Murals

by David McShane

There's a mural on my dining room wall of the railroad tracks at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I love having my hometown with me out here in California.” Jill Scott

Asked to list the ten athletes I most enjoyed watching, number one in terms of chronology is Philadelphia Phillies centerfielder Richie “Whitey” Ashburn, who batted at the top of the order for the pennant-winning 1950 “Whiz Kids.”  Disparaged as “the foul ball king” who couldn’t hit for power, Ashburn often led off a game fouling off pitch after pitch to wear down the pitcher and coax a walk. Like many teammates, the two-time batting champ and Hall of Famer played the entire decade of the 1950s with my home town team, and I can still name at least a dozen core players, starting with pitchers Robin Roberts and Curt Simmons, catchers Andy Seminick and Stan “Stosh” Lopata, colorfully-nicknamed infielders “Granny” Hamner and “Puddin’ Head” Jones, and frequently booed home run hitter Del Ennis. Grandpa Elwood Metzger took me to many home games; we’d get off the train at 30^th Street station. Ashburn played two years with the Cubs before ending his playing career with the expansion Mets, whose games he’d go on to announce until his death in 1997.  He was a class act.

Murals serve many purposes, from purely decorative to propaganda. Often they commemorate celebrities (such as Gary’s Jackson Five and Seymour’s John “Hoosier” Mellencamp) or victims (i.e., George Floyd, murdered by a Minneapolis cop). Two famous muralists, Mexican communist Diego Rivera and American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, were contemporaries who attempted to capture historic trends between the world wars.  Rivera’s most controversial mural was “Man at the Crossroads,” commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation for New York City’s Rockefeller Center.  Contrasting capitalism and socialism, Rivera included a portrait of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, which Foundation director Nelson Rockefeller ordered to be painted over; the entire mural was ultimately replaced.  Rivera subsequently installed a similar mural in his native Mexico.

Thomas Hart Benton is perhaps most famous for murals depicting the history of his native Missouri, but he also designed a series of Indiana murals for the Century of Progress exhibition at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.  One showed Ku Klux Klan members in full regalia along with images on behalf of freedom of the press, which exposed the venality of Klan leaders of the hate group.  Benton’s Indiana murals found a permanent home at Indiana University in Bloomington.  In 2017 students petitioned to have the one depicting the Klan removed from a large lecture hall.  Provost Lauren Robel called the mural a national treasure and opposed its removal, issuing this statement: “Like most great art, Benton’s murals require context and history.  Many well-meaning people, without having the opportunity to do that work, wrongly condemn the mural as racist simply because it depicts a racist organization and a hateful symbol.” Since then, things have remained at a stalemate, with the mural not removed but with classes no longer held in the lecture hall. What an opportunity for a teachable moment squandered.

 

In Northwest Indiana the leading muralist is Felix “Flex” Maldonado, who started as a graffiti artist and whose portraits have been exhibited at Gary Public Library and other local venues.  I’ve met Maldonado on several occasions, and he truly is committed to capturing the diversity of life in the Calumet Region. His works have helped beautify numerous neighborhoods, including Miller and his home town of East Chicago.  His current effort, commissioned by the East Chicago Parks Department for its greenhouse, is a beautiful depiction of the wonders of nature.

Elsewhere

"The mechanism of human destiny – that intricate weave of chance and fate and free will, as distinctly individual as a fingerprint - is surely meant to remain life’s central mystery, to resist transparency, to make blame a dangerous and unsatisfactory exercise.” Richard Russo, “Elsewhere”

“Elsewhere” is a memoir about the relationship between favorite author Richard Russo and his mother, Jean, who sought to escape the upstate mill town of Gloversville and lived either with him or nearby her entire life.  By turns hilarious and sad, the book contains events and personality traits similar doings and characters found in Russo’s novels.  Taking away his mother’s huge pill supply while she was in the hospital, Russo felt “like the parent who’d disposed of the weed he discovered in the back of his kid’s closet.” After his mother dies and her ashes are scattered at sea, Russo belatedly realizes that she exhibited the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and that he was not so different from her as he once imagined.  Fortunately, Russo’s adult compulsion – fiction writing - enabled him to make a comfortable living.

Russo wrote that, unlike many university-trained novelists, he valued plot, paid attention to pacing, and had little tolerance for literary pretention. His literary references- to Kafkaesque nightmares, Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic, Jim Thompson’s crime fiction characters helpless in the grip of relentless forces, Melville’s Bartleby saying, “I prefer not to” – are easily grasped. And, finally, as per Thomas Wolfe’s acknowledgement, Russo realized that he couldn’t go home again, not even for Jean’s family memorial service.  He described his final sighting of the house on Helwig Street where he grew up:

    The hazardously sloping back porches, up and down, had been amputated, and nobody had even bothered to paint over the scars. The back door I was in and out of a hundred times a day as a boy now opened into thin air, a four-foot drop to a rectangle of hard brown earth that the house’s new owner couldn’t be bothered to seed.  After that, I no longer had the heart, or maybe the stomach, to bear witness, so strong was my sense of personal failure.

I enjoyed returning to my home town of Fort Washington every five years or so, when best friend Terry Jenkins and I would retrace neighborhood haunts. For many years our old homesteads were in decline.  In my case a German couple whom I expected would be model owners took more interest in building a second home in the Poconos.  Once, Terry talked them into letting us inside; the rooms seemed smaller and shabby, and I spotted a photo of some relative, surely, in a Nazi uniform.  On our last tour new owners had spruced up the lawn and garden, painted the side fence and garage, and left the magnolia and Japanese trees in their full splendor.  The Jenkins estate now had two houses on it, but we copped an invitation to come inside the 150-year-old original (at least as far as the first floor) and were impressed with the new décor with several doors removed and the screened-in porch now the main family room. Terry recalled that his old man had arranged for one screen door to face out and the other in so their collie, Taffy, could exit and enter at her pleasure.

Many former Gary residents share Russo’s reluctance to visit the neighborhoods of their youth, at some point having become determined to live elsewhere.  That was not the case with former Catholic priest and longtime Gary teacher John Sheehan, who nonetheless wrote a volume of poems titled “Elsewhere, Indiana” (1990).  The title poem goes:

Gary
a tenuous misshapen T

gerrymandered for planners

who live elsewhere

your streets torn up by heavy trucks

that make money for peopl

who live elsewhere

your “urban renewal”

twenty years old

only just begun

high-paid planners

mostly gone elsewhere

profits gone elsewhere

ain’t nobody here to say

enough money where their mouth is

how you can really be

a good place to live

for those who can’t very easily

go no elsewhere

         except maybe somewhere even worse

than this here where


like high-rise Chicago
one thing Gary
your kids growing up
if they can dodge bullets
that enrich profiteers
elsewhere
can look out their windows
and walk out their doors
to somewhere

Gary, Indiana
where
in spite of mammoth trucks
bisecting tri-state expressway
and abandoned buildings
they can see trees and squirrels and birds
and every manner of God-given beauty
in the trash-lined dunes and swamplands
 
but they can’t see the lake
unless they get out to Miller
and it’s hard to find the river too. 

Ray Smock responded: “Gary's story is the story of American exploitation and capitalist greed.  Far too many places in this country are just like Elsewhere, Indiana. The whole damn country is Elsewhere."

Muralist Felix “Flex” Maldonado described a labor of love in honor of the Region first responders that now exists in Gary’s Miller beach neighborhood:

    10 days.. 10 days of scorching sun, sweating so profusely it burned eyes while i painted, sweaty masks, ankle breaking rocks, rain storms disrupting my flow, mosquitos biting so bad i couldn’t stand it.... but i carried on because, knowing all this, i knew i would finish one day.... but not for these individuals who CHOOSE to struggle through worse conditions EVERYDAY.. This mural is a tribute to ALL first responders who put their lives on the line so we can try and live a little better life- my “heroes”, as I like to call them... i dedicate this one to you.

    Thank you Pat and Karen Lee, of Lee Companies for allowing me to bring this long awaited vision to life. you have made the community and this world a better place...

    if you see a first responder, tell em “FLEX” said “thank you”.. @ Miller Beach Indiana

Kidding

“Please don’t use a bad word when you can use a good word,” Jeff Pickles (Jim Carrey) in “Kidding”

The Showtimeseries “Kidding” was a tour de force for versatile actor Jim Carrey, who plays Jeff Piccirillo, host of a children’s TV show, “Mr. Pickles’ Puppet Time,” modeled after “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”  In the course of ten episodes Jeff struggles to keep his sanity as a son dies in a car accident, his wife leaves him, and a second son starts smoking pot and displaying dangerously aggressive behavior.  When he tapes an episode about loved ones passing away, his father Seb, the show’s producer (a marvelous Frank Langella) refuses to air it because it might upset his young audience. One of the show’s fans is a killer on death row whose execution Jeff attends; the lethal injection enters the condemned man’s arm in the center of his tattoo, a fly modeled after a puppet on the show.  Later, when Jeff destroys his father’s office, we see that he now has the same tattoo on his arm.  I’ve re-watched every episode of “Kidding” and find subtleties I missed the first time, like all the witnesses to the execution having red hair like the victims. Voxreviewer Karen Han summed up the series perfectly when she called Carrey a marvel and “Kidding” “wonderful, terrifying, and heartbreaking at the same time.”  Mr. Pickles’ final advice to parents before his show went off the air: listen to your children.

 above, Ish Muhammad; below, Felix "Flex" Maldonado, Times photo by Joseph Pete

Toni and I attended John Cain’s 25th annual Holiday Reading, Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” at South Shore Arts in Munster.  Beforehand, we enjoyed the gallery exhibit “Windy Indy,” curated by self-taught artist Ish Muhammad and featuring several pieces by graffiti artist Felix Maldonado.  Donna Catelano, my book club companion and South Shore special projects director, greeted me. The second part of the Urban Legendsseries, “Haunts,” will open in February and highlight guerrilla explorers of such Gary architectural ruins as City Methodist Church, Union Station, Horace Mann School, and the Palace Theater.  Since I wrote the catalogue essay, Cain provided free tickets and wants me to return for a February talk and gallery tour that is part of the Art in Focus series.  I chatted with friends from IUN and Miller, including Al Renslow and Judy Ayers.  I told Nick Mantis, who is producing a documentary on Region bard Jean Shepherd, I was looking forward to his February Art in Focus lecture titled “The Making of Shep: A Filmmaker’s Progress.” 

below, Jim West and John Cain

Buddy and Sook

Cain told Post-Trib feature writer Philip Potempa: “I never met or saw Truman Capote in person. However, one of my prized keepsakes came when I was 30 years old and I purchased a used copy of ‘A Christmas Memory’ from a book store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The book not only turned out be a first edition, it was also signed by Capote, making it extra special.”Potempa summarized “A Christmas Memory” in this manner:

  Originally published as a feature article in Mademoisellemagazine in December 1956, “A Christmas Memory” captures the folksy atmosphere of Capote’s youth with the aroma of pecan pies and the flickering of candles in the windows of homes back in December of a 1930s Alabama. It follows the dreams of a young boy named Buddy (the name Capote used as a youth) and his friendship with his eccentric relatives, including his much older cousin and best friend, "Sook."  Capote lived with “a spinster aunt,” and one of his favorite traditions was helping mail fruitcakes [he helped Soot make] to everyone from actress Jean Harlow to President Franklin Roosevelt, as a means to feel a connection to the famous names of the day.

One humorous highlight is when Buddy accompanies Sook to a menacing bootlegger’s den in order to buy a bottle of whiskey for the fruitcakes. After finishing their labors, the cousin pours the remaining liquor into two glasses and they celebrate, much to the chagrin of uptight relatives.  At Christmas Soot imagines Mrs. Roosevelt serving their fruitcake at the White House.  Shortly after that holiday, Capote’s family sent him off to a military academy, but over the years he continued to receive fruitcakes from his beloved childhood companion.

I moved into a first-place tie in Fantasy Football by defeating nephew Garrett Okomski on the strength of 26 points from Eagles tight end Zach Ertz.  Needing a substitute kicker with mine on a bye week, I lucked out with former Bear Robbie Gould, who kicked 3 field goals for San Francisco, including one over 50 yards, on a weekend when Bears kicker Cody Parkey missed 2 3-pointers and 2 extra points.

The granddaughter of Elbert H. Gary’s brother visited the Archives in search of information about Bishop Herman Alerding, who founded a Gary settlement house for foreign-born Catholics that bore his name.  In 1920 Alerding wrote to U.S. Steel Board Chairman Elbert Gary appealing for money, using this rationale: “A Catholic settlement house would result in more and more amicable relations between employer and employee.  Americanization would be a good investment, an insurance not only against atheism, but against communism.”Judge Gary responded by donating $100,000.

On Jeopardy none of the high school contestants knew the sport African-American heavyweight champ Jack excelled in.  Incorrect answers included baseball and golf.  On the other hand, unlike me they knew all the Bodies of Water answers, but only one in three recognized that it was Betsy Ross ousted by the Quakers when she married an Episcopal upholsterer and subsequently took over his business after his death.

 Sara Teasdale

Post-Trib columnist Philip Potempa was judged a poetry recital at La Lumiere school in LaPorte. Winner Lauren Jordanich chose “Let It be Forgotten,” a 1924 poem by rebel and suicide victim Sara Teasdale:

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,

Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,

Let it be forgotten for ever and ever,

Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

If anyone asks, say it was forgotten

Long and long ago,

As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall

In a long forgotten snow.

Another student recited “The Days Gone By” by Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley. Its final verse goes: 

O the days gone by! O the days gone by! 

The music of the laughing lip, the luster of the eye; 

The childish faith in fairies, and Aladdin’s magic ring— 

The simple, soul-reposing, glad belief in everything,— 

When life was like a story, holding neither sob nor sigh, 

In the golden olden glory of the days gone by.

 James Whitcomb Riley

In “The Winter of Trump’s Discontent,” Ray Smock wrote about the President’s latest display of embarrassing behavior:

  The president went to Paris to join other world leaders in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. Unfortunately, he could not muster enough energy to go to an American cemetery where more than 6,000 American soldiers, mostly Marines, are buried in sweeping semi-circles of white crosses interspersed with rose bushes. These honored dead were the casualties of the Battle of Belleau Wood about 50 miles from Paris during the month of June 1918. President Trump blamed his absence on the rainy weather. Somehow other world leaders got there just fine. Later he blamed his protocol people for not telling him that a no-show was bad for his image. When he returned to the United States, this same president who castigates the patriotism of NFL players who kneel during the playing of the National Anthem in protest of civil rights violations could not muster the strength to visit Arlington Cemetery, just 2.1 miles from the White House, on Veteran’s Day. Clearly, the president is distracted by other things right now. 

From Martinsburg, West Virginia, Ray Smock attached this caption to a photo: “It’s elementary Watson! The suspect walked down the driveway, picked up the Washington Post, went to the mailbox, back-tracked to the garbage can, and wheeled it back to the house.”

Wildfires are out of control in California and a nor’easter has blanketed the East Coast. Back home in Chesterton, I shoveled two inches of wet snow (heart attack snow, Toni calls it) from the sidewalk and drove to IUN in preparation for a big day Friday.  In the morning I’ll interview 89-year-old jazz horn player Art Hoyle, who moved to Gary at age 13 with his mother and lived with an uncle, a pediatrician who insisted on discussing books Art was reading by the likes of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens at the dinner table.  At Gary Roosevelt Art came under the tutelage of music teacher Ernest Bennett and played in a jazz band that performed at school dances. His future wife attended Froebel and was part of a greeting committee that met Frank Sinatra prior to his performance at a Tolerance concert during the Froebel school strike.  At age 19, prior to joining the air force, Hoyle played in Thomas Crump’s orchestra in Calumet City and learned how properly to back up vocalists.  During a 70-year career that included stints with bands led by Sun Ra and Lionel Hampton and gigs in Europe and at Chicago’s best venues, Hoyle is still going strong. In 2010 he told Chicago Jazz Magazine: “I’m still working enough to keep the flies off.” 

 Alessandro Portelli

Preparing for the Art Hoyle interview, I re-read Sandro Portelli’s Oral History Review essay “Living Voices: The Oral History Interview as Dialogue and Experience.” Portelli wrote: “Our task is not only to extract information, but to open up narrative spaces.”  He argues that an interview is an exchange of gazes -  a co-created moment in a relationship between the past and the time of the telling.  Portelli recalled interviewing Kentucky civil rights activist Julia Cowans in 1983, who began by saying that she didn’t trust him because he was white and then spent many hours explaining why that was so.  Here is Portelli’s final paragraph:

  “Never trust a white school teacher,”says Baby Suggs, a character in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. So here I am, a white schoolteacher who learned the meaning of oral history because a black woman did not trust me, and because she trusted me enough to tell me why. 

 Ish Muhammad collage

In the evening I’ll attend an artists’ reception at South Shores Arts gallery for the exhibit “Indy Windy: A Love Story” and hope to give free copies of “Gary: A Pictorial History” to Ish Muhammad, who curated the show, and other Region artists who are in the book and the exhibit.  Beforehand, I’ll pay tribute to retiring colleague Chuck Gallmeier at an afternoon gathering of IUN faculty.  This is what I plan to say:

  The first time I recall conversing with Chuck was at a 2-day retreat Chancellor Peggy Elliott arranged at Avalon Manor in Chesterton.  I hadn’t known what to make of this tall, handsome, long-haired ladies man.  From our very first conversation I realized this was someone I wanted to know better. At lunch on the final day of the retreat, after a rather tedious morning, faculty and administrators dined in two adjacent rooms.  Chuck and I opted for the one without the bigwigs.  A waitress came to take drink orders; most folks ordered coke, sprite or lemonade.  Chuck and I opted for something stronger; immediately almost everyone else switched to beer, wine or a cocktail.  Five or 10 minutes later, a waiter entered carrying a tray of soft drinks.  “That must be for the other room,”Gallmeier said deadpan, drawing hearty laughs all around the table.  

  During the next quarter-century Chuck established himself not only as IUN’s most popular teacher but as one of the very best, right up there with Sociologist Bob Lovely, my former colleague Jerry Pierce, and English profs George Bodmer and Anne Balay.  When I talk with alumni about memorable professors, these names come up most frequently. 

  Chuck was much in demand to teach Swing Shift courses to steelworkers. Labor Studies staff member Mike Olszanski taped classes for those unable to attend.  Oz confided to me that Gallmeier normally let it all hang out and frequently used salty language; but one evening he noticed that Chuck had really toned things down.  During the break he realized why – a student had brought her 8-year-old daughter. That’s typical of his concern for students.

  Chuck once asked me to take over his class because of university obligations in Bloomington.  Beforehand, I watched him in action and found the experience scintillating.  When my turn came, a fair share of students had read the assignment -  about the Central Park 5 case - and were both eager to hear what I had to say on the subject and prepared to engage meaningfully with each other.  Chuck had primed them to assume an active role in the learning experience but to stay within the boundaries of mutual respect. 

  As a longtime chair of the Faculty Organization Gallmeier was a worthy successor to such distinguished predecessors as “Founding Fathers” Jack Buehner and Bill Neil, soft-spoken Fred Chary and John Ban, union activists Lew Ciminillo and Esther Nicksic, erudite Bill Reilly, curmudgeons George Roberts and George Bodmer, no-nonsense IUN grad Linda Rooda, and diplomat Mary Russell. I can think of nobody who has devoted more time and energy than Chuck in providing necessary faculty input to administrators.  He and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye on university matters – he was more the pragmatist while I was more outspoken in criticizing questionable actions of our “Old Boys” network.  While faculty can often be petty about holding grudges, Chuck never, ever let university matters ruin our friendship.

   Several years ago, Bill Neil, IUN’s first elected Faculty Org chair, who hired me, spoke to this body about a recently deceased colleague, George Thoma, I think, or perhaps Herman Feldman.  Bill confessed that what he most missed about the university was the collegiality.  So do many of us, and that is one reason why I suspect that we will continue to see my good friend around campus for many years to come.  Let’s hope so. I can’t imagine IUN without him.

Mad Dog

“The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”

Camp, according to Susan Sontag is a sensibility of reducing that which others take seriously to frivolity.  Examples include John Waters’ “Hair Spray,”  RuPaul’s “Drag Race,” and the science fiction spoof “Dr. Who.”  The purest forms of Camp take themselves seriously.  Thus TV shows such as the 1960s “Batman” series that intentionally strive to be funny are “campy” but not true Camp, according to Sontag’s standards. Mad Dog is a Marvel Comics super-villain and also the nickname of Jack Martin of the Deadly Dozen and evil Joe Fasinera, who appeared in a 1981 “Moon Knight” Marvel comic series episode. 

“Mad Dog” has been used both literally and in a campy context as the nickname for gangsters, rock stars (such as Joe Cocker, whose 1970 “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tour was his path to fame)  and many pro wrestlers, rugby players, and other athletes. One of my favorites, Greg Maddux, pitched for the Cubs both at the beginning and near the end of a long career. Also known as the Professor, Maddux won four straight Cy Young awards and, according to legend, once deliberately yielded a home run to Astro slugger Jeff Bagwell so that when they faced each other in the upcoming playoffs, Bagwell would be looking for the same pitch but never see it.

The HBO series “Camping” straddles a thin line between Camp and campy.  Created by Lena Durham and starring Jennifer Garner and David Tennant as Kathryn and Walt Jodell, the premise is that four couples (plus a teenager) go camping to celebrate Walt’s 45th birthday.  Kathryn is an over-the-top control freak who won’t have sex with Walt but, when he is horny, offers to use her hand (he refuses). Kathryn’s carefully scripted arrangements go awry when free spirit Jandice (Juliette Lewis) shows up, the new girlfriend of one of Walt’s pals.  Another character is a recovering alcoholic who gets drunk and calls an African-American camper “Little Chocolate,” causing her husband to rush to her defense only to have his mate berate him for his trouble.  

Phrases.org describes “mad dog syndrome”as the capacity for unpredictable, dangerous actions, sometimes applied pejoratively for leaders like Saddam Hussein or admiringly for leaders like Civil War general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.  Phrases.org mentions the usage of “mad dogging” as a strategy of feigning outrageous or crazed behavior in order to stick a restaurant with the bill, something Toni and I once witnessed, a sorry spectacle indeed. Urban dictionary defines mad dogging as staring in an intimidating manner to convey disdain and a warning that fisticuffs are likely to ensue. “Mad Dog” is sometimes used ironically as a nickname for gentle folk.

Trump’s Secretary of War James Mattis, whose nickname “Mad Dog” emanated from the marine general’s exploits in Iran and Afghanistan, appears to be on the outs with his commander in chief. Mattis opposed the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, protested budget cuts that hindered his department’s ability to monitor climate change, and favors a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Once thought to be, along with Chief of Staff John Kelly, one of the few “adults in the White House” minding the store, Mattis allegedly once said that the President had the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader. Recently, Trump seems bent on insulting African-American women, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, Representative Maxine Waters (whom he’s labeled “Crazy Maxine” and “Low-IQ Maxine”), and several distinguished reporters, including Abby Phillip, April Ryan, and Yamiche Alcindor, who asked him perfectly legitimate questions.  He’s a disgrace.

R.I.P.: Billy Leo “Mad Dog” Madison, 71, born in Evarts, Kentucky, millwright at U.S. Steel for 41 years, married for 59 years to Virginia (nee Mann), great-grandfather to Lara and Emerson, and “Best Buddy,” according to his obit to brother-in-law Al Piunti.  On the Rees Funeral Home Guest Book Marshall Gjebre wrote: “I loved that man like a father. He was a gift to the world and will surely be missed.”

The Engineers won two games but lost series to Dorothy’s Darlings, named for octogenarian Dorothy Peterson, absent due to an outing with, to quote teammate Gene Clifford, her “church ladies.” I rolled a mediocre 430 but did pick up 3 splits, including a 3-6-7 and a 5-6-10.  More important, on a strike and facing a 6-7-10 split in the tenth frame of the one close game, I picked up the 6- and 7-pins for four points, exactly our margin of victory.  Opponent Ed Fox rolled a 686, the highest series all season.

In “‘I’m Not Gonna Die in This Damn Place’: Manliness, Identity, and Survival of American Vietnam Prisoners of War” (2018) Juan Coronado described the rise of Chicano militancy during the 1960s at a time when they were negotiating their American identity that also influenced who they were:

  Chicanos rallied behind an array of concerns ranging from addressing social inequality, along with police brutality, to supporting los pintos(Chicanos in Prison), to backing the struggles of farmworkers, to promoting cultural reaffirmation.  Chicanos were also adamant in endorsing their Mexican cultural and indigenous roots, which to a certain extent had faded due to forces and voluntary acculturation.  Cultural plurality became a key component as Chicanos embraced their heritage along with their identity as “Brown people” or “people of color.”  Chicanos took their pride to the streets during protest marches carrying signs that read “Brown Is Beautiful” and “Brown and Proud.”

In a chapter titled “The Manly Ideals of Machismo, Duty, and Patriotism,” Coronado writes that in captivity Latino POWs had their manliness tested in terms of how much torture they could endure.  On the other hand, by the late 1960s, many had begun to question the legitimacy of the cause they supposedly had been fighting for.

At the Gary Public Library doing research looking at back issues of the Gary American, a black weekly, on heavyweight champ Joe Louis’ participation in Par-Makers golf tournaments, I checked out Felix Maldonado’s mural depicting the history of Gary.  The Gary Crusaderphotographed visits by two Steel City natives depicted by Maldonado, “Peanut Man” Joe Mays and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.  For a half-century Mays hawked his wares on the corner of Twenty-First and Grant.  An adept juggler, he once toured with the Harlem Globetrotters and appeared several times of “Bozo’s Circus.”  One person I was unfamiliar with was builder Marcello Gerometta, whose structures included the Hotel Gary, the Palace Theatre, Holy Angels cathedral, and homes for 280 National Tube Works employees and their families. 

At the Hagelbergs for bridge Saturday, Brian Barnes mentioned receiving a letter from his 70-year-old brother in Bangladesh, who evidently was quite a hell-raiser in his youth but then joined the Roman Catholic Maryknoll Order of lay missioners. Known as the “Marines of the Catholic Church,” they move into impoverished areas and live side-by-side with indigenous people, not proselytizing but ministering to practical needs.   Brian’s brother travels by bicycle to remote villages and tries to help folks with no access otherwise to medical care.  He told Brian about asking an old paralyzed Muslim man who was dying if he could bring him a radio so he could listen to music.  The man shook his head no but whispered that he could do him one favor, bless him.

Cheryl Hagelberg told me that son Corey’s show at Lubeznik Center for the Arts in Michigan City was very successful except he had a severe allergy attack afterwards at the home of someone who owned a long-haired cat and was hospitalized for two days.  She also gave me an issue of Ball Bearings magazine that featured a write-up by Katie Savage who compared his work to social realists Ben Shahm and Philip Evergood. She wrote: 

  One of Corey’s woodcut prints, The Hoosier Slide, depicts a famous 200-foot sand dune that once sat in Michigan City, Indiana. Over a 30-year period beginning in the 1890s, the dune was dismantled and its sand hauled as far away as Mexico. In Muncie, the Ball Brothers used some of this sand to make their iconic blue-green canning jar. The logging of trees and removal of sand in the area destroyed a diverse habitat. More than 13 million tons of sand were taken from the Hoosier Slide until it was no more. Afterward, a coal-fired energy plant was built on the site and has been in operation for decades. Corey’s woodcut print depicts the sand dune and the ecosystem that once thrived there. The image includes a zigzag path, showing carts hauling the sand away.

A memorial service for Naomi Millender took place at Gary Genesis Center.  This eulogy appeared on Valparaiso University’s Welcome Center site:

  Today we mourn the loss and celebrate the life of Naomi Millender, our friend and collaborator. Naomi was an important person for the growth of our Flight Paths initiative – always connecting us to good people to interview and keeping us in the loop about important city events and historical preservation efforts. She was a Renaissance person - a musician, writer, educator, and advocate. She ran a summer camp that kept kids engaged with learning and creativity. Three years ago when her mother, Dolly, passed, she took on the work of preserving the rich history of Gary. Always generous with her time and wisdom, this photo of Naomi is from when she hosted Allison Schuette’s “Who's My Neighbor?” class at St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church in Gary.  We will miss you, Naomi. Thank you for all the good you brought into the world.

At Gino’s I ordered a draft beer at the bar, and the manger brought me a large plate of delicious plate of angel hair pasta.  When a woman nearby turned down the bar food, claiming she needed to get home and cook dinner for her children, he went to the kitchen and returned with a a container filled, I’m certain, with enough to feed her entire family. Book club member Keith Anderson spoke on “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War and Seeded Civil Rights” by David S. Reynolds.  The author insisted Brown was not insane, as many detractors have alleged, and compared him to Old Testament prophets and seventeenth-century English Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell.  Like Ulysses S. Grant, who finished that Brown started, he had failed in almost every economic endeavor he’d tried.  Reynolds pronounced the raid on Harper’s Ferry to be a “doomed, heroic effort”and explained the slaughter of five Missouri “Border Ruffians” with broadswords at Pottawatomie Creek as understandable retribution for acts of terrorism committed against anti-slavery “Free-Staters” Kansas.  Brown’s only role in the actual massacre itself was to administer the coup de graceto a victim dying of grievous wounds.

During discussion of whether slavery would have eventually been abolished had there not been a Civil War, I brought up Maryland professor George Calcott’s thesis that the spread of democracy in the antebellum South hastened secession.  Patrician plantation owners tended to be loyal to the Union while the firebrands, for the most part, were young “man on the make” who dreamed of an expanding slave empire that extended in Cuba and Central America. As I was saying my good byes, former Emerson grad and attorney Paul Giorgi introduced me to a friend as a Gary historian who had written about his grandfather, Dr. Antonio Giorgi, having founded a medical clinic that treated African Americans and poor people, often free of charge, at a time when blacks were prohibited from using the facilities of Methodist or Mercy hospital.