Intolerance

“Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice,” Somalian feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali (above)Alfred Paget as Belshazzar in "Intolerance"

“Intolerance” was a three and a half hour 1917 epic silent film by D. W. Griffith, who denied he was seeking redemption for the racist glorification of the Ku Klux Klan in “The Birth of a Nation” (1915). “Intolerance” consists of four parts, including the Persian King Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylonia, the religious persecution of Jesus, the massacre of French Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572, and the exploitation of American mill workers in Griffith’s own time.
Janet Bayer and grandson Nick at protest

A Catholic priest in the wealthy Indianapolis suburb of Carmel, Theodore Rothrock, branded Black Lives Matter organizers “maggots and parasites feeding off the isolation and addiction of broken families and offering to replace any current frustration and anxiety with more misery and resentment.”  This outrage caused a thousand protestors to gather at St. Elizabeth Seton Church demanding that Father Rothrock be suspended, including Janet Bayer and grandson Nick, eagerly chanting “Black Lives Matter.”  A small number of counter-demonstrators defended the priest.  Bishop Timothy Doherty not only suspended the offender, who subsequently half-heartedly apologized, but ended the announcement by saying, “Black Lives Matter.”Times photo by Kyle Telechan

Vandals spray-painted a racial slur on a bakery and café that Black entrepreneur Sameka Coaxum was attempting to launch in a predominantly white neighborhood in Hammond.  Mayor Tom McDermott denounced the act of racism and had city officials remove the ugly remark without delay. The Times obtained this statement from the victim: “In order to make a change, someone has to be a trailblazer and take a hit and I feel I have taken that hit,” Sameka Coaxum said. “There’s no other African American businesses in this district and Hammond needs to change with the times. It’s time to transition over to 2020.”

The Chesterton Tribune received letters to the editor denouncing the peaceful Black Lives Matter (BLM) march that I participated in, claiming the BLM organizers are Marxist revolutionaries.  Answering this rubbish in “Voice of the People” was Rich Hawksworth in words less diplomatic and more sarcastic than I’d have chosen but no less effective:

    Heaven forbid black folk – Marxists no less! – descend on Chesterton and threaten that snuggly-safe feeling that white folk have come to expect.  I’m sure the angst experienced by local residents during the recent Juneteenth rally was awful, just awful.  Surely, George Floyd, in his last moments on Earth, would have empathized with your discomfort.  No doubt, Ahmaud Arbery, as he was being hunted down and assassinated by white vigilantes, would have identified with your fear. And surely, Breonna Taylor, in the moments before she was murdered in her own home by police officers would have recognized the utter terror you experienced as “leftists” gathered in Thomas Park.  Perhaps it is time to shelve the pathetic white privilege and strive for the equality that our founders promised, but never delivered.
circa 1922

IU historian Jim Madison appeared on the radio program “All In” in connection with 1925 Ku Klux Klan records from Hamilton County recently made available to scholars. Found in a trunk 25 years ago, they include dues receipts from about a thousand Klan members from the Noblesville area. Madison has a forthcoming book titled “The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland” that will document how powerful this hate group was in Indiana during the 1920s.  He quoted the book’s first line: “The Klan was as dark as the night and as American as apple pie.”  Members, both men and women, considered themselves good, God-fearing, 100% Americans whose enemies were Catholics, Jew, immigrants, and African Americans in that order.  He debunked the idea that many were coerced into joining or that Klaverns (local chapters) quickly faded away after Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson was convicted of murdering a young woman he’d raped. Several Klan members were on the jury that found him guilty. Americans want “comfort history,” Madison stated, but the truth is that Hoosier history isn’t always noble.  Unlike a century ago, the modern Klan consists of a few misfits, white supremacists who nonetheless can cause mischief.

Four years before, in the summer of 1963, 15 Blacks girls in Americus, Georgia, attempted to buy tickets at the front entrance of a movie theater and got locked up for 45 days in a Civil War-era structure. The so-called Leesburg Stockade Girls were discovered a month into their captivity by photographer whose photo alerted their parents to where they were captured public attention.

RIP: Chesterton resident Bobbie Dean “Injun Bob” Gajdik, 77, whom I knew as the friendly bouncer at Leroy’s Hot Stuff when Dave’s band Voodoo Chili played there. Tim “Voodoo Daddy” Brush won him over and he loved the classic rock songs they played.  Even though there was officially a cover charge, anyone who told him they were friends of the band he’d let in free.  Leroy’s was a biker bar; and, as Dave once told me, bikers are great supporters and don’t start fights but know how to finish them.  The obit mentioned that Gaidik was an avid motorcycle rider and that “his stories will be missed.”  Sadly, I never heard those anecdotes but recall that he was a tolerant man and proud of his Native American ancestry.  I wish I’d known him better and was happy to learn that longtime companion Carol Mitchell and many close friends, including Dave Shivalec, were with him when his health declined. I first went to Leroy’s with Mike Bayer to see Hoosier blues artist Duke Tomatoe.  Stevie Van Zandt played an incandescent set there.  Their Mexican food is so good Kevin Horn often orders it for the Horn’s New Year’s Eve parties.  It’s a friendly place, and something will be missing with Bobbie Dean gone.

Reading about the antiwar protests against Dow Chemical Company at the university if Wisconsin in October 1867 in “They Marched into Sunlight” by David Maraniss, I was saddened by the enmity between protestors and police, who were ordered to clear a building as a result of administrators’ incompetence.  Maraniss mentioned English grad student Michael Krasny, who was disgusted by Johnson’s escalation of the war but who had grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Cleveland and had friends and relatives who were soldiers and cops. Music major John Pikart, who opposed the war but feared his friends obstructing the building might be arrested and expelled, felt conflicting emotions in the heat of the confrontation.  Maraniss wrote:

    He was furious about the police attack, by their use of nightsticks, by the fact that the administration had allowed the confrontation to take place, yet he was also disturbed by the mass psychology of the angry crowd. That night he wrote a friend: “It was a terrible sight.  Than the students by the door starting spitting on the police and screaming at them.  The police charged with their clubs. . . . I have never seen such hysteria and hatred in so large a group of people. On my way out, I looked back to se the whole crowd screaming “Dirty Fascist Honky” at the police.

Flight Paths

 “Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking.” Justin Cronin

Historian Ray Boomhower wrote: “On this day in 1943, Charles Hall of Brazil, Indiana, became the first African American pilot, and Tuskegee Airman, to shoot down an enemy fighter aircraft in World War II, blasting a German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 Würge out of the sky while escorting B-25 bombers in his P-40 fighter on a mission over southwestern Sicily. Hall flew 198 mission during the war, becoming the first African American to win a Distinguished Flying Cross. A real Hoosier hero.” After the war Major Hall worked at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma until 1967, four years before his death.Terry Allen in center

In “They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967” David Maraniss described the death of Lt. Col. Terry Allen, Jr. during the battle of Ong Thanh.  The son of General Terry Allen, a veteran of both World Wars known as “Terrible Terry,” he left a wife and three daughters behind in El Paso and began having second thoughts about a military career after realizing that his marriage was on the rocks and another man was living in their house.  Commanding the famed 28^th infantry regiment known as the Black Lions, Allen died in an ambush while directing an assault on an enemy base camp.  He preferred overseeing his troops by helicopter but was ordered to be on the ground, where an overall view of events was denied him.  Cautioned by Lieutenant Clark Welch to wait for re-enforcements, Allen, prodded by superiors, was overconfident that he could accomplish the mission.  Maraniss wrote:

    His determination to stay on the battlefield was a manifestation of the pressure coming down, all the way down, from President Lyndon Johnson, who wanted good news and enemy body counts, to General William Westmoreland, who believed the war could be won by search-and-destroy missions in which the First Division pursued the enemy overland relentlessly, to General John Hay, who was feeling the heat for being too cautious, to Colonel George Newman, who wanted the Black Lions and their commander out there on the ground, not just searching but destroying, to Lieutenant Colonel Allen, who wanted to prove that he could do it.

Terry Allen’s father had written in a booklet on combat leadership, “The battle is the payoff.”  His son died slumped behind an anthill, cut down by AK-47 machine-gun fire, his body riddled with bullets and an eye shot out, one of 161 casualties, including 64 dead.  Against all evidence, the military brass declared Ong Thanh a great victory. By the time the senior Allen learned of his son’s death, he had already begun a decline into dementia.  As his condition worsened, he’d tell people, using the present tense, “Terry is a good soldier.  Terry would never get ambushed.” Though he took no part in the tragic fire fight, General Hay would be awarded a Silver Star for it.

 

Confirming through contacts that his son was dead, General Allen, according to Maraniss, went on a long walk and asked himself, “Why my son?  Why not me?”  As he prepared to get official notice from the commander of Fort Bliss, “Terrible Terry” steeled himself, muttered “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” and thought, “This is the house of an infantryman.  There will be no tears.”

 

Mary McDowell

I watched the final two episodes of historian Heath Carter’s series on unsung heroes whose religious faith made a difference in people’s lives and in the course of American history.  “The Angel of the Yards” described the half-century of settlement house work by Mary McDowell, a protégé of Jane Addams who ministered to the needs of poor people at Chicago House, located in the Windy City’s notorious “Back of the Yards” neighborhood. “A voteless people is a hopeless people” examined the lifelong activism of Amelia Boynton, who was knocked unconscious by troopers in 1965 on Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, an event that led to the 1965 Voting Rights Acts.  More than three decades earlier, Boynton had started the Dallas County Voters League in an attempt to secure the ballot for African Americans. In 2015 at age 103 Boynton crossed Edmund Pettus bridge next to President Barack Obama.

Amelia Boynton in 1965 ad 2015

Elizabeth Wuerffel interviewed Heath Carter on May 25, 2020, about why American cities such as Gary, Indiana, were so rigidly segregated after World War II despite the opportunities supposedly available to returning African-American servicemen during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.  One factor Carter emphasized was the practice of redlining:

    Black veterans found themselves effectively unable to take advantage of the G.I. Bill’s offer of a cheap FHA subsidized mortgage. This was because of the practice of redlining. Redlining is named for these maps that were used in conjunction with FHA mortgages. If you pull up one of these maps, you’ll see neighborhoods that are color-coded: yellow, green, blue, and red. Red were what the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation thought, at least, were the highest-risk neighborhoods and those were neighborhoods that had high concentrations of persons of color. Fundamentally, at some level, the grading system governing these maps reflects kind of just a racist point of view on the mid-20th century American city where, in many ways, race is being taken as a proxy for risk.

    If you’re an African American veteran who’s going into a bank to try to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, the banker would say, “Oh, where’s the home you’d like to buy? Oh, it’s in this neighborhood? Let me pull up my map.” They’d look on the map, if they didn’t already know. And that neighborhood’s graded red which means that it’s considered too risky for them to give you an FHA subsidized loan. And so what redlining meant [ was that] Black Americans were effectively boxed out of the housing market, and Black residents find themselves crammed into very tight quarters and are paying, often, an incredible premium. They’re often paying vastly more for rent in a kind of very challenging neighborhood than they would pay for a mortgage in a middle-class white neighborhood. So this was one of the sort of central obstacles for Black Americans seeking to kind of make their way in postwar America.

Mayor Jerome Prince of Gary, like his predecessor Karen Freeman-Wilson and longtime state legislator and educator Vernon Williams, grew up with a mother who stressed the value of education as a necessary path to a productive life.  Though a teenage mother living in modest circumstances, DaNita Marshall never wavered in that belief, Prince recalled in an interview on June 22, 2020 by Elizabeth Wuerffel for the Valparaiso University Flight Paths Project.

 

Born in St. Louis, DaNita Marshall moved from Chicago to Gary with her mother, stepfather and ten siblings from in 1956 at age ten to live with her grandmother in a one-story, three-bedroom, 700-square-foot flat on Indiana Street, later renamed Martin Luther King Drive.  When she was 17, DaNita frequently visited her grandmother, who had moved back to Chicago after deeding the house over to DaNita’s parents.  On one such visit DaNita established a relationship with Lloyd Williams and subsequently became pregnant.  On August 16, 1964, DaNita gave birth to a son at Gary Methodist Hospital, whom she named Abner Jerome Marshall in honor of her grandfather.  The baby’s first bed was a bassinet made out of a drawer.  In 1969 DaNita married David Prince, and the young family moved to the newly built East Point Terrace apartments.  They were its first residents; in fact, the cement was sill moist, so DaNita etched her and David’s names outside their unit.  Neighbor kids teased their son incessantly about his name, which was the same as a character in the TV series “Bewitched” and the comic strip “L’il Abner.”  Eventually he persuaded DaNita to change it to Jerome Abner Prince. His dad, meanwhile, had joined the marines and served in Vietnam. In 1973 the couple split up, and DaNita moved in with an aunt in Glen Park.

Prior to fourth grade, Jerome Prince, who presently is Mayor of Gary, had gone to a virtually all-black school.  Recognizing that he could use more structure and discipline with a father figure no longer on the scene, DaNita enrolled him at St. Mark’s School on Ridge Road.  His teacher was Sister Elise, and for the next four years he had mostly white classmates.  He learned how to fit in and with DaNita’s prodding spent many long evenings doing homework. Jerome went to Lew Wallace High School and in his junior year became a father. He decided to follow David Prince’s example and join the marines immediately after graduating in 1983.  After 13 weeks of boot camp, Jerome married his teenage sweetheart De Anna Slaughter, and she and their son moved to Concord, California, I the San Francisco Bay area to be with him. 

 

One reason Jerome had enlisted in the marines was because the employment situation in Gary had become dire by the 1980s, with U.S. Steel employing far few workers than in previous decades. Returning to Gary in 1986 after completing his tour of duty, Jerome asked his mother for advice.  DaNita, a sales director for Mary Kay Cosmetics, suggested he seek a career in sales.  His work in real estate led to a position in the Calumet Township Assessor’s office as a real estate deputy.  In 1998 he was elected a Gary Precinct Committeeman.  One of his goals was to get streets in his neighborhood repaved.  Prince remembered:

  I thought that all I had to do was make some noise and get other people to join me, and so we took that path. I actually initiated a petition, took it around my neighborhood, and we submitted it to the administration at that particular time, and I don’t think it got a second look. It became very clear to me that you have to do a little bit more than this, but more importantly, you have to be in the position to effectuate change.  I quickly discovered that I could have a greater impact and connection to the constituents as a councilperson.

In 1999 Prince unseated longtime incumbent Cleo Wesson and became city councilman for Gary’s Fifth District.  Twice re-elected, he became a member of the Lake County Council in 2014 to fill a vacated seat. From there he successfully ran for Lake County Assessor, and in 2019 he defeated incumbent mayor Karen Freeman-Williams.  Crediting DaNita with setting him on the right path at critical times in his life, Prince claimed that she was his toughest task master, more than any marine drill instructor.

Mayor Jerome Prince and wife De Anna

Social and Political History

 

“The facts fairly and honestly presented, truth will take care of itself,” William Allen White

 

When I was in grad school more than a half-century ago, political history was still “in” while social history was generally disparaged as the study of pots and pans.  Nonetheless, a growing number of historians attuned to the tumultuous events of the 1960s began advocating studying the past “from the bottom up,” that is, concentrating on ordinary people and marginalized groups too often neglected in traditional histories, such as workers, minority groups, immigrants, women, and queers (although that word only came into widespread use recently).  The field of social history included a growing number of young scholars investigating family dynamics, gender issues, and popular culture.  As a social historian, I was pleased to see the tide turning but still respected political history.

 

 In the current Journal of American History (JAH) there are multiple reviews of social histories for every book on politics.  Examples include Alison Lefkovitz’s “Strange Bedfellows: Marriage in the Age of Women’s Liberation” and Jaime Harker’s “The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement and the Queer Literary Canon.”  How delightful to come across my University of Maryland buddy Don Ritchie’s friendly critique of “Crusader for Democracy: The Political Life of William Allen White” by Charles Delgadillo.  Well-respected as editor of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette and a nationally syndicated columnist, White was a progressive Republican who helped Teddy Roosevelt form the Bull Moose Party in 1912 and broke his vow never to seek elective office by running for governor of Kansas in 1924 as an independent after both major candidates had ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Ritchie wrote that while White “conducted a lifelong crusade for democracy, social justice, and economic fairness, his editorials were usually more emphatic than his politics.” When White supported Alf Landon against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, the President quipped that he could rely on the editor’s support for three and a half out of every four years.  Ritchie concludes: “Delgadillo provides a suitable study of this politically-minded journalist and liberal Republican, whose once forward-minded political faction is now virtually extinct.”

 

Despite the flattering subtitle of Arnold A. Offner’s Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of the Country,” JAH reviewer Danial Scroop wrote that the author presented the Minnesota liberal as “a flawed, and not entirely likeable figure who talked too much and neglected his family while pursuing a policy of compromise that owed as much to his vaunting personal ambition as to political pragmatism.”  Examples include timidity in the face of McCarthyism and as President Lyndon B. Johnson disastrously escalated the war in Southeast Asia.  As LBJ famously said of his vice president, “I’ve got Hubert’s pecker in my pocket."

David Maraniss’s Pulitzer Prize winning “A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father” (2019) combines political and social history.  Elliott Maraniss, the son of Eastern European immigrants, was a baseball-loving, patriotic World War II veteran who in 1939 had written columns for the University of Michigan student paper praising the Soviet Union. Although the author’s father never talked about whether or not he had been a member of the Communist Party at that time, he came under FBI scrutiny and in 1952 was called to testify before the notorious House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). Instead of acting contrite and “naming names” of those he suspected to be former Communists, Elliott Maraniss refused to cooperate with the committee, which refused to allow him to read a statement defending his patriotism; it was buried in HUAC files until discovered by his son decades later.  That stance cost Maranisss his job with the Detroit Times and, hounded by the FBI wherever he sought work, it was several years before the editor of the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, hired him.  Rather than allow the experience to embitter him, Elliott, according to his son, remained an optimist and eventually regained his reputation as a fair-minded newspaperman respected by both Democrats and Republicans

 

Trump has been browbeating governors who are facilitating constituents being able to vote by mail ballot, claiming without a shred of evidence that it will lead to fraudulent returns. His constant downplaying of an epidemic that has killed upwards of a hundred thousand citizens gets more disgusting with each passing day as do the racist appeals to his base.  Dean Bottorff wrote: “Sadly, Trump supporters are like brainwashed cultists. No amount of reason, irrefutable facts or even common sense will influence their beliefs. If you try to persuade them of even the simplest fact (say, how Trump's two-month denial marathon about Covid-19 has caused tens of thousands of needles deaths) they will either not listen, claim the media and scientists are lying, throw up false equivalencies or simply go down a rabbit hole of flawed logic and conspiracy theories.”

 

In the Chesterton Tribune Betty Canright and Kevin Nevers reported on these events that took place 100 years ago: two-year-old Loraine Bedenkop died after swallowing a three-eighths iron washer; pickerel were abundant in the Kankakee River due to high water in Illinois lakes and streams; New York Central railway officials are ignoring demands by town officials to safeguard the Calumet Road railroad crossing; and this item: “forced to descend on account of heavy fog, U.S. mail aviator Carr Nutter escaped injury after crash-landing his machine in a soft field on the Ralph Peterson farm a half mile north of Crocker.”  The following day, I was mentioned in the “Ten Years Ago” section of the column for speaking to the Dunes Historical Society, and Becca’ photo appeared on the front page for winning a Chesterton music award.

 

Historian Ray Boomhower wrote that Hoosier homemaker Juliet V. Strauss (1863-1918), whose weekly column in the Indianapolis News was titled “The Country Contributor.”  Strauss also enjoyed a wide readership from a monthly column, “The Ideas of a Plain Country Woman,” published in Ladies Home Journal, played a major role in the establishment of Turkey Run State Park.  Boomhower posted this quotation by Strauss that captured her zest for life: “I lived my own life.  If I wished to ride a horse, or to play a game of cards, or to go wading in the creek with the children, I always did it. I never strained my eyesight or racked my nerves trying to arrive at small perfections. I avoided rivalries and emulations. In short, I lived.”

Something in the Air

  “Call out the instigators
Because there's something in the air
We've got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right”

    “Something in the Air,” Thunderclap Newman

When I first heard “Something in the Air,” I had no idea who Thunderclap Newman was but loved the song. It appeared on the album “Hollywood Dream” (1969) and reminded me of the Beach Boys if they had decided to make a political statement.  The original title was “Revolution,” but the Beatles had used that name for the B side of “Hey Jude.” The brainchild of the WHO’s Pete Townshend, who played bass guitar under the assumed name Bijou Drains, Thunderclap Newman consisted of Speedy Keen (who wrote “Something in the Air”), Andy Newman, and Jimmy McCullough.  Even though the single was a smash hit in the UK and U.S. and featured in such movies as “Easy Rider,” “The Strawberry Statement,” and “Almost Famous,” the group never recorded another album. “Something in the Air” was coved by many others, most famously Tom Petty in 1994.

    “We are prepared to spend the rest of our lives if necessary to save the dunes,”

  Save the Dunes founder Dorothy R. Buell

Shirley Roman touched countless lives during her 92 years.  Born in western Pennsylvania in the Ohio River town of Coraopolis, she grew up in Racine, Wisconsin and graduated from Gary Emerson High School.  While at DePauw University, she started dating Frank Roman, who’d been the star quarterback at Emerson when she was an undergraduate and after serving in World War II was attending Wabash College. They married in 1952 and became Miller mainstays, active in Save the Dunes, Marquette Park Methodist Church, scouting, the MCC (Miller Citizens Corporation), and, in Shirley’s case, gardening and knitting clubs. Shirley taught elementary school in Gary and first grade at Portage’s Crisman, where granddaughter Alissa started school, for over 20 years.  I met the Romans at a party that Tom Eaton hosted.  I recall them as strikingly handsome and personable octogenarians. Shirley loved the beach and as her obit states, “was a force for good and change in her community and fierce protector of the lake, dunes, and woods, and the unique Miller community.”  The obit added:

   Shirley and Frank loved cross-country skiing and to travel and were very social, celebrating anything they could think of with their famous cocktail parties. Later in life, they moved to Rittenhouse Senior Living.  The family (Meg, Frank, Jr., Leah Shelby, and others) thanks the staff there, as well as the staff of Harbor Light Hospice, for their gracious care given to Shirley and for laughing at her jokes until the end.

The Chesterton area establishments in Porter County are not practicing social distancing in a uniform manner. Some restaurants are open, others still closed, and many serving drive-thru or carry-out only.  The Chesterton library opened for curbside service.  One calls ahead, has books and DVDs or CDs (in my case by the Beths and Night Ranger) and then goes to one of five reserve parking spaces and calls inside for delivery.  Gaard Logan recommended a trilogy by Hilary Mantel that takes place in Tudor England.  Those novels weren’t available, so I checked out one of Mantel’s early works, “Beyond Black” (2005).  Ron Cohen also loaned me a John Williams novel, “Stoner” (1965) and “They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America October 1967” (2003) by one of my favorite authors, David Maraniss.  That should keep me busy.  Nancy greeted me at the door wearing a mask, as was I, and had a bag of books and periodicals plus three homemade chocolate chip cookies.  After a 30-minute visit, I gave Nancy an elbow bump and said, “Guess no hugging or kissing.”



“They Marched into Sunlight” focuses on two main events, a Vietcong attack on an American division on a search-and-destroy mission and an antiwar sit-in at the University of Wisconsin protesting the university allowing Dow Chemical Company, makers of napalm, to recruit in campus.  The title comes from Vietnam vet Bruce Weigl’s “Eulogy,” about a patrol suddenly under fire.  Here are the poem’s opening and closing lines”

into sunlight they marched,

into dog day, into no saints day,

and they were cut down

. . . .

The bullets sliced through the razor grass
So there was not even time to speak.
The words would not let themselves be spoken.
Some of them died.
Some of them were not allowed to.

On Their Shoulders

“Everything begins with the body of the father.” David Maraniss, “When Pride Still Mattered”

 Vince Lombardi and Sonny Jurgensen

In a biography of legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, David Maraniss wrote that patriarch Enrico Lombardi arrived in the U.S. from Italy at age 3 and got nicknamed “moon” because of his round face and later “Five by Five” due to his short, squat stature.  Henry, as he liked to be called, covered his body with tattoos, much to the chagrin of his mother, Matilda, who friends and family called Matty.   Finding work as a butcher, he was so physically powerful he could lift two kids on a coal shovel with one hand. Son Vince’s life revolved around family, church, school, and sports, not necessarily in that order.  Brother Harold moved to San Francisco and, in response to constant inquiries about when he was getting married, finally revealed in a letter that he was gay.  Henry wrote back, “I don’t care.  You are my son.”When Vince came out of retirement in 1969 to coach the Washington Redskins and discovered that a player was gay, he told running back coach George Dickson, “if I hear one of you people make reference to his manhood, you'll be out of here before your ass hits the ground.”  I became a Skins fan that year, with quarterback Christian Adolf “Sonny” Jurgensen my favorite player.  The two got along famously, and Washington enjoyed a turn-around season, going 7-5-2, but it would be cancer-stricken Lombardi’s last. Both Henry and Matty Lombardi outlived their celebrated son.

After conducting research on the parents of successful Gary natives, I wrote articles on athletes Alex Karras (son of a family doctor and a registered nurse who was the better athlete), Hank Stram (whose father wrestled professionally and widowed mother managed a store), and Tony Zale (born Anthony Florian Zaleski into an immigrant family of steelworkers).  Prior to Zale’s initial bout, his mother fed him fish because it was on a Friday. He lost, and thereafter she served him steak no matter what day the fight took place.  Actor Karl Malden’s parents, Peter and Minnie Sekulovic, both acted in ethnic plays that young Mladen participated in, as well as Karageorge choir at Saint Sava Serbian Orthodox Choir, which his father directed.  

Coming of age during the Great Depression, my parents, Midge and Vic, valued the security of family and steady work.  Vic preferred sticking with a company that didn’t always treat him fairly to taking a chance when a riskier venture came along.  Midge worked full-time before marriage, was a substitute teacher while I was in school, and got hired as a dentist’s secretary after Vic died at age 50. To the extent that I am frugal and cautious in financial matters, it comes from them. My competitive streak in sports and games comes from Vic. They paid for my college education, as we did for Phil and Dave.  Despite similarities in looks and attitudes I’m not exactly a chip off the old block, as the saying dating back to Greek poet Theocritus goes, especially when it comes to my progressive political views and lifestyle. Both parents hated my musical tastes in the Fifties and still would today.

Vic was about 5’9”, weighed around 190, and had a full head of hair (like me, knock on wood; my younger brother has a bald spot).  A meat and potatoes man who smoked nearly a pack a day (mainly nonfiltered Camels), he commuted to work and had a mostly sedentary job.  A golfer and bowler, he and I went at it in ping pong and one-on-one basketball games, but wiffleball he could never get the hang of, frustrating him. Midge, barely five feet tall and given that nickname due to her diminutive size, went by her given name, Mary, after Vic died.

Until recently I thought that impressive Presidential candidate and former HUD secretary Julian Castro under Barack Obama was the Texas Congressman who recently visited overcrowded detention centers where the Trump administration treats immigrants like cattle. That happens to be Julian’s identical twin brother Joaquin, named for the character in Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez’s “I Am Joaquin” (“I am Joaquín, lost in a world of confusion, caught up in the whirl of a gringo society, confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes, suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society”).  Matriarch Victoria Castro came to America from Mexico as an orphan at age 6.  Her daughter Maria (Rosie”) became a San Antonio community activist, while the twins’ father Jessie Guzman was a mathematics teacher. Rosie helped start the Chicano party La Raza Unita.  Julian, who served three two-year terms as Mayor of San Antonio after succeeding Henry Cisneros as city councilman, once said: “My mother is probably the biggest reason that my brother and I are in public service. Growing up, she would take us to a lot of rallies and organizational meetings and other things that are very boring for an 8-, 9-, 10-year-old.”

Peter Lorre as Ugarte in "Casablanca" 

According to “We’ll Always Have Casablanca” by Noel Isenberg, Hungarian-born Peter Lorre began his stage career as Laszlo Lowenstein, Born in the Hungarian town of Rozsahegy, now part of Slovakia, Lorre was the son of a Jewish bookkeeper frequently absent on military maneuvers with the Austrian army reserves. His mother died when he was four, and Laszlo frequently clashed with his stepmother.  Having arrived in the U.S. in 1934 and taken the stage name Peter Lorre, he portrayed gay dandy Joel Cairo in the 1941 film noir “The Maltese Falcon,” directed by John Huston and starring Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet.  In CasablancaLorre played unsavory black market dealer Signor Ugarte, who sold exit visas desperately needed by those fleeing the Nazis. In one exchange Ugarte says to Rick (Humphrey Bogart), “You despise me, don’t you?”Rick responds, “If I gave it any thought, I suppose I would.”   Lorre often took roles portraying sexually ambiguous oddballs and often appeared as Japanese or German villains in war movies.  In his last film for Warner Brothers, “The Beast with Five Fingers” (1946) Lorre played a crazed astrologer.   A practical jokester, Lorre sometimes had actors rehearse nonexistent movie scenes in his dressing room. When “Casablanca” director Michael Curtiz would leave a lit cigarette in an ashtray, he’d put it out with from an eye dropper. 

“We’ll Always Have Casablanca” makes reference to the phrase “Don’t Bogart that joint,” which pot smokers sharing a joint commonly use when someone is hogging it.  According to one explanation, while most smokers hold cigarettes between the second and third fingers, Bogie’s, when not in his mouth, were between thumb and forefinger, like pot smokers.  In 1978 Little Feat recorded a song by that name that starts out, “Roll another one just like the other one.  You been holding onto it, and I sure would like a hit!  Don’t bogart that joint my friend, pass it over to me!”

Cracker put on a live show at Acorn Theater in nearby Three Oaks, Michigan.  On WXRT’s Saturday morning flashback show on the year 1992 I heard “Happy Birthday To Me.” which Cracker hardly ever performs live.  Perhaps it’s the silly lyrics, although that’s true of many of their songs.  Here’s two verses:

I was having a good sleep in my car
In the parking lot of the Showboat Casino-Hotel
I say "I remember you, you drive like a P.T.A. mother
You brought me draft beer in a plastic cup"
    . . .
I remember you, I crashed your wedding
With some orange crepe paper and some Halloween candy
Uh, sometimes I wish I were Catholic (I don't know why)
I guess I'm happy to see your face at a time like this

I sang along to the “Happy Birthday To Me” chorus in the car.  

A “Jeopardy” question on national parks asked for one located in the Mojave Desert desecrated by vandals during a recent government shutdown.  Having visited Joshua Tree National Park, I knew the answer.  I’ve attended two cracker Campout weekends in nearby Pioneertown, California, which contains majestic Joshua trees.  Phil, Dave, cousin Bobby, and I traveled there to see the Head and the Heart, coming to Grand Rapids next month, where I first saw them. One song on their 2016 “Signs of Light” CD is “Your Mother’s Eyes.” Midge’s were green, Vic’s, like mine, blue.

 Bobby Skafish

At poker I met John Skafish, brother of longtime Chicago deejay Bobby Skafish, who has written “We Have Company: Four Decades of Rock and Roll Encounters” about celebrities such as David Bowie and Jackson Browne that he’s met during stints at Chicago radio stations WXRT, WLUP (the Loop), and WDRV (the Drive).  The Skafish brothers grew up in Hammond, John is a former math teacher at Andrean whose wife taught social studies at Lake Central.  With ten at the table we mostly played high-low Omaha, where one must use exactly two cards from the four dealt to you and three of the five common cards dealt face up, first by “flopping” three and then turning the others one at a time. If nobody has at least an eight low or two pair for high, there is just one winner. Other than splitting a couple small pots, in the three and a half hours, I won just a single pot but it was a huge one – in a high-only criss-cross game. I got dealt 2 fives, and two more came face up.  My four of a kind defeated two others betting heavy with a flush and full house.  The rest of the evening I minimized my losses by dropping out of most hands after the flop rather than hope for an unlikely card.  

 Baltimore and Ohio & Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Crossing in Miller, 1889, Calumet Regional Archives

Our nation and, in microcosm, the Calumet Region, became an industrial power on the shoulders of the laboring classes, whose ranks and clout are diminishing in the wake of automation and globalization.  Good riddance to some unsafe, unhealthy, demeaning jobs, but vanishing, too, are those that pay a living wage.

Allison Schuette had a poem accepted by Belt(as in rust belt) magazine, which publishes essays, features, and literary depictions of the industrial Midwest. Allison wanted to include a photo of a 1889 Miller railroad crossing that inspired her and appeared in Ron Cohen and my “Gary: A Pictorial History.” Calumet Regional Archives curator Steve McShane was able to send the jpeg to the editor.  Checking out Beltmagazine’s impressive digital publication, I discovered Tricia Orr’s “Cleaving” in the June 6, 2019 issue. It poignantly captures the bittersweet fascination with urban ruins:

In what may be her last message to me
she says she likes taking photographs
of abandoned places.

My city is abundant in that respect.
She says she knows this. One day
this summer she might visit and
go exploring. I take this as polite talk.

Still, I unfold my maps and trace my finger
across searching for the most authentic-looking
ruins. Perhaps I should show her the forlorn church
On E. 67^th, moss creeping up the bricks,
a red Hells Angels sign nailed to a nearby house.

Or maybe the massive warehouse
once used for making filament for lightbulbs.
Walls partially intact, open to the sky.

Some locals suspect the building spreads a little each year.
As though the weeds are the workers now,
carrying the building on their backs,
forcing us to come face to face
with what we’ve lost,

with what we might still recover.