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 “Baby baby baby, what's wrong with Uncle Sam?

He's cut down on my sugar, now he's messin' with my ham
I got the ration blues, blue as I can be
Oh me, I've got those ration blues”

         Ration Blues,” Louis Jordan

In Nicole Anslover’s World War II class I passed out copies of Steel Shavings, volume 46 in preparation for my appearance next week to discuss the Gary Homefront. I pointed out short sections for them to read beforehand on Pearl Harbor memories, civil rights activist L.K. Jackson, and Gary in 1942 as portrayed in Kendall Svengalis’ novel “The Great Emerson Art Heist.”  The Pearl Harbor section makes mention of Vic and Midge, 25 on Pearl Harbor Day, and awaiting my birth some two months later.  A fourth selection by IUN student Jessica Nieman about farm girl Jean Schultz Ellis demonstrated that much of Lake and Porter County was rural in those days.  Nieman wrote:

 The youngest of six, Jean gathered eggs, fed the chickens, and brought in the cows.  When Jean was 14, she had her eyebrows done for school picture day, and they swelled up.  “My mom was pissed,” she recalled.  Jean was first in her family to graduate high school.   She said, “At 16 you could stop going.  My older sister would buy me clothes to keep me in school. She wanted me to succeed.”  She was one of 28 graduates in Chesterton’s class of 1943.  Jean had started waitressing at Edward’s Barbecue when just 14.   She learned to drive in her mother’s 1934 Ford.   A Chesterton movie theater had midweek dime shows, which made for an affordable evening out. Jean also loved roller-skating.

above, Jean Shultz at 14; below, Jessica Nieman with "Pally" and Jean

Next I read several passages to demonstrate the city’s wartime blue collar nature and being home to dozens of ethnic groups, as well as Southern white and black newcomers needed in the mills and defense plants.  First I recited Robert Buzecky’s “Steel City, Stone City,” which begins: 

Buzecky, Militich, Rodriguez, Kowalak,

Thousands of Somebodies

From all over the planet.

Names make them different

Blue shirts and steel made them family.

I read brief excerpts from student articles by Lori Van Gorp (about Florence Medellin living in the heart of Gary’s red-light district) and Kristin MacPherson, who learned about her Italian grandparents Wilbur and Margaret from her father Donald Rettig.  Wilbur worked at a title company, drove a taxi, and kept the books for a bowling league.  Margaret worked part-time in the bowling alley kitchen and was famous for a cinnamon streusel coffee cake.  Donald told Kristin:

    My mom loved Dean Martin and Perry Como. The aroma of food was always in the air, with a pot of spaghetti sauce or soup on the stove. Noodles might be drying over chairs or homemade ravioli scattered over the dining room table. I will never forget my mom wringing a chicken’s neck and nailing it to the garage to clean it.  We had the biggest garden in the neighborhood. Everyone helped.  Mom canned tomatoes, beans, and beets and made pickles, jellies, and jams.  At Easter there’d be a lamb cake, and at Christmas containers of cookies were on each step going upstairs. No one ever left hungry.  

    My mother’s sisters would come over to play cards.  They’d speak Italian and laugh for hours.  We’d sneak under the big dining room table in hopes they’d drop some coins.  After bedtime we’d peek through the floor grate and watch them.

 Wilbur, Margaret and Don Rettig

Since Vee-Jay Records co-founder Vivian Carter was on the cover, I explained that during the war she joined the Quartermaster Corps and was stationed in Washington. D.C., broadening her horizons and discovering  musicians that she later recorded.  I explained that many black performers in the 1940s had crossover hits and were popular with white audiences, not only jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington but vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole (my father’s favorite) and harmony groups such the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots that influenced Gary’s own Spaniels, pictured on the back cover. Up-tempo band leaders such as Cab Calloway (who appears in the 1980 “Blues Brothers” film performing “Minnie the Moocher”) and Louis Jordan belted out “jump” music that presaged rock and roll. I had Nicole play YouTube excerpts from “If I Didn’t Care” by the Ink Spots and “Caldonia” by Louis Jordon and the Tympany Five.  The latter begins:

Walkin’ with my baby she's got great big feet
She’s long, lean, and lanky and ain’t had nothing to eat
She’s my baby and I love her just the same
Crazy ’bout that woman cause Caldonia is her name

Next week, I’ll play “Ration Blues” by Louis Jordan, which contains this verse:

They reduced my meat and sugar
And rubber's disappearing fast
You can't ride no more with poppa
'Cause Uncle Sam wants my gas

Speaking about the war in the Pacific, Nicole brought up the army’s use of Navaho code talkers (above) to communicate in the field, since almost nobody outside the tribe could speak their unique language.   The Japanese could never crack it.  After class a student named Heather had the magazine open to a page containing a photo of M to F transgender Dakota Yorke, a 2016 Portage High School homecoming queen finalist.  “Dakota’s my best friend,”Heather exclaimed, and showed me that she had sent a photo of the page to Dakota, who texted back that she was really excited and anxious to read what I’d written.

above, Dakota; below, woodcut by Corey Hagelberg

At bridge Dick and Cheryl had noticed a photo of son Corey’s woodcut “We All Share the Same Roots” in the new edition of “Gary: A Pictorial History” and inquired about obtaining it.  I offered to trade one for an out-of-print copy of the “Tales of Lake Michigan and the Northwest Indiana Dunelands” Steel Shavings (volume 28, 1998), which they produced three days later.  It contains an interview with a former bowling acquaintance whom I nicknamed “Slick Tom” where he talked about picking up girls along the Lake Michigan shoreline in his cabin cruiser.  The steelworker bragged:

 In the summer I’d trade with everybody to get on straight midnights so I could cruise the beach to see who I could pick up.  A good spot was Lake Street.  Usually I’d take a friend.  By 11 or 12 o’clock, girls would be out sunbathing.  You might pick up one, two, three or four girls.  It was easy.  You just looked to see who was waving their arms.  When a girl starts flagging down a boat, it usually sends a signal that they are ready to party.  You pulled in, and if they weren’t good-looking, you pulled back away.

 Once my cousin and I picked up two pretty-looking girls.  We thought they were in their mid-20s.  We zoomed out about a mile and a half and started drinking some wine.  We were getting out of our bathing suits when I asked one girl how old she was.  I found out the two girls were 14 and 15 years old.  Needless to say, we got them dressed very quickly and rushed them back to shore.

 If we saw a good-looking girl who didn’t wave, we’d get out the inner tube and tie it to the back of the boat. I’d get on it.  Then my buddy would race in close towards shore and spin the boat and make the tube go right into the beach.  I’d stumble up on shore and say, “Hey, my name’s Tom.  We need three people to water ski.  Would you like a boat ride and be an observer?”  That worked like a champ.  Initially, they might say no, they were engaged or married.  Once they were on the boat for a few hours, after some persuasion and some drink, the changes in their demeanor were amazing.

“Tales of Lake Michigan” also contains my interview with Region Dunes artist David Sander (1923-1999), who told me:

 I was in the navy during World War II. After my discharge, I went back to the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill.  I met and married a classical language student, who was not familiar with the Dunes.  One day we drove to have a look at them.  It just happened that we parked next to a station wagon that had a Chesterton real estate address.  We asked the lady to show us some land.  The first place she showed us, we bought, a 40-acre tract in Beverly Shores at the end of a road that had a house, a barn, and a set of batteries because we were too far for city electricity.

 The former owner was an old Hungarian farmer.  He and his wife lived in a little milk house for several months after we purchased the land. She used to walk to Chesterton and try to sell articles they no longer needed, like a butter churn.  She’d be saying things in Hungarian, and people thought she was crazy.  Finally their son came and rescued them.

 I started painting again.  Lake Michigan became part of my nature.  Mostly I painted the Dunes.  Without people.  People-less dunes. I found the less I put into a painting, the more original it was.  After all, a painting is a rendering of a subject, not the subject itself.  The details are not the subject of a painting. The true artist creates something which is an amalgam, different and presumably greater than either him or his subject.

I vividly recall scores of dunes paintings scattered all over Sander’s home, seemingly discarded, and not having the nerve to ask him for one or two.  Not long afterwards, he was dead.

 Marcus Brown; photo by Beverly Brown

After winning the first game from 2 L’s and 2 R’s, the Engineers had only one strike in the entire second game and lost by 70 pins, as Marcus Brown bowled in the 240s,well above his average.  I had felt a twinge in my upper leg and briefly considered sitting out the finale.  Then, after a spare, split and missed 10-pin, I strung six strikes in a row and then converted a a spare, finishing with a 221, my highest score since I started at Hobart Lanes.  I got several fist bumps from bowlers nearby.  The Engineers picked up an amazing 17 strikes in that one game to win handily and garner 5 of 7 points.  I edged Joe Piunti, who won game one for us, for most pins over average by a mere 2 pins for the four-dollar pot.  Afterwards, I asked Dorothy Peterson and Gene Clifford how they liked “Shrek: The Musical” Sunday. They enjoyed it, but a woman near them with a young girl was complaining about hearing three curse words.  That was news to me.  They must have been pretty inoffensive.  Gene and Dorothy have tickets for “Million Dollar Quarter” at the Munster Theater.

Dorothy Peterson

Zion Williamson on ground

Nike stock fell more than 1% after Duke star Zion Williamson’s sneaker imploded 33 seconds into a game with North Carolina and he injured a knee.  Nike had signed a lucrative deal with the university that mandated players wear their brand even though they received nothing but free sneakers while Coach K’s annual salary rose to in the neighborhood of 10 million dollars. What a farce.

Wombats and Kangaroos

When wombats do inspire

I strike my disused lyre”

         Christina Georgina Rossetti

On IU Day in Moraine Student Union students were holding, petting, and cuddling various marsupials, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, including tortoises, salamanders, boa constrictors (including a rare albino specimen from Brazil), and even a wombat. Chancellor William Lowe was taking a photo of Communication instructor Ibrahim Yoldash cradling the wombat, so I told them that I’d seen a wombat in Australia.  In Sydney with Toni and 13 year-old granddaughter Miranda for an oral history conference, I convinced them to go on a day-long excursion to the Blue Mountains because the brochure promised a visit to a small petting zoo where tourists could feed kangaroos.  The schedule was running behind as a result of overlong shopping stops, and the bus driver announced that we’d be skipping the petting zoo.  When I protested, he agreed on a 15-minute stop.  Upon arrival, we rushed past the wombat and koala bears, so Miranda could interact with the kangaroos.

In his History class on the Sexual Revolution Jonathyne Briggs brought up the furor caused by a 1968 New York Times article about Linda LeClair, a student at Barnard College “shacking up” with boyfriend Peter Behr for convenience, security, and sex.  After alumni vociferously complained at this violation of the college’s housing policy, LeClair was pressured into dropping out of school.  Forty years later, Maggie Astor wrote in the Columbia Daily Spectator:

    The controversy was only one part of a larger debate over women’s changing role in society, and critics noted the double standard between housing policies at Barnard and Columbia.

  “Barnard students had to live at the dormitories, and there were some stringent curfews, and Columbia students could do whatever they wanted to,” LeClair said. “The media coverage made it into a story about sex ... but really what it was about was power and equality. There was a lot of unhappiness about the kind of patronizing attitude toward the college women that this represented.”

In Nicole Anslover’s History of the Media class students discussed a gaffe by New York City mayor Bill De Blasio.  At the Inner Circle Dinner, known for off-color routines, De Blasio, who is married to an African-American lesbian, made a tasteless remark after Hillary Clinton thanked him for his endorsement.  When she added, “Took you long enough,” he replied, “I was running on C.P. time” – slang for “colored people’s time.”  In the script he was supposed to add, “Cautious politician time” but forgot and Hillary had to say the line.

From Ray Smock: “Hillary's campaign is now a year old.  One year ago today I posted this picture of a ‘Ready for Hillary’ glass containing some Woodford Reserve Bourbon. I am still ‘Ready for Hillary,’ I still have the glass. And I await the day I can raise it again at her inauguration. Hell, why wait until then. Here's to you Hillary.”  Calling me the Samuel Pepys of the Calumet Region, Ray also sent this email:

  The latest issue of Steel Shavings arrived and it is another cornucopia of history, pop culture, the arts and numerous signs of our times presented with humor and wisdom. There probably isn’t anything like it on Planet Earth. In some distant time, an archeologist, either an earthling or some life form from another world, will study these volumes and reconstruct a complex portrait of humanity in the Calumet Region and beyond.  Will they understand it all? Hell no. I don’t understand all of it now.  But keep them coming dear friend.

Smock’s praise is one of the things that keeps me going with my blog and magazine.

 Bishop Donald Hying speaks against GEO Proposal; NWI Times photo by Jonathan Miano

After protestors gathered for a prayer vigil at City Hall and at a Gary Board of Zoning Appeals meeting railed against GEO’s plan for a for-profit detention center, the Board voted 3-1 to deny the nefarious company a zoning variance.  According to NWI Times reporter Edwin Bierschenk, Board member Jamelba Johnson told GEO representatives, “I don’t know how you even had the nerve to ever come back.”  Unfortunately the issue isn’t dead, as the Common Council can choose to ignore the Board’s recommendation.  Samuel A. Love posted: “Today I've been yelled at, mildly assaulted, etc., but that's all gone after many kind words of encouragement from a political hero.”

Chesterton Tribune ace reporter Kevin Nevers can make even the most pedestrian assignment compelling and educational.  In “No sidewalks on 100E makes walking perilous for Tamarack residents” he describes the plight of residents living in a small, unincorporated Porter County subdivision near town.  Nevers wrote:

  [They] have no good, which is to say safe, way of walking from their homes to the South Calumet Business District and the Downtown beyond.

  Or to Chesterton High School.

  Or, really, anywhere.

Sympathetic Chesterton Town Board member Lloyd Kittredge suggested a joint sidewalk project with county officials.  In the piece Nevers employed a word unfamiliar to me – debouch – which, I leaned, comes from the French prefix “de” (from) and “bouche” (mouth) and means to emerge from a narrow space into a wide, open area, as military troops on the march or a river debouching into the sea.

Speaking to Steve McShane’s class on the Calumet Region between 1945 and 1953, I brought up the Postwar juvenile delinquency scare.  Self-appointed custodians of morality decried the growing popularity of comic books; my parents thought they were a good way of getting me to read.  Tom Higgins wrote of being in a hot stick shift Dodge when Horace Mann classmate Joe Sullivan outran the police with him in the car.  Drag racing was popular, both on side roads and along Fifth Avenue, a main drag.  Teenagers cruised Gary’s “Red Light District” along Washington Street, where hookers flashed their wares and sometimes jumped into their convertibles.  One student read the reminiscences of Florence Medellin as told to Lori Van Gorp:

  In 1946 Florence Medellin was dressing one of her girls for tap dancing when she heard what she thought was a car backfiring.  It turned out to be someone gunning down racketeer Buddy Hutchins.  She saw him lying face down in the gutter and called police. They asked her all kinds of questions.  It turned out to be a mob execution.

  Florence was a cashier at Chicken House on 113 West 14th Avenue.  They’d put a knife to the poultry’s jugular vein and catch the blood for soup.  They sold several thousand a day.  Chickens were shipped in from all over Indiana.  People stole eggs from the delivery trucks.  The bold ones stole whole chickens.

  Although Florence lived near Gary’s “Red Light District” she’d leave the door unlocked.  She and her five children slept on the porch when it was too hot inside.  She’d send kids down to the pool hall on 14th and Washington for ice or pop.  Even though many neighbors were prostitutes, who’d display themselves in glass windows or doors, they’d make sure nothing happened to her children.  One black man named Louis delegated himself as her children’s special protector.  He’d sit on a bench and watch them as if he were their guardian.

On IUN campus for several events is Gary native Crystal Lynn O’Brien, motivational speaker and author of “Pretty, Raised Ugly.”  A single mother at 16 who survived sexual abuse, she has an undergraduate degree and MBA and has worked for IU in Human Relations.  Vice president of the Urban League Young Professionals of Northwest Indiana, Crystal Lynn started iRaise, whose philosophy is, “Love who you are and embrace where you’ve been.  It all works together in making you the person you were born to be.”

Kevin Murphy and Joann Pokkul taped my talk on steelworkers and have put it on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fem4EA-10c) under the title, “Calumet Revisited Dr James Lane 040516 1920 x 1080.”  So far I’ve gotten the nerve to watch the first five minutes.

From federal prison satellite camp in Terre Haute George Van Til wrote:

  Not feeling so good but DA says I’m OK to make it through to my out date here and be able to go to my doctors in July.  Just can’t accomplish much in a day with my extreme fatigue, stomach, asthma, etc., slowing me down, and the weather sucks in this river valley.  But, when people like you visit, it makes the days right before and after easier to deal with.  Fondly, G.VT

Anne Balay is part of a Yale forum on “Queer Labor.”  Fellow panelist Katherine Turk did research at the Calumet Regional Archives on African-American women war workers at Kingsbury Ordnance Plant in La Porte County.  I met Ms. Turk at a 2012 Indiana Historical Society awards dinner where she received the Thornbrough Prize for best scholarly article, edging out my piece on Gary football legend and actor (“Blazing Saddles,” “Webster”) Alex Karras. Panelist Miriam Frank wrote the pioneering study, “Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America” (2015).