Walt and Lois Reiner

 "Show up.  Make change.  Have fun.” Lois Reiner motto

As a freshman at Valparaiso University in 1948, Lois Bertram Dau had little connection with the town other than Saturday movies at the Premier Theater. Soon after graduating four years later, Lois married VU football coach Walt Reiner, a World War II and Korean navy vet.  In 1962 VU’s president asked Reiner to start a Youth Leadership Training Program, and three years later, when Walt became director of the Prince of Peace Volunteers, the Reiner family moved to Chicago’s Near North Side to minister to the needs of Cabrini Green Homes residents.  An outspoken advocate for civil rights and opponent of the Vietnam War, Walt survived 1967 heresy charges levied against him by conservative Lutheran-Missouri Synod officials to which VU was affiliated. As the Reiners prepared to return to Valparaiso, Cabrini Green housing project resident Barbara Cotton lamented that her family was denied the same opportunity.  That plea became the motivation for the Reiners and other Lutheran activists affiliated with the university founding the Valparaiso Builders Association, whose stated mission was “to strengthen the community by addressing issues of race, class and poverty, and to build healthy families and neighborhoods whose diversity is welcomed and cherished.”  The initial agenda: construction of a home for the Cotton family in what at the time was considered a lily-white “Sundown” town, a prospect not necessarily welcomed by a majority of Valpo residents. Braving death threats and other forms of harassment, this goal ultimately became a reality.  Rob Cotton, just ten at the time, is now a city council member and one of approximately a thousand African-American residents in a city of 33,000.

volunteer (now exec. dir.) Paul Schreiner in 1987

Still going strong in its 51^st year, the volunteer organization now called Project Neighbors has provided homes for over 300 residents.  Walt Reiner led by example and often told others, “Don’t sweat the small stuff, caulk it.”  Viewing his mission as liberating, he once stated, “When you give up the need for power, reputation, and money, you have the whole world open to you.” In 1995 the Reiners led efforts to found Hilltop Neighborhood House, which offered health, child care, pre-school, and adult educational services to area residents.  When Walt died in 2006 at age 83, the city renamed a street in the Hilltop neighborhood in his honor.  Loie Reiner, now in her nineties, remains active in Project Neighbors and serves as secretary of the organization.  Currently, there are two Project Neighborhoods-sponsored facilities in operation that provide homes for 33 women and their children. Recently, the zoning board approved a 14-unit facility for men (with preference for veterans) but held up a second rental unit by labeling it a “homeless shelter” despite its opposite intent, to offer an affordable alternative becoming homeless.  After the tie vote Loie posted: “DREAM DASHED….NOT ERASED.  STAY TUNED.”

Liz Wuerffel at zoning board meeting

Through our friendship with Ron and Liz Cohen, Toni and I were supportive of the Reiners’ efforts a half-century ago to desegregate Valparaiso. I met Loie a few years ago at a house party Health and Thais Carter hosted for VU students that had taken Heath’s course on civil rights in Northwest Indiana.  She and I had both participated in the course as speakers and resource persons.  Not surprisingly, Loie was engaging and looking forward more than to the past; I’m honored to have become her friends.  On the eve of her 91^st birthday she wrote:

    My children and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren and all young people of every race, gender, religion, economic level are on my mind. I pray for their courage to fight evil and build their lives on caring and generosity and creativity. I pray that they have faith in a Greater Power; and if that gives them what mine does, they will celebrate each God-given day as opportunity to love their neighbor....someone very different from them but in need of them. I pray that they - that all of us - refuse to be dragged into the hate and despair streaming through our present situation. And I pray that they - we - are listening to those too long unheard for the salvation of our endangered moral fabric.

Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke, 2000

RIP: Funny man Carl Reiner, born in the Bronx in 1922, a year before Walt Reiner (no relation) and integral part of the classic Sid Caesar TV comedy shows of the 1950s.  He was the creator of the 1960s “Dick Van Dyke Show” and longtime film collaborator (and sometimes actor) with Mel Brooks and Steve Martin. Son Rob Reiner (“Meathead” to Archie Bunker in the “All in the Family” series), Carl brought lots of laughs to this fan over a 70-year career.

Echoes of the Past

"   "What is history?  An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”

     Victor Hugo

The controversy over removing statues of Confederate leaders from public places has expanded to include Spanish colonial monuments in the Southwest.  A bronze statue of Don Juan de Oñate (1550-1626), for example, was recently removed in Alcalde, New Mexico for “safekeeping.” Oñate, sometimes called the “Last Conquistadore,” is infamous as a result of the Acoma Massacre, carried out by his orders while he was the colonial governor of New Mexico. After Spanish troops took food that the Acoma pueblo needed for the winter, a dozen of them were killed in an ambush, including Oñate’s nephew.  In retaliation the Governor ordered the pueblo destroyed.  Close to a thousand Native Americans were slaughtered, and survivors enslaved for 20 years.  In addition, he ordered that the right foot of men over 25 be cut off; historians disagree on whether or not this order was fully carried out or restricted to toes since it would have rendered the victims relatively useless as forced laborers.  In any event Spanish authorities found that Don Juan de Oñate had used excessive force and sent him in exile.  In 1998, four years after its installment, protesters cut off the right foot of the Reynaldo Rivera-designed Alcalde statue. A note explained, “Fair is fair.”  In 2017 the left foot was painted red, and a message read, “Remember 1680,” the year of a pueblo revolt.

 

I recently finished Mari Grana’s “Pioneer Doctor: The Story of a Woman’s Work,” a biography of Dr. Mary Babcock Atwater, the author’s grandmother.  Dr. Mollie, as she became known, left her husband in Osage, Iowa to become a doctor in a frontier mining town in Montana. She eventually became active in the women’s suffrage movement and in public health efforts to provide clean water to Montanans. After her second husband died, Atwater moved to California to be with her only daughter.  She died when granddaughter Mari was just four, but the author was able to find an 88-year-old named Fanny who provided insights into Dr. Mollie personality, including her initial chagrin when she became pregnant.  While Grana invented some details for dramatic effect, she captures the iron determination of a Victorian feminist and healer who fought against ignorance, illness, and bigotry on the western frontier.

The Chesterton Tribune’s “Echoes of the Past” July 1 column reprinted this hundred-year-old item by Eugene W. Flack that first appeared in the Chicago Herald-Examiner:

    After five years of self-imposed solitary confinement in the sandy wastelands of northern Indiana, Miss Alice Gray, more widely known as “Diana of the Dunes,” came up for air.  And with her were six feet two inches of Scandinavian suitor in the person of Paul Wilson.  A half-decade ago, she would have introduced him in effete Chicago society circles as “my fiancé.”  In the wilderness of sandy hillocks and popular groves that border the southern margin of Lake Michigan, Miss Gray acclaimed this giant proponent of primitive life as “my caveman.”

As I noted in “Gary’s First Hundred Years," Alice Gray, a University of Chicago graduate 39 years old in 1920, became in the hands of the press the center of unwanted publicity whose quest for solitude failed because the world wouldn’t leave her alone. In 1922 a drunken deputy sheriff fractured her skull with the butt of a pistol for trespassing on his property; she never fully recovered and three years later died of uremia.  The Prairie Club Bulletin eulogized her as an incorrigible individualist and free spirit who found happiness in the dunes, at least for a time.

 Dorothy Mokry with Professor Raoul Contreras

Dorothy Mokry, who used to work at IU Northwest, recalled taking her husband Larry to Jackson’s Steakhouse on Route 12-20 in Miller when they were first dating.  He was almost six years her junior and got carded and denied a drink because he was only 20-year-old.  Toni and I were in Jackson’s Steakhouse in the mid-1970s when former Gary mayor George “Cha Cha” Chacharis arrived, stopped at every table, and knew virtually everyone’s name, including ours.  I had interviewed him for “City of the Century” and invited him to speak in my Urban History class.  He lived in an apartment near Wilco Foods; once with son Dave I ran into him near Wilco’s bakery section. As we were leaving, I noticed that Dave had a large bag of cookies.  “That nice man bought them for me,” he said.  Chacharis was known for his generosity.  When mayor, he’d give out giant candy bars at Halloween.

 

Dorothy mentioned that  in her 20s she was a key punch operator at U.S. Steel doing shift work and after the 4 to midnight shift would go dancing and partying with co-workers, often ending up at Jackson’s or the Golden Coin nearby.  The Golden Coin had ribs that Phil especially loved, and once we were having lunch there with the boys when young women wearing see-through lingerie walked by on their way to a men-only luncheon. Dorothy once witnessed three attorneys sitting at the bar jump up and beat the crap out of a guy.  High stakes poker games evidently took place at Golden Coin, and this guy must have either welched on what he’d owed or been some sort of snitch who worked with the police.  She added, “Good Ol Gary.”

RIP, Carl Reiner (with wife and Mel Brooks)