots of young kids, including a five-year-old who smiled at me as she ignored parent’s announcement about it being time to get out of the pool. Phil and I won three of four corn hole matches, losing finally to Dave and John English, 22-20, when the host put one in the hole on his final shot.   Wore the Burger Lounge t-shirt, a present from nephew Bob Lane, who posted a shot of Pittsburgh Penguin Chad Ruhwedel bringing the Stanley Cup to San Diego Ice Arena.

 At San Diego Ice Arena Addie Lane touches Stanley Cup held by Chad Ruhwedel

Becca doing karaoke at 15th birthday party

Phil and Dave perform "Betty Lou's Gettin' Out Tonight"

Sunday Dave set up karaoke in the basement.  After Becca’s friends held forth for several hours, the 40-somethings took over.  Phil did a rousing take on Bob Seeger’s “Betty Lou’s Gettin’ Out Tonight,” sometimes substituting “and Delia, too” for a second “Betty Lou,” after which he declared, “Billy Bob is back,” a reference to his persona when the boys and their teenage Ogden Dunes friends would record “Funny shit on tape” sketches. Dave sang “I Got You, Babe” with Tina Horn.

I completed “The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren,” edited by Bettina Drew, to get ready for a discussion Friday at the Algren Museum in Miller.  Based largely on the author’s personal experiences in the Lone Star state during 1932, they deal with vagabonds doing whatever they can to stay alive during the Great depression - jumping onto freight trains, working at carnivals, often ending up in local jails or at the mercy of sadistic railroad cops, especially if black or Mexican or caught fraternizing with one.  The stories take place in the Rio Grande Valley near where former Lake County sheriff Roy Dominguez grew up.   

 Dominguez family visiting Las Flores, Mexico, June 30, 2017, across the Rio Grande border

The setting of “A Holiday in Texas,” a classic example of social realism, is an outdoor feast on the lawn of the Double-O ranch, complete with beer on ice, that owner Boone Terry threw for his 15 hands upon his return from Argentina.  After bragging about his loyalty and generosity toward his workers, the big blowhard got drunk and revealed his true nature:

  Ah’m the big bull o’ the Big Bend country, tha’s what ah ah’m – bigges’, toughes’ bull in th’ whole state o’ Texas – ever’thin’ – ever’ acre an’ ever’thin’ in it – ever’ man, woman and chil’ – where’d you bastards be if it weren’t fo’ me, eh? Who’d feed such a lousy crew like you, anyhow?  Ever’ goddam man o’ you stinks t’ heaven, ah kin kick the gut out o’ any six o’ you with ‘un hand behin’ me.

Someone called for young Scott Naylor to fetch his guitar and lead them in song.  With his boss listening, “foolish with drink,” Naylor sang these words:

Oh, I love my boss, and my boss loves me

And that is the reason I have no money.

I went to my boss to draw my roll,

He figured me out ten bucks in the hole.

So I’ll sell my outfit as fast as I can,

And I won’t punch cows for no damned man.

When the men pressed Naylor for something livelier, he sang:

Rise up, fields and workshops,

  Rise up, workers, farmers,

To battle! March onward

   March on, world-stormers!

The songs and beer having lulled Big Boone to sleep, Naylor arose, “spat once at the boss’s feet, and walked slowly away from the big white house toward the ranch house, where already the shadows were lengthening toward night.”

Led by Polina Shaganenko, Director of Overseas Communications

for Mariupol Regional Television, a Ukrainian crew a half-dozen strong interviewed me at the Calumet Regional Archives concerning how the loss of industrial jobs has hurt the city of Gary.  They also questioned John Trafny and Mike Olszanski, both former steelworkers and historians.  Polina would translate questions for me and relay my answers to the interviewer. Summarizing factors hastening Gary’s decline, I brought up economic, demographic, and political conditions, including hostility from Republican legislators downstate and federal neglect, and then broached the subject of racism, in particular the irrational anti-Richard Hatcher sentiment by bankers and corporate tycoons who acted as if they wanted America’s first black mayor to fail. President Obama would face the same relentless opposition from racist Republican partisans.  After the interview, as a token of appreciation, Polina gave me a shopping bag containing a miniature wooden easel, a small jar of red paint, a tiny brush, and a gift-wrapped, postcard size scene of the city of Mariupol.

 Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, Mariupol, 2007

Located in southeastern Ukraine, Mariupol is just miles from territory seized by pro-Russian insurgents and still in danger of attack. Approximately 35,000 steelworkers are employed in its largest mill, whose future is in jeopardy. The TV crew, arriving from Chicago (two teenage relatives were wearing Chicago Blackhawk caps), will visit other communities coping with deindustrialization, such as Cleveland, Youngstown, Flint, Detroit, and Pittsburgh.  Olszanski wrote Polina this note: “There are many, many questions I have about what is happening in your country today, and it is extremely difficult here to get reliable, unbiased news on the situation. Perhaps you could recommend some reading? I realize the situation is complicated, and has a historical element that goes very far back. I would like to try to understand it as well as I can.  Thank you and best of luck with everything.  Be safe!”

I’ve been perusing h the oral history papers Steve McShane’s students wrote about duplicate bridge players.  Here’s McKenzie McKnight’s opening paragraph about Dottie Hart, one of my favorite former partners, whom I played with when Terry Bauer was on vacation.

  On a Thursday morning, I pulled up to a duplex to see Dottie Hart bent over watering her flowers in her pajamas and slippers. Smiling to myself, I thought, “I’m glad I’m not the only one that dressed for comfort.”  Dottie kindly invited me into her clean and comfortable home. As we settled into chairs, she was distracted by the scene on the television of James Comey testifying before a Congressional committee. As I set up my phone to record our interview, she smiled over at me and said, “I’m afraid I’m going to miss this. I can’t stand Trump.”

above, Dottie Hart; below Terry Bauer and Jim Carson