Exceedances

“Another sad day for Lake Michigan.  Industry still using the lake as its own dumping grounds!” Jim Brown

 IDEM officials checkoff dead fish near Portage marina, NWI Times photo by John Luke

A malfunction at ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor plant has resulted in thousands of fish dying in the East Branch of the Little Calumet River and in nearby Lake Michigan. Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) officials have used the euphemism “exceedances” to characterize the chemical spill of cyanide and ammonia-nitrogen.  Indiana Dunes National Park superintendent Paul Labovitz closed the Portage beach area and told Kevin Nevers of the Chesterton Tribune, “It was a broad-spectrum kill.  It was not species-specific.  Anything close to the source was killed.  It even killed catfish, and catfish are pretty hard to kill.”  Labovitz was rather cavalier in concluding, “I put this in the category of ‘Shit Happens in an industrial community.’”  He praised Arcelor-Mittal for accepting blame for the environmental disaster and communicating results of their ongoing investigation far faster than was the case with U.S. Steel when a deadly carcinogen spilled into Burns Ditch from its Portage facility 30 months ago with dire consequences. Republicans being in control of state and federal regulatory commissions, it is doubtful that Arcelor-Mittal will receive more than a slap on the wrist.

Post-Tribune photo byZbigniew Bzdak

Cha Meyer reacted to Portage Beach being closed until further notice: “We are canaries in the coal mine of the world that our society has polluted and squandered away.”

Portage officials contradicted Superintendent Labovitz’s charitable assessment.  A spokesman noted: “While reports show many, including IDEM, knew of the concerns as early as August 12th, the City of Portage was not informed of this concern until August 15th.” Commenting on the Portage Indiana Municipal Facebook site, Diana Dempsey Bartkus wrote: “It’s cheaper for them to pay the fine than dispose of properly, I’m sure. Throw down! Make an example out of them! There should be zero tolerance! Beach goers were not turned away from any of these beaches on Thursday! They already knew of the situation for more than 24 hours! This is awful and infuriating!!!” Tammie Klym added:“How is any level of these deadly chemicals allowed to be near our water supply? How are these companies allowed to have any vessel that allows anything to be dumped into water? I can see intake. This is why our ecosystem is failing. This company makes millions if not billions of dollars. Put in a filtration system and make sure it works.” This from Jonathan Fronczak: “Forget a fine, some people need to be locked up. You can get a felony and jail for hunting and fishing unlawfully. The only way to stop future events is criminal prosecution. Make an example!!!”

George Takei at Rowher and at present

Rohwer Internment Camp

Veteran actor George Takei, best known as Hikaru Sulu in the “Star Trek” series, is in AMC’s “The Terror: Infamy,” which takes place in an internment camp where Japanese-Americans were consigned during World War II. In a Timeinterview Takei tells of his family being interned when he was just five. Soldiers showed up at their home in Los Angeles and took them to Santa Anita racetrack, where a chain-link fence surrounded the entire facility.  Takei recalled:

  We were unloaded and herded over to the stable area. Each family was assigned to a horse stall.  For my parents, it was a degrading, humiliating, enraging experience to take their three kids to sleep in a smelly horse stall.  But to me, it was fun to sleep where the horses slept.

One stall had been home to the famous racehorse Seabiscuit, winner of the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap less than two years before. From Santa Anita the Takei family was sent to Rohwer internment camp in Desha County, Arkansas.  Takei recalled: 

  We were plunked down in the swamps of southeastern Arkansas.  To me, it was an exotic, alien planet.  Trees grew out of the water of the bayou that was right next to the barbed-wire fence. I remember catching pollywogs and putting them in a jar. Dragonflies, which I’ve never seen before.  The first winter, it snowed. I was a Southern California kid.  To wake up one morning and see everything covered in white, it was a magical place.

  For my parents, it was a series of goading terrors, one after the other.  But children are amazingly adaptable.  We adjusted, and we got used to what would have been a grotesque thing – lining up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall, or going with my father to bathe in a mass shower.  When I made the night runs to the latrine, searchlights followed me.  I thought it was nice that they lit the way for me to pee. It wasn’t until later that I learned about the reality, the horror, the terror, and the injustice of the incarceration.

Toni and I attended a RailCats baseball contest against the Milwaukee Milkmen.  While the game itself was rather boring, afterwards there was a spectacular fireworks display, like a grand finale that lasted a good 10-15 minutes.  In“They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” essayist Hanif Abdurraqib admitted to being a fan of his hometown Triple-A Columbus (Ohio) Clippers, and watching a Fourth of July fireworks display at Huntington Park:Over the weekend:

  You’ll roll your eyes when “Born in the U.S.A.” plays while the fireworks fly screaming into the sky, tucking all its darkness into their pockets.  I still go to watch the brief burst of brightness glow on the faces of black children, some of them have made it downtown, miles away from the forgotten corners of the city they’ve been pushed to. Some of them smiling and pointing upwards, still too young to know of America’s hunt for their flesh.  How it wears the blood of their ancestors on its teeth.

Music critic Abdurraqib, it turns out, is a big Bruce Springsteen fan.  He has attended several of The Boss’s concerts and is particularly fond of “The River” album, which celebrates the small pleasures of blue-collar culture and, as Abdurraqib put it, “the ability to make the most of your life, because it’s the only life you have.”  Catching Bruce and the E Street Band at a sold-out show in Newark, New Jersey’s Prudential Center, Abdurraqib observed:

  As I looked around the swelling arena, the only other black people I saw were performing labor in some capacity.  As the band launched into a killer extended version of “Cadillac Ranch,” I looked over to the steps and saw a young black man who had been vending popcorn and candy.  He was sitting on a step covered in sweat and rubbing his right ankle.  A man, presumably attempting to get back to his seat, yelled at him to move.

  In Bruce Springsteen’s music, I think about the romanticization of work and how that is reflected in America.  Rather, for whom work is romantic, and for whom work is a necessary and sometimes painful burden of survival. In my decade-plus of loving Bruce Springsteen’s music, I have always known and accepted that the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal will come from.

I woke up disoriented, then realized; no electricity.  Most of Chesterton suffered the same fate.  Dave took us to breakfast.  After encountering long waits at Round the Clock and Bob Evans, we were about to settle for Culver’s when Dave noticed that, it being 11 o’clock, AJ’s Pizza Company was just opening.  They served great coffee, and the lunch menu included a tasty steak sandwich and homemade chips. I called Ron Cohen on Dave’s cellphone, and, back at the condo, he and Nancy picked me up for Fred Chary’s 80th birthday celebration just as our power returned.   

EllaRose

As always, Diane Chary prepared a bountiful buffet.  Having recently eaten, I was pleased to discover a vegetable plate and chunks of mangoes in a salad.  Later I went back for other delicacies.  Fred’s daughter EllaRose, a playwright, came from New York City.  Missing were regulars Karen Rake and Milan Andrejevich, as well as recently retired English professors Alan Barr and George Bodmer. Both attended ten years ago but not for Fred’s 75th, by which time they were shunning me – a case of letting academic differences take priority over friendship.  Not surprisingly, right-winger Jean Poulard and lefty Jack Bloom, both still teaching despite being well past retirement age, argued over Trump separating immigrant families.  Bloom is teaching a Fall course on the Vietnam War and is eager to see my old syllabus.  Its reading list included Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Ronald J. Glasser’s 365 Days,Michael Herr’s Dispatches,and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk. I talked with Fred about the Phillies’ recent sweep of the Cubs and told him that the Steel ShavingsI gave him contained descriptions of the Eagles’ Superbowl victory and the raucous celebrations afterwards. EllaRose opened a bottle of champagne Poulard had brought from his home village in France, and we toasted the guest of honor and vowed to gather again five years hence.  Diane insisted I take food home for Toni, so I opted for slices of vegetarian lasagna and chocolate cake.  On the birthday cake were figurines depicting a Phillies pitcher and catcher and a Cubs batter striking out.

Like Fred, I am a loyal Philadelphia sports fan with a couple all-time favorite players in each major sport – Richie Ashburn and Dick Allen in baseball, Eagles Chuck Bednarick and Sonny Jorgensen, Flyers Bobby Clarke and Bernie “Kid” Parent, and 76ers Julius “Dr. J” Irving and Allen “AI” Iverson.  Iverson is also a favorite of Hanif Abdurraqib, who wrote an essay titled “It Rained on Ohio On the Night when Allen Iverson Hit Michael Jordan with a Crossover.” The memorable event took place in 1996, AI’s rookie season, when “he hadn’t yet grown out his soon-to-be signature cornrows and was several tattoos short of where he would end his career.”  At the top of the key facing his idol, AI pulled off a double crossover, then nailed an easy jump shot.  While in high school, Iverson had been incarcerated in the aftermath of an interracial bowling alley brawl in Hampton, Virginia (only black kids were arrested). Accused of throwing a chair, Iverson told the judge, “What kind of man would I be to hit a woman in the head with a damn chair?”  Sent to a correctional farm, Iverson couldn’t play basketball his senior year and scholarship offers dried up.  Only Georgetown’s coach John Thompson took a chance on him.

Beloved by 76er fans and self-described “punk kids” like Abdurraqib, Iverson gave his all on the court, “throwing his body all over the place for the city of Philadelphia and dragging lackluster teams to the playoffs and then [in 2002] to the finals.”  The day after watching AI fake out Jordan, Abdurraqib was on a still-slick playground in Columbus “in baggy jeans that dragged the ground until the bottoms of them split into small white flags of surrender”dreaming “of having enough money to buy my way into the kind of infamy that came with surviving any kind of proximity to poverty.”  Of Iverson Abdurraqib concluded:

  He was a 6-foot wrecking ball, who wouldn’t practice hurt, but who would play hurt for what felt like half of the season.  The era of witnessing Allen Iverson was the era of learning a language for your limits and how to push beyond them.

 Ray Smock in Nebraska

I heard from old friend Ray Smock from Maryland days, traveling through the Great Plains states, and Paul Turk, whom I met when my family moved to the Detroit area in the mid-50s.  He’s a Cleveland Indians fan and, to a lesser degree, the Washington Nationals, now that he’s living in the DC area.  Daughter Kat, a grad student in archeology at Vanderbilt, “spent much of the summer in the Fish River Canyon in Namibia, scratching for the fossil record of the very earliest animals in the Ediacaran Period, 450+ million years ago.  Dinosaurs are SO nouveau and come-lately.” According to the online Encyclopedia Britannicathis was the latest of three periods of the Neoproterozoic Era marked by considerable tectonic activity and the rapid retreat of ice sheets associated with the Marinoan glaciation.

                            Kat Turk; fossil from Ediacaran period found in Australia                                                                           

Let Me Down

“Don’t go changing to try and please me

You never let me down before.”

         “Just the Way You Are,” Billy Joel

 Billy Joel

The final request of Jeffrey Riegel, dead at age 56, was that 8 Philadelphia Eagles serve as pallbearers at his funeral so that his favorite pro football team could let him down one more time. I was privileged to attend the Eagles’ Last Hurrah, the 1960 championship when they prevailed over Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers.  Since then, it has been disappointment after disappointment.  But, to paraphrase Cub fan Walter LaFeber, any team can have a bad half-century.  Philadelphia is 0-2 in Superbowl appearances, losing to the Oakland Raiders, 27-10, in 1981 and to the New England Patriots, 24-21, in 2005.  Down ten with six minutes to go, Donovan McNabb took over four minutes to engineer a scoring drive but had one final chance with 46 seconds to go before tossing a desperation pass from his own four-year line into the hands of Patriot Rodney Harrison.

A sure sign Fall is on the way: Fantasy Football draft day for our 8-team LANE league.  With my fourth pick, I drafted Steelers stud wide receiver Antonio Brown.  The only Eagle on Jimbo Jammers is wide receiver Alshon Jeffery, a former Bears who will start on the bench behind Doug Baldwin of Seattle.  If the past is any indication, injuries will play a key role.  For example, my three tight ends, Jordon Reed, Tyler Elfert, and Eric Ebron, are all questionable for game one.

Another harbinger of autumn: opening week of bowling.  Worried how my knee would hold up, my caution probably accounted for having more splits than strikes.  I was pain free, at least until the endorphins wore off.  Despite two poor games on my part, the Engineers won three of seven points, barely winning series after I finally rolled my average.  Bob Robinson is battling liver cancer, so Frank Shufran got affable Joe Piunti, a veteran of the Wednesday evening Sheet and Tin League, to join the team.

 Little Richard in 2007

In a Rock Music Studies review of “1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music,” critic B. Lee Cooper argues that author Andrew Grant Jackson neglects the mid-1950s birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, a time when, in his words:

The marginalized music of hillbilly cats and R&B honkers and shouters overwhelmed traditional pop tunes.  Rockabillies and doo wop groups bid farewell to country-and-western isolation and ghettoized, chitlin’ circuit life as they attained nation-wide acclaim for their recordings.  Teenagers rejoiced at the new records.  Parents and civic groups grumbled loudly.  But the musical revolution, an integrated rebellion, reached both television and theater screens as well. 

Cooper adds that Bob Dylan was a self-proclaimed Little Richard fan, and Jimi Hendrix played in Little Richard’s band.  Before they teamed up with Dylan, members of the Band played rockabilly numbers such as “Susie Q” with Dale Hawkins.  At age nine, David Bowie heard “Tutti Frutti” when his dad brought the record home and later claimed it was like hearing God.  Long before achieving commercial success, both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were collecting Chess LPs and devouring discs by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Carl Perkins, and Larry Williams and covering Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruiti”.  Both bands opened for Little Richard in 1962, and his organist, Billy Preston, played on several of their albums. 

Originally an ice cream flavor that contained tiny bits of candied fruit and then a chewing gum flavor, “Tutti Fruiti” in Italian means “all fruits.”  Little Richard’s original version of “Tutti Fruiti (Oh Rutti)” was quite raunchy and contained the lyrics, If it’s tight, it’s alright/ if it’s greasy, it makes it easy.”  Specialty Records made him clean up the words before recording it.  Some claim that instead of singing “Wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom,” the original words at the end of the line were “a good goddam,” but Richard claimed he never took the Lord’s name in vain.  He also came up with this implausible story about washing dishes at a Macon, Georgia, Greyhound bus station:

I couldn't talk back to my boss man. He would bring all these pots back for me to wash, and one day I said, “I've got to do something to stop this man bringing back all these pots to me to wash,” and I said, “Awap bop a lup bop a wop bam boom, take 'em out!” and that's what I meant at the time. And so I wrote “Tutti Frutti” in the kitchen.

 Fieldhouses on "Bridge Break"

After John and Karen Fieldhouse scored a 70.83 percent in a duplicate bridge game, Newsletter editor Barbara Walczak wrote this blurb:

  John fell in love with bridge when he was in college and has enjoyed the game for over 50 years.  He has also enjoyed teaching bridge in his community.  Karen took up bridge after she married John some 18 years ago. Since she did not want to become a bridge widow, she started to learn how to play bridge by taking lessons – but not from John!  Karen has enjoyed bridge ever since.

In Steve McShane’s class, I paired two dozen students with bridge players for their oral history assignment. I notified some of the volunteers Tuesday at Chesterton and Wednesday at Valparaiso. At Valpo’s Banta Center a record turnout of 18 couples enabled director Charlie Halberstadt to employ a so-called Mitchell Movement: North-South couples stayed at one of 9 tables as East-West couples moved a table to the left after three hands while the boards rotated in the opposite direction.  The only drawback: we didn’t get to play against some of my favorite pairs, including the Fieldhouses, Chuck and Marcy Tomes, Tom and Lori Rea, and Tom and Sylvia Luekins.  Opponent Donna Penn, 82, recalled Lew Wallace principal Verna Hoke, social studies teacher Marie Edwards, and murder victim Mary Cheever.  Dee Van Bebber and I finished fourth and naturally lingered over our mistakes more than our triumphs – in my case, trumping with a six of Spades when I held the 8-9-10 and losing to a seven (I knew I goofed the instant I did it).  Holding eight Diamonds, including the top three, plus a bare Ace of Clubs and Queen of Hearts doubleton, Dee bid 6 Diamonds after I opened a Spade. She took all 13 tricks and lamented not asking for Aces (I had two) nor bidding the grand slam.  As it turned out, nobody else did.

 Michael and EllaRose Chary

A Chary family “Thank You” card requested that we remember Michael “with a smile and by helping others find hope and justice in this world.” On the back was this postscript: “He was our lion.”  That he truly was.  While his dad and brother were soft-spoken, he was boisterous and intrepid and no doubt somewhat of a role model for sister EllaRose, who after graduating from Brown University embarked on an exciting stage and screenwriting career.

Rich Cohen wrote a Vanity Fair article entitled “Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope.”  Those born between the mid-1960s and early Eighties (including sons Phil and Dave), according to Cohen, supposedly are more realistic and anchored in common sense than Baby Boomers or Millennials.  A Gen Xer himself, Cohen wrote:

  We are the last generation to grow up with crappy video games, with actual arcades instead of quality home consoles. If you wanted to play, you had to leave the house and mix it up with the ruffians. That is, we are the last Americans to have the old-time childhood, wherein you were assigned a bully along with a homeroom teacher. Our childhood was closer to those of the 1950s than to whatever they’re doing today. It was coherent, hands-on, dirty, and fun.

 Walter LaFeber

“Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope” got me thinking about something historian Walter LaFeber, ten years my senior and supposedly part of the “Silent Generation,” wrote in a letter congratulating me on the publication of Steel Shavings, volume 40, my so-called retirement journal: “Ours was supposedly the generation that never showed up.  But some of us did show up.” Born in Walkerton, Indiana, the son of a grocer and a lifelong Cubs, fan, LaFeber treasured an autographed photo of Hall of Famer Ernie Banks with the inscription “Keep Going Walt.”  It adorned his office at Cornell, along with a sign warning, “Chicago Cubs Fans Parking Only.”