Strange Days

“Strange days have found us
Strange days have tracked us down
They're going to destroy
Our casual joys”

    “Strange Days,” The Doors

The Doors

Lori

James

People are putting all sorts of weird stuff on Facebook to relieve boredom during the pandemic.  One fad is melding one’s photo into an avatar look-alike.  Lori Montalbano was more successful than James Wallace, methinks.  Political commentary abounds, the latest batch debunking Trump’s threats to force governors to open churches on Sunday – this from a man pandering to the Christian right who only worships himself.  Fortunately, friends have not lost their sense of humor, as evidenced by this post by Cindy Bean:

I’ve finished posting album covers on Facebook but am enjoying choices by others, including Fred McColly (Warren Zevon), Chris Daly (folk and bluegrass singer John Hartford), and Gregg Hertzlieb (Steve Hackett, former lead guitar player for Genesis.  Brenden Bayer introduced me to School of Fish, an alternative rock band from L.A. who in 1991 recorded “3 Strange Days.”  Brenden also suggested posting a list of five people, four of whom you’ve met or been within a few feet of and one you haven’t and see if friends can guess the correct one.  Here’s a list of civil rights leaders: Julian Bond, Andrew Young, James Farmer, Jesse Jackson, Stokely Carmichael.  Here’s a second list of famous people: Dick Clark, Jesse Owens, Frank Borman, Muhammad Ali, Lyndon B. Johnson.  Can you identify one from each list I’ve never met?  Spoiler alert: answers are Andrew Young and Muhammad Ali. Surprisingly few people guessed Young but most guessed Ali (I thought more would select LBJ, who I saw speak in Lewisburg, PA, in 1960 when he was JFK’s running mate, or track star Jesse Owens, whose hand I shook when the Gary NAACP honored him at a luncheon at IUN).

 

Julian Bond

I met Julian Bond, who was then teaching at the U. of Virginia, at an Oral History Association conference. I heard Carmichael speak at IUN in 1979 on Pan-African socialism when he went by the name Kwame Ture. Richard Morrisroe was in the audience, and the two former freedom fighters embraced.  James Farmer, a founder of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and a 1961 Freedom Rider on a bus attacked by racists, spoke at IUN and I got him to sing one of the songs that calmed people on the bus - he had a great voice and it's on an episode of "Eyes on the Prize."  I first saw Jesse Jackson in 1968 speak on Solidarity Day in DC. Richard Hatcher brought him to IUN when he was running for President in 1984, and I spoke with him at a Genesis Center event on the 40th anniversary of the 1972 West Side National Black Political Convention. Ali visited Gary several times while Hatcher was mayor, but I never met him.  Janet Bayer wrote: “Mayor Hatcher's Evenings to Remember were great for meeting people. I actually was in line with Julian Bond behind me waiting to get to the Campaign Fountain. He was charming. Another year Rev Jesse Jackson came in to do some fund raising. The Black National Convention that was hosted by Mayor Hatcher had everybody. I was one of very few white people invited.  We were so fortunate to live in Gary.”

 

Brenda Ann Love suggested opening a book to page 45 and seeing what the first thing you read tells you about yourself.  Why not?  Pamela Roorda-Barnett wrote: "There was a clear sense that the school had invested in us, which I think made us all try harder and feel better about ourselves." Michelle Obama - “Becoming.” This was on page 45 of Hilary Mantel’s “Beyond Black” – of all things, a one-night stand with a bookstore manager, who sold her a book on tarot and the cards as well:

    He had a room in a shared flat.  In bed he kept pressing her clit with his finger, as if he were inputting a sale on a cash machine.  In the end she faked it because she was bored and getting a cramp.

This on page 45 of Jean Shepherd’s “A Fistful of Fig Newtons”: “The roar in the driveway meant the old man was home from bowling.  Our Oldsmobile made a distinctive, loose-limbed, gurgling racket that came from 120,000 hard miles and gallons of cheap oil. “YER LOOKIN’ AT A GUY THAT JUST ROLLED A SIX HUNDRED SERIES!”  He strode through the kitchen ten feet tall, smelling of Pabst Blue Ribbon and success.”  Moral: every dog has its day.

On a positive note Facebook has connected me to online board games and bridge with friends and allowed me to learn about the doings of family members such as Dave, who’s been able to order appropriate masks for East Chicago Central seniors and volunteers.  Also Anne Koehler has taken the opportunity to write her memoirs. Here’s the latest installment:

In late 1957 I took the train from home in northern Germany to Sweden to meet a friend in Goeteborg. I had been an exchange student earlier in the year at Asa Folkhoegskola in Skoeldinge. In the beginning I did not know a word of Swedish, but became fairly fluent by the end of the Summer. People would ask "Aer Ni fran Skone?" (are you from Schonen, a southern part of Sweden) because of my accent. I considered that a compliment.  Back then the Danish isles were not all connected by bridges and tunnels as they are now. One had to get off the train or car and onto a ferryboat. Topside at the railing I started to talk to a young man from America who spoke German. He was a GI on vacation with a German family. After the 15-minute crossing it was time to get back to our respective modes of transportation and we exchanged addresses. His time of enlistment was up in 1958 and I did not see him again until 1960 when I came to the USA. We had corresponded for three years. Since Richard was fluent in German, the Army used him to spy on East German radio stations. He had a car and got to travel up and down the border separating East and West Germany. His mission was secret and he very reluctantly told me about it.- Two weeks after arriving in the USA we got married.

 

Desperate to find a decent movie I hadn’t already seen On Demand I discovered a category labeled Indie films – evidently in contrast to mainstream blockbusters and entered into film festivals – and found “Ophelia” and “Tumbledown.”  The latter was about a professor and a grieving widow collaborating on a book about  Hunter Miles, a dead folk singer whose songs in the movie were sung by Seattle folkie Damien Jurado.  “Ophelia” was a remaking of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from Ophelia’s point of view, starring Daisy Ridley (below), who reminded me of high school redhead Gaard Murphy.

"Tumbledown" takes place in Gaard’s home state, Maine, where fans come to put momentos, including bottles of Jack Daniels, by their hero’s gravesite. Seen teaching a music pop culture class, Andrew (former SNL cast member Justin Sedeikis) appears to be a snob.  Lecturing on the music of The Notorious B.I.G., he asks the class, “Fiction or autobiography, pose or confession?” adding “Biggy was as much defined by as he was killed by his 10 crack commandments; what does that mean, to hinge your street cred on your own moral evanescence?” Say what?  As class ends, he asks students to analyze the assigned music in terms of cultural appropriation.  Boring!   In the course of the film Andrew drops his phony pretenses, shows endearing and vulnerable sides of his personality, and falls in love with Hannah (Rebecca Hall).  Highly recommended.

Clock Dance

“If Willa were to invent a clock dance, it would feature a woman racing across the stage from left to right, all the while madly whirling so that the audience saw only a spinning blur of color before she vanished into the wings, pouf!  Just like that.  Gone.” Anne Tyler, “Clock Dance” (2018)

In Anne Tyler’s most recent novel, again set in Baltimore, nine-year-old Cheryl and two friends invent a routine where they stand behind one another and move their arms to resemble the hour and minute hands of a clock. Flying from Arizona to care for Cheryl while her mother Denise (ex-girlfriend of son Sean) is hospitalized with a gunshot wound, Willa enters a world inhabited by characters much more appealing than found in her over 55 community, including her boorish husband.  Visiting Denise, she notices a nurse wearing a pajama-type uniform printed all over with teddy bears.  In the hospital commissary were tiny Saguara cacti on sale, looking forlorn and out of place compared to stately 15-foot ancestors back in Arizona. Surprised when Denise expresses hopes to marry, explaining that people are supposed to go through this world two by two, Willa thinks the sentiment resembles a line from Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” When Denise comes home, a neighbor named Sergio (Cheryl calls Sir Joe) carries her from the car to a couch, from which she watches “Space Junk” on TV and plays “I Doubt It,” only she and Cheryl say “Bullshit! to Willa’s feigned shock

Until age 61, Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles wrote:

  Willa always does what she’s told, always shifts the attention away from herself. Raised by a moody, histrionic mother, she coped by becoming exceedingly responsible at a young age. She takes after her father, a man “so mild-mannered that he thought it was impolite to pick up a telephone in mid-ring.” A peacekeeping jedi, Willa detects and soothes the first flutter of anyone’s irritation or disappointment.

Coming to prefer an eccentric new “family” to a lonely life in Arizona, Willa finds a true soulmate in precocious, ersatz granddaughter Cheryl.  She heeds the insight of an elderly Baltimore neighbor who tells her: “Figuring out what to live for.  That’s the great problem at my age.” Willa thinks to herself, "Or at any age."  Ron Charles concludes:

   The bond that develops between this lonely child and this obliging woman forms the emotional heart of “Clock Dance,” radiating what Tyler calls a “sweetly heavy, enjoyable kind of ache.”But there’s a steelier theme here, too, an existential sorrow cloaked by the embroidery of Willa’s grandmotherly demeanor.“Sometimes Willa felt she’d spent half her life apologizing,”Tyler writes. “More than half her life, actually.” She knows that the world, which has largely ignored her, expects her now to coast along that deferential rut into oblivion.

Charlie Halberstadt and I were runners-up in bridge at Chesterton Y to Rich and Sally Will.  My moment to shine came when Charlie overcalled I Diamond and bid a Heart. I only had 4 points but held 6 Spades to the King and a couple Hearts.  I passed, the person on my left bid 2 Diamonds, and after two passes, I bid 2 Spades. Charlie raised to 3 and I made the contract with a trick to spare despite him having only 10 high card points. Barbara Mort, who got married last week to 87-year-old Korean War veteran Ascher Yates, said that he is going on an Honor Flight to tour DC war memorials.  

Next day in Valpo Australian-born Naomi Goodman and I finished fourth (the Wills had 70.24 %) despite never having played together.  We meshed; when Charlie asked how things were going, she said, “I haven’t had a hissy fit yet.”   Once an exclusively American expression, now, thanks to films shown abroad, the saying is now more common elsewhere.  I called Chuck Tomes Mr. East when Naomi inquired whether it was he or his partner sitting west was playing a hand.  When I adding, “like the Merrillville basketball coach,” Chuck said, “He was a good one, his record speaks for itself.”  Chuck noted that Cardinals Hall of Famer Bob Gibson wanted to play basketball at IU but Coach Branch McCracken already had his quota of one, so Gibson went on to star for Creighton.

Phil picked up our 2004 Corolla from Dave because Tori’s old Saturn died.  Toni made a seafood feast, and my sons and I got in a game of Acquire, first time in months.  At a party in Grand Valley Phil and Delia ran into IUN public relations staff member Terry Ann Defenser, who told them she sees me almost every day.  At the time we both parked in the same lot and arrived around the same time, but since then I’ve moved to the A and S Building due to library renovation so park elsewhere.

 Paul and Jean at Miller beach

At Paul and Jean Kaczocha’s Fourth of July picnic were huge pans of grilled chicken, ribs, beef tips, hot dogs, and hamburger patties even though Paul and Jean are now vegetarians.  I gave him Steel Shavings, volume 48, which contains his moving eulogy to rank-and-file steelworker Eddie Sadlowski.  Sue O’Leary, whose delicious mac and cheese was from a Queen Latifah recipe, recalled Toni and Alissa eating orange day lilies at a previous July 4 party.

Kaczocha and brother Tim are big White Sox fans. Paul has a framed Carlton Fisk No. 72 jersey on his garage wall along with union posters.  At a table with Sue and Mike Olszanski, Tim recalled one of Oz’s relatives telling about working for Sox owner Bill Veeck and getting dressed down (but not fired) in 1979 for having endorsed what became known as Disco Demolition night, which ended in a riot and forfeiture of game 2 of the scheduled doubleheader.  I became a Sox fan in 1972 when my favorite player, former Philly Dick Allen, joined the team and had an MVP season, batting .308 with 37 home runs.  Five years later, after Allen was released by Oakland, I phoned Veeck to suggest he bring him back to Chicago.  His secretary put me right through, and Veeck told me he’d spoken to Dick, but he preferred to retire to his Pennsylvania farm and breed race horses.

Famed drummer Henry E. “Riggs” Guidotti, who moved to Highland, Indiana 70 years ago with wife Ella, is dead at age 96.  According to an obit, Riggs’s career spanned 60 years and that after touring with several famous big bands, “he spent 17 years with WGN Radio, playing for Orion Samuelson's Country Fair and on a few occasions filling in with the Bozo Show's Big Top Band. In the mid-1960s he was invited to play the Calgary Stampede and returned every year for the next 29, performing for Queen Elizabeth II when she opened the Stampede in 1973.”

In Chesterton Strack & Van Til’s parking lot was the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile but without Little Oscar. A 1952 model came to Fort Washington when I was a kid with Gary native George Molchan the likely “Little Oscar,” passing out the hot dogs – at least that’s my memory. One came to Toni’s north Philadelphia neighborhood, and kids only received little whistles shaped like hot dogs.   Molchan enjoyed a 36-year career until retiring in 1987, his last 16 at the company’s Disney World restaurant.  When Molchan hung up his Chef’s Hat, Oscar Meyer retired the character.  Molchan died in 2005 at age 82 while living in Hobart. According to Timesreporter Myrna Oliver, a Wienermobile appeared at the Merrillville burial site, and mourners sang the enigmatic jingle, “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener.”

Inside Stracks, a man was wearing an East Chicago Washington t-shirt.  I told him my son Dave taught at EC Central, and he said that he knew him. When I brought up Pete Trgovich, who led the Senators to a state title and coached the 2007 state champions, he said he was a friend of the family.  A 1964 graduate named Jerry Craven, he played for legendary coach Johnny Baratto. Dave recently had a memorable student whose last name was craven, so Jerry was likely his grandfather.

                                         Senators Foote and Sunmer

Virtually all students of American history are familiar with South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks’s brutal 1856 caning of Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor. Joanne Freeman’s “The Field of Blood” reveals that at least 70 other violent outbursts occurred in the chambers of Congress in the 30 years leading up to the Civil War.  The Congressional Globemade no mention of such pushing, shoving, knife-wielding and pistol-waving incidents.  During debate on the Compromise of 1850, for instance, according to a New York Review of Books essay by James Oakes, when Mississippi Senator Henry Foote pulled a pistol on Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, “Benton defiantly bared his chest and dared the would-be ‘assassin’ to shoot.”

Gary ruins photographer Cindy C. Bean posted a shot taken from inside the to Emerson School, captioned “Grand entrance to one of my favorite buildings.  Lyn Pellett replied: “We had to stop on the stairs with one foot on each step, if necessary, and stand perfectly still when the bugle played each morning. Emerson was the grandest of schools in her prime.”

The Searcher

“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus,” Martin Luther King, Jr.

An HBO documentary about Elvis Presley,  appropriately titled “The Searcher,” emphasizes Presley’s fascination with black music, both gospel-tinged ballads and upbeat rhythm and blues.  It offers a nuanced view of manager Colonel Parker, who guided Elvis’ career to heights it probably wouldn’t have otherwise reached but, in the words of critic Jon Pareles, treated him like a commercial workhorse, making trivial movies and performing like a nostalgia act. Elvis was a unique talent and true American hero, with tragic flaws that cut short his extraordinary career.

When I put on my 1958 dance party for Art in Focus seniors in Munster, I’ll open with a recording of Elvis singing “Hard-Hearted Woman” ( from the movie “King Creole” and Presley’s first Gold Record for RCA), One Night,” originally an R&B hit in 1956 for Smiley Lewis and called “One Night of Sin” – with sanitized lyrics,changing, for example, “One night of sin is what I'm now paying for”to “One night with you is what I'm now praying for.” Elvis sometimes inserted the original words during live performances. The third Elvis song in the medley will be “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” and I’ll have Dave turn up the volume for the final spectacular drumroll. 

The 1956 film “The Searchers,” directed by John Ford, starred John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, a Confederate Civil War veteran on a mission to rescue his niece Debbie (young Natalie Wood looking ravishing in Native American dress) from Comanches.  Ethan is a racist, bent on revenge and, until the very end, intent on killing Debbie or bringing her back to “civilization,” even against her will.

above, Tori at prom; below,James (with tie) at final curtain call

Daughter-in-law Beth spent the night after catching the final performance of James in “The 25^thAnnual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”  At Strack and Van Til primarily for donuts, I found my choice of shelled peanuts limited to raw, hot and spicy, or dill-flavored.  WTF?  I opted to go with hot and spicy to my later regret.  Why no lightly salted roasted nuts?

At Inman’s award banquet, James sat with his Bowling for Donuts teammates while I chowed down two slices of pizza next to Angie and Dave, whose pot luck contribution was a delicious salad.  Toni prepared a veggie platter, with hot peppers being the most popular item. I limited myself to one but took a half-dozen of the slow-moving black olives.  During the award presentations a young kid made a hand motion that, according to Dave, was giving dap.  The practice originated with black soldiers in Vietnam chest-bumping or exchanging intricate handshakes and now can be any number of subtle hand gestures.  Racist critics jumped on President Obama for giving dap by using an innocuous gesture.

Watching Jeopardy, I did a double take when in an ad a young woman eating an ice cream cone under a tree was day-dreaming when bird droppings landed on her thigh; she scooped it up with her finger and was ready to eat it.  The sponsor was For Eyes demonstrating the victim's need for glasses. I knew all the “Rhymes with Bob” Jeopardy answers but was slow on the draw with “Eighteenth-century Enlightenment” terms, failing to come up with Denis Diderot’s “Enyclopedie” or one I should have known, Voltaire’s religious philosophy, Deism.

Host James Wallace and IUN’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs (ODEMA) honored graduates who belonged to ALMA, Brother 2 Brother, My Sisters’ Keeper, Delta Phi Rho (a Latin-based fraternity), the Asian American Association, and MORE (Minority Opportunity for Research) Scholars.  

For a crossword puzzle Toni wanted to know the name of a Finnish architect.  Voila! Alvar Aalto, who designed many buildings in Jyvaskyla, including the university where the upcoming oral history conference will take place. Before returning Deborah Swallow’s Guidebook to the Valpo library, I learned not to tip in Finland and that Finns loves saunas, especially during the long winter.  Swallow passed on these sayings popular with a laconic people belonging to an egalitarian society: “Behave in a sauna as you would in a church”and “Remember what the fleas say, you’re just a man like any other.”

At bridge, partner Dee Van Bebber asked if I persuaded my wife to play on Wednesdays.  “Never,”was Toni’s answer. We tried it when we first moved to Indiana and she disliked it.  We did meet a nice couple at Temple Israel and invited them to our house. After they arrived, they mentioned having been on the radio earlier talking about being practicing nudists. Telling that story led Sally Will to say that one of her friends is a nudist.  Jim Carson told of camping at Lake Mead near Vegas during a heat wave. He was outside his tent when a young French woman wearing nothing but a string bikini bottom walked up to him needing help to locate her campsite. Jim, usually not at a loss for words, was so befuddled all he could do was stammer incoherently.

 photos by Cindy Bean; above, Horace Mann; below, barred window of abandoned Gary store

At Crown Point Library I enjoyed an exhibit of Cindy Bean’s photography, especially shots of Gary.  On hand were old friend Rocky Ferrer and fellow book club member Barb Wisdom, who asked if I knew IUN History professor Bill Neil (he hired me), who was good friends with her father.  I brought up that he played the bagpipes, and she recalled hearing him play.  Small world. Arriving early, I perused Amy Chozick’s book Chasing Hillary,about the 2016 election.  She believed Trump’s outrageous antics detracted attention from  and distracted Hillary from concentrating on winning over working-class voters.  Also husband Bill was a millstone around her neck, neutralizing the issue of Trump’s abusive treatment of women.

For her forthcoming book “Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers” Anne Balay wrote this blurb for the University of North Carolina Press website:

      Long-haul trucking is linked to almost every industry in America, yet somehow the working-class drivers behind big rigs remain largely hidden from public view. Gritty, inspiring, and often devastating oral histories of gay, transsexual, and minority truck drivers allow award-winning author Anne Balay to shed new light on the harsh realities of truckers' lives behind the wheel. A licensed commercial truck driver herself, Balay discovers that, for people routinely subjected to prejudice, hatred, and violence in their hometowns and in the job market, trucking can provide an opportunity for safety, welcome isolation, and a chance to be themselves--even as the low-wage work is fraught with tightening regulations, constant surveillance, danger, and exploitation. The narratives of minority and queer truckers underscore the working-class struggle to earn a living while preserving one's safety, dignity, and selfhood. 

     Through the voices of drivers who spend eleven- to fourteen-hour days hauling America's commodities in treacherous weather and across mountain passes, Semi Queer allows truckers from marginalized communities to speak for themselves, revealing stark differences between the trucking industry's crushing labor practices and the perseverance of its most at-risk workers.

Teachers Fight Back

“Students, because you’re mine, I walk the line.”  Sign at West Virginia rally of teachers during 9-day strike, borrowing a Johnny Cash line

 Oklahoma state Capitol on third day of nine-day strike

Teacher walkouts and strikes have occurred in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona – red states, for the most part -  to protest low salaries, large class size, inadequate supplies, including obsolete textbooks and lack of computers, plus threats to teachers’ pensions.  In Kentucky, Governor Matt Bevin claimed that the walkout led to a student being sexually assaulted, then was pressured into apologizing for the outrageous remark. He vetoed a bill that included a hefty budget increase for education, but lawmakers managed to override his action. The situation for teachers in Indiana is also dire.  In fact, the state appropriates less money per pupil than where walkouts have occurred. Since the 1990s, when Dave started at East Chicago Central, teachers’ salaries have been stagnant and lost ground to inflation.  What a sad commentary on America’s priorities that teachers are so underpaid and burdened by policies that force them to respond to unrealistic guidelines intended to undercut public education in favor of for-profit charter schools.

 Hedy Lamarr

Bridge was at Herb and Evelyn’s in Ogden Dunes, where granddaughter Alissa and their son Alex used to play in their swimming pool.  The huge Passo dog would get so excited when company came that they’d have to keep the friendly beast in the garage, where he’d bang against the wall in frustration.  After a few loud barks, current dog Hedy Lamarr, named for a Forties movie siren was friendly.  When Dick Hagelberg noted that he had Finnish ancestors, I mentioned reading a history of Finland because of my upcoming trip to a conference in Jyvaskyla and that their language is different from neighbors Sweden and Russia.  Connie Barnes noted that one of her great-grandmothers boarded a train to get married only to discover that her fiancée already had a wife, so she wed someone she met on the train.  It was her second marriage and lasted a lifetime.  Evelyn Passo, a kindergarten teacher, is planning to retire soon.  There’s even pressure at that level for teachers to drill stuff into their charges instead of making their first year of school mainly a socializing experience.

In “Straight Man” Richard Russo compares a situation to the plot of “Scuffy the Tugboat,” Gertrude Crampton’s 1946 best seller.   Bored with being confined to a bathtub, Scuffy embarks on a great adventure but in the end realizes he’d rather be back home. Russo also references Brobdingnag, the land of giants in Jonathan Swift’s eighteenth-century satire “Gulliver’s Travels.” When Hank, an English Department chair under duress from both professors and administrators, muses that he must be Porthos to others’ Athos and Aramis, the reference is to “The Three Musketeers” (1844) by Alexander Dumas.  A literary allusion I particularly liked was saying that someone, like Oliver Twist in the Charles Dickens novel, went from a poor home to an even worse one.  One section begins with lines from English poet Stephen Spender, who wrote about social injustice and class struggle:

What I had not foreseen

Was the gradual day

Weakening the will

Leaking the brightness away

Two interesting words Russo employs are dudgeon(a feeling of deep resentment) and ellipsis(the omission of obvious or superfluous) words. Reviewing “City of the Century,” historian James Madison called my Gary book elliptical, which I took to mean, rather than obscure or ambiguous, that I left readers to draw their own conclusions. 

Like Hank, there was a time in academe when I went a little crazy – in my case, soon after achieving promotion and tenure.  I decided to revive the near dormant IUN student newspaper by teaching a History of Journalism course and becoming adviser to the Northwest Phoenix.  Under my guidance it came out weekly and didn’t shy away from controversy.  I was sensible enough, however, to leave editorial decisions to student editors John Petalas and Joe Salacian and discourage articles about professors’ personal lives, such as one about Economics professor Les Singer being a practicing nudist. While I took pride in my teaching and influenced a fair share of students, my impact was miniscule compared to son Dave at East Chicago Central.

There are so few movie comedies worth seeing that, after deciding I didn’t have an appetite for the spy knockoff Beirut, which received mediocre reviews, I debated between Blockers(about parents trying to keep daughters from getting laid on prom night) and Girls Trip(four old friends reconnect in New Orleans),  I opted for the latter since Queen Latifah was in it, I could watch it free on HBO, and it got a 90% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It was  quite raunchy, but Queen Latifah didn’t disappoint, and I enjoyed musical cameos by Ne-Yo, Sean Combs, and New Edition and the dirty dancing scenes. Critics evidently loved Tiffany Haddish as an impulsive party animal, comparing her performance to Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids (2011).

 Cindy Bean

Emerson interior ruins

Cindy C. Bean granted Ron Cohen and me permission to use her photo of Lake Michigan and area steel mills for our new edition of “Gary: A Pictorial History.”  It originally appeared in Jerry Davich’s “Lost Gary.”  Cindy and husband Larry frequently visit abandoned buildings in Gary, such as City Methodist Church, Union Station, the Palace Theater, and Emerson School.   Its disgraceful present condition is a sad testimony to the city lack of resources. According to historian Kendall Svengalis, an Emerson grad, the latter cannot be demolished due to it being on the National Register of Historic Places, but Cohen disputes this. 

In “The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and the National Black Political Convention of 1972” (2018), Leonard N. Moore described how Jesse Jackson stole the spotlight at the West Side black summit in hopes of becoming Martin Luther King’s successor as the leader of African Americans. Following is Moore’s account of Jackson and the three conveners, poet Amiri Baraka, Detroit Congressman Charles Diggs, and Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher, at the opening press conference:

All four men were dressed in garb appropriate to their constituency: Diggs in a conservative suit as representative of the National Black Caucus; Hatcher in an expensive tailor-made suit exemplifying the new generation of young, educated, urban mayors, controlling black-majority cities; Baraka in his dashiki representing black nationalists; and Jesse Jackson dressed like Superfly – wide-collar shirt, vest, with a large medallion engraved with the image of Martin Luther King, Jr. hanging from his neck.

Ray Smock wrote tongue-in-cheek about Stormy Daniels showing up at Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s court appearance in an attempt to block authorities from seeing his email correspondence:

     While I have not made a scientific study of the phenomenon, it did appear to me from video clips of the event that there were more reporters, cameramen, and paparazzi at Stormy Daniels' court appearance today than there were people at Trump's inauguration.

     Since we know that Trump's inaugural crowd was the largest in history, according to our highest authority, I will settle for Stormy's crowd as being the second largest.

     For those of you who may feel I am exaggerating a bit, let me find a way of stating this that cannot be disputed. The crowd at the courthouse to see Stormy Daniels today was the largest crowd in history ever to gather for the purpose of seeing a porn star who had an affair with a President of the United States.

 Chase Utley heroics in 2008 World Series

At bridge Dee Van Bebber and I finished second with a 63.89 percent and finished second despite my twice being too cautious in not pushing us to game.  Having lived many years in Florida, Dee is a Tampa Bay fan and resented Joe Madden leaving the Rays to manage the Cubs.  Commenting on last Saturday’s atrocious weather at Wrigley, Madden mentioned that his worst experience was the deciding 2008 World Series game 5 in Philadelphia. A Phillies fan, I vividly recall it being suspended in the sixth inning with the Phils holding a one-run lead and being resumed next day.  I was at the bowling alley with the TV on mute when, with the score tied, Philly second baseman Chase Utley knocked down a grounder headed for centerfield, faked throwing to first, and then nabbed the lead runner at the plate, thanks to a great tag by Carlos Ruiz.  At the time I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened, but, by all accounts, it saved the Series for the Phillies.  I also recall the on-field celebration after closer Brad Lidge, a perfect 48 for 48 for the season, struck out the final batter with a nasty slider, causing me to let out a whoop.