Visionaries

“Once meek, and in a perilous path

The just man kept his course along

The vale of death.”

    William Blake, quoted in “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead”

Olga Takarczuk

There could only be one reason why I’d be reading an English translation of Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk’s depressing-sounding detective story “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead” – on the recommendation of good friend Gaard Logan, whose judgment has never led me astray.  Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tokarczuk tells the story through the eyes of an eccentric elderly woman.  Following an introductory quotation by William Blake (above), this is how “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead” begins:

    I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.

Romantic poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) was a true original who many contemporaries thought mad.  A Christian who despised organized religion, a devout husband who believed in free love, a visionary anarchist, as biographer Peter Marshall called him, who claimed to have experienced visions, Blake left posterity many provocative proclamations, such as “The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom” and “Each man must create his own system or else he is a slave to another man.”  One found I in “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead” is “Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with the bricks of religion.”

Dave, James, and I watched my grandson’s former team bowl at Inman’s.  On the way I dropped off the new Steel Shavings at Fred and Diane Chary’s.  We talked about recent developments at IU Northwest, including both archivist Steve McShane and Chancellor Bill Lowe retiring at the end of June.  I told Fred that Lowe was teaching a seminar on Irish history and plans to join the History department after a year’s leave of absence.  At Inman’s Kaiden Horn rolled a 267, just one frame from a perfect game, leaving a ten-pin in the fifth.  His Uncle Tom asked me to pull the winning raffle ticket from a bowl.  Sharon Fisher, who used to bowl in my Hobart Lanes league, greeted me warmly.  Her grandkids Otto and Kaylee were competing against James’s old team.  They both wrestle in middle school.  Kaylee recently defeated a favored Crown Point grappler, and the guy refused to shake her hand as customary and tossed his protective gear across the room.  His coach should have publicly chastised him.  For lunch we stopped at Culver’s, like old times.

 SpongeBob SquarePants

Sunday, Maryland defeated Michigan for a share of the Big Ten title, and seventh seed Valpo bowed to Bradley in the Missouri Valley conference final - the Crusaders’ fourth game and four days; they held their own until the final minutes.  Toni served scallops, pan fried noodles, asparagus, and salad to six of us, including Dave’s family.  Afterwards, we played Telestrations.  Angie guessed that my drawing of SpongeBob SquarePants was a hunk of swiss cheese. My flamingo and snail were equally dismal.  I did nail big toe though, and Russia.  Mercifully, there are no winners nor losers, as the game is played for laughs, of which I provided plenty. James isin the midst of a two-week semester break – that’s why Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette are still galivanted through the Southwest.

Al and Liz at Plaza Blanca north of Santa Fe; on the climb Liz said she was only really scared once

Despite the Coronavirus scare, my Art in Focus talk in Munster on Rock and Roll Music, 1960 drew an overflow crowd, including bridge buddy Mary Kocevar and old friends Gloria Biondi, Vickie Voller, Patricia Gonzales, and Jan Trusty. Director Micah Bornstein always begins with a personal anecdote, this time regarding home repair. When he was a kid, he said, his father was fixing an electric socket and told him to stand nearby with a broom and hit with it to disconnect him with what he was holding in case he got an electric shock. Vic fancied himself a handyman and often would send down to his basement work bench for a tool. Without fail, I’d bring the wrong one.

The crowd got into it as I played two dozen songs mingled with commentary.  I saw folks mouthing the words to numerous songs.  I never used to notice audience reaction but got several big laughs, including the reply by Gary U.S. Bonds to rumors that lascivious words could be heard on the recording “Quarter to Three”: “My mother was at that session!”  Maybe she was the culprit, I suggested. Director Micah Bornstein had the 24 songs all cued on YouTube up in advance without the normal 5-10-second ads.  Positioned near me, he cut them off when I gave the signal.  Some I played all the way through, such as “Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go” by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Walkin’ to New Orleans” by Fats Domino, “Running Scared” by Roy Orbison, and “Stay” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.  

This paragraph got a big reaction:

    Appearing atop the hit parade in the winter of 1959-1960 were such vapid songs as “Venus” by Frankie Avalon, “Lonely Boy” by Paul Anka, “Come Softly to Me” by The Fleetwoods, theme from “A Summer Place” by the Percy Faith Orchestra, “Tall Paul” by Annette Funicello, a “Mickey Mouse Club” graduate, and “Cherry Pie,” the one big hit for Skip and Flip, which was catchy but more pop than Rock and Roll.  Many thought the innocent-sounding “Cherry Pie” lyrics had double meanings of a sexual nature (i.e., “singing in the living room, swinging in the kitchen, Swingin’ in there because she wanted to feed me, so I mixed up the batter and she licked the beater, she’s my cherry pie, tastes so good, makes a grown man cry”). 

Born in New Orleans in 1928, Rock and Roll pioneer Antoine “Fats” Domino began to play the piano and sing in Bourbon Street bars while still unable to buy a drink legally.  He had several Rhythm and Blues hits, including “The Fat Man” (1950)  before soaring to the top of the Billboard Pop charts with “Ain’t That a Shame” in 1956.  He followed with soulful versions of the old standards “My Blue Heaven” and “Blueberry Hill.” In 1960 “Walking to New Orleans” and “My Girl Josephine” were huge hits. I noted:

     In high school I had all his records I could get my hands onto and came across some rare Oldies at a Montgomeryville PA flea market. When Fats Domino performed on the road, he’d take his band with him unlike many Rock and Roll stars.  It featured Dave Bartholomew who co-wrote many of his songs and several saxophonists, a drummer, and a bassist.  Region promoter Henry Farag, who booked them into the Star Plaza in Merrillville, told me that Fats would also take soul food in and cook meals for the band (and Henry). 

At Merrillville’s Star Plaza a quarter-century ago, Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon was urging without much luck his audience of mostly seniors to get up and dance. From Revere, Massachusetts, Cannon (real name Frederick Picariello) grew up idolizing Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard.  His first hit was “Tallahassee Lassie” followed in 1960 by “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” Recording on Swan Records , a label Dick Clark had a financial interest in, he appeared on American Bandstand a record 110 times.  One admirer wrote: “Freddy ‘Boom Boom’ Cannon was a true believer, a rocker to the bone.  Freddy Cannon made great noisy rock and roll records infused with a giant drum beat that was an automatic invitation to shake it on down anyplace there was a spot to dance.”  His biggest hit was “Palisades Park” (1962). Lesser known Freddy Cannon songs include “Transister Sister” and “Abigail Beecher (She’s Our History teacher)”. Lyrics went:

All the kids are just crazy about her
Central High would be a drag without her
She knows her history from A to Z
She'd teach a monkey the WatusiWhoa, it's Abigail Beecher Our history teacher, Whoa

“Prince of Soul” Sam Cooke started out as a child with a Chicago gospel group, the Highway QCs, and at age 20 joined the Soul Stirrers.  At live concerts young Sam Cooke stirred young female admirers in ways that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with his sex appeal.  As a solo artist, between 1957 and 1964 Sam Cooke had a 30 U.S. top 40 hits that included “You Send Me,” “Cupid,” “Wonderful World,” “Chain Gang” (in 1960), and many more.  After playing “Chain gang” I noted that after Reconstruction many Southern states forced black men arrested on false or trivial charges to labor on chain gangs where life expectancy was less than two years. The hits kept coming for Cooke until he was fatally shot at age 33 under suspicious circumstances by the manager of a motel where he had taken a young woman with a shady past whom the hotel manager may have been in cahoots with.  Cooke’s song “A Change Is Gonna Come” would become one of the anthems of the civil rights movement.

The 1960 Billboard Top 40 charts also included crooners such as Johnny Mathis, folk singers such as Harry Belafonte, the Highwaymen, and the Kingston Trio, and instrumentals by the Ventures, Duane Eddy, and Floyd Kramer (“Raunchy” by Sun Records saxophonist Bill Justis, was banned from some radio stations even though it contained no words).  Country artists who crossed over into Rock and Roll, included Brenda Lee, Charlie Rich, and the Everly Brothers (“Bird Dog,” “Wake Up Little Susie”), whose 1960 hits included “Cathy’s Clown” and “When Will I Be Loved?”   At Ravinia we and the Hagelbergs saw the Everly Brothers open for the Beach Boys, whom they very much influenced.  Although rumor was that Don and Phil Everly couldn’t stand one another, they made beautiful harmonies and sang songs that spoke to teenagers. 1960 pop music, unlike today, embodied many different genres.  Young people were exposed to all types of music, including novelty songs like “Along Came Jones” by the Coasters and “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles, whose lyrics are still in the head of many aging rockers: “He got a chauffeur that’s a genuine dinosaur, And he can knuckle your head before you count to four.”  After playing “Alley Oop” but cutting it short to a few groans, I mentioned that after playing rock and roll hits in the Fifties college class, the only similar reaction I got cutting them short was “The Chipmunk Song” by Alvin and the Chipmunks.  Go figure.

Ending with “The Twist, to which I danced with Gloria, Vickie, her husband Dan, and a woman named Isabel (“Izzie,” she confided), I noted:

    Although Hank Ballard’s version of “The Twist” failed to become a hit, young people began dancing versions of the twist, often solo rather than connected to a partner.  Quick to notice the new trend, Dick Clark convinced Cameo Records to record “The Twist” by an ex-chicken plucker named Ernest Evans, whom Clark renamed Chubby Checker (a takeoff on the name Fats Domino).  It sounded so like the original that when Hank Ballard first heard it, he thought it was his.  

    In “Soul on Ice” black militant Eldridge Cleaver wrote: “It was Chubby Checker’s mission, bearing “The Twist” as good news. To teach the whites, whom history had taught to forget, how to shake their asses again.”

    “The Twist” became the most influential song of 1960, shaking rock and roll from its doldrums. During the next few years, one critic wrote, “the music would revitalize itself with dance crazes, surf and girl-group records, the British invasion, and soul music.  The old sounds were changing, but Rock and Roll appeared stronger than ever.”

At Bucknell when  bussing dishes at Women’s Cafeteria after meals, the women would put on a Bob Dylan album and guys would replace it with Chubby Checker.  The record player battle was played out on many occasions. 

 

I received a hearty round of applause, and Art in Focus director Micah Bornstein invited me to return next year.  Afterwards, East Chicago Washington Class of 1960 graduate Barbara Whittaker, a cheerleader for the state champion basketball team, asked if I could speak at her sixtieth reunion and Vickie wants me to reprise the talk to her Tri Kappa group. We’ll see. John Cain, one of more than a half-dozen men in the audience (a rarity) invited me to lunch.

Educated

“I believe, finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience: that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing,” John Dewey

At bridge in Valpo Vickie Voller and I finished in a tie for first with Dee Browne and Sharon Snyder.  Opponent Jim Bell sometimes bangs on the table when he’s uncertain what to bid.  Vickie jokingly asked if he was signaling to partner Fred Green.  On the final hand Fred opened 4 Diamonds; after two passes I bid 4 Hearts.  Jim raised to 5 Diamonds and I doubled.  We set them 2 vulnerable for 500 points and high board.

 Tara Westover at Cambridge U., 2018

Lila Cohen loaned me Tara Westover’s “Educated: A Memoir,” a 2016 best-seller that she had reported on at her AAUW book club. It’s a harrowing coming-of-age account of breaking away from Mormon survivalists in southeastern Idaho and, specifically, a paranoid, despotic father preparing for the end of the world, who kept Tara from attending school or seeking medical help when needed.  New York Times reviewer Alec MacGillis wrote:

    She learned to read from the Bible, the Book of Mormon and the speeches of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The only science book in the house was for young children, full of glossy illustrations. The bulk of her time was spent helping her parents at work. Barely into her teens, Westover graduated from helping her mom mix remedies and birth babies to sorting scrap with her dad, who had the unnerving habit of inadvertently hitting her with pieces he’d tossed.

In the Prologue Westover introduces herself:

    I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn.  The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt.  The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling.  On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping.  I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.  We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom.

Emboldened by the example of a brother, who read whatever books he could lay his hands on and left for college, Tara did well enough on an ACT test to be admitted to Brigham Young at age 16.  MacGillis wrote:

    There, she is shocked by the profane habits of her classmates, like the roommate who wears pink plush pajamas with “Juicy” emblazoned on the rear, and in turn shocks her classmates with her ignorance, never more so than when she asks blithely in art history class what the Holocaust was. (Other new discoveries for her: Napoleon, Martin Luther King Jr., the fact that Europe is not a country.) Such excruciating moments do not keep professors from recognizing her talent and voracious hunger to learn; soon enough, she’s off to a fellowship at Cambridge University, where a renowned professor — a Holocaust expert, no less — can’t help exclaiming when he meets her: “How marvelous. It’s as if I’ve stepped into Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion.’”

 The 1913 George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion was the inspiration for My Fair Lady. 

Miller's Sullivan St. lakefront illustrating beach erosion and mild winter, by Paul Kaczocha

Bob Seeger’s “Roll Me Away” came on the car radio and I just had to turn the volume way up and sing along.  On the surface it’s such a celebratory “on the road” anthem that the wistful final verse, not unusual in Seeger compositions, always comes as a sobering reality:

I'm gonna roll me away tonight
Gotta keep rollin', gotta keep ridin'
Keep searchin' till I find what's right
And as the sunset faded I spoke
To the faintest first starlight
And I said next time
Next time
We'll get it right

I attended Valparaiso University professor Allison Schuette’s interactive workshop at IUN sponsored by the Center for Urban and Regional Excellence (CURE) and titled “Flight Paths: Mapping our Changing Neighborhoods.”  Allison acknowledged my participation in the Indiana Humanities project and since the featured interactive map was on Gary’s Tolleston neighborhood, she passed out a brief history of Tolleston that I had written for Flight Paths. Allison played excerpts of interviews with three people who grew up in Tolleston.  One man described the ethnic mix prior to the 1960s as a blend of Slovak, Polish, Czech, and German.  His father had black friends; when he drafted Jimmy Scott, a black kid, for his Little League team, people phoned to complain and called him a “nigger lover.”  He recalled:

    Realtors would come into a neighborhood, say to the whites, “Better move now while your property is still worth something because when this neighborhood starts changing, property values will decrease and you’ll lose out on a lot of money.” And that eventually became illegal, but for quite a while these white folks just felt, “Well, I’d better do as they say and turn my house over to the realtor and get rid of it while I move elsewhere.”

    So many people just heard about these problems or these issues; they didn’t really experience them. They were watching television, seeing all kinds of marches and rebellions across the country, and they just got the impression that the black culture was antisocial, and they were a people that just didn’t understand the needs of the white person.

    When we watched on television the funeral of Martin Luther King, my uncles in particular would say, “Oh, man, we can’t have this, what is going on here? What’s happening to our society?” All they saw was the violence. They did not see the peace. They did not see the change. And the violence, they thought, was going to be widespread. It was going to come into Gary.

And I guess the whole idea of being in the same neighborhood, in the same church, in the same organization with black people was just something that they could not understand or tolerate.

When Karen Freeman-Wilson’s parents moved to Tolleston, it was rapidly becoming a black neighborhood, due to white flight.  Her father was a steelworker and her mother worked for Neighborhood Settlement House, which became Gary Neighborhood Services.  The building housed recent migrants from the South and helped integrate them into the community.  It also offered child day care and activities for teenagers and seniors. Freeman-Wilson recalled:

  I was a 4-H member there. We had a very vibrant program. I learned how to cook and to sew.  I can probably still do a pretty good hem with a sewing machine, and I still slipstitch.  We skated on a floor that was really wobbly, but it made you a good skater.  When you went to a real nice rink, you were a pro because if you could make it through the wobbles and the buckles in the floor at the neighborhood House, you could skate anywhere.

Councilwoman Mary Brown praised the resilience of Tolleston residents:

Just look around at people in my community. Retired doctors, retired teachers, retired professionals who have stayed. They’ve continued to pay taxes and pay into the city because they still believe that we can come back. They believe in the city and believe that it can work.

To illustrate Tolleston’s rapid racial transformation, Allison opened a section on St. John’s Lutheran Church, which predated the Gary’s founding by a half-century.  In 1962 Reverend Norman Brandt became pastor and visited the homes of new African-American residents, urging them to come to St. John’s.  A succession of church confirmation photos dramatically illustrated the rapid transition from all-white to all-black.  Reverend Brandt founded an alternative school in Glen Park that Phil and Dave attended for six years.  Rebecca Brandt was a classmate, as were good friends Clark and Gloria Metz’s girls.

(left; below, confirmation classes: 1962, 1964 & 1974) 

The large crowd included IUN colleagues Joseph Gomeztagle, Kathy Arfken, Lanette Mullin-Gonzales, Chris Young (with son Robert), Ellen Szarleta, Suzanne Green, Sue Zinner (with students from her Ethics class, including Munster clerk/treasurer Wendy Mis), Kay Westhues (from IU South Bend), and people from the community.  Allison posed questions that prompted small group discussions.  When the entire group shared insights, I remained quiet except to note the redlining by banks and government agencies not only prevented minorities from owning homes but also discriminated against black entrepreneurs.  African Americans in the audience shared experiences of growing up in segregated neighborhoods and encountering institutional racism.

Seeking more information about St. John’s Lutheran Church on Google led me to Michelle McGill-Vargas’s website, where I was cited in an article about Gary during the Prohibition era.  McGill-Vargas wrote:

    James Lane’s City of the Century led me to real-life gangster Gasperi (or Gaspari) Monti who ruled the city’s Little Italy section until his violent death in 1923. According to local newspaper reports, Monti is best known as the government’s star witness in a corruption case against more than sixty judges, prosecutors, policemen, and even then-Gary mayor Roswell Johnson, all for violating Prohibition laws. At the time, the Gary Police Department had a special enforcement arm called the Sponge Squad that arrested bootleggers, and then would sell liquor confiscated in the arrests to line their pockets and the pockets of everyone else up the law enforcement chain in Lake County. Monti made a deal with federal prosecutors to expose the corruption, but was gunned down in broad daylight by two unknown assailants on March 13, 1923, just days before he was scheduled to testify.

    Monti was no stranger to violence and attempts on his life. In 1922, he’d been shot through the mouth by a man who’d shot him a year prior. He owned and operated the Black and Tan Club in the 1700 block of Adams Street where shooting deaths were commonplace. Even Monti’s wife, Mary, was into the rackets. After her husband was killed, police found illegal liquor and several pounds of explosives in her home.

So-called “Black and Tan” establishments were saloons where African-American and Caucasian clientele intermingled. Scandalous to blue-blood Northsiders, the Gary “dive” was known for “debauched” activities such as interracial dancing and prostitution.

On a mute TV screen at Hobart Lanes was an ad for Lawless Auto Repair in Valpo.  Love the name.  Terry Kegebein will be attending a sixth family funeral within a year.  Since the price of obits in local newspapers has skyrocketed, many only use funeral home websites.  My great-aunt Ida Gordon, who lived with us when I was growing up, subscribed to the Easton (PA) Express for the obits about people she may have known.  I scan obits for personages of local significance or that illustrate Gary’s former ethnic diversity.  For example, from February 20 obits in the NWI Times I learned that Alice Geraldine Kiefer, 82, worked at USS Gary Sheet and Tin, met husband Carl at the Midway Ballroom, and the two were married at Holy Angels.  Robert Joseph, 96, played tackle for Gary Emerson and at IU, was a member of the 1945 Big Ten champions, and met wife Mabel at Calumet High School, where he taught for many years and founded its football team.  Here’s an excerpt from the obit for Mihailo Kostur, 77, like Robert Joseph a Gary Emerson grad:

    Mihailo was born in Vrlika Dalmatia Croatia.  He immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 15.  He worked as an operator for Arcelor Mittal for37 years. Mihailo enjoyed being outdoors, gardening playing bocce ball, many different card games, making homemade wine following Serbian traditions, and spending time with his grandchildren. Mihailo was a member of St. Elijah Cathedral in Merrillville as well as the Chetnik organization.  He was preceded in death by parents Bozo and Andja Kostur.

Historian Jerry Pierce found a humorous cartoon on Facebook, and Ray Gapinski posted photos of an abandoned asylum near Terre Haute. Larry Bean, who like wife Cindy pseeks out historic ruins, responded, “Looks like it’s worth the trip.”

Consumer Counterculture

    “The natural foods movement launched many citizens into activism for nutritional equity, food workers’ rights, and sustainable agriculture and contributed to the neoliberal definition of the marketplace as a force for social justice and self-fulfillment.” Maria McGrath

 Maria McGrath                                                                          Carol Flinders

In the introductory chapter to “Food for Dissent: Natural Foods and the Consumer Counterculture Since the 1960s,” titled “The Gathering Storm: Baby Boomers and Their Discontent,” historian Maria McGrath profiles Carol Flinders, co-author of “Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition” (1976).  In 1967, married with a two-year-old daughter and living in Berkeley, California, Flinders met future collaborator Laurel Robertson at an antiwar activity.  After involvement in encounter groups, potting, and eastern meditation, she reconnected with Robertson and joined the Food Conspiracy, a natural foods buying club.  Sharing Beat poet Alan Ginsberg’s contempt for “Supermarket America” as a symbol of capitalist America’s unchecked excesses and civic irresponsibility. Flinders, McGrath concludes, found community and purpose.  Nourishing the body with non-processed foods, she believed, had the potential to transform one’s life and help save the planet.  

 Selma Miriam and Noel Furie at Bloodroot Restaurant

McGrath, daughter of Upper Dublin High School classmate Susan Floyd, quotes hippie Raymond Mungo, author of “Total Loss Farm” (1970) responding to critics who claimed he had retreated from political action by moving to a Vermont commune: “We are saving the world.”  In other words, the personal is political, a rallying cry of student activists, feminists, queers, and natural foods advocates.  During the 1970s, McGrath concluded, cultural nonconformists attempted to create the markets services, and societies that matched their dreams for a better world in the pursuit of “right livelihood.”  One example, which Maria talked about at the Oral History Association conference in Montreal last year, is the vegan restaurant and bookstore Bloodroot Collective in Bridgeport, Connecticut, whose cookbooks proclaimed that carnivorous people were part of a “Blood culture” while vegetarians honored the cycles of nature. Lesbian owners Selma Miriam and Noel Furie are still keeping the faith 42 years after Bloodroot’s debut.

Justin Henry Miller, "Wannabe Satyr";     James Deeb, "Pyles Regiment" 

Toni and I attended John Cain’s annual Holiday Reading, “Don We Now Our Gay Apparel,” at Munster Center for the Arts.  Beforehand, we enjoyed the gallery exhibit “Things that go bump in the night,” whose paintings and sculptures had a ghostly Halloween flavor.   We ran into numerous Miller friends, including Karren Lee and Judy Ayers.  Elaine Spicer introduced me to folklorist Sue Eleuterio, who directs Goucher College’s graduate virtual writing center and is a consultant with the American Folklore Society.  She was familiar with my Gary books.  Last year Sue took part in a Walk the Line protest against oil pipelines running through residential neighborhoods in Griffith, Hammond, and East Chicago.   

 Susan Eleuterio with Vietnam Vets exhibit

The meal was vegetarian, featuring tomato bisque, quiche, fruit, rolls, salad, and pumpkin mousse.  It was nutritious, without processed foods so far as I could tell, and filling without leaving you stuffed like often the case at such functions. At the IUN table I talked to Mark Hoyert about meeting fellow Marylander Jim Muldoon.  Mark told me he was a History major about 10 years after I graduated, and that his favorite professor was military historian Gordon Prange, author of the popular account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and a consultant on the set of the movie. David Klamen asked about the rumor that the Jackson 5 had once lost a talent show at IUN.  It happened at Gary Roosevelt, I told him, when audience applause for a skit by high school jocks exceeded their ovation.  Papa Joe Jackson supposedly was so angry he kept the brothers up all night rehearsing.    

A somewhat embarrassed Art in Focus director Micah Bornstein, adorned with angel wings and halo, introduced John Cain and Jim West, who read a humorous 1950s account of a kid watching “The Lawrence Welk Show” in his pajamas with a cynical father and chain-smoking grandmother followed by one about a New York City family celebrating both Hanakkah and Christmas.  Last year, at his twenty-fifth Holiday Reading, John indicated it might be his finale. I’m glad he reconsidered; with some 300 people in attendance, it remains a popular and profitable affair. Toni and I find Cain to be charming, and by now he knows both of us by name.

 Marcia Carson on left

At bridge Jim and Marcia Carson were wearing Red for Ed Action t-shirts, having been among the 15,000 demonstrators assembling earlier outside the Indianapolis statehouse. For many years Marcia taught Art, a program that has suffered from draconian budgets and policies forcing educators to concentrate on preparing students for standardized exams to the neglect of cultural enrichment.  Indiana State Teachers Association president Keith Gambill told the crowd, “To the legislators in the statehouse today we say pencils down, time’s up.” Average pay for Indiana teachers is $51,000, less even than in most Deep South states.  Speakers also blasted a recent bill requiring teachers to complete 15-hour “externships” free of charge with local businesses as a condition of having licenses renewed. At Banta Center Charlie Halberstadt and I finished second to Chuck and Marcy Tomes by a single percentage point.  In out three hands head-to-head we played them pretty much to a draw.

Charlotte and Terry Kegebein

In bowling the Electrical Engineers took all 3 games from Portage Four despite having to spot them 28 pins.  Back from Georgia because his wife Charlotte is in the hospital, Terry Kegebein rolled a 530 series and after a 220-game quipped that he was still not bowling his weight.  Leading off, Joe Piunti rolled a 180 and won the league pot in game 2 for most pins over average.  Despite a sore shoulder I bowled 20 pins over average opposite Neda Gonzalez, who carried a 146 average.  Each game we were virtually neck and neck.

For IU’s Bicentennial oral history project, I interviewed IUN Dean of Health and Human Services Patrick Bankston, who will be retiring after 42 years of service to the university.  He grew up in a community near Rochester, New York, and majored in Biology at Hobart College before earning a PhD at the University of Chicago and teaching for five years at Hahnemann Medical College.  Bankston was proud of collaborating on a research paper with Nobel Laureate George Palade. When he was hired as a professor of anatomy and cell biology, only one year of medical school was available on the Gary campus. Classes took place in World War II “temporary” buildings that endured into the twenty-first century.  Bankston was instrumental in expanding the program to all four years and, more recently, launching an initiative that allowed graduates to take part in residency programs at area institutions. Among his heroes were predecessor Dr. Panayotis Iatridis, Congressman Peter Visclosky, Senator Richard Lugar, Indiana legislator Charlie Brown (who calls him “my brother from a different mother”), and his wife of 25 years Dr. Glyn Porter, an IU School of Medicine graduate whom he has known for 40 years.  “I guess she knew what she was getting into,” I quipped, as we concluded the productive 70-minute interview.

After the interview Bankston told me about recently attending a Muslim wedding of two former IU medical school graduates.  Years earlier, the Pakistani father of the bride brought her to meet with him while she was still in high school  in order to learn what was needed to become a doctor. Pat joked about his political career, “unsullied” by ever winning an election.  He was appointed to finish out the term of a Porter County commissioner and during his brief tenure found outside funding to replace a dangerous, century-old bridge in Union Township from the state and the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission (NIRPC).  During the ensuing election his opponent falsely claimed the project wasted local taxpayers’ money.  As Media Production Specialist Samantha Gauer, who taped the 70-minute session, was leaving, Pat said he hoped he didn’t bore her.  “No, I learned a lot,”  she replied.

Samantha Gauer

Valparaiso University professor Liz Wuerffel’s podcast students signed a “Thank You”card with expressions of gratitude for my guest appearance.  Noah wrote: “Keep history alive.”  Liz added: “I appreciate that you were willing to share your [interviewing] mistakes that helped you be a better oral historian and recorder, too.  Much appreciated!”  

Felicia Childress

Wuerffel’s Welcome Initiative co-founder Allison Schuette recently interviewed 101-year-old Felicia Childress, who moved to Gary from St. Louis during World War II.  Born prematurely in the house of her grandfather, a Baptist minister, she and a twin brother each weighed less than three pounds and were not expected to live. She knew the wife of Joseph Chapman, hired to head up Gary’s Urban League chapter, and initially came to help the Chapmans get settled.  Joe Chapman would play a key role in mediating the 1945-46 Froebel School Strike.  Childress recalled:

   When we came into Gary, we were coming up 5th Avenue, and I was amazed. I looked out the car window and there was tumbleweed blowing down the streets. I said, “This looks like the Wild West.” I could see sand hills between buildings and said, “It’s so flat.” Nobody had a house over two stories. I found out that everyone wanted to come to Gary because there was a mill. All the way down Broadway we could see the gates to the mill and realized that was why people came to Gary. In the old days, the mill would take the huge, molten steel and dump it directly into the lake. These were the days before EPA, and when that hot steel hit the water, Uh-whump! - it was so loud you could hear it past the borders of Gary. I cringed and said, “I don’t like it.”  But I’ll tell you what I did like. I learned about the South Shore.  I could relate to the South Shore because it looked so much like the streetcars in St. Louis. When I got on that South Shore, I looked out the window and there were trees. And then past that canal, you could see pheasants with beautiful feathers.  You could see the colors of their feathers as they would be flying through the trees. But they were soon gone, I think because whatever they were throwing into the mill was so frightening, and so they left. 

At Chesterton library I came across the Goo Goo Dolls “Miracle Pill” and found the 2019 CD irresistible.  Formed in Buffalo some 33 years ago, the band, featuring Johnny Rzeznik and Robby Takac, enjoyed two smash hits,“Iris” and “Slide,” in the late 1990s from the album “Dizzy Up the Girl” and then pretty much dropped out of the spotlight. The track “Autumn Leaves” differs from the 1945 Johnny Mercer standard, covered by countless crooners including Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Robert Goulet, Johnny Mathis and more recently, Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton, and Bob Dylan. An instrumental version by pianist Roger Williams became a number one hit in 1955. The Goo Goo Dolls “Autumn Leaves” contains these lines:

Life is change, we move on

And where you go,

I hope the summer goes along.

In my CD collection, lo and behold, was a nearly forgotten 1993 Sting album, "Ten Summoner’s Tales.”  Most titles were unfamiliar and fun to discover, and to my delight were the tracks “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You” and “Fields of Gold.”  Here are the latter's bridge lyrics:

        I never made promises lightly

        And there have been some that I've broken

        But I swear in the days still left

        We'll walk in fields of gold