Goodbye, Columbus

“I’m going home

I’m going to Palestine

Goodbye, Columbus.”

  1920s Yiddish song

The screenplay for the 1969 hit film “Goodbye Columbus” starring Ali McGraw and Richard Benjamin was based on a 1959 novella by Philip Roth that dealt with a romance between a young Jewish couple from different economic backgrounds.  The title comes from a ditty sung by graduating seniors at Ohio State, located in the largest of at least 20 American cities named for Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, whose mistreatment of indigenous people has caused a reconsideration of his place in history.  At Notre Dame, for example, university officials announced plans to cover up nineteenth-century murals by Italian Luigi Gregori depicting Indians and African Americans in submissive poses with the cruel conqueror.  They ultimately will be moved to a museum and exhibited for purposes of teaching and research.

In her Ayers Realtors Newsletter column “Home on the Range” Judy Ayers included a recipe for Apple Crisp that a friend gave her after they bought apples at Garwood Orchard in La Porte.  She recalled sharing the back seat of the family car with sister Jane during the 1950s in the days without navigation features, temperature control, and hand-held entertainment devices: 

  There was no air conditioning, and we traveled with all the windows rolled down.  Shouting was not only allowed but required.  Jane and I fiercely enforced with military precision a dividing line between her space and mine.  Even short trips required our mother to come up with activities to keep us occupied and less likely to bicker with one another.

Lane family trips from Fort Washington, PA, to visit relatives in Easton and McKeesport found brother Rich and I squabbling when not preoccupied with games involving passing vehicles’ license plates.  Sometimes, in a surprisingly low bass voice, Vic would sing multiple verses from a fraternity drinking song he learned at Pitt featuring a battle between a Russian and a Turk, Czarist warrior Ivan Skavinsky Skivar and Abdul Abulbul Amir (“The son of the desert, in battle aroused, could spit 20 men on his spear.  A terrible creature, both sober and soused, was Abdul Abulbul Amir”).  Vic would rest his left elbow on the open window (that part of his arm had a deeper summer tan) and have the vent window at an angle for increased ventilation, a feature now sadly unavailable on most automobile models. Whenever we approached a two-lane road, Vic would joke that two of us would have to get out.  Taking James to Liam’s house in Portage, we came upon a bridge on Samuelson Road that narrows to a single lane.  For old times’ sake, I quipped, “Looks like you’ll have to get out.”  He’d heard me use the line before but obligingly chuckled.

Ron Cohen showed me a new book by Penn State professor Gary S. Cross, “Machines of Youth: America’s Car Obsession,” that contains several references to my Fifties Steel Shavings, “Rah Rahs and Rebel ’Rousers,” published in 1994 and containing oral histories of Calumet Region residents who were teenagers during the era when Baby Boomers were becoming old enough to drive.  I got my license while still in tenth grade and picked up prom date Mary Delp in my parents’ yellow-and-white 1956 Buick. In the back seat were Vince Curll and Pam Henry. On bethleham Pike, a three-lane highway, I attempted to pass a slow-moving vehicle only to have the driver speed up and not let me in as a car bore down on me from the other direction.  I barely made it.  I’m not sure the three passengers realized how close we’d come to a head-on collision.  Weekends I’d cruise in Bob Reller, Pete Drake or Skip Pollard’s car; we’d often end up at a drive-in theater or diner hoping to hook up with girls.  

I emailed Gary Cross to tell him how delighted I was to be in the book and ask where he had come across “Rah Rahs and Rebel ’Rousers.”  He answered within the hour, informing me that Steel Shavings was at Penn State library and calling the interviews in it priceless and invaluable for his book.  Pretty cool!  Other books by Cross include “Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood” (1999) and “Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity” (2008).

A right-winger responded to Ray Smock’s indictment of Trump by claiming Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff were evil and that God would punish them, adding “How I miss the USA of the 50s.”  Smock replied sarcastically:

Yeah, I sure miss Joe McCarthy, hunting for communists behind every tree. I miss the duck and cover exercises while the world went mad with nuclear bombs tested in the atmosphere. I miss the old days of the colorful crime bosses who made murder seem so cool. And I sure miss Jim Crow America. But I was a kid then, and I lived in a kid world, oblivious to such things. I am not a kid anymore. I live in the present. I will oppose the corruption of Donald Trump because I love my country and want to see it do so much better than it is doing right now. He is killing the Constitution every day of his presidency. This is the worst crime of all. He insults everyone who has ever defended the Constitution and stood up for the rule of law. 

Liz Wuerffel (left) with Valpo candidates for mayor, council & clerk/treasurer; below, Pete Visclosky

My friend Liz Wuerffel lost a race for Valparaiso city council to the outgoing mayor’s son, as Republicans, running scared, outspent Democrats by a four-to-one margin.  Congressman Pete Visclosky, 70, announced he would not seek another term as Indiana’s First District Representative on the 35th anniversary of his upset win over incumbent Katie Hall and Lake County prosecutor Jack Crawford.  During that campaign Visclosky, son of Gary’s interim mayor after George Chacharis went to prison, solicited our votes in person at our remote Maple Place residence within the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  Roy Dominguez met Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg while in South Bend and wrote on Facebook: “We are so proud of his accomplishments, and he would make a great President of the U.S.A.!!!”

 Pete Buttigieg and Roy Dominguez

In “Amy and Isabelle” novelist Elizabeth Strout, so skilled at revealing the inner lives of everyday people, attributes office worker Bev’s addiction to cigarettes to loneliness.  Strout wrote:

  Bev knew why she smokes.  She smoked for the same reason she ate: it gave her something to look forward to.  It was as simple as that.  Life could get dull, and you had to glook forward to something.  When she was first married, she had looked forward to going to bed with her husband Bill, in that hot little apartment on Gangover Street. Boy, they used to have a good time.  It made up for everything, all their squabbles over money, dirty socks, drops of pee in front of the toilet – all those little things you had to get used to when you married someone.

  Funny how it could wear off, something that good.  But it did.  Bev kind of lost interest after the first baby was born.  She began to resent how night after night he’d still want to do it, that rigid thing always there.  It was because she was exhausted and the baby cried so much.  Her breasts were different too after that tiny angry baby had sucked them till the nipples cracked; and she had never lost the weight.  Her body seemed to stay swollen, and by God she was pregnant again.  So at a time when her house, her life, was filling up, she had experienced an irrepressible feeling of loss. They still did it once in a while, silently, and always in the dark.

The opening paragraph of Stroud’s new novel “Olive, Again” re-introduces a unique, unforgettable character, whom I came to love, nonjudgmental in matters of the heart but one who did not suffer fools - and played in an HBO mini-series by Frances McDormand:

  In the early afternoon on a Saturday in June, Jack Kennison (Bill Murray in the mini-series) put on his sunglasses, got into his sports car with the yop down, strapped the seatbelt over his shoulder and across hos large stomach, and drove top Portland – almost an hour away – to buy a gallon of whiskey rather than bump into Olive Kitteridge at the grocery store here in Crosby, Maine.

Chesterton bridge partner Joel Charpentier and I are on quite a roll, finishing first, third, and first in the three weeks since first pairing up. On Tuesday second-place finishers Chuck and Marcy Tomes cleaned our clock the final two hands, so edging them out came as a surprise.  I asked Terry Bauer, whose daughter is working in Hong Kong, whether she still is staying clear of the anti-government protests.  For all the publicity they’ve generated, he noted, not a single person has died.  It's more like street theater, with each side getting its point across.

This poignant letter from Ray Andersen of Newburgh, IN, appeared in the November 2019 Bridge Bulletin:

  My wife and I have participated in all of The Longest Day promotions to raise funds to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. About two years ago, she began to change.  Once a good bridge player, the last time we played bridge as partners (about four months ago) she could no longer recognize even simple things such as Jacoby transfers (responses to a 1 No Trump bid). I hope that ACBL (American Contract Bridge League) will continue The Longest Day promotions to fight this wicked disease, and that all of our members will participate and contribute.  Now it’s personal.

 Lucy Mercer

Leafing through Jean Edward Smith’s FDR biography that Jim Pratt will be discussing at my upcoming book club, I enjoyed the account of Roosevelt’s romance with Lucy Mercer that blossomed during World War I.  After giving birth to five children, Eleanor decided that they’d practice abstinence.  Acerbic cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth quipped, “Franklin deserved a good time.  He was married to Eleanor.”  On July 16, 1917, anxious to have Eleanor away from Washington, DC, for the rest of the summer, Roosevelt wrote her, “You were a goosy girl to think that I don’t want you here because you know I do.  But honestly you ought to have six straight weeks at Campobello.” In a chapter covering the emergence of 1940 Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, a Democrat until just months before the nominating convention, former Republican Senator James E. Watson said of his fellow Hoosier, “If a whore repented and wanted to join the church, I’d personally welcome her and lead her up the aisle to a pew.  But I’d not ask her to lead the choir the first night.”

  

Prior to the 1940 Democratic convention FDR had decided to seek an unprecedented third term due to the war in Europe but, according to Jean Edward Smith, only on the condition that Secretary of Agriculture be his running-mate.  He believed Wallace’s candidacy would help him carry farm states and that Wallace would support liberal programs in the event anything happened to him, in contrast to Vice President John Nance Garner or House Speaker William B. Bankhead of Alabama.  It took determined arm-twisting by Jim Farley and Jimmy Byrnes and a moving convention speech by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to carry the day.  

In July 1944 FDR traveled on the cruiser Baltimore to Hawaii to meet with military leaders Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz to finalize strategy for defeating Japan and to quiet rumors that his health was failing.  While in Honolulu the President toured military bases and requested that he be photographed with Nisei (Japanese-American) soldiers.  He also visited an amputee ward, his only public appearance ever in a wheelchair.  Jean Edward Smith wrote: “The President stopped at one bed after another, chatting briefly.  He wanted to show his useless legs to those who would face the same affliction.”

Perilous Journeys

“The thing that has gotten me going is discrimination. I tried to be equal to, and as good as, the Anglos. I wanted to make as much money, speak as well, and have all the goodies as the dominant society. But no matter what I did, I was always a ‘Mexican’.” Julian Samora (1920-1996)

Julian Samora (above) was a pioneer in the field of Mexican-American studies.  He grew up in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, whose public park had a sign at its entrance reading, “No Mexicans, Indians or Dogs.”   He was a History major at Adams State College and received a PhD in Sociology and Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Samora taught for two years at Michigan State and spent the rest of his academic career at Notre Dame.  In addition to his academic accomplishments, he helped found the National Council of La Raza, the leading Mexican-American civil rights organization.  I read his book “La Raza: Forgotten Americans” (1966) in grad school.  Ed Escobar and I included an excerpt from his 1967 publication with Richard Lamanna “Mexican-Americans in a Midwest Metropolis: A Study of East Chicago" in our 1987 anthology on Latinos in Northwest Indiana, “Forging a Community.”

 Rita Perez and daughter Maria Arredondo, circa 1922

I’m putting the final touches on “The Journeys of Maria Arredondo,” a talk I’ll be delivering at Michigan State during a conference celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Julian Samora Institute.  Maria came to America from Mexico at age 7, 19, and 32, the final time after her mother had been deported.  Describing a confrontation with customs official on the third border crossing, I’ll quote this passage from Ramon and Trisha’s “Maria’s Journey”: 

    Early in the day they reached customs.

  “My children and I are going home to Indiana to join my husband,” she explained to the guard at the border. 

  “I think not, Senora,” replied the guard gruffly. “Nobody goes across without passports.”

  It was true.  She had no documents.  She had left them at home.  When she hurriedly left the States, her discouragement was such that she believed Mexico would be her home until she died; why bother with documents? She saw now that she had acted without thought, but it was too late.

  She explained again her intentions, but with no proof of her story, no papers supporting her claim, she was turned away once more.  Just when she was ready to abandon all hope, another border guard, noticing her distress, walked over to her.  He took in the desperation on her face and the 8 wide-eyed children who clustered around her.  “Go sit over there,” he pointed to some shade, “and wait until evening.  The guards are no so hard then.  They may let you cross, but be careful.  Don’t make them angry.”

  With that small amount of encouragement, Maria resolved to make one more attempt.  She prayed hard to her saints, pleading for a miracle.  That night the bedraggled little band tried to cross once more.  At first demands for documents were repeated.  As the night wore on, the guards relented somewhat and asked for proof that Maria had only been in Mexico a short time.  Did she have some receipts or other evidence that their stay had been less than six months?

 Tangible proof, however, was simply not to be had, no matter how hard they searched the two pathetic suitcases with their meager cache of clothes and sundries.

    Another guard gazed at the mother and her children.  Seeing the hopelessness in Maria’s lovely face, he cleared his throat and spoke for the first time since the border drama had begun: “I’ve been talking to this boy here [Pepe], and he’s answered every question in English.  He knows his name, his age, and where he lives.  He says his Dad is waiting for them in the States,” he said to his colleague.

  “So what?” replied the other customs man, disgusted with the delay caused by the family.  “They have no proof!”

  “Let them go,” answered the other.  “There’s no way this little boy could speak such good English if they’d been in Mexico any length of time.”

  Pepe had been discussing his life with the second guard in great detail and with enthusiasm.  His talkativeness proved the family’s salvation.  

  “Oh, very well, go.  Take those snotty-nosed kids and get out of my sight before I change my mind,”said the officer, tired of the aggravation.  It was late, and he wanted to relax and drink his coffee, not hassle with a nearly hysterical woman and her brood of sad-eyed kids.

  The guard motioned for them to cross.  Maria hustled the children into one of the many taxis stationed at the border before the guard could change his mind.  They were squished into the hot car before Maria allowed herself to believe they were truly going home.  

  As they crossed the long bridge to stateside, Jenny looked back.  “Wow, ma, look how long this bridge is!”

  “Don’t turn around!” Maria admonished her.  “What if they call us back?”  Wiser than Lot’s wife, Maria stared fixedly forward until they were safely delivered onto America’s soil.

Young Pepe (José Arredondo, 1934-2017) went on to earn a doctorate in Education from IU and be elected sheriff of Lake County. This is my final paragraph: “Finally, I’d like to acknowledge my intellectual debt to Julian Samora whose 1967 book about East Chicago, Indiana, “Mexican-Americans in a Midwest Metropolis” (with Richard Lamanna) was the starting point for my intellectual journey into this subject.  Samora proclaimed that family was the bulwark of Mexican tradition.  Maria would have agreed.”

 José Arredondo

Conservative commentator George Will criticized Republicans as “vegetative” for their “canine obedience” to that “scofflaw” Trump.  Well put.

Ray Smock wrote:

    President Trump likened the impeachment process to a lynching in the hopes of elevating the emotions of his supporters.  He wants us to believe that impeachment, a provision of the U.S. Constitution that gives the sole power of impeachment to the House of Representatives, and the sole power of conducting an impeachment trial to the Senate, is the same as a lynching, a word forever etched in American history with the most illegal acts of violent murder suffered mostly by African American men during a hundred-year war with terrorists in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

      Trump is accusing duly elected members of the House as being nothing more than vigilantes taking the law in their own hands just because they don’t like him and want to un-do the 2016 election.  This emotional narrative is the kind that demagogues like Trump thrive on. In Trump’s case, it is the only kind of narrative he can use.  He lives in a maelstrom of conspiracy theories, where everyone is out to get him.  His current narrative is but an extension of what we have heard for three years, that any and all investigations of the president are part of an extensive witch hunt with no basis in fact.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other members of the GOP have not described the process as a lynching. Indeed, most have eschewed such comparisons, except for the mercurial and inconsistent Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who agrees that Democrats want to lynch Trump.

Going on TV to announce that an American special operations raid resulted in the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr-al-Baghdadi, Trump couldn’t resist taking swipes at leakers and whistleblowers, thanking Russia for its cooperation, bragging that this was more important than the mission Obama ordered that killed Osama bin Laden, and claiming that before blowing himself up, Baghdadi was “whimpering and crying.” The latter was palpably untrue and certain to inflame Islamic extremists.  Replying to comments by columnist Jerry Davich, Robert Malkowski wrote: “Donald was rushed to the hospital for dislocating his own shoulder while patting himself on the back for 45 minutes.”

Michael Frisch emailed that it was good seeing me at the OHA conference, meeting Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette, and learning about their Welcome Initiative and Flight Paths project.  He added, in a reference to my longstanding magazine: “Glad to know Steel is still being Shaved, and I look forward to seeing the current issue.”  I replied that one was on its way.

In the Journal of American History Dylan Gottlieb’s “Hoboken Is Burning: Yuppies, Arson, and Displacement in the Postindustrial City” wrote that nearly 500 fires set by arsonists-for-hire in Hoboken’s Puerto Ricanbarrio killed at least 50 people and drove displaced residents to leave the city permanently, paving the way for a yuppie “rebirth” for the traditional blue-collar city (hometown of Frank Sinatra, son of Italian immigrants), situated just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.  Similar trends occurred in Chicago and Atlanta, the author concludes, as the arrival of yuppies signaled the beginning of a new phase of exploitation and profit-seeking.

I informed University Advancement that former trustee James W. Dye passed away and invited Media Specialist Erika Rose to make use of an interview I conducted last year published in Steel Shavings, volume 48.  My email stated:

    At the request of IU’s Bicentennial Committee, I interviewed James Dye, 87, a retired builder and major university donor. I showed Dye the Rev. Robert Lowery library study area funded by the James and Betty Dye Foundation.  It also offers scholarships to many IUN students. 

  Manager for IU’s football and basketball squads in the early 1950s, Dye recalled a Sigma Chi fraternity party that lasted 48 hours after the Hoosiers beat Notre Dame and then Kansas for the 1953 NCAA championship. He joked that IU probably gave him an honorary degree for attending so many losing gridiron contests.  

  Dye was an imaginative entrepreneur who built his first house by himself at age 20.  His company, the Landmark Corporation, built Mansards Apartments in Griffith.  On its tennis courts Dye competed with former Gary mayor George Chacharis and driver John Diamond.  Dye praised past IUN chancellors Dan Orescanin and Peggy Elliott and asked me about Chancellor Lowe.  I lauded Lowe’s participation in community affairs, History Department functions, basketball games, and student functions. 

 Gary Crusader collage

Jonathyne Briggs mentioned that he might include a unit of IU Northwest in his Spring seminar covering the year 1968.  I suggested he expand the project to concentrate on the city of Gary and wrote him this explanation: 

    Early in the morning of January 1, 1968, Richard Gordon Hatcher was sworn in as mayor and became the first African American to serve as chief executive of a significantly sized city.  During a year of riots (but not in Gary), assassinations, antiwar protests, and white backlash, Hatcher played a major role in national events, meeting with President Lyndon Johnson as Washington, DC, went up in flames, launching imaginative War on Poverty programs funded by the federal government, campaigning with Robert F. Kennedy as he sought the Democratic presidential nomination, and attracting major grants from foundations eager for his administration to be a success.  On the other hand, white flight and business disinvestment escalated, fueled by fear, racism, and corporate decisions beyond Hatcher’s control. Detractors turned the slogan “City on the Move” on its head, adding the words, “Yah, moving out” and asking, “Will the last [white] person to leave, please turn out the lights?”

    Students could make use of my Gary publications (“Gary’s First Hundred Years,” a Sixties Steel Shavings that includes an oral history of Hatcher’s first two years in office, a chapter in “Black Mayors”) as well as magazines, material in the Calumet Regional Archives, the Post-Tribune (on microfilm), as well as interviews on the Valparaiso University website Flight Paths and oral histories that students themselves conduct.  Perhaps the entire class could produce a podcast or documentary as a final project.  What was happening at IUN regarding Black Studies would fit within the context of Gary, regional, national, and international events.

In Elizabeth Strout’s “Amy and Isabell” daughter Amy resents her distant, nagging mother and enjoys the lunchroom chatter in the factory where she has a summer job.  Stout wrote:

  Everything talked about was interesting to her, even the story of the refrigerator gone on the blink: a half gallon of chocolate ice cream melted in the sink, soured, and smelled to high hell by morning.  The voices were comfortable and comforting; Amy, in her silence, looked from face to face.  She was not excluded from any of this, but the women had the decency, or lack of desire, not to engage her in their conversations either.  It took Amy’s mind off things.  

  Fat Bev hit a button on the soda machine and a can of Tab rocked noisily in place.  She bent her huge body to retrieve it.  “Three more weeks and Dottie can have sex,” she said. “She wishes it were three more months,” and here her soda can was popped open.  “But I take it, Wally’s getting irritated.  Chomping at the bit.”

  Amy swallowed the crust of her sandwich.

  “Tell him to take care of it himself,” someone said, and there was laughter.  Amy’s heartbeat quickened, sweat broke out above her lip.

  “You get dry after a hysterectomy, you know,” Arlene Tucker offered this with a meaningful nod of her head.

  “I didn’t.”

   “Because you didn’t have your ovaries out,” Arlene nodded again she was a woman who believed what she said.  “They yanked the whole business with Dot.”

  “Oh, my mother went crazy with hot flashes,” somebody said, and thankfully irritable Wally was left behind; hot flashes and crying jags were talked about instead.

Glory Days

"Glory days, well, they'll pass you by
Glory days, in the wink of a young girl's eye"

         Bruce Springsteen, "Glory Days"

One verse of “Glory Days,” on Springsteen’s 1984 album “Born in the U.S.A.,” refers to an unemployed autoworker:

My old man worked twenty years on the line
And they let him go
Now everywhere he goes out looking for work
They just tell him that he's too old
I was nine years old and he was working at the
Metuchen Ford plant assembly line
Now he just sits on a stool down at the Legion hall
But I can tell what's on his mind

At the fourth annual Steel Pen Writers Conference at Fair Oaks Farm in Winamac, I met the remarkable Melissa Fraterrigo, whose new novel, Glory Days, has received rave reviews.  Booklist wrote: If Willa Cather and Cormac McCarthy had a love child, she would be a writer such as Fraterrigo.” “Glory Days,” Bonnie Jo Campbell concluded, “strikes with the unexpected force of a summer tornado.” At the edge of a rural Nebraska town is a carnival named Glory Days, where characters, to quote Campbell, “struggle to make sense of lives marked by loss, violence, and despair.”

A panelist in the opening general session, titled “That’s Not What My Grandma Said: Preserving Regional Studies,” I drove down Route 65 the day before, checked out Fair Oaks Farm (a huge complex, including a birthing barn, crowded despite the cold and dreary weather), checked in at Comfort Suites in Rensselaer, and drove to St. Joseph’s College, which recently closed after 128 years. A chain-link fence kept me from driving through the abandoned campus, but I spotted the historic Chapel Tower in the distance.

Back at Comfort Suites, I struggled with my room key until learning that one does not slide the plastic card but merely places it near the lock.  I caught the end of Footloose (1984), with the John Lithgow character, Reverend Shaw Moore, more sympathetic than I’d remembered.  His daughter Ariel (Lori Singer) was a true hellion, rebelling against the repressed pastor. After she tells him she’s not a virgin, he slaps her and immediately regret sit; from that moment, he was a changed man.  A complimentary USA Today contained a photo of pitcher “Old Hoss” Radbourn, a 59-game winner with the Providence Grays in 1884, flashing the “fuck you” middle finger in an opening day ceremonial team picture at New York’s Polo Grounds.

Up at 5:30 to ready the body for the 9 a.m. session, I arrived at registration to be greeted by poet and IUN alumnus Betty Villareal, who said, “You look snazzy” (I was wearing white dress shirt, tie, vest, and slacks) and then, to those next to her, “Jim bowls with my husband.”  At the book display, Roland Camp, the husband of my session moderator Kathryn Page Camp and a retired social studies teacher, said, “I taught with your son at East Chicago Central.” In Newton Ballroom, the main conference venue, joining my table was Melissa Fraterrigo, who described activities at her Lafayette Writers’ Studio and handed me a lollipop attached to a miniature likeness of the “Glory Days” cover with blurbs on the back. I decided to attend her workshop.

above, Heather Augustyn; below, Kathryn Page Camp

On my panel were charismatic storyteller Sharon Kirk Clifton and Purdue Northwest professor Heather Augustyn, who has written books on Ska music and done extensive research in Kingston, Jamaica.  When she asked if anyone had heard of The Specials, I pointed to a page in my latest Steel Shavings, which I had given to each panelist, where I mentioned lyrics from the British band’s “Monkey Man.”  She compared conducting research to confronting a mythical, many-headed hydra, in that once you solve one mystery, others pop up. Sharon Clifton exclaimed, “I call that chasing bunnies” – meaning, I assumed, they multiply.   Clifton’s compared collecting stories to weaving a tapestry, one that is never fully completed, I added, remembering that IUN historian Bill Neil had used that analogy. I was pleased with my performance, with one exception.  After discussing memorable interviews with steelworker Paulino Monterrubio and Baptist firebrand L.K. Jackson (“The Old Prophet”) to make the point about the need to be open to the unexpected, I brought up Anna Rigovsky, wife of a union leader who told stories about struggling to survive the Great Depression.  I meant to explain learning about her activities with the Slovak Club and how when her grandchild, hearing Anna’s mother speaking Slovak, asked, “Why is Baba speaking Spanish?” Instead, I left that out; hopefully, nobody noticed.

above, Melissa Fraterrigo; below, George and Betty Villarreal

Melissa Fraterrigo’s workshop, “Connecting to the Unconnected: Exploring the Novel-in-Stories,” took place around a large conference table.  I got one of the last seats, thanks to Betty Villareal.  Melissa constantly paced around the table, quipping that she’s usually more active but that she’d only had three cups of coffee.  She reminded me of peripatetic IU professor Bill Reese speaking at an American Studies conference in Dubrovnik some 30 year ago.   Melissa passed out three odd photos of a man seemingly shredding a mask that had been his face and asked participants to put them in an order and be prepared to explain why.  I imagined someone whose humdrum life was transformed after reading Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” 

In describing fiction’s unifying elements, such as background, tone, plot, and central characters, Melissa recited a paragraph from Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, one of my favorite books.  Appearing rather late in the novel, this was the first scene the author wrote, Melissa claimed, and provided clues into both the Crosby, Maine, setting and Olive’s sensitive, ruthlessly honest character:

  Three hours ago, while the sun was shining full tilt through the trees and across the back lawn, the local podiartist, a middle-aged man named Christopher Kitteridge, was married to a woman from out of town named Suzanne.  This is the first marriage for both of them, and the wedding has been a smallish, pleasant affair, with a flute player and baskets of yellow sweetheart roses placed inside and outside the house.  So far, the polite cheerfulness of the guests seems to show no sign of running down, and Olive Kitteridge, standing by the picnic table, is thinking it’s really high time everyone left.

Melissa also read a snippet from Cathy Day’s The Circus in Winter (2005), like Olive Kitteridge a series of linked stories.  It’s about circus folk wintering in a small Hoosier town.  Cathy Day grew up in Peru, Indiana, winter quarters for Ringling Brothers, Hagenback-Wallace, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.  Peru is presently home of the International Circus Hall of Fame.  The author described a poker game taking place in a circus cookhouse.  Participants included an elephant keeper and, wrote Day, “High-Flying Jennie Dixianna in a flourish of feather boa”:

    The wind outside howled across the plains and whistled through the walls.  In the corners of the room, snow gathered like dust. The players drank cheap whiskey from tin cups and sat at a round wooden table laced so close to a potbelly stove that it seemed like another player.

        

Unable to write for a year after someone dear to her succumbed to cancer, Melissa overcame her writer’s block by composing fragment similar to the previous examples.  Melissa asked everyone to imagine a setting for a story.  Perhaps because of a recent deadly accident, where the only witness was the surviving driver, who naturally claimed not to be at fault, I thought of former girlfriend Carol Shuman’s younger brother, who’d been killed bicycling home from school.  I was in college and don’t recall whether I offered condolences.  In sixth grade, Carol’s puppy love for me could morph into jealousy.  One day, with my mother subbing for Mr. Miller, she stabbed me in the hand with a pencil.  I can’t remember why; perhaps I was flirting with Judy Jenkins, who had supplanted her as my girlfriend.  There’s still a trace of lead in my palm.  Carol’s mother was a school cafeteria server and paid me to wash her car in the summer.  I’d strip to the waist and hope Carol, now dating older boys, was watching from her bedroom upstairs. At a high school reunion, I chatted with her briefly, but she left before we talked at length. Was she bored?  Angry, for some reason?  When I’d told her companion that she had been my first girlfriend, she replied, “I thought it was Judy Jenkins.” I learned Carol became very religious, engaged in some type of missionary work, causing me to wonder if the calling was the result of her brother’s tragic demise. In our senior yearbook, she wrote: “Never forget how I used to like you at Fort School and how I used to chase you around.”  I haven’t.

Carol

At lunch, I told Heather Augustyn that my granddaughter Alissa loved to dance to a Grand Rapids ska band.  “Mustard Plug,” she replied, knowing exactly the group I was referring to. Janine Harrison, poet laureate of Highland, asked if I knew Corey Hagelberg and Samuel A. Love.  Do I ever!  That earned Heather a copy of Steel Shavings.  Altogether, I gave six away, to my panel, Melissa Fraterrigo, Highland elementary teacher Robin Sizemore, and Coal Science Inc. president Hardarshan Singh Valia.  I had mentioned folklorist Richard Dorson’s Land of the Millrats in my presentation, and Sizemore, a steelworker’s daughter, inquired about my research on that subject. Hardarshan Singh Valia, who hired in at Inland Steel in 1979, gave me a poem composed for Indiana’s Bicentennial entitled “Volcanoes of Northwest Indiana.”  Here’s an excerpt:

From spoon that fetches you food
To needle that stitches your wound
All came from my womb
Bloodied, exhausted
Mother of Volcanoes
Yes, I am the Blast Furnace of Northwest Indiana.

 . . .

Yes, I do explode
Yes, I do spew ash
Yes, I do emit noxious fumes
Shed enough tears repenting over mistakes
Took many corrective actions to improve.

Hardarshan Singh Valia; below, kachera 

Hardarshan Singh Valia wrote these inspiring words about Region Sikhs for the IU Press anthology “Undeniably Indiana: Hoosiers Tell the Story of Their Wacky and Wonderful State” (2016):  

  When I first arrived here, to my knowledge, there were five Sikh families in the close vicinity of Highland, Griffith, Munster, and Valparaiso.  Today a beautiful Sikh Gurdwara (temple) is located in Crown Point where about 300 Sikh families worship, and at the end of the service is a free lunch.  This is a practice started by the founder of Sikhism around 500 years ago so as to bring equality to all regardless of caste, religion or social status. A Sikh is easily identified because he wears a turban (pagri) and adopts five articles of faith (5Ks) namely, kesh (long uncut hair), kanga (comb), kada (bracelet), kachera (shorts), and kirpan (sword).  These bring him dignity, courage, and spirituality.

  Indiana made it easy for Sikhs to assemble in its melting pot.  The community thrives and benefitted from its riches.  Now it asks Hoosiers that when you see a Sikh, greet him, visit his Gurdwara, enjoy the langar (free lunch), and allow him to express his thanks and gratitude.

above, Inauguration; below, Hatcher with Jackson 5; from Calumet Regional Archives

Back home, Toni had chili on the stove, and Dave arranged gaming.  Tom Wade agreed so long as the IU game was on TV (alas, the Hoosiers lost another close one, to Maryland). I won the latest version of Evan Davis’ train game by using a strategy previously employed by T. Wade, currently infatuated with purchasing hub cities rather than railroad companies.

Sunday’s Post-Tribune looked back on Richard Hatcher’s historic 1967 mayoralty election victory.  Correspondent Craig Lyons utilized quotes from a half-dozen admirers, me included.  Ron Cohen was pleasantly surprised at the absence of detractors.  Representative Charlie Brown called Hatcher a “history maker” who “did the impossible.”  George Van Til, with Hatcher in 2008 when Barack Obama appeared in Gary for a rally, got the candidate’s attention by yelling out, “Here’s Mayor Hatcher.”  Obama approached Hatcher, embraced him, and, according to Van Til, expressed thanks for letting him stand on his shoulders.

Lyons quoted me about the limits to a Gary mayor’s power, especially pertaining to the economy.  The only misquote I noted was that I’d mentioned that a policy boss had tried to bribe Hatcher into dropping out of the 1967 Democratic primary, but Lyons wrote political boss. I wish he had included my assertion that Gary’s fate would have been far worse without Mayor Hatcher.  Most certainly blacks would have rioted had the Lake County Democratic machine stolen the election. Again, in 1968, in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, when so many American cities erupted in flames, Hatcher, accompanied by IHSAA state champion Roosevelt basketball players, went from neighborhood to neighborhood, counseling against violence.  As Mayor Hatcher’s press secretary Ray Wild put it, “Maybe the wonder is not that Gary experienced the difficulties it experienced but that it survived at all, that it didn’t just go to hell in a hand basket.  There’s a good argument to be made that a less creative, less farsighted administration might have cost this city everything.”

Dawn Darceneaux in 2017 (right) with Joslyn Kelly, McKenya Dilworth, Errol Hefner

The Hatcher article contained quotes from Dawn Darceneaux, whom I interviewed years ago when she was a U.S. Steel administrative assistant. The Mayor persuaded her mother, who worked for Model Cities, to complete a high school degree, Dawn told Lyons, even though she was a grandmother. A cheerleader at Froebel in 1960, Dawn told me about the aftermath of a basketball game in Michigan City::

  On the way home my boyfriend, Caesar Antonio Morales, who was Puerto Rican, stopped at a restaurant and sent some of us in to order hamburgers to carry out. They wouldn’t serve us so he went in and got it.  We went in with him and acted like it was a big joke.  We didn’t get hurt, but in situations like that there’s always a chance that they might mess with your food. Michigan City beach and zoo were places we could go, while in Gary blacks were not welcome in Miller beach.  We had our prom at Marquette Pavilion, but afterwards we had to get out.  No beach parties for us.

During Dawn’s senior year she got pregnant and told me:

  It was a big issue.  A lot of people were sending notes to the principal when they noticed my tummy poking out, as if I should be ashamed and go hide in a closet. The school nurse, Mrs. Steinhard, a wonderful Jewish woman, would just take the notes and throw them in the garbage.  Eventually, pressure was brought to bear that if I wasn’t ejected from school, some of the teachers would get in trouble.  Six months pregnant, I didn’t go to school the last couple weeks. I didn’t get to go across the stage, but the principal did give me my diploma because all my credits were in.