Moving Around

   "What you’re trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You’re trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.” Robert Stone

For the past century Americans have enjoyed more social mobility than any other people in history.  In the 1960s, for example, it is estimated that one out of five families changed addresses every year. Robert Stone (1937-2015) grew up in Brooklyn and spent several years in a Catholic orphanage after his mother was institutionalized with schizophrenia.  Between 1960 and 1965 he moved from New York to New Orleans to various places in California and back to New York City again where he partied with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters when their hippie bus reached the Big Apple. Stone’s most famous novel, “Dog Soldiers” (1974), is about a Vietnam correspondent.  In his 2007 memoir, “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties,” Stone wrote that from being stoned, he began to everything as “a mystical process,” an insight that stayed with him.

2016 parade

Michael Puenti reported that the Mexican Independence Day parade in East Chicago has been cancelled due to Covid-19.  Sponsored by the Union Benefica Mexicana, the September 16 celebration began in 1926 and has only been cancelled twice previously, in 1942 during World War II and 2011 after the attack on the World Trade Center.

Emiliano Aguilar, 2nd from left

Professor Allison Schuette interviewed Emiliano Aguilar for the Valparaiso University Flight Paths project.  They both will be participating in a conference session with Liz Wuerffel, Kay Westhues, and myself originally scheduled to take place in Indianapolis but now, like the Democratic National Convention, to be conducted via zoom.  Emiliano, an East Chicago Central graduate, credits my son Dave with encouraging him to continue his studies.  The current Northwestern doctoral student recalled in an interview that I've taken the following excerpt from:

    Growing up in East Chicago, everyone wanted to know where you were from. And you always mentioned, you know, “I’m north side. I’m south side. I’m from the Harbor. I’m from Sunnyside.  I’m from West Cal.” All these neighborhoods came with their own history. And to this day, there’s still this mentality with the older generation of noting, no, they’re from East Chicago, not the Harbor. It’s called the Twin Cities because of the railroad yards that essentially divide these two chunks of the city. There is this divided-city mentality. 

    We lived across the street from a railroad yard, a train switching area. My great-grandfather came to East Chicago to work on the railroad. Inland Steel was right across the street as well, and they had trucks coming and going at all times. Everything was across the south end of the tracks, and we tended to get stuck and have to wait for a train to switch for half an hour, forty minutes, just to go, like, to the grocery store.  You had industry, a temple, a Presbyterian church as well as about ten, twelve houses all on one block.

    My paternal grandfather left Mexico from a border town, Nueva Rosita, to come to East Chicago to work at Inland Steel. He had to sleep in his pickup truck for seven, eight days until the company finally hired him; and then he was pretty much couch-surfing in friends’ houses as he saved up money to purchase a house and then bring up my grandmother, uncle, and aunt from Mexico.  My mother is Irish and Italian, adopted by a German and Polish couple. And I lived primarily with them: my grandparents and my mother.  My grandmother was heavily involved in the Methodist church.  I saw my father’s side normally on weekends and holidays. My grandfather loved telling stories. I’m not a native Spanish speaker aside from what I picked up over the years, so when I was with my father’s family, that became, I think, a barrier to understanding my family’s stories.  That’s definitely created, like, this boundary that I’ve tried to overcome.  I became one of those Mexicans who didn’t speak Spanish growing up at a time when East Chicago was becoming evenly split between Latino and African-American communities.

    I initially went to Wabash College with the mindset that I’d be a high school teacher. A visiting professor, Aminta Perez, from the University of Iowa, taught Borderlands Scholarship: History of the West, and it was the first time I had encountered history of Mexican-American communities. It really wasn’t taught in high school, so I took that as an opportunity to learn more about my heritage. Dr. Perez encouraged me to try out graduate school, to dip my toes in the water. I applied for a master’s program at Purdue University Northwest, loved it, and now I’m researching political history and union politics in Northwest Indiana as a Northwestern University doctoral student.  I’ve joked with my advisor that my dissertation project is me coming home literally and studying something denied to me. After spending four years in Crawfordsville away from East Chicago, I’ve moved back to the region and delved into its history in order to understand where my personal story fits, and hopefully leave something impactful for another generation.

 

If interviewed for the Flight Paths Project, I’d mention our four homes since I began teaching at IUN in 1970, beginning with moving into a rented house four blocks north of the Gary city limits in unincorporated Ross Township.  The following year, residents fearful of being annexed by the city of Gary incorporated as the Town of Merrillville despite the existence of a Buffer Zone statute making such a development illegal until the Indiana state legislature allowed it as a special exception. With two pre-schoolers, Toni and I had hoped to find a home in Glen Park closer to campus, but none were available that met our needs.  After a couple years, we rented a house on Jay Street in Miller, where several of our friends lived.  Within a year our Jay St. neighborhood went from nearly all-white to nearly all-black. One new neighbor spent thousands of dollars furnishing his basement only to see it flooded and the new furniture ruined the following spring. One evening I discovered a teenager rummaging through our car’s glove compartment; another time, we came home to find our bedroom drawers open and clothes scattered all over the floor.  

 

Knowing our landlord was looking to sell, we searched for a property near Lake Michigan. Every one realtor Gene Ayers showed us either was a fixer-upper or had no yard.  After two years, he finally took us to one in a wooded area not far from the lake located a block east of County Line Road within the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  Although it had a Gary address and phone prefix, it was in Porter County within the city of Portage. Among other things, that meant that our taxes and insurance rates were much less than in Gary.  Better yet, within a year, the federal government bought our house and offered us a 20-year leaseback for approximately the amount that we had profited from the sale.  In other words, a free house for 20 years with no mortgage to pay off. We eventually stayed over 30 years until forced to move, ultimately purchasing a condo in Chesterton.

After watching “The End of the Tour,” about novelist David Foster Wallace, I checked out Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” from Chesterton library, now closed against except for curbside service since two staff tested positive for Covid-19.  Wednesday after 18 bridge hands online with Charlie and Naomi, the four of us dined outside at Lucretia’s, it being a beautiful evening.  They loaned us Mary Trump’s scathing book about her Uncle Donald, “Too Much and never Enough,” was much more readable than the dense, thousand-page Wallace opus, which requires frequently looking up the meaning of words like agoraphobic (fear of crowded places) or phylacteryish (resembling a small leather box containing Hebrew texts).  Though a clinical psychologist, Dr. Trump never got too technical. Meanwhile the Democratic National Convention, on all week, has featured many eloquent speakers, none more telling than former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell.  Hope disgruntled Republicans had tuned in.

Dean Bottorff (above), who lives in South Dakota near Sturgis, scene of the annual motorcycle rally, checked out the scene while, unlike most of the thousands of helmet-less bikers, taking precautions against the coronavirus.  He wrote:

    I never got off my bike or took off my helmet, but I believe that qualifies aaaas this year’s attendance at the Rally and keeps my modern record of 24 consecutive years intact. I can still count some pre-1996 rallies beginning with the first time I went in 1967 and blended in with 3,000 other rally goers.  My fond memory of that year was walking into a bar called Dante’s Inferno that consisted of an abandoned mine stope on Chair Lift Road with five student nurses.  The bar is long gone and you can no longer find Chair Lift Road on any maps.  Back in those days we went to Deadwood because the town was “wide open” and anybody could buy booze, go to a gambling den or, something that was of little interest to us college students, visit one of five brothels openly doing business in town – some of which had been in continuous operation for a hundred years until they were shut down in 1987.

"Defacing" Monuments?

“The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.” Lew Wallace

 

Some protestors against police brutality have turned their attention to public monuments honoring Confederate generals and other controversial historical figures.  In Birmingham, Alabama, and Jacksonville, Florida, statues of slaveowners have come down, and in Ashville, North Carolina, pressure builds to remove a huge sculpture of Civil War governor Zebulon Baird Vance.  Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Richmond and Charlottesville, Virginia, have demanded that statues of General Robert E. Lee be moved to less prominent locations. Blaming vandals, Fox News has claimed that monuments in the nation’s capital have been “defaced” with graffiti.  Overseas, protestors have railed against a statue honoring imperialist King Leopold II, responsible for atrocities in the Congo that resulted in an estimated 10 million deaths.  In Bristol, England a sculpture commemorating slave trader Edward Colston was toppled. The pro-Trump Western Journal claimed that Londoners had defaced monuments honoring Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, in the case of the British Prime Minister writing that he was a racist and adorning America’s “Great Emancipator” with disrespectful signs. In the past when statues of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Communist leaders in Eastern Europe were destroyed, there was jubilation, not hand-wringing, by conservative news outlets.

 

As a historian, I believe public monuments to be an important factor in studying what values a society hold in esteem. While I hate to see any destroyed, I favor removing controversial ones from public squares or statehouse property.  I do not regard the edifices as particularly sacred. For example, at the entrance to Marquette Park in Gary is a statue of French Jesuit missionary Pere Jacques Marquette, who in the seventeenth century may have stopped in Northwest Indiana during one of his explorations of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River. At various times the statue has been painted black and adorned with Christmas apparel and other decorations.  My view - no harm done.  Last year on Columbus Day, protestors in Providence, Rhode Island, splattered the fifteenth-century explorer and enslaver of Native Americans with blood-red paint.  Again, no harm done.

 

Dean Bottorff wrote about the statue of Confederate general John Hunt Morgan astride a horse:

Morgan was famous for riding a mare, but sculptor Pompeo Coppini thought a stallion was more appropriate. Coppini said, “No hero should bestride a mare!” Therefore, Coppini added the necessary testicles. Undergraduates from nearby University of Kentucky have been known to paint the testicles of the horse in the school colors of blue and white ever since. So, no matter how you feel about Civil War generals, you gotta love a mare with balls.

 

The two statues representing each state located in the Capitol Rotunda are especially telling.  Mississippi still is represented by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Georgia by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens (not Martin Luther King) and Louisiana by demagogic Populist Huey Long.  Hawaii’s bronzes are of Father Damien, who ministered to lepers, and King Kamehameha, who united the islands but at much human cost.  Indiana is ably represented by General Lew Wallace (author of “The Robe”) and Civil war Governor Oliver P. Morton.  States have replaced some statues with others.  Until recently none had chosen to honor an African American; now educator Mary McLeod Bethune represents Florida and civil rights activist Daisy Bates Arkansas.

 

Trump is accusing protestors of being anti-police, failing to distinguish between those striving to serve and protect and those abusing their power.  Demonstrators calling for the de-funding of police forces are, in my opinion, playing into the president’s hands since no responsible public official or citizen would countenance abolishing law enforcement.  What must cease is a police culture of tolerating “bad cops.” During Barack Obama’s presidency significant progress was made in proper training of officers and rooting out so-called rogue cops, something grievously lacking since 2017. In my lifetime I have virtually never been hassled by police, but I am not so naïve to think that people of color have been similarly treated.

 

In Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” I came across Bishop Hugh Latimer, whom I wrote a gad school paper about that was later published by the Journal of Church and State.  In Oxford, England for an oral history conference I came up the Martyrs’ Monument, erected during the 1840s to honor Latimer, Bishop Thomas Ridley, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, all burned at the stake during the reign of “Bloody” Queen Mary. Writing about the reversal of fortunes that resulted in Sir Thomas More’s execution, Mantel wrote: “Death is a japester (jester); call him and he will not come.  He is a joker and he lurks in the dark, a black cloth over his face.”

Edgewater

"Growing up in Edgewater, I was always aware of Lake Michigan's presence, whether it was the roar of the whitecaps from a blustery north wind or the smell of dead alewives rotting on the beach." John Laue 

                          Dorreen Carey with whitecaps and Chicago skyline in background
John Laue asked my advice on expanding the oral history of Edgewater, located near Lake Michigan just east of Gary’s Miller district in Porter County, that I had published in “Tales of Lake Michigan” Steel Shavings (volume 28, 1998).  He had written then that his family had moved there from Chicago in 1951 when he was six and that their log cabin was in a wooded area at the bottom of a large sand dune at the end of one-block-long Oak Place. In a new essay he wrote:

  The Edgewater community was a great place to grow up.  There were lots of Baby Boomer kids to play with, and wonderful places to explore.  Like most children of that era, we were able to leave our homes right after breakfast and not return until dinnertime during the summer. We spent hours playing in the woods, wetlands, sand dunes, and white sand beaches along the Lake Michigan shoreline.   We built forts in the woods, played baseball and football in the sand, and swam in the lake. 

    My friends and I learned how to adapt our sports activities to our unique dunes environment.  For example, we played hours and hours of baseball on a field of sand where we quickly learned how to hit a baseball in the air instead of on the ground.  A ground ball, on matter how hard it was hit, would only travel a few feet in the soft sand.  So we learned how to hit line drives, fly balls and pop-ups…any ball hit in the air was better than hitting it on the ground.     In the fall, we played tackle football on the top of a nearby sand dune.  Even though I was very small and skinny (5’6”, 125 lbs.), I never got hurt playing tackle football.  We need shoulder pads or any other equipment because the soft sand provided a nice cushion for tackling.  As one of the smaller and quicker kids on the field, I usually ran my way out of trouble, but I remember one time someone hitting me so hard at the line of scrimmage that I was thrown into the air and fell to the ground with a thud.  Except for some sand in my mouth and some wounded pride, I wasn’t hurt at all, and I don’t remember anyone else ever getting seriously injured either.

    One of the amazing things about sand dunes is their regenerative power and their movement from one place to another.  Any evidence of the sand lots where we played baseball and football 50 years ago have been covered over by large sand dunes covered with Miriam grass.  The Indiana sand dunes are constantly shifting and moving.  The sand dune where we played football as kids has now moved south into an oak forest, burying large trees and everything else in its path.  It’s no coincidence that the always shifting sand dunes and constantly changing environment become the birthplace of the science of ecology.

Laue (above) noted that several strip clubs existed o Route 20 in Gary near and even within the boundaries of what became Indiana Dunes National Park. I recall a prominent attorney being killed when he stopped to turn left into Dante’s Inferno and his car being plowed into from behind.  Laue wrote:

   I still remember the excitement and anticipation of walking into Dante’s Inferno, as it was called back then.  The girls would hustle you for drinks between their turns on the dance floor, and if you had some decent cash in your pocket, you could invite one of them to join you in one of the booths way in the back of the lounge where they could titillate you and took more of your money.  This bar has gone through several makeovers and name changes. After Dante’s Inferno, it was renamed The Scuttlebutt.  Through all these name changes, the scene inside remains the same.  There’s always a big, tough-looking bouncer at the door to check your ID, and, depending on the time of day, the girls are inside walking around with vacant, cokehead stares, looking to sit down and hustle some drinks and money out of you.

John Laue asked me to write down memories of living in the disappearing community of Edgewater, now part of the Indiana Dunes National Park.  While renting a house in Miller, we looked for one to buy that would not be close to Lake Michigan, with a decent yard, and not badly in need of repair.  After a two-year search, realtor Gene Ayers showed us one in good shape just east of County Line Road at 9649 Maple Place in a wooded area just a few blocks from the lake with an adequate yard.  Voila!  I loved it and didn’t mind that the federal government intended to buy it and offer us a 20-year leaseback.  When that happened, we made enough of a profit that it paid the total cost of the leaseback, meaning we had a free house for 20 years, later extended.  We wouldn’t have any equity but were able to buy savings bonds for what we’d have been paying for rent. The previous owners, two former nuns, had hoped to convert the garage into living quarters for one of their fathers, but it hadn’t panned out.  After we moved in, one of them drove up Maple Place and parked at the bottom of the driveway several times but would quickly depart when we’d see if she wanted to look around.  We subsequently learned that she was miffed that we had gotten a better deal from the park department that she’d been offered. About ten years later, a daughter of the original owner stopped by and was delighted when we offered to let her come in.  Built after World War II, the house was her childhood home and she recalled Phil’s bedroom once being hers and watching Elvis on TV in the front room.

At the time we moved in, most Maple Place residents were moving out, having accepted the government’s offer to pay for them to purchase another house and moving expenses.  A neighbor across the street left many boxes of trash.  Scavenger that he was, Phil found Christmas tree bulbs and a Ku Klux Klan pin and robe.  In retrospect, I should have kept the pin for the Archives but told him to get rid of them. Neighbors in back of us had three boys, including a pot smoker who enjoyed lighting up and playing Rush albums at full volume outside while he washed his car.  For a year or so, Dean and Joanell lived next door; we became friends and even more so after they moved to a farm near Valpo where they raised goats and a bee colony. Down the street from us was a “mystery” cabin that appeared to be used by long distance truckers.

Although our yard was rather small, we played wiffleball even though if a righthander pulled the ball, it was liable to go over the hill into the ravine.  You really had to loft the ball to get it over the centerfield trees and then it was likely to go on the neighbors’ roof. We didn’t run the bases but designated what were singles, doubles, and home runs.  After the Bottorff property was returned to nature, the boys invented a wiffleball golf course with six different holes and three different places to tee off for each one.  In winter we sometimes went sledding on the access road.  Even though we had a Gary mailing address and phone number, being in Porter County reduced our insurance substantially and enabled Phil and Dave to attend Portage schools and play Little League baseball.  During snowstorms Portage street department took good care of us despise our remote location.  At Christmas and Easter Toni caked cakes that I took to street department headquarters.

Through John Laue, who lived two blocks down (toward the lake) from us, I got to know his dad Gib, a poet, and artist Dale Fleming, who had an intricate train platform in his house.  One of John’s neighbors was Joyce Davis, who came to own Lake Street gallery.  Our friend Sheila Hamanaka moved into a place formerly owned by a prominent Chicago conductor.  A friendly dog belonging to an attorney roamed the neighborhood and beyond, once venturing a mile into Miller and befriending Dave and Angie when they rented a house on Shelby and Lake Shore Drive.

Our Maple Place home had a fireplace room and plenty of wood outside that I could scavenge and chop or cut with a chain saw and a finished rec room where we played ping pong and often used as a guest room.  Upstairs were three bedrooms and a large family room; the only drawback was its distance from the kitchen, but a small fridge relieved the need for beer runs.  During the 35 years that we lived “on the hill,” we had as many as 15 people sleep over when relatives visited or after parties.  Our pets, especially Marvin the cat, loved being able to roam outside and learned to steer clear of raccoons and deer.  Whenever a feral cat came on our property, however, Marvin got in a fight to protect his turf, usually resulting in his needing to be taken to the vet, something he hated so much we had to cage him in order to get him in and out of the car.



Seeing my Facebook post, Dean Bottorff, who was an editor at the Post-Tribune, wrote:          I have many fond memories of Maple Place, Miller and working in Gary. Too often people think of Gary negatively in terms of crime and urban decay but I actually had some of the best times of my life there. I loved the diversity in Gary and Northwest Indiana and making friends with a broad range of different backgrounds. “Urban” people like you greatly contributed to the vast range of new experiences for this guy from the rural, Western state of South Dakota. Memories include everything from watching pierogi made by little old ladies at a Glen Park church to smelt fishing on the beach at 2 a.m. to riding my bicycle to work from Maple Place to 11th and Broadway.
    I prefer to remember the good times and some of the best might be considered dangerous ... like the time Knightly and I went into a blind pig on Washington Street at 2 am when a couple of pimps almost got into a gunfight. Or the time Galloway went on an interview and Tom and I posed as his body guards.

Trump seems incapable of holding a press conference without lying and demeaning reporters, first by insisting that anyone who wants a Covid-19 test can get one and then by insulting Weijia Jang.  West Virginian Ray Smock wrote:

    Trump stormed off the platform, ending the briefing suddenly, when CBS reporter Weijia Jiang asked a perfectly reasonable question about why the president keeps casting this pandemic as a global competition among nations. He shot back that she should ask China that question. She lowered her mask and asked why he was asking this of her. He replied that her question was nasty and ended the briefing. This is not the first time Trump has tangled with Jiang, a distinguished American journalist of Chinese ancestry who was raised in Wild and Wonderful West Virginia.

The latest Facebook fad is to post covers of one’s ten favorite albums a day at a time.  After former student and now friend George Sladic nominated me to participate, I began the daily ritual with this remark:

    OK, George Sladic, here's my favorite power pop album, "Present Tense" by The Shoes. Saw them at a small club near O'Hare Airport circa 1982 and a year ago at Memorial Opera House in Valpo.

Among my friends, albums by the Ramones, Tom Petty, and the Beatles have been popular choices, so I put off listing any of them for the moment. Here’s my day 2 choice and remarks:

I've been a Graham Parker fan ever since he recorded "Squeezing Out Sparks," featuring "Nobody Hurts You," "Passion Is No Ordinary Word," and "Don't Get Excited," with The Rumour in 1979. Toni and I saw Graham-bo at the Vic Theater in Chicago with Terry and Kin Hunt. He's also in the under-rated movie "This Is 40."

Inspired in part by the death of legendary rocker Little Richard, whose singles I collected in high school, Here is my day 3 choice and commentary:

    The first album I ever bought was "What'd I Say" by Ray Charles. In the 1950s I bought .45s by Rock and Rollers Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, and others that I played on an inexpensive record player in my room. After hearing "What'd I Say" I wanted to listen to any Ray Charles song I could get my hands on, and my second album were songs recorded live in concert with his full band and the Raelettes. Awesome!

Stevie Kokos recalled what a thrill it was to have Ray Charles perform at the Holiday Star, where he worked for many years.  Connie Mack-Ward wrote that one of her first albums was “The Genius of Ray Charles” and she saw him perform live at one of Gary mayor Richard Hatcher’s “Evening to Remember” fundraisers.

 1973 was a great year for albums - "Band on the Run," "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, "Innervisions," "Dark Side of the Moon" - but I loved to rock out to the Doobie Brothers' "The Captain and Me," which leads off with "China Grove." In Paul Kern and my history of IU Northwest Milan Andrejevich recalled: "My parents took a lot of vacations, so I'd have parties. Lane loved to dance and was always trying to put on China Grove."

Milan and Marsha Andrejevich introduced me to David Bowie and several New Wave groups, including the Police and the Romantics. When I stayed with Terry and Gayle Jenkins in1980 while attending my twentieth high school reunion, I gave them the Romantics album that contains “What I Like about You,” and he three of us dance together. A couple years after the Romantics were out of fashion, I saw them in concert at Valparaiso in front of a few hundred people and they rocked out like they were playing for tens of thousands.

Ray Boomhower wrote about a little-known campaign to retake Alaska’s Aleutian Islands from the Japanese:

    On this day in 1943, men from the Seventh Infantry Division landed on Attu in the Aleutian Islands to wrest it from control from Japanese forces, who had taken Attu and Kiska as part of the Battle of Midway. American soldiers were hampered in their attempt to win back the treeless, volcanic island by inadequate clothing, perpetual pea-soup fog, icy rain, blinding snow, sudden gale-force winds (called williwaws), and boggy terrain. A sergeant remembered that while fighting in Attu’s mountainous terrain, conditions were so severe that, even when unconscious, wounded men’s bodies “trembled violently from the cold.”

    Time correspondent Robert L. Sherrod covered the Aleutian campaign, arriving on Attu on May 25. Attu was no “taxicab war,” said Sherrod. “The only way to get to the battle lines was to walk over mountains where a mile an hour was fair speed.
To keep warm, the reporters and cameramen on Attu dressed in one to three sets of underwear, a field jacket, parka, sweaters, woolen cap beneath their helmet, two or more pairs of woolen socks, shoepacs (special cold-weather footwear) or leather boots, and raincoats.”

    Uncomfortable conditions, to be sure, Sherrod said, but “looking at the suffering infantrymen and the supply carriers who had to take loads up steep mountains and the little carriers who had to bear the wounded down [from the mountains], we could not feel very put out.”

    Many of those fighting in the snow-covered mountain peaks became “so cold and miserable,” he said, “they didn’t give a damn whether they lived or died,” Sherrod reported. One soldier told Sherrod that he had been cold for so long he no longer believed “there is any warmth left in the world. I have not been able to wiggle my toes for more than ten days.”

Correspondents could honestly write in their dispatches, Sherrod noted, that not “since Valley Forge have American troops suffered so much” and finally mean it, and they could view their colleagues in London, Algiers, Melbourne, and even Moscow as “sissies.”

Early in World War II, Sherrod had wondered if American soldiers had what it took to win the war. He had been encouraged by what he witnessed from the soldiers on Attu. “In this primitive, man-against-man fighting enough of our men rose up to win,” he said.  Sherrod also learned a valuable lesson he remembered as he covered subsequent campaigns: “not all soldiers are heroes—far from it; the army that wins, other things being fairly equal, is the army which has enough men to rise above duty, thus inspiring others to do their duty.”

Machines of Youth

“It’s a hard trip to the kitchen sink

’Cause I can’t wash this one clean.”

   “Stick,” Snail Mail (Lindsey Jordan)

Along with CDs by The Beths, Weezer, Lumineers, and Goo Goo Dolls, I’ve been listening to “Lush” by Snail Nail featuring teenager Lindsey Jordan that Alissa’s husband Jeff Leffingwell gave me at Christmas (it’s a favorite at his office).  The lush arrangements and lyrics of unrequited queer love are delivered with no trace of self-pity,  In fact, if I hadn’t read the liner notes, I wouldn’t have guessed how confessional the songs were.  Despite the plaintive plea to “Stick Around,” the lyrics of “Stick” also imply the termination of a sticky situation, one that can’t emotionally be washed clean. The album’s opening lyrics set the mood perfectly:

Go. Get it all.

Let them watch. Let them fall.

Nameless. Sweat it out.

They don’t love you.  Do they?

Grace. Born and raised.

Cut you down. Still bleeds the same.

As it is. For you anytime.

Still, for you. Anytime. 

Those responding to the above post included Alissa (“Glad you’re liking the CD, J-Bo”) and Cindy B. Bean, whose photos of Gary ruins have appeared in several of my publications.

 above, Larry and Cindy Bean; below, Gary girls at drive-in, 1957 by John Vachon

Ron Cohen loaned me “Machines of Youth: America’s Car Obsession” (2018) by Gary S. Cross.  It contains several references to my Fifties Steel Shavings (volume 23, 1994) on teen culture in the Calumet Region and a great John Vachon photo from Look magazine of Gary girls at a drive-in. “Machines of Youth” begins: “In modern America, growing up has meant getting a driver’s license, buying, driving, and maybe crashing the first car; the ritual of being picked up for the date and ‘making out’ in the front or back seat; even the pleasures of repairing, customizing or racing that car.”  I am cited mostly in the chapter “Cruising and Parking: The Peer Culture of Teen Automobility, 1950-1970.”  One reference mentions both sexes skinning dipping at night on beaches along Lake Michigan.

“Juliet Naked” (2018) features Ethan Hawke, one of my favorite actors, as Tucker Crowe, a Nineties indie rocker who dropped out of sight 25 years before but is still venerated by a few hundred fanatical fans, including Duncan, played by the endearing Chris O’Dowd, whom I found so amusing in a similar role in Judd Apatow’s comedy “This Is 40” (2012).   As much as I enjoyed those characters, the women were even more compelling, including Tucker’s pregnant teenage daughter, who comes back into his life after ten years.  Unbeknownst to Duncan, his long-suffering mate Annie (Rose Byrne) develops an online relationship with Tucker that blossoms into a romantic friendship after Duncan takes up with a younger woman.  Annie, manager of a museum in an English seacoast town, curates an exhibit highlighting the summer of 1964.  One old photo shows two young couples by the beach.  At the opening 84-year-old Edna, one of the four, identifies herself and her date:  “It was George, mmm, he was a fast worker. He wanted a bit of fun. I wish I did too, but I fought him off. I thought, ‘Edna, you can never go wrong not doing something. It's the things that you do that get you into trouble. Here I am 84 years old and I've never been in trouble in my whole bloody life. Goddammit!’   

Annie takes Edna’s lament to heart.  Up to this time, her chief sexual pleasure came from a dildo-shaped vibrator, in contrast to her lesbian younger sister Ros, who is with a new lover each time they meet. When Ros brags that her latest is a gold star, meaning never had sex with a man, Annie doesn’t know what that means.  Annie decides to move to London, reconnect with Tucker, and be open to new experiences. My favorite scene: coerced to perform at Annie’s museum, Tucker sings the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset.” 

                      Alissa Yoshitake and Dean Bottorff with Angie

Several Holiday cards came with newsletters describing 2019 family highlights.  Good liberal Lois Hart’s came redacted, emulating the Mueller Report that documented Trump’s obstructions of justice.  Many mentioned beloved pets; in fact, the Yoshitakes, California relatives whose daughter Alyssa recently graduated from the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music (where Becca had a try-out), was composed as if written by new cat Emmy:

  They told me that my predecessor, 17-year-old Ariel, who went to the “rainbow bridge,” didn’t do her job last year.  They say that’s the way cats are.  I didn’t know any better because I am only 6 months old and I act more like a greyhound than a kitten sometimes.  The place I came from (the Humane Society) was really scary busy.

Dean and Joanell Bottorff’s began:

  Where to start.  Maybe order of importance.  Angie got fed this morning and every morning throughout the year.  Not once did she forget to remind us to put food in her bowl.  Best of all, for several months, she got extra scraps of beef trims, left over from the Wykoff (SD) Volunteer Fire Department Picnic and daughter Ann’s birthday celebration.  You may not think that having your bowl filled every morning is the most important event of the year, but then you are probably not a dog.

Gayle and Ed Escobar’s included photos of their China trip, a new grandchild, and, most prominently, their cat.

In a PBS interview with David M. Rubenstein published in a new book (“The American Story”), Chief Justice John Roberts spoke briefly of growing up in Northwest Indiana but left out that his father was plant manager at the Bethlehem Steel plant in Burns Harbor, and the family resided in the affluent beachfront community of Long Beach.  Roberts attended Notre Dame Elementary School and the exclusive La Lumiere private school in La Porte (I passed the grounds en route to Halberstadt Game Weekend), where he was an honor student, student council officer, a Regional champion wrestler, and captain of the football team.  While at Harvard Roberts majored in history and  anticipated a future in academia until a taxi cab driver told him he’d also been a history major at Harvard. Realizing that job prospects for historians were grim (just as they had been 50 years ago and remain today), the practical Hoosier decided to set his sights on law school.

Reviewing Richard A. Hall’s “Pop Goes the Decade: The Seventies” for Choice magazine and being limited to 190 words, I couldn’t fit in the comic genius of filmmaker Mel Brooks, that “High Fives” originated in the 1970s, or that future tech behemoths Apple and Microsoft started then.  In many ways the Seventies was my favorite decade. On the cover: John Travolta, Richard Nixon and “Wonder Woman” actress Lynda Carter.  My choice would have been the original Saturday Night Live cast.

Food For Dissent

“Industry don't pay a price that's fair
All the common people breathing filthy air
Roof caved in on all the simple dreams
And to get ahead your heart starts pumping schemes”

    “Neutron Dance,” Pointer Sisters

“Food for Dissent: Natural Foods and the Consumer Counterculture since the 1960s” by Maria McGrath is now in print.  At the Oral History Association meeting in Montreal last October McGrath spoke about the feminist Bloodroot Restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the subject of one of the chapters.  Tracing the natural food movement by focusing on vegetarian cookbooks, food co-ops, and health advocates, Maria explores, according to a University of Massachusetts Press announcement, efforts to harness principled shopping, principled eating, and cooperative entrepreneurship as tools for civic activism. Historian David Farber, author of “The Age of Great Dreams, wrote: “Well researched and intellectually rich, Food for Dissent joins an emerging literature that rethinks the counter-culture in American life, especially how it intersected with capitalism in the 1970s and reimagined whole sectors of the economy over the last fifty years.”  I congratulated Maria on the awesome accomplishment and suggested she submit a proposal about Bloodroot Restaurant for the International Oral History Association conference in Singapore next June. She replied, “Food for thought,” adding: “us food historians have to constantly watch out for food idiom/ catch phrase land mines.”

In a recent email Maria McGrath’s mother, former Upper Dublin High School classmate Susan Floyd employed the old saying, “Looks like the cat that swallowed the mouse.” I replied that in Northwest Indiana steel mills rats got to be so large and formidable, according to steelworker lore, that the expression was,“The rat that swallowed the cat.”  Management evidently released cats to deal with the rat menace, and they were never seen again.

Jeff Manes held a fish fry at his place by the Kankakee River on the same day as grandson James’s graduation party at the Portage Legion hall.  I was familiar with James’s bowling buddies and talked to several thespians who were in plays with him.  Dave’s friend Matt Simmons, who spent 19 days in a coma after a motorcycle crash, amazingly looked to be fully recovered.  He was tattooed and muscular, and I first thought he was former Voodoo Chili keyboardist Bob Heckler, who also once taught at Central and sometimes got mistaken for Matt. Simmons spoke highly of an IUN graduate class taught by Education professor Vernon Smith, who kept a jar of Jolly Rancher candy bars on the desk. If someone made a particularly salient comment, he’d toss the student a Jolly Rancher, something Matt started doing in class.   I initially thought Matt had said Jolly Rogers, the nickname for pirate ship flags that often bore a skull-and-crossbones.  The name has been used by many eateries, and a navy aviation unit and may have been an inspiration for Jolly Rancher Company in Golden, Colorado, which originally marketed hard candy, jelly beans, gum, and ice cream.

 pirate Paul Jones

I enjoyed chatting with East Chicago Central principal Dee Etta Wright, an IU Northwest grad who was with her cute two-year-old grandchild.  She recalled being at a 2013 semi-state playoff game when East Chicago upset football power New Prairie when Martayveous Carter scored on a fourth down play in overtime after New Prairie’s normally dependable kicker missed a last-second field goal.  Earlier QB Carlos Fernandez avoided a near-sack and threw a pass to TreQuan Burnet for a 64-yard TD. I was in the press box with Dave, who was announcing the game.  At the open house I pigged out on fried chicken, salad chip, salsa, and a delicious grape concoction that is Angie’s Aunt Linda’s specialty.  Brenden Bayer brought his family and told me that Revolution Brewing Company in Chicago has a robust porter named after labor radical Eugene V. Debs.  Brenden bought some cans for Michael, his dad, whose father was named Eugene. People were coming and going throughout the afternoon, and James was pleased with the large turnout

The last major league baseball player to bat over .400 was Ted Williams in 1941.  Born the following year in segregated Little Rock, Arkansas, Aaron Pointer accomplished the feat 20 years later while with the Salisbury, (N.C.) Braves of the South Atlantic League.  Pointer, whose sisters were Grammy winners in 1985 for the hit song “Jump (For My Love),” grew up in Oakland, California, competing on the playground against basketball great Bill Russell and major leaguers Joe Morgan, Vada Pinson, and Kurt Flood.  The Pointers shared a duplex with the family of cousin Paul Silas, who became an NBA all-star and coach.  During his .400 season, Pointer could not stay at the same hotels as white teammates and frequently had to eat meals on the team bus. Pointer had a brief major league career with the Houston Astros and then played in Japan and Venezuela. After becoming the first African-American Pacific-10 football referee, he served as an NFL head linesman while living in Tacoma, Washington, and enjoying a 29-year career serving Pierce County Parks and Recreation.

Anthony is N. Ireland

Phil, Beth, and Alissa stayed overnight at the condo and Delia and Anthony nearby at Delia’s brother’s place.  Toni showed Anthony a photo album she was putting together that included shots of when he was in Northern Ireland for a summer class arranged by the Grand Valley State overseas program of which Alissa is a coordinator.  Retiring to bed while Toni and guests were still going strong, I made blueberry pancakes and kielbasa one morning and scrambled eggs the next.  Alissa had a great story about my mother, whom she called Nana Midge, leaving her a piece of jewelry whose purpose was unclear but that is now known among some of her and Josh’s friends as Nana Midge’s roach clip. I’d like to think that would put a smile on her face if she were alive rather than, as the saying goes, make her turn over in her grave.

A photo of Ladies Aid Society members belonging to the Methodist Episcopal Church taken in March of 1907, less than a year after Gary’s founding, inspired Allison Schuette to compose a poem about these urban pioneers, no doubt wives of some of the fledgling steel town’s movers and shakers.  Who were these club women, one wonders, were they motivated by a social consciousness toward the poor or a desire to impose their Victorian values, including temperance, the less fortunate?  Ladies Aid societies formed during the Civil War to provide supplies to soldiers in combat, including medical care for the wounded.  After the war some functioned in a nursing capacity and worked to improve sanitary conditions for the poor. Gary’s society formed shortly after the arrival of the church’s first pastor, Reverend George E. Deuel and his wife.  Schuette wrote:

Ten women pose on the corner of 3^rdand Broadway, members 

of the Ladies Aid Society, Gary, Indiana’s first. It looks to be a cold

March day, trees barren, snow pack on the sidewalk. The women

are bloused and skirted, one slips her hands into her pockets, two wear hats 

(Sunday-best). I cast the women into roles: moralist, sassy wit,

caretaker, loyalist, agitator, heavy lifter, tender heart, 

mediator, backbone, force of nature. They stand not in front 

of the Binzenhof, one block over, where Methodist Episcopal meets

in a hall above the social club, but in front of Dr. Chester W. Packard’s

office. Happenstance? Optics? Patronage? The surgeon stands 

in the photo, tall and dour, black overcoat, black bowler, hands fisted in

pockets, apart and above, looking off camera. Why is he here?

Against the white blouses of the women, he draws my eye. I don’t want 

to make him the rooster that I have.

If we knew where our efforts landed, would we ever make the effort? 

In 1907, the Ladies Aid Society could not see that twenty 

some years later, City Methodist would dedicate a million-dollar 

gothic cathedral at 6^thand Washington, though maybe some of them

over the course of those twenty years worked very hard to ensure

it (and maybe some of them thought the money would be better

spent serving the poor). City Methodist at its height counted more

than 3000 members, the largest Methodist congregation in the Midwest,

a church built in large part through steel money, fate knit to the city’s.

Even Elbert Gary, that founding father, felt moved to leave his mark,

every organ note played beholden to him, until the notes foundered

into silence only fifty years after their first sounding. 

Listen, dear Ladies, to the voice of the future: as Gary's social 

makeup altered and better-off inhabitants moved away, the church 

fell into ruin, a disused church, abandoned, rotting away, cut

from the budget, closed for good, a casualty of the Indiana 

steel industry crash, a haunting piece of urban ruin.  There are truths 

and half-truths here, interpretations of documented facts—it did 

close in 1975; there were only three hundred and twenty

members left—but the whys and wherefores sit unpacked in the “altering” 

of the “social makeup” and the “casualty” of the steel “crash.” We need 

a surgeon, dear Ladies, to slice through that muscle.

I’ve been enjoying John Updike’s final collection “Licks of Love” (2000).  Like fiction writer Richard Russo, Updike is brilliant at brief descriptions of minor characters.  In “Cats” a Rutgers professor’s son-in-law Hiram is “unctuous and prematurely balding with a Princetonian complacency that makes one want to kick him.”  When Dave offers to pick up doughnuts while at the market, Hiram says, “We don’t believe in doughnuts.” Dave retorts,“Anybody here who doesn’t believe in pretzels?”  Common Updike themes are sex, aging, and religion.  In “Natural Color” a reference to a former lover’s red hair, Updike compared the social turmoil in a small new England town caused by exposure of the affair to a Unitarian-Congregationalist schism of the 1820s.

Trump responded to efforts by Congressman Elijah Cummings to investigate his administration by tweeting that the Baltimore legislator should spend more time cleaning up his rat-infested district, a racist insult previously levied against Georgia Representative John Lewis.  Cummings replied: “Mr. President, I go home to my district daily.  Each morning I wake up and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch.  But it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.” Robert Blaszkiewicz commented: “Better to have a few rats than to be one.”  The Baltimore Suneditorialized: 

  The most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin, and the guy who insists there are good people among murderous neo-Nazis is still attempting to fool most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his present post.

Dean Bottorff reported: “News from Keystone: This just in. The outcrop on Mt. Rushmore formerly known as Clinton Rock has been renamed Trump Rock.” I replied,“He’s a dickhead.”