Cold War Kids

“You say you want to change the world

Well, do you believe in magic?

But you can only change yourself

Don’t sit around and complain about it.”

    “Complainer,” Cold War Kids

Cold War Kids formed 15 years ago.  Charter member Matt Maust thought up the name when visiting a park in Budapest and noticing that statues were missing.  They were of Socialist Workers Party leaders such as János Kádár and had been removed after the fall of communism.  “I am a Cold War kid, too,”Maust claimed, having been born in 1979.  After releasing a compilation CD in 2018 titled “This Will Blow Over in Time,” their newest album, featuring “Complainer” and “Fourth of July,” is “New Age Norms.”  I also consider myself a Cold War kid.  Because of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, at Fort Washington school we got under our desks during air raid drills in case the Russians dropped a hydrogen bomb in our midst.  Our Weekly Readertold of “human wave” attacks by “Red Chinese” hordes fighting Americans in Korea.  The Red Scare infected politics and produced such rancid demagogies as Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican from Wisconsin. Vestiges of Cold War rhetoric remain in Trump’s latest attempts to brand leading Democratic Presidential contenders as communists.

Having helped write the inscription, I was invited to a historic marker dedication ceremony honoring the legacy of City Methodist Church.  Reverend Curtis Whittaker (on right) of Gary’s Progressive Community Church, a leader of the Legacy Foundation urban revitalization group, was familiar with my portrait of Reverend William Graham Seaman in “Gary’s First Hundred Years” and according to the Post-Tribune’sCarole Carlson, stated:

  This was a church that fought against the evils of the time.  It wasn’t popular to speak on behalf of immigrants and blacks. This church took a stand.  If these crumbling walls could talk, they would tell you it wasn’t an easy decision to get involved in change.  Others in the church didn’t see the vision.

Lay criticism, racial polarization, and the onset of the Great Depression torpedoed Seaman’s dream of an inner-city church bringing together Gary’s fragmented community under the banners of faith and brotherhood and ultimately led to his being summarily transferred to a parish in Lancaster, Ohio. 

Pastor Whittaker’s hopefulness in the face of formidable obstacles facing his Emerson district neighborhood brings to mind Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay “Searching for a New Kind of Optimism,” written on Cape Cod as 2016 concluded with Trump poised to enter the White House.  Abdurraqib was listening to “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids, which contains the line, “It’s such a gamble when you get a face”and pondered what lay ahead for people of color and himself in particular:

  I have been thinking about the value of optimism while cities burn, while people are fearing for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, while discourse is reduced to laughing through a chorus of anxiety.  A woman in a Cape Cod diner the day after Christmas saw me eyeing the news and shaking my head.  She told me that “things will get better,”and I wasn’t sure they would but I nodded and said, “They surely can’t get any worse,”which is a lie we all tell, the one that we want to believe, even as there are jaws opening before us.

A half-century earlier, writer Norman Mailer pondered similar concerns as the tumultuous Sixties culminated with Richard Nixon in the White House and an American flag planted on the moon, presaging, Mailer feared, the jaws of technology and Big Brother opening before us.

A Saturday Evening Club (SEC) presentation by Jim Albers dealt with William E. Pinney, one of the organization’s charter members.  The event took place at Pinney-Purdue Agricultural Center in Wanatah and began with a tour conducted by Superintendent Gary Tragesser of the 486 acres of farmland that Pinney and daughter Myra donated “for the use and benefit of the trustees of Purdue University.”  According to the booklet “Celebrating 100 Years, 1919-2019,” the crops produced, mainly corn and soybeans, were connected to research projects pertaining to “hybrid and variety evaluation, agronomic practices, organic and conventional vegetable production, weed science, insect and plant disease management, climatology, and forestry.”  Superintendent Tragesser offered free watermelons to those on the tour. Mine proved to be delicious.

Born in 1847 in a La Porte County log cabin to Horace and Nancy Pinney, William E. Pinney attended Valparaiso Male and Female College, VU’s predecessor, and became a successful lawyer, banker, and real estate investor. He originally offered the 486 acres, approximately a tenth of his farm holdings, to his alma mater(being one of its trustees), but the school lacked the resources to manage it properly. Albers’s talk focused on Pinney’s civic activities. I learned that that the Saturday Evening Club (SEC), founded in 1903, was an all-male spinoff of the Mathesis Club, which began in 1897 with members of both sexes, and whose records, Albers noted, are housed in IUN’s Calumet Regional Archives (CRA), which he visited several times researching his talk. Women members of the Mathesis Club tended to favor literary matters, while the men preferred political discourse and debate about subjects deemed unsuitable for the opposite sex.  The two groups initially met on alternative Saturdays in members’ homes, which after SEC meetings, wives complained, stunk of cigar smoke for days afterwards.

The town of Wanatah, Albers noted, was named for a Potawatomi Indian whose name meant “knee deep in muck”– a fit description for much of the soil. That elicited a joke about a fire breaking out in a Wanatah farmer’s bathroom that fortunately did not spread to the house. The two times I recall being in Wanatah were to buy inexpensive furniture in the 1970s and to attend a memorial service for Kevin Horn’s father.  

Around 20 years ago, member Pat Bankston advocated that SEC membership be open to women, but the consensus among others back then was that wives wouldn’t be comfortable with their husbands meeting on Saturday night with other women that might be unattached and potential rivals for their spouse’s affection.  As a compromise, once each year a Ladies Night takes place featuring an outside speaker. Next April, for example, it will be Keith Gambil, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association. There is precedent, someone interjected, for inviting women to regular monthly meetings when the subject is germane to their field.  From the discussion I sense a general sentiment for going coed.

Each person was expected to comment on the presentation.  I praised the inclusion of historical background on the Pinney family, much of which came from Pinney’s 1923 presentation called “The Pioneers,” based largely on his Aunt Mary’s recollections.  During the taxing seven-week journey from Virginia, some days the wagons became so mired in northwest Ohio’s “Great Black Swamp” that the party could literally see the site where they had camped the evening before. I noted that when Valparaiso University acquired the Pinney property, its financial hardships had intensified to the point where bankruptcy was a distinct possibility, and trustees even considered selling the institution to the Ku Klux Klan.  In 1925 the Lutheran University Association came to the rescue and took control of the college.

Jim Albers passed out copies of Pinney’s 1923 paper “The Pioneers,” which related that his paternal grandparents both died soon after the arduous migration to LaPorte County, leaving two daughters and three sons, including Pinney’s father Horace, a Civil war veteran who claimed to have heard Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Here is an excerpt:

  The carrier pigeons, now extinct, came in wonderfully great flocks and were so numerous that at times of sowing wheat it became necessary to guard the wheat fields. An old German neighbor of ours was an expert in catching these wild pigeons with a net, and he kept what he called “stool pigeons” which he used as decoys to which he attached a net of some kind in which the wild pigeons became entangled.  In this way he caught pigeons by the bag full.  

  A remember sand hill cranes made annual visits, and when they took their flight from the ground about mid-day, they circled round and round each time getting higher and higher in the direction of the sun, nearly straight upwards, until they were mere specs and then disappeared among dazzling sunbeams.

IUN’s Theater Department put on free weekend performances of a modern version of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” set during Desert Storm.  The play, directed by students Stephanie Naumoff and Jay-Lan Halliburton, was staged at various Region outdoor venues during the summer. Professor Mark Baer played Brabantio while recent alumnus Brandon Hearne had the title role.  Melissa Downs played evil Desdemona

In Nicole Anslover’s class on the Cold War  era and Red Scare, students identified sources of anxiety after World War II, such as the so-called “fall of China,” the Korean War, and the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case. When she brought up the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and the baseless accusations of Senator Joseph McCarthy, I interjected that Republicans were desperate to find an issue to exploit after being out of power since 1932.  Victims of the Red Scare included not only academicians, librarians, and members of the Hollywood establishment but labor leaders, the target, I pointed out, of the HUAC hearings held in Gary.  Nicole discussed the 1953 Lavender Scare against homosexuals when an estimated 5,000 gays were hounded from government positions on the specious grounds that they were security risks possible susceptible to blackmail. Until recently the Lavender Scare received scant, if any, mention in textbooks.  Now “queer history” is in, if not universally accepted by the “Old Guard.”

2017 PBS documentary

Nicole showed a film clip designed for Cold War-era schoolchildren called “Duck and Cover” on instructions how to react to a sudden nuclear attack. An animated turtle demonstrated by ducking into its shell when Air Raid sirens went off.

 Myriam and Chris Young in 2016; photo by Erika Rose

Arriving at Gino’s with wife Myriam, colleague Chris Young spoke to book club members about Jim DeFelice’s “West Like Lightning,” covering the short-lived but legendary Pony Express.   In my introduction I noted that the book dealt with the social history of the American West as well as technological advances and business entrepreneurship. Chris provided an interesting analysis of how history intersects with memory, myth, and folklore.  He contrasted the Congressional support for expanding the postal service during the Early National period with late 1850sgovernment torpor at a time when sectional differences were coming to a head.  Those who hadn’t read the book were amazed that the Pony Express lasted barely more than a year. It was celebrated in dime novels and Wild West shows by those looking back with nostalgia to a vanishing era, similar, I noted, to present interest in rodeos.  Brian Barnes, who always reads the bimonthly selection, joked that in school he played a game called Pony Express, adding that it was similar to Post Office but with more horsing around. 

The Cars’ front man Ric Ocasek died, evidently from a heart condition exacerbated by emphysema.  WXRT’s Lin Brehmer credited him with being a true innovator respected by both purists and the general public.  I put on “Heartbeat City” in tribute – just what I needed.  Brandon Flowers of the Killers called Ocasek “my first king”and shared an email he once sent Ric to express his gratitude for enriching his life:

  My family was visiting my sister Amy in Layton, Utah, when I was 13 or so.  Her husband Kenny was stationed there at the air force base.  While we were out one day, my mother Jeannie gave me 10 bucks to but a cassette for the ride home.  It was a rite of passage!  All my buddies at that to me were listening to grunge or gangster rap.  I didn’t feel much like a gangster and was too tender for the heavy stuff.  My brother Shane was 12 years older than me and would play me bits and pieces from his record collection when I’d stay with him on occasional weekends.  Independence and adrenaline rushed through me on my way to the register to purchase The Cars Greatest Hits.  It set me on a path towards the adult I would become, towards the job I have, even towards the woman that I was blessed to marry.

I talked on the phone to Gaard Logan about Ocasek and legendary journalist Cokie Roberts, who succumbed to cancer, and put the Cars Greatest Hits CD on heavy rotation - just what I needed -  along with the Avett Brothers, The Beths, Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” and “Copper Blue” by Sugar. 

 Ray Smock with Cokie and Steve Roberts

Ray Smock wrote this tribute:

   The passing of Cokie Roberts has left a void in American journalism and in my heart, since she and her husband Steve, were friends of long standing, going back to the 1980s when my mentor in Congress was Cokie’s mother, Congresswoman Lindy Boggs. 

    One of Cokie’s last public appearances was this past July, when she and Steve came to the Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education in Shepherdstown, WV at my invitation to help us raise funds for our student intern program. The evening was a resounding success and everyone in attendance was treated to some of the best and most inciteful political discourse imaginable.

    Cokie was a pioneer among women in journalism and she wrote best-selling books about women in politics and in the life of the nation whose stories are often left out of the history books. She took seriously the admonition of Abigail Adams, who wrote to her husband John in 1776, when the new nation was being formed, “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”  

    I will always remember Cokie as the kind of woman Abigail Adams had in mind to   take this country forward.

Thanksgiving weekend

“To succeed in life you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone, and a funny bone.”  Reba McEntire

Born in 1955 in McAlester, Oklahoma, Reba McIntire sang at rodeos while in high school.  Her dad was a steer-roping champ, and Reba was married for ten years to a steer wrestler.  The country singer was sold 80 million records, played Annie Oakley on Broadway in “Annie get Your Gun,” and had a hit TV show for six years. In 1990 eight members of her band died in a plane crash.  She dedicated her next album, “For My Broken Heart,” to them, featuring the song, “The Greatest Man I Never Knew,” about a daughter’s lament.  One verse goes:

           “He was good at business

But there was business left to do

He never said he loved me,

Guess he thought I knew.”

Republican staffer Elizabeth Lauten resigned after criticizing Malia and Sasha Obama for the way they looked and acted at the annual turkey pardoning ceremony. This Facebook rant of hers went viral: “Act like being in the White House matters to you.  Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar.  And certainly don’t make faces during televised public events.”  Evidently Malia winced and said, “Nah” when asked if she wanted to pat the turkey.  Showing her true colors, Lauten added this shot at the girls’ parents: “Your mother and father don’t respect their positions very much, or the nation for that matter, so I’m guessing you’re coming up a little short in the ‘good role model’ department.”  Sounds like it is Lauten who lacks respect. Lauten later apologized.

breakfast at Sunrise Restaurant; gaming at condo

Thanksgiving weekend at the condo saw plenty of good eating, board games (Apples to Apples, Wits and Wagers), Wii contests, and cards (pinochle, bridge, and SOB).  Phil and four of the grandkids – Miranda, Tori, James, and Becca - were with us four days straight, while Anthony, Dave, and Angie were present intermittently.  One question in Wits and Wagers asked what year the first gumball machine appeared.  I guessed 1876; the answer was 1907.  As a joke my remaining answers made use of the numbers 1876. For number of hazardous waste sites in New Jersey I wrote down 187.6 and won; for number of countries bordering the Mediterranean I answered 18.76 and won again.  I’d have been three for three only Phil wrote down 19 for a third question, making it impossible for 18.76 to be correct.

Being a Lions fan, Phil enjoyed their routing the Bears, while I was pleased that the Eagles prevailed in Dallas.  I was uninterested in an evening game (talk about wretched excess), Seattle versus San Francisco.

My raving about “Sonic Highway” finally got Dave interested.  The latest episode was on Seattle, home to rock pioneers Jimi Hendrix, The Sonics, Paul Revere and the Raiders. Dave Grohl joined Kurt Cobain and Nirvana there as he band’s drummer.  Pioneers of the so-called grunge sound were garage bands such as the Sonics. Guitarist Nancy Wilson told Grohl that Heart moved to Vancouver because one member was a draft dodger.  In the 1990s Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana made Seattle the most happening club scene in America.

Phil and I watched James bowl, and I said hello to Chris Lugo’s granddaughter Angel, a student at Ball State.  When she was a toddler, her mother used to bring her to the bowling alley.  I told her that after I mistook her for a boy, she wouldn’t talk to me for weeks.  She admitted she was stubborn and told a friend her hair wouldn’t grow out when she was a kid.   Afterwards we stayed around to talk with John and Chris English, whose son Alex is also on James’ team, Bowling for Doughnuts.  In high school Phil and John were best friends, and John always asks how Phil is doing when see him.  

Before the Michiganders took off, the weather was so balmy Miranda and Tori went on a short walk with me.  Dave was announcing a basketball tournament at East Chicago Central.  If he or Miranda’s friend Derek were here, we would have been playing football, a past Thanksgiving tradition. 

Chicago Tribune reporter Ron Grossman compared the Ferguson disturbances to the so-called Dixmoor Riot that occurred 50 years ago in a Chicago suburb.  Both involved petty shoplifting.  In Dixmoor the owner of Foremost Liquor forcibly stopped a woman from leaving with a bottle of gin. Next day rumors spread that she had been beaten, and the store was looted. The violence continued for two more days, resulting in 37 injuries and scores of arrests.  The sentence Judge Nathan Cohen imposed on those found guilty of disorderly conduct was to write a book review of Bishop Fulton Sheen’s “Love One Another.”  Pretty bogus.

On “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” Cokie Roberts expressed outrage at Prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s subversion of the grand jury process and the timing of the announcement - after dark, knowing protests would surely follow.  Cokie added that there was no excuse for a virtually lily-white police force in a community with a majority black population.  Conservative Bill Kristol, smug as always, claimed the process was fair and that more Americans care about law and order than the grievances of rioters. 

Five St. Louis Rams players came out of the tunnel at the Edward Jones Dome with their hands up.  No comment so far from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who seems to be into hiding.  An arbiter overturned Goddell’s indefinite suspension of Ray Rice, arguing that it amounted to double jeopardy since Goodell had first given him a two-game suspension.  Once a videotape of Rice hitting (or slapping) his wife in an elevator went viral, sponsor threats caused Goodell to bend over backward to please them, but Rice had already admitted to what was on the tape.

An early (1984) Coen Brothers flick, “Blood Simple,” stars a young-looking Frances McDormand and features an Oscar-worthy performance by M. Emmet Walsh (the Machine-Shop Ear-Bender in “Raising Arizona”) as a crazed private detective, who has a hysterical laugh and, like characters in the Coen Brothers’ “Fargo,” has some unforgettable asides, including this “test of true love”:

  “You know, you know, a friend of mine a while back broke his hand and put it in a cast. Very next day, he falls, protects his bad hand, and he breaks his good one. So he breaks it too, you know. So, now he's got two busted flippers. So, I says to him: ‘Creighton,’ I says. ‘I hope your wife really loves you, because for the next five weeks, you can't even wipe your own god damn ass.’  [laughs] That's the test, ain't it? Test of true love.” 

I also checked out “The Lincoln Lawyer,” which I had seen when it first came out, and enjoyed the banter between Matthew McConaughey and Marisa Tomei as a divorced couple.  I discovered that Shea Whigham, who played Eli in “Boardwalk Empire,” had a minor role as the jailbird snitch.  A man of many looks, Whigham was in “American Hustle” and “Silver Linings Playbook.”

According to Peter Ackroyd’s “Tudors,” Henry VIII was a spendthrift who lusted after glory and had few redeeming qualities.  Breaking from the Catholic Church in order to remarry (he had a total of six wives) and produce a male heir, he profited from the confiscation of church lands and ordered an obscene number of people executed; victims included women, clerics, and officials who had served the king faithfully.  While some merely had their heads chopped off, others were drawn and quartered, disemboweled while still alive, thrown in boiling water, or slowly burned to death.  What seems truly appalling is the amount of deaths caused by doctrinal disputes that seem trivial today.

In Cincinnati over Thanksgiving with Emma and Riva’s family, Anne Balay (above) has an upcoming job interview next week and is preparing two model syllabi.  “Steel Closets” has won yet another national award.  IUN should be bragging about her accomplishment; instead my beloved university is an object of ridicule for getting rid of her.

above, Black oak scenes; below, Borman Square; by Samuel A. Love

Samuel A. Love was part of a Black Oak property survey blitz team and is preparing for a talk on Gary’s parks.  In Marquette Park Alexandra Forsythe spotted a snowy owl.

I easily won a second straight Fantasy match and finished 5-8.  I’d be in the playoffs except that an earlier tie allowed both grandson Anthony and nephew Bob to finish a half-game ahead of me at 5-7-1.

In class Nicole Anslover explained Harry Truman’s unlikely elevation as FDR’s 1944 running mate and claimed he was one of the only Presidents with little or no desire to hold that office.  I mentioned Republican campaign efforts (“Clear It with Sidney”) to tie FDR with Jewish labor leader Sidney Hillman and spreading rumors that FDR had dispatched a destroyer for his dog and that he was near-death.  FDR countered by touring New York City’s five boroughs and Philadelphia in an open car on a cold, rainy day and with the famous “Fala speech”:

“These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him - at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars- his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself - such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.”