Mayor Pete

“The function of education is to teach us how to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of education.”  Martin Luther King

photo by April Lidinsky

South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg officially announced his candidacy for President.  On the strength primarily of his brilliant appearances on network news shows, the openly gay former Rhodes scholar and Afghanistan war veteran has polled third among the crowded field of Democratic hopefuls in both Iowa and New Hampshire, behind only septuagenarians Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.  On MSNBC Joe Scarborough asked Buttegieg to describe himself in a single word; “Millennial,”the 38 year-old replied.  A decade ago, Robert Blaszkiewicz, then working for the NWI Times, encountered him when he ran for state treasurer.  Robert told me to keep an eye of him, that he was really impressive and heading places.  Tom and Darcey Wade have read his book “Shortest Way Home,” and son Brady has been working for him without pay. Tom displayed lawn signs he hopes to distribute to supporters. Throwing his hat in the ring at a refurbished complex formerly owned by Studebaker Corporation before an overflow crowd, Buttigieg embraced his husband Chasten and gave him a kiss.  Tears flowed freely.

In “Mayor Pete has caught Republicans’ attention” Times columnist Brian Howery wrote that Vice President Mike Pence, pouncing on a moving statement Buttigieg made at a LGBT Victory Fund brunch, shamefully accused him of breaking a pledge to run a civil campaign and attacking the former Hoosier governor’s Christian values.  Poppycock!  Addressing his sexual orientation, Buttigieg said, “It’s hard to face the truth that there were times in my life that, if you had shown me exactly what is was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife.  If you had offered me a pill to make me straight, I’d have swallowed it before you had time to give me a cup of water.”  Then he added: “That’s the thing that I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: that if you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me, your problem, sir, is with my Creator.”    

Brian Howery’s column cited these observations by Andrew Sullivan of New York magazine about the 2020 election, emphasizing the differences between Buttigieg and the White House incumbent:

 Trump would be the oldest president in history; Buttigieg would be the youngest at 39.  Trump landed in politics via his money and celebrity after years in the limelight; Buttigieg is the mayor of a mid-size midwestern town, unknown until a few weeks ago.  Trump is a pathological, malevolent narcissist from New York, breaking all sorts of norms.  Buttigieg is a modest, reasonable pragmatist, and a near parody of normality.  Trump thrives on a retro heterosexual persona; Buttigieg appears to be a rather conservative, married homosexual.  Trump is a coarad and a draft dodger; Butiegieg served his country. Trump does not read; Buttigieg does.  Trump’s genius is demonic demagoguery.  Buttigieg’s gig is careful reasoning.  Trump is a pagan; Buttigieg is a Christian.  Trump vandalizes government; Buttigieg nurtures it. To put it simply, Mayor Peter seems almost designed to expose everything that makes the country tired of Trump.

Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal, believing the political system is at a crossroads, put it this way: “As different as the two men are in most every way, Candidate Buttigieg might not exist without the example of President Trump, who shattered expectations and the old paradigms in 2016.”My dream ticket for 2020 include Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Pete, with whomever prevails in the primaries choosing the other as running mate.

Adra Young and Hobart H.S. students Brandon Marciniak and Tyler Schultz; photos by Kyle Telechan

Big doings at IU Northwest over the weekend.  Several motivational speakers appeared at a Youth Violence and Drug Prevention conference, including Indiana Parenting Institute COO Jena Bellezza and Northwest Indiana Heath Department Cooperative tobacco prevention coordinator Cynthia Sampson. Adra Young’s keynote address linked bullying and substance abuse.

Leaving John Will Anderson Library Friday afternoon, I noticed a job fair in progress involving area schools.  In the lobby were tables for Merrillville, Gary’s 21st Charter School (located across thestreet from the ruins of City Methodist Church), and others.  A greeter directed me to the East Chicago Central table in the conference center. Two comely administrators, who introduced themselves as Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Hogan, greeted me.  Both knew son Dave and raved about what a great, caring teacher he is. Mrs. Hogan, now a vice principal, is an IUN grad whom Dave mentored when she was in the UTEP program.  She recalled taking a course from me and reading a Steel Shavings article about a Region resident overcoming numerous obstacles.  Her son Carrington Frank is presently a student of Dave’s.  I gave both copies of the latest Shavingsand directed them to a section titled “Twin City” that contained photos of Dave with the E.C. Central  girls tennis team, league champs with a 10-2 record.  Also in that section were photos of NBA basketball player E’Twuan Moore, a Central grad, putting on a summer basketball camp.  Along with Kawaan Short and Angel Garcia, Moore was part of the 2007 state championship team coached by Pete Trgovich that defeated Mr. Basketball Eric Gordon and North Central, 87-83, in the exciting final.

 Lorrell D. Kilpatrick

IUN Minority Studies professor Raoul Contreras and Rene Nunez of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies hosted a two-day Participatory Democracy conference centering on the theme “Democracy is in the Streets.”  I missed the Friday evening events but attended a Saturday workshop titled “Active resistance of racial and social injustice” chaired by Dr. Patricia Ann Hicks and featuring Lorrell D. Kilpatrick, adjunct professor of Sociology and co-organizer of the Gary chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM).  On Twitter Kilpatrick describes herself as a Marxist Black feminist, environmentalist, and disability rights advocate.  Kilpatrick asked the several dozen participants their initial impression of Black Lives Matter.  Most decried police brutality but were less certain about such BLM tactics as stopping traffic.  When a person identified himself as half white, half black, Patricia Hicks explained that categories of race are meaningless and that we all share common ancestors. 

Kilpatrick made clear she didn’t want excessive speech-making or participants talking more than once until everyone had a chance to make their views known. That didn’t sit well with three men, one of whom spent ten minutes merely introducing himself as , among other things, an agent who booked strippers for the “Jerry Springer Show.”  He argued that activists should be addressing black-on-black crime rather than the police.  A second pontificator excoriated the justice system; a third claimed Moors were the first Americans and that pre-Columbian tribes deserved their land back.  While all may have had some valid points, Lorrell wisely did not let allow them to take over the agenda. 

Yu Zhang, second from left

During the workshop and at lunch I sat with Yu Zhang, a personable IUN actuarial science grad student who is taking a class with Raoul Contreras.  She’s been in the U.S. 13 years, speaks perfect English, has a three-year-old, and works at Methodist Hospital, both in Merrillville and Gary. She had not heard of Cubs pitcher Yu Darvish and told me that Yu can be either a male or female name depending on the pronunciation and inflection.  Googling her name, I discovered that she was part of a team, including Steven Rynne, Anthony Zuccolo, Jacob Jakubowicz, and Jillian Milicki, that competed last year in an international competition and out of 70 universities worldwide was the only U.S. team to reach the finals.  They called themselves the Redhawk (Pi)rates.

Angie and Becca; in audience Toni and Beth (right), Tamiya, Dave, Jimbo (below) 

At Chesterton H.S. Becca sang Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” at the Duneland Exchange Club Talent Show.  Since we skipped the primary and junior divisions, the program was a decent length and the dozen acts quite good, especially granddaughter Becca (it goes without saying).  My two other favorites were a dance group featuring Ellery Brunt, Barbara Holslaw (rhymes with Cole slaw), and Mackenzie Simmons performing to Lady Gaga’s “Shallow” and Ally Christian playing guitar and singing to “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones with drummer Colin Campbell accompanying.  Winner of the ACE (Accepting the Challenge of Excellence) Award was Elias Hanna, a Syrian immigrant who knew very little English when he started at Chesterton as a freshman.  By senior year he was making straight A’s in mostly honors courses and preparing to go to Icollegeand major in pre-med.  Coming up from Fishers, Beth brought me a delicious blueberry pie as a belated birthday present.  After the show, Dave and Tamiya Towns dropped in for pie and in Tamiya’s case Toni’s beef stew, which she had enjoyed at dinner.  Toni gave her a bowl to take home.

above, Elias Hanna; below, Guetano Givens on left at Ball State

While Mayor Pete’s candidacy was front page news, the Times Forum section contained a column by IUN Chancellor William J. Lowe touting the fiftieth anniversary of IUN’s Minority Studies program and the Black Student Union (BSU) members, including Jerry Samuels, whose pressure helped bring it about.  He cited present BSU member Guetano Givens, who persevered against numerous obstacles to receive a degree after six years.  In October 2017, Givens attended a Diversity Research Seminar at Ball State, where the keynote speaker, Angela Davis, bemoaned the nation’s unjust prison system. Last year Givens was with a group that visited Atlanta on the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

I spent a snowy Sunday afternoon watching the thrilling climax to the Masters tournament.  Tiger Woods entered the final round two strokes behind Italian Francesco Molinari and caught him when Molinari put a tee shot in the water and settled for a double bogie.  Another half-dozen players were within a stoke of the lead, including reining PGA champ Brooks Koepka.  The issue was in doubt until Tiger putted to within inches of the cup on the eighteenth green.  Listening to the crowd roar “Tiger, Tiger, Tiger”and watching him embrace his two kids and Thai mother was unbelievably emotional.  Afterwards, Koepka and several others who grew up idolizing Tiger waited to offer their congratulations.

Dean Bottorff posted these kind words on Facebook:

  Thanks to James Lane for the shout-out in the new edition of Steel Shavings. For those who may not know, Steel Shavingsis a publication by Indiana University that records the daily lives of those living in Northwest Indiana. Jim, ever the historian, publishes Steel Shavings that will be an invaluable reference for future historians who will want to understand the rise of America's industrial heartland cities such as Gary, IN, and the issues such places faced in the 21st Century. Unlike most historical references Steel Shavings will provide future historians an intimate view of everyday life of ordinary people. So if anyone in the 25th Century wants to know anything about Ann Bottorff’s role in a scavenger hunt, this is where he or she will find it. My personal thanks goes out to Jim for publishing this picture of me.

Arriving early for book club at Gino’s, I ordered an APA on draft and Jimmy the owner placed a plate of delicious mushrooms in front of me.  On TV was coverage on the 850-year-old Notre Dame Cathedral ablaze, with its iconic spire collapsing.  With a stone foundation all indications are that it will be restored eventually.  Bar mates were speculating whether it was a terrorist act.  

 Barbara Wisdom and Rock Fraire

Barbara Wisdom’s excellent book club presentation on “A Slave in the White House” was succinct and thought-provoking.  We learned that it was Paul Jennings, not Dolley Madison, who rescued the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington before the British sacked the White House during the War of 1812 and that Dolley gave the diminutive fourth president piggy back rides.  All agreed that Dolley was heartless toward her slaves, even selling her faithful mistress of 30 years to enable her spendthrift son to buy a new suit.  At the conclusion of the talk I declared that as a descendant of Harriet Lane, I now proclaim her the best First Lady of the nineteenth century.  Learning I was related to President James Buchanan, Jim Pratt suggested I report on a book about him.  “There’s only one,”Brian Barnes quipped.

Women's Place

“When the working day is done

Oh, girls they wanna have fun”

         Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”

In 1983 Cyndi Lauper, now 66 ,burst onto the American music scene with a debut solo album, “She’s So Unusual,” that contained four top-five hits, “Time after Time,” “She Bop,” “All Through the Night,” and “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” “She Bob” gained notoriety from mention of “Blue Boy,” a gay porn magazine, and contained these lyrics:

Hey, hey they say I better get a chaperon
Because I can't stop messin' with the danger zone
Hey, I won't worry, and I won't fret
Ain't no law against it yet, oh she bop, she bop

An advocate for LGBT rights, Lauper won a Tony Award in 2013 for composing the score for “Kinky Boots,” which Toni and I enjoyed on stage in Chicago.

Grand Rapids, MI, was the latest venue for Trump’s rant-fest, as he baselessly claimed total exoneration of collusion charges and threatened to close the Mexican border totally due to yet another alleged caravan of immigrants from Central America seeking asylum.  Knowing no Lanes would be attending, I was curious when I received a jpeg from Alissa titled Trump rally.  She wrote: “So many hateful idiots in red hats out today. But proud so see the resistance is strong in Michigan.”  One sign greeting Trump read, “Keep your hate outta my state.”

For at least a hundred years American popular culture has been youth-oriented. During the 1920s high school girls emulated the Flappers and “It Girl” starlets in films and popular magazines. When women entered the work force in large numbers during wartime, government propaganda featured the slogan “For the Duration,” a double-edged message that implied they’d give up their jobs and become housewives once the war was won. Public health officials worried about unsupervised “latch Key” kids.  Teenage girls readily found work in pool halls, greasy spoon restaurants, and bowling alleys where  men, their elders feared, were liable to prey on them. According to William K. Klingaman’s “The Darkest Year: The American Home Front, 1941-1942,” V-Girls (Victory Girls) as young as 12 dressed to look older and sought excitement from men in uniform.  After  ajourney across America, British-born observer Alistair Cook, reportedon the V-Girl phenomenonin “The American Home Front: 1941–1942”:

   To their families they are often known as high-spirited daughters full of the joy of life.  To the soldiers they are  known as broilers, dishes, bed-bunnies, popovers, free-wheelers, touchables, Susies, teasers, [and] free-lancers.

Among the consequences were a rash of war babies and a venereal disease epidemic. Prostitutes complained that V-Girls were horning in on their business.

 lesbian gets tattoo during World War II

Jackie Gross and Catherine Borsch arrested in 1943 for violating Chicago's cross-dressing ban

In “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America” Lillian Faderman wrote: “The social upheaval of the war threw off balance various areas of American life. Troubling questions of life and death confronted many young women directly for the first time, and ‘normality’ and concepts of sexual ‘morality’ were seen as far more complicated than they appear during more ordinary years.”  Geographical and social mobility enabled gay and lesbian experimentation and made easier opportunities for heterosexual relations as well. Wives whose husbands were overseas experienced loneliness but more freedom than any other time in their lives. Those who sought employment often, to paraphrase Cyndi Lauper, wanted to have fun after their working day was done. Some had been pressured into marrying their boyfriends before they went off to war and were not ready to settle down.

If war deprived servicemen of constant female companionship, it exposed them to fleshpots both stateside and abroad.  In his autobiography “Weasal” East Chicago native Louis Vasquez wrote about his amorous adventures with a hairdresser named Renee while in uniform in France. After I published the manuscript as a special issue of Steel Shavings,historian Archibald McKinlay embellished his adventures in a Timescolumn that infuriated me but that Vasquez apparently loved.  Titled “The Lamented Lover,” the article  revealed as much about the author’s imagination as the reality of Louis’ experiences.  McKinlay wrote:

 Renee had more on her mind than coiffures.  She helped him with his French and a great deal more.  Weasal became the war’s first literal P.O.L.: prisoner of live.  After de-flowering the over-age altar boy, Renee held Weasal virtually incommunicado for a solid week.  She gave him a crash graduate course in French, exploring empirically the complete etymology of the term amour, with special emphasis on lab work. While his friend Clark stumbled around Le Mans using hand signals, Renee plumbed the very depths of Weasal’s ability to learn.

 When Weasal finally broke loose from Renee, he became the second coming of Don Juan.  He tore a swath through Gaul that made Sherman’s march to the sea seem like a parade and inspired the French imploration “pour l’amour de Belette!” When he was shipped home,  throughout France grateful females paused for 30 seconds and lay motionless in their beds with arms outstretched in mute salute.

 Barbara Wisdom

Barbara Wisdom will report on “A Slave in the White House” during April’s book club meeting.  Employed in the White House beginning at age 10 during the James Madison administration, Paul Jennings wrote a memoir on which the book is based.    Jennings never mentioned his mother’s name, only that she was part native American and impregnated by a itinerant merchant. First Lady Dolley Madison’s father was a Quaker who sold his slaves, moved to Philadelphia, and subsequently went bankrupt.  A social climber, Dolley regarded him as a loser and had no scruples about exploiting slave labor when she married the much older Virginia politician regarded as the “Father of the Constitution.”

Anne Balay spoke at Smith College about her book on LGBTI long-haul truckers, “Semi Queer.”  She wrote:“I did my first book talk about Steel Closets, as a promising new scholar in the field of queer and labor studies, at Smith in 2014. This will then be my last talk as a scholar hoping to leverage myself into an academic career. I believe in the power and impact of my writing, and I will find a way to keep doing it, but academia can kiss my aging but always uppity ass.”  Anne is hoping to do a book about sex workers if she can find the time and resources. 

Leslie Mann and Megan Fox

What little I know about sex workers beyond the exploitation of immigrant women tricked into prostitution is that both in the past and the present there are those who turned tricks from time to time due to economic necessity or, more recently, worked for escort services to support themselves in college or to maintain a more affluent lifestyle.  In “This Is 40” (2012), one of my favorite movies, Megan Fox plays such a person, causing boutique owner Debbie (Leslie Mann) to believe her employee is stealing from her until Fox (Desi) admits that she admits to occasionally moonlighting as an escort.

Speaking to VU sociology professor Mary Kate Blake’s class about early Gary, I stressed that the “City of the Century” was both similar to other Calumet Region industrial cities undergoing rapid growth during the early twentieth century, such as Whiting, Hammond, and East Chicago, but that each had its own unique characteristics.  U.S. Steel’s half-planned “different type of company town” (from Pullman, Illinois) left unskilled immigrant laborers to fend for themselves on the southside, whose Red Light district, “the Patch,” contained over a hundred saloons, many with prostitutes on the second floor. A number of women began their path toward upward mobility by running boarding houses whose row-to-row cots sometimes were shared by two steelworkers on alternate12-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week shifts.

At least a half dozen students hailed from the Region. Being used to 75-minute classes at IUN, I was amazed how quickly the 50-minute class flew by.  I was peppered with questions about race-relations in the schools, mills, and neighborhoods. Someone asked about the Ku Klux Klan in Gary during the 1920s; students were familiar with its presence in Valpo and that the Klan almost purchased VU until the Lutheran Church rescued the nearly bankrupt institution. In Gary the hate group dared not operate openly but supported Republican mayor Floyd Williams, a segregationist.  I briefly discussed the 1927 Emerson School Strike and the 1974 steel industry consent decree, which compensated African-American workers for past discrimination and led to large numbers of women hiring in.  I promised to return in a week when they will have read my Eighties Steel Shavings.   In addition to discussing the drying up of industrial jobs, I’ll compare Hoosier stepchild Gary and Indianapolis under Mayor Richard Lugar (1968-1976), the lack of Gary home rule (weakening the power of mayors), and grapple with the role of race as an explanation for Gary’s decline.

James Wallace

  Toni Dickerson addresses group on lack of black IUN faculty, 2018; Times photo by Carmen McCollum

At a Diversity luncheon hosted by IUN director James Wallace I was seated next to one of the award recipients, Black Student Union (BSU) president Toni Dickerson.  A Social Work major, Toni (like my wife, named after her father) attended Marquette Elementary School in Miller, as did Phil and Dave until we became disgusted over the paddling of kids for minor offenses.  I told Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson how pleased I was that she will be speaking to Mary Kate Blake’s VU students next Friday when they tour Gary. It was great seeing former Arts and Sciences dean F.C. Richardson, honored for his role as BSU faculty adviser 50 years ago when a Black Studies program was established.  He gave me such a big hug that his name tag ended up on my sweater.  Ron Cohen nominated Richard Hatcher for an award and daughter Ragen, Second District state representative, made a pitch in support of an anti-hate crime bill that included gender identity.

left, Eric Degas; below, Chuck Degas

The featured speaker was NPR TV critic Eric Deggans, author of “Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation” (2012), the subject he chose to discuss.  An Andrean and IU graduate whose father Chuck Deggans wrote a Post-Tribcolumn and hosted a radio show on WWCA called “Deggans Den,” Eric excelled that eliciting audience participation after showing media associations of white as good and black as evil and examples of situational racism. One clip involved a Minneapolis TV station claiming that Mayor Betsy Hodges flashed a gang sign while posing with community activist Navell Gordon, identified as a convicted felon.  Hodges had been critical of her city’s police, some of whom circulated the bogus story.  It reminded me that some years ago a nearby school district considered banning paraphernalia showing the IU logo since it was similar to a gang sign. IU caps wore at a certain angle were especially suspicious.