Surprises

“Life is full of surprises, but never when you need one.” Bill Watterson

Bill Watterson, creator of the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” is known for a sardonic sense of humor.  He once said, “The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere is that it has never tried to contact us.”  He also stated: “Know what’s weird?  Day by day, nothing seems to change.  But pretty soon, everything’s different.”  In the movie “Life,” which Toni and I saw, the space station crew named the alien from Mars “Calvin.”

Indiana History student Kayla Norton (above) interviewed Diane Hamady, who on January 15, 1990, gave birth to a healthy baby boy named Casey 13 years after Casey’s sister Jill was born.  Diane said:

       Everyone was so thrilled, especially my husband Bill’s father, who always said, “You need to give Billy a little boy because he’s going to need someone to help him with the business.”  We couldn’t keep Bill’s dad away from the house, he was just so excited over Casey. He was always bringing Casey candy bars and junk food he shouldn’t have been eating at such a young age.  Then, late one night, Bill’s dad called saying he wanted to stop by to see Casey.  Well, Bill and I thought that was odd, but we told him to come on over.  When he arrived, he did not want to put Casey down; he just kept holding him and talking about all the things he was going to do in the future.  After he finally left, Bill and I both thought it was weird for his dad to stop by so late.  Well, the next day Bill father died from a brain aneurysm.  He was such a healthy, strong, outgoing, energetic man, you can only imagine what a shock we were all in.

One of Steve McShane’s students wrote about her father, a 1990 Griffith graduate, who, during his senior year, worked at Schoop’s Hamburgers in Highland:

        Schoop’s was a really busy and popular place. Most nights, there would literally be a line out the door. People wouldn’t mind waiting that long to get a table there. In the winter this older guy in his thirties got a job there.  Less than a month later, he was gone, and so was one of the cooks.  We came to find out that the old guy was an undercover cop, and the stoner cook had been selling cocaine. I had no idea what was going on until after the fact. Soon afterwards, I almost burned down Schoop’s.  Changing the grease in the fryer, I had drained it and started refilling it with new grease.  When it was a little over half filled, I turned it on to start warming it up, and then went to go get more grease. Well, nobody told me I couldn’t do that, and so when I came back it had caught on fire because the top of the heater was exposed. There was literally a fire in the kitchen, and we had to get the fire extinguisher to put it out, and then they had to take the equipment out. My manager let the owner know that I was never trained properly, so I wasn’t fired.

Ryan and Vicki

 

Alyssa Garvey interviewed her father Ryan, who was born December 30, 1977, and grew up in the Hessville neighborhood in Hammond. 

        My twin brother Rodney and I spent hours playing baseball, taking turns batting and pitching, using a tennis ball or a wiffle ball. We were allowed to run around the neighborhood pretty much untethered.  Most of the time we kept our noses clean, but sometimes we did stupid things.  I recall “bombing” cars - throwing snowballs or crab apples at passing vehicles.  One time a guy chased us, and my only recourse was to go inside my house.  The guy rolled down his window and let out a sinister laugh as I ran inside. I was terrified the next couple of days because the man knew where I lived.  Nothing ever happened though. 

        Seventh grade was the year I really started to be interested in girls. I enjoyed the newness of relationships: meeting someone, getting to know them, learning all about them, kissing them for the first time, holding hands in the hallway going from class to class, passing notes to each other, calling them on the phone, and spending hours talking about nothing.  Then after a bit we’d both get bored or meet someone else and go our separate ways.  Around this time, I’d go to “make out parties” - couples kissing for hours on end and barely coming up for air.  I didn’t go much further than that, but other people did.

In high school at Hammond Morton, Sarah became my first serious relationship. I’d get off from school and go over to her mom’s apartment.  We spent three years doing just that.  She was the first girl that I had sex with.  At the time, we had off-campus lunches, so one day instead of getting lunch, Sarah and I headed to a friend’s house and did it in his mom’s bedroom.  In the spring of my junior year, Sarah broke up with me. We just drifted apart and that was that.

At the end of junior year, I started going with Vicki.  In the summer of 1995, Vicki and I were hanging out at a friend’s “party house.”  Somehow, we ended up alone downstairs and had sex on a pool table.  About a month later, Vicki found out she was pregnant.  I was absolutely scared to death to tell my parents. Vicki had dreams of going away to college and studying medicine but decided to keep the baby.  When I started my senior year, I avoided Vicki a lot because I was still scared about everything.  And then there was no question; I started dating her for good.  Then we had our daughter, Alyssa, on March 29, 1966.  Vicki and I were able to go to our senior prom and graduated that June. That summer I got a job at the Lake County Surveyors Office.  At this point, Vicki and I kind of lived together, just not permanently; we both still had houses to go back to.  It was always acceptable to stay together because of our child.

In October 1998, our next child was born, Jacob. Vicki and I moved into our first apartment in Griffith.  We stayed here only shortly because the roof came down in one of the bedrooms and some creep broke in once only to steal Vicki’s underwear.  When my mother’s second house opened up, we took it.  

Isabel Tavaras interviewed her mother Shari, who in November of 1990 at age 25 married Isabel’s father:

John proposed to me in January and wanted to get married in 1990 so he could always easily calculate how long we had been married.  Every time that I went to a bridal salon, they told me ten months was too short of a timespan to get wedding dresses for me and my bridesmaids.  So, I went to a fabric store, fell in love with some lace, bought the necessary materials on the spot, and made my own dress. I had a lot of prior sewing experience. I also made the flower girl’s dress.

We got married at Prince of Peace Church in Merrillville, where I had been baptized as a baby.  John’s family was unhappy that it wasn’t a Catholic wedding and didn’t think that the marriage would last.  The reception was at Lake Hills in St. John. The windows looked out onto a golf course.  We liked it because we could leave the dinner tables, and go upstairs into a ballroom filled with pink and silver balloons. Dad’s friends from his Scottish pipe band came.  John’s parents brought a loud group from their Lithuanian church. I bought a wedding cake that was supposed to feed 250 people. The Lithuanian guests tried taking multiple pieces of wedding cake to go! My Aunt Helen kept insisting that they could only take one each!

Our honeymoon was on the Netherlands side of St. Maarten island. Upon arrival, we were at a strange place in the middle of the night, and some random guy in a jeep told us he was from the hotel. We were apprehensive, but he actually was a hotel employee sent to pick us up. Most of our week was spent by the ocean, or by the hotel’s pool.  We were pretty struck by how much poverty was on the island. It was a little scary and very sad. 

Shari went on to have three children during the 1990s. She and John lived in Hammond, then Chesterton, and finally Crown Point.  They went to the Dunes every summer to catch up with extended family and are still together.

Ray Smock’s friend Matthew Simek wrote:

  Not only are Republicans -- especially but not limited to the president -- showing themselves to be a particularly paranoid lot, claiming everything is a plot by Democrats, but at the same time they are the most conspiratorial bunch of politicians I've ever seen. Their well-documented plotting session at The Monacle restaurant in Washington, DC, on the very day that Barack Obama was being sworn in as president, was clear evidence that "winning" was their only goal, even to the point of shutting down the government and threatening the U.S. global credit rating, among other despicable acts. Their admitted plot to block anything and everything the Obama Democrats would do in the next four years, regardless of the impact on their fellow Americans, was reprehensible. While the Democrats have clearly had their moments of shame, they have done nothing as conspiratorial and deceptive as the Republicans have done in the past three months, and continue to do each and every day. In spite of Republicans' cries of "Foul!" America's future will depend on returning to a state of respect and cooperation in our legislative processes. I am convinced that we cannot count on the exclusionary Republican party to lead in that effort.

Former House of Representatives historian Smock replied:

It is a shame that the Republican plotting against Obama in 2009 occurred at my favorite restaurant, the Monocle. This restaurant on D Street just behind the Senate Office Buildings is a favorite watering hole and dining place for members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, lobbyists, congressional staff, and even House and Senate historians. The food is OK. The service is excellent. Some of the waiters have been there for decades. They know their customers. It has a great advantage of location, location, location.

 Ruth Westberg, front, middle

Barb Walczak’s latest bridge Newsletter noted that Ruth Westberg turned 90 and with partner Rosietta Brown finished first among east-west pairs at Community Bridge Club.  Barb added: “Think of our nonagenarians – maybe it’s bridge keeping them young.”

 Frank and Joan Shufran; photo by Jeff Manes

Post-Tribune columnist Jeff Manes interviewed bowling teammate Frank Shufran and wife Joan.  Surprised to get the request, Frank suspected (correctly) that I had something to do with it.   Here’s an excerpt of “Hobart couple find joy in rescue pets, quilting”:

      Frank: In 1950, at age 18, I came to Gary. My family is from Philipsburg, Pa. My father was a coal miner. I didn't want no part of that.

      Manes: So, you became a steelworker in Northwest Indiana.

      Frank: That's right, U.S. Steel. I started out as a spark tester. I operated a little machine with a wheel on it. By looking at those sparks, you can tell what's in the steel. All the materials like chrome or carbon have different sparks. I did that for four years.

      Joan: My father was his foreman.

      Manes: Good move, Frank.

      Frank: With two years' seniority, I was drafted into the Army.

      Joan: My mother said I couldn't marry Frank unless he went to college.

      Frank: When I got out of the service, I went to Valparaiso University.

      Manes: Good move, Frank.

      Frank: I worked in the mill during my summers while going to school. I ended up with an electrical engineer degree in 1959.

      Manes: The year the White Sox won the pennant. Also the year steelworkers went on strike for 116 days.

      Frank: I was still a bargaining unit employee at the time. No paycheck for nearly four months.

. . . .

      Manes: What kind of dog is Sugar?

      Frank: Jack Russell terrier, rat terrier and Chihuahua.

      Joan: Frank has walked five miles a day at six in the morning since 1991 — rain, sleet or snow.

      Frank: I also take Sugar for walks every day. We walk all over Hobart. Whichever way she wants to go, I follow her. Sugar's getting older now. Sometimes I have to carry her home.

French History scholar Jonathyne Briggs gave a talk at IUN’s Robin Hass Birky Women’s Center on theories of autism entitled “Smother Mothers.”  Until the 1980s many French child psychologists blamed overprotective parents for having autistic children.  The remedy, horrible as it sounds, was to institutionalize the offspring away from their destructive parents.  Ten years ago, Jenny McCarthy published “Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds,” a controversial book that claimed it was possible to cure autism and lauded the benefits of a gluten-free and dairy-free diet and chelation therapy. Critic Shannon Des Roches Rosa wrote:

Autism Warrior Parents (AWPs) insist on supporting their autistic kids either by trying to cure them, or by imposing non-autistic-oriented goals on them — rather than by trying to understand how their kids are wired, and how that wiring affects their life experience. Ironically, an AWP’s choices not only interfere with their own kid’s happiness and security, but contribute to social biases that prevent autistic people of all ages from getting the supports they need. Worst of all, by publicly rejecting their own children’s autism and agency, and by tending to hog the autism spotlight, AWPs are partially responsible for the public’s tendency to sympathize with parents rather than autistic kids.

        

Teddy Roosevelt set impossibly high standards for his progeny. In addition to his own brother, two committed suicide and Ted, Jr., didn’t feel worthy of his name until he led troops onto Utah Beach during D-Day and then succumbed to a heart attack peacefully in his sleep.  William J. Mann ends his impressive “The Wars of the Roosevelts” with a 1991 family reunion that included Franklin’s Hyde Park ancestors and the ancestors of Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt (Eleanor’s father) and his lover Katie Mann.  William Mann wrote:

There was a striking lack of pretension and formality.  Among the prominent names, there were also artists and writers and performers and musicians.  Nonconformists were evidently now welcome among the sprawling Roosevelt clan.  One grandson of Franklin and Eleanor’s dropped his pants to show off a new tattoo on his thigh.  [Once shunned] Elliott and Kermit and Jimmie and Sadie and Dirck would have felt right at home. It was a very different world.

Beloved and Abandoned

 For better or worse Gary’s my home

And I’d rather live in this left-over city

Than any suburb I know.”

         Gary Postscript 1989” John Sheehan

In preparation for a talk about my Gary research interests, I’ve decided to stress how poems, journals, and oral histories have enriched my attempts to capture the city’s social history.  For example, “City of the Century” (1978) cites over a hundred interviews I conducted, ranging from Johnny Kyle, Gary’ first sports star, to Mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher. “Gary’s First Hundred Years” (2006) contains poems by Carl Sandburg and John Sheehan, excerpts from the diaries of pioneer Albert Anchors and Red Scare political prisoner Katherine Hyndman, and journal entries by 2003 IUN students of mine. 

 Photos by Jim Sullivan

On his “Places That Were” site, photographer Jim Sullivan shared over a dozen shots of Horace Mann School, which opened in 1928 and closed in 2004, calling it a monument to the lost prosperity of Gary.  It was designed by famed architect William B. Ittner as a unit school with grades from kindergarten to 12 in accordance with Superintendent William A. Wirt’s work-study-play educational philosophy of learning through doing.  Sullivan wrote:

        I parked beside a crumbling brick apartment building in downtown Gary, Indiana. On a cold autumn morning, a few people were still asleep in nearby cars, a cruel irony in a city with so many abandoned homes. Across the street, a sprawling abandoned high school filled the horizon. Like the breathtaking ruins of City Methodist Church, which I had explored the previous evening, Horace Mann School was a casualty of Gary, Indiana's shrinking population.  Several middle-aged couples walked laps along the track that stretched the length of the building.

        The school was enormous, with a capacity of around two and a half thousand students. It originally consisted of three main structures that were eventually joined together. On the large plot of land in front of the school's main entrance, an existing ravine was transformed into a pond with several pedestrian bridges and a rock garden, giving it the appearance of a beautiful park. It was a popular location for picnics, fishing, and ice skating in the winter.

        The school was named after Horace Mann, one of the most important reformers of the public-school system. He believed that a free society cannot exist without equal access to education and that schools should not be aligned with any particular religious denomination. Though controversial at the time, his ideas eventually became widely accepted throughout the United States. Many schools have been named in his honor. 

        In 1929 Horace Mann School had a student body of 870. By 1937, it increased to nearly 2400 students and 80 staff members.  When enrollment grew to nearly 2600 in 1956, exceeding Horace Mann's intended capacity, the district decided to build an additional school on the southern portion of the property. John H. Vohr Elementary School opened in in 1958. Sadly, the pond was filled in to make room for a parking lot.  By 2003, Horace Mann High School had only 546 students, roughly a fifth of its capacity.  The final graduating class consisted of only 72 students.

        It seems unlikely that the building will ever be put to use again. Vandalism and the elements have taken a heavy toll. There is a great deal of water damage in the basement. The floor of the gym is so heavily warped from moisture that a large section of it has risen up and buckled.

Princess Garvis (Scott) replied to Sullivan:

        I am a graduate of Horace Mann, class of '93. I was born and raised in Gary, though I've since moved. I walked these very halls, used these lockers, watched many presentations in this auditorium, used the Science Labs, as well as classrooms. I'm heartbroken by it all, but the gym with the buckled floor brings tears to my eyes. I was a cheerleader all 4 years here. I cheered on this floor and watched MANY games.  I know the young men who are the Champions on the gymnasium wall. I had P.E. and swam in these pools.  I have yet to see Horace Mann's ruins in person.  I have to say, I don't know if I'm emotionally ready.

Denny Cavanaugh; photo by Johnny Gorches

Horace Mann grads I’ve written about include former IUN Bookstore manager Ruth Nelson, radio and TV personality Tom Higgins, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, football coach Joe DeSoto, and baseball star Dennis Cavanaugh.  Mann teams were nicknamed the Horsemen.  Coincidentally, reporter Johnny Gorches did a Post-Tribune feature on Cavanaugh entitled, “At 79, Denny Cavanaugh keeps rolling along.” He competes in six bowling leagues, including mine (Thursday Mel Guth Seniors at Hobart Lanes). Gorches wrote:

        “I've been bowling for 60 years and in six leagues right now,” Cavanaugh said. “I'm gonna drop out of a couple of them.  I find it hard to compete with the 'young swingers' anymore.  It's just hard to keep up with them."

        Still, he's done a decent job in recent years. Cavanaugh has eight career 800 series and 16 career 300 games. In February, 2014, he rolled a pair of 290s two days apart at Hobart Lanes. His last 300 came earlier that season at Cressmoor.

I gave the new Steel Shavings to Alan Yngve and Charlie Halberstadt at duplicate bridge and got requests from several others after Charlie showed his off.  Kris Prohl noticed a photo of the late Home Mountain Printing owner Larry Klemz, formerly her close friend.  Charlie and I did well despite two low boards.  In one, everyone passed; the opponents had more points than us, but every other East-West pair that bid got set.  In the other, Charlie preempted 3 Clubs, and East doubled.  I held 8 Spades headed by the Ace, King, Queen, plus a lone Diamond and 2 Queen doubletons.  I jumped to 4 Spades and lost the first four tricks, two in Clubs and 2 in Hearts.  Other North-South pairs stopped a 3 Spades or, in one case, made 5 Diamonds (opponents must have opened with a Spade or Diamond lead). Charlie had 7 Diamonds headed by the Ace, King, the 10 and Jack of Spades, and, like me, losing doubletons in Hearts and Clubs.

 Harold Haydon

Harold Hayden, figures at beach 

Bridge opponent Marcia Carson, an Education Division instructor for many years, now teaches Art History both at IUN and Valparaiso University.  During the 1970s, Toni had such a course at IUN from artist Harold Haydon, who had retired from the University of Chicago and was living in Northwest Indiana.  After Toni told me how interesting he was, I audited the class.

At Hobart Lanes, the Pin Heads had to spot us Engineers 127 pins, and we ended up beating them scratch in game one, enough to take series before losing the final two games. Teammate Frank Shufran brought me some treasures for the Calumet Regional Archives, including bowling records former teammate Bill Batalis saved dating back to 1961, when the Electrical Engineers were in the Good Fellows Supervisors Bowling League. I learned that in 1964 Dick Maloney, still on the team but then with the Mechanical Engineers (as was Bob “Robbie” Robinson), rolled a 266.  Here are the 16 teams in the order they finished in 1963-1964: Electrical Engineers, Blast Furnace, Construction Engineers, New Era Electric, Locomotive Shop, Mechanical Engineers, Accounting, Design Engineers, #3 Sinter Plant, Test Engineers, Safety, Services, Industrial Engineers, Electric Shop, Central Maintenance, Machine Shop.  In 2011, Bill’s final year bowling, ours was the only U.S. Steel team left in the Wednesday Night Sheet and Tin League. His records show that I finished with a 161 average; my friend Clark Metz, who subbed for us on six occasions, finished with a 160 average.

 Larry Klemz at 2004 quilt show

Frank Shufran also brought me booklets from the String-A-Long Quilt Guild’s first (1986) and tenth (2004) biennial quilt show (both he and wife Joan are quilters).  Frank and Joan invited Toni and me to a show, held that year at Timothy Ball Elementary School in Crown Point. On display were not only quilts by both of them but others by good friend Al Sterkin’s wife Carol, IUN colleague Jim Tolhuizen’s wife Marilyn, and Home Mountain Printing owner Larry Klemz’s spouse Jeri.