My Way

“I've lived a life that's full
I've traveled each and every highway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way”

         “My Way,” Paul Anka

“My Way” was originally a 1967 French song, “Comme d’Habitude” (“As Usual”).  Paul Anka wrote English lyrics expressly for Frank Sinatra, whose recording became a hit and thereafter his signature song. Elvis Presley covered it on the 1973 album “Aloha from Hawaii,” and it became a staple at his live shows, as well as Anka’s.  The Sex Pistols recorded a punk parody version with profane and nonsensical lyrics (i.e.,“To think, I killed a cat, and may I say, oh no, not their way”).  The final lines: “The record shows, I’ve got no clothes, and I did it my way.”  Martin Scorsese used the Sex Pistols rendition at the end of “Goodfellas,” as credits rolled.

  Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols  

Grandson James may perform “My Way” at a Portage H.S. Outstanding Student competition. I assume he’s familiar with the Sinatra version, but I told him that at Omar Farag’s Elvis Tribute shows, when the final performer sings “My Way,” women rush the stage to get scarves from “Elvis,” emulating The King’s female fans over 40 years ago.  I’d love it if James did an Elvis impression – or, even better Sid Vicious.  When Dave (whose high school nickname was Sid) was at Portage, he and his buddies appeared as the Sex Pistols in an air band contest and got disqualified.

 Al Samter and Mike Olszanski, circa 1974

A relative of Al Samter saw his name on my blog and asked for more information.  I replied that he was a labor activist, poker player, pipe smoker, and jazz expert who died from throat cancer.  A New Yorker who moved to Gary as a steel mill “colonizer” for the Communist Party, Samter would show up at a mutual friend’s house at Christmas bearing gifts and two geese for the hostess to cook. After he retired from the mill, Al Samter was a district leader in S.O.A.R, (Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees) and hosted a dinner dance at McBride Hall that went from 4 p.m. until 8.  At the time we poked fun at the hours, but now it makes perfect sense.  He and an African-American deejay took turns spinning records, alternating between jazz and rhythm ‘n’ blues.  At one point Samter played a Dixieland number and led the crowd in a strut around the room.  He had class.  Mike Olszanski and I interviewed him for our Steel Shavingsissue “Steelworkers Fight Back: Rank and File Insurgency in the Calumet Region during the 1970s” (volume 30, 2000).  Here is part of what he told us:

  After the war I had worked for a small record store in New York and then got laid off.  The big chain stores starting reducing prices on phonograph records, which forced mom-and-pop stores to cut back.  I was on and off the unemployment rolls and finally decided to make use of my G.I. Bill of Rights and get into an apprentice program.

 Everybody was going into the big industries, so in April of 1949 I came to Northwest Indiana and applied for an apprenticeship.  They didn’t have any such programs open but were hiring for the summer.  They sent me out to the coal chemical plant, as a pump operator.  The summer job turned into a permanent job.  I stayed 37 years.  I never did get into the apprenticeship program.  My job, especially after they built a new chemical coal plant in 1955, paid more than I would have gotten in any of the craft jobs.  My department took light oils which come off the coke-making process and separated and distilled them into the industrial oils benzene, toluene, and xylene.

  I became a shop steward and got acquainted with African-American Curtis Strong, who was running for grievance committeeman. I wrote some of his material. After he got elected, I became a shop steward.  One of my jobs was to sign up new members.  There were still some old-timers who were not union members, but I kept signing them up until our department was 100% union.

  Like Curtis Strong, I belonged to the caucus that supported John Mayerick, who became President of 1014 and formed a Civil Rights Committee.  I became its secretary. At one point we decided to have a joint civil rights committee meeting at Local 1014’s headquarters.  Among those attending were Fred Stern from Youngstown and Jim Balanoff from Inland.  At that point the International decided they better recognize us, so they sent somebody in from the International.  It was one of the things that pushed them into having a civil rights division. 

When I published a Shavingsissue on the Calumet Region during the Postwar years (volume 34, 2003), I dedicated it to a dozen “Old Lefties,” including Al Samter, who kept the faith in a time of repression. Class-conscious activists for civil rights, trade unionism, and peace, they realized the need for a fundamental reordering of wealth and power if the nation were to remain true to its historic ideals.

I was pleased that Garrett Peck’s “The Great War in America” had plentiful quotes from acerbic H.L. Mencken, a second-generation German-American and Baltimore Sun columnist critical of American participation in the conflict and the resultant abridgement of civil liberties. He supported women’s suffrage, and expressed outrage at the postwar Red Scare roundup of radicals.  He ridiculed the Eighteenth Amendment, Prohibition. In “A Carnival on Buncombe,” Mencken wrote: “Between [Woodrow] Wilson and his brigades of informers, spies, volunteer detectives, perjurers and complaisant judges, and the Prohibitionists and their messianic delusion, the liberty of the citizen has pretty well vanished in America.”  As Warren Gamaliel Harding was on his way to victory in the 1920 Presidential election, Mencken sneered:“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by an outright moron.”

In an epilogue, Peck, on the advisory council of the Woodrow Wilson House  at 2340 S Street, mentioned that Wilson lived out his remaining years in a Washington, D.C., townhouse located in the fashionable Kalorama neighborhood. The outgoing President purchased a replica of the White House Lincoln bed and kept his oval office chair and gifts received during his Presidential trip to Europe, including a huge tapestry.  Peck added:

  Along with the transport vans carrying Wilson’s furniture was a truck bearing a special cargo: their wine collection. Prohibition had made the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol illegal, but not its possession. Wilson had no desire to leave behind his collection for President Harding, who was known to throw a good party. “In the shipment was a whole barrel of fine Scotch whiskey, besides a variety of rare wines and liquors,”the New York Times reported.

 George Remus

I learned from author Garrett Peck that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled title character Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby” (1925) after Cincinnati bootlegger George Remus.  An actor assumes the role of Remus in the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.”  Born in Berlin, Germany, and growing up in Chicago, Remus became a pharmacist and then a lawyer who took advantage of a loophole in the Volstead Act permitting alcohol to be sold in drug stores for medicinal purposes. He invested heavily in both pharmacies and distilleries.  After moving to Cincinnati, he’d have his own men “steal” liquor from the distilleries and resell it for huge profits.  Remus threw lavish parties at his mansion, nicknamed the Marble Palace.  One featured a 15-piece orchestra and aquatic dancers wearing scandalous bathing suits.  At another he gave diamond stickpins to male guests and new automobiles to their wives. His extravagant lifestyle attracted the attention of federal agents.  Remus spent two years in prison for bootlegging, during which time wife Imogene and her lover cheated him of his fortune, and she filed for divorce.  He had left properties, stock, and bank accounts in her name.  Freed, he fatally shot Imogene and, pleading temporary insanity, was acquitted.  Thereafter, Remus lived modestly in Covington, Kentucky and died from a stroke in 1952 at age 77.    

 Tom Brady

Even though I was rooting for New Orleans and Kansas City in the conference championships, the contests, both going into overtime, could not have been more exciting. When Rams kicker Greg Zuerlein nailed a 57-yarder, Bears fans couldn’t help but think that could have been their fate had they signed a competent place kicker.  As Tom Brady led the Patriots on consecutive clutch TD drives, one couldn’t help but admire the 41-year-old future Hall of Famer.  New England’s presence will give me a team to root against in Super Bowl LIII. Still, I feel sorry for Saints QB Drew Brees and Chiefs coach Andy Reed, who had several good years with the Eagles.

 Charles Eastman

The HBO movie “Bury My Heart in Wounded Knee” not only traced the cruel fate befalling the Lakota tribes during the late nineteenth century but described the life of Hakadah, a Santee Lakota tribesman who took the Christian name Charles Eastman and graduated from Boston University medical school.  At Pine Ridge Reservation in 1890, he cared for survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre.  He was subsequently dismissed by the Bureau of Indiana Affairs for criticizing its policies toward Native-Americans. He married reformer Elaine Goodale, and the couple had six children.

Season 3 of “True Detective” has Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff teaming up as Arkansas troopers Wayne Hays and Roland West on a case involving the murder of a 12 year-old and the disappearance of his 10 year-old sister.  During one racially charged exchange Ali tells his partner that he is not one of his tribe.

 David Parnell

I spoke in David Parnell’s freshman seminar on the history of IU Northwest.  IU Extension classes began a hundred years ago and expanded rapidly during the 1920s.  School Superintendent William A. Wirt started Gary College in 1932 intended for enable students unable to go away to college to earn a two-year degree. Classes met at Horace Mann after high school hours.  After World War II, Gary College ended, and IU Extension classes met at Seaman Hall in downtown Gary, as well as a facility in East Chicago until the move to its present Glen Park location in 1959.  Eight years later, IU Northwest, as it came to be called, held its first graduation ceremony as a four-year institution, outdoors, near its one building, Gary Main, (later renamed Tamarack and condemned after the 2008 flood). I explained that Kern and my collaboration combined social and administrative history, with Paul relying on written sources while I provided oral testimony both from student interviews and my own.  Parnell’s acclaimed book, “Justinian’s Men: Careers and Relationships of Byzantine Army Officers, 518-610,” takes a similar approach.  When I mentioned that to Parnell, he replied: “​That's true! I would become even more of a social historian if I could conduct oral interviews on ancient Byzantines. What a treat that would be.”

Because the class will be discussing future possibilities for IUN, I brought up past debates over possible merger with Purdue Calumet.  One student asked whether doing recent history led to controversies, so I brought up incidents involving my Steelworkers Tales and cedar Lake issues and the Anne Balay case, Another question involved Glen Park student hangouts, and I brought up taking evening classes to Jenny’s Café and the Country Lounge in Hobart.  Even though desegregation was occurring in Glen Park, several bars along Broadway were still hostile toward African-American customers.

Rolling Thunder

“You might as well expect rivers to run backwards, as any man born free to be contented penned up.  Let me be a free man and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.” Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain (Chief Joseph) 

Young Chief Joseph

Rolling Thunder

Operation Rolling Thunder represented a dramatic escalation of the Vietnam War, as Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1965 ordered an intense bombing campaign against North Vietnam that lasted four years and though ineffective in shortening the war resulted in untold Vietnamese casualties andmany American pilots, including John McCain, being shot down and taken prisoner.  It became the name of a Vietnam veterans advocacy group. In the mid-Seventies Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue toured extensively with a supporting cast that included Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn.  Rolling Thunder is also the name of a Six Flags roller coaster.

Garrett Peck’s “The Great War in America” argues convincingly that World War I (as the conflict was called only after World War II) was the most momentous event of the twentieth century, breaking up the Ottoman and Austria-Hungarian empires, spawning Bolshevism, destabilizing the Middle East to this day, killing millions, sparking Third World nationalism, and, due to defects in the Versailles Treaty, sowing the seeds of World War II. It marked a vast increase in the power of the federal government and America’s “coming of age” in world affairs despite an isolationist backlash domestically and led to postwar runaway inflation, strikes, race riots, a Red Scare, and an ignoble experiment, Prohibition. In the introduction Peck wrote:

  War leaves a scar on a nation’s psyche, one that never fully heals. . . Arlington, Virginia, is my home, and every Memorial Day it witnesses tens of thousands of Vietnam war veterans who descend on the nation’s capital in the motorcycle caravan known as Rolling Thunder.  The veterans seek an answer to unanswerable questions: What good is war, and is the sacrifice worth it?

General William Westmoreland (Waste-more-land) once claimed with unintended irony that life was cheap in Asia.  During the World War II Japanese occupation of Vietnam, approximately 4 million peasants died of starvation because their crops went to feed foreigners.  Never again, nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh vowed, would Vietnam be at the mercy of a foreign power.

Charlie Halberstadt and I finished fourth in bridge with 52 percent, just one bad hand from second place.  In another we scored an unbelievable 2800 points.  An opponent opened one Heart and Charlie overcalled a Spade. The player to my right bid 2 Diamonds.  I held 8 points, including three Spades and five Hearts, King, Queen, Jack, nine, deuce. I bid 2 Hearts, alerting Charlie that I had that suit covered in case  he wanted to bid No Trump.  The player on my left, thinking I was indicating a void in Hearts, eventually bid 4 hearts, doubled and re-doubled.  We set the contract down 5. 

I gave Dee Browne a copy of Barbara Walczak’s Newsletter that paid tribute to Dee Van Bebber.  She was grateful, feeling she needed closure since there were no funeral services for her friend.   Terry Bauer, who finished first with partner Dottie Hart, mentioned that a car dealer asked him to fill out a survey that included this surprising question, “Do you identify as male, female or other?”  Earlier in the day I got my driver’s license renewed, needing a passport and multiple documents showing my social security number and proof of where I lived.  Ridiculous. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles folks were very nice and, after all, didn’t make up the stupid regulations.

Miller’s Aquatorium Society will show movies as part of its 2019 fundraising efforts, including the 1927 film “Wings” (the first ever to win an Oscar, starring Clara Bow and with a minor role for Gary Cooper), “Red Tails” (about the Tuskegee Airmen), and Fellini’s “Strada,” starring Anthony Quinn. According to Greg Reising, when Myrna Loy received her award for best actress, she claimed that the statue resembled her Uncle Oscar, and the name stuck.  The ten=dollar contribution will evidently include free popcorn.

A New York Times puzzle clue was “one keeping a secret metaphorically.”  Toni got it: clam.

Chicagoan Barbara Proctor died, Maurice Yancy informed me.  Before founding the largest black-owned advertising agency in America, Proctor worked for Vee-Jay Records writing liner notes. In 1962 she negotiated a contract with EMI Records in London obtaining for Vee-Jay the rights to 30 songs by the Beatles, then an unknown commodity. She grew up in a “shotgun shack” without electricity or running water in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

Also dead at age 71 is Hobart H.S. and Notre Dame football great Bob Kuechenberg, a six-time All-Star guard with the Miami Dolphins who played on the 1972 undefeated team that went on to beat the Washington Redskins, 14-7, in Super Bowl VII. Washington’s only points were the result of a blocked field goal attempt in the final minutes.  In 2013 when President Barack Obama invited the 1972 Dolphins to the White House, Kuechenberg declined to attend, citing political difference.  What a jerk.

At bowling, with Melvin Nelson being on the DL with a bum shoulder, Terry Kegebein in Florida, and Frank Shufran serving as a pallbearer at a friend’s funeral, half-blind Dick Maloney filled in admirably, as did sub Bob Fox, wearing a Marvin Harrison Colts jersey.  After splitting the first two games, we were up 13 pins when the final bowlers, Bob Fox and Larry Hamilton bowled in the tenth frame.  Hamilton struck out, meaning Fox needed to mark and then pick up 8 pins for us to prevail.  He left the 6-10 but converted the spare and ended the series with a strike.

After summarizing a multitude of connections between Trump and the Russians in an essay titled “An American President as Russian spy,”  Ray Smock concludes:

  Trump may not even comprehend that he has acted as a tool of the Russian government. He sees Russia as a cash cow. I do not think national security concerns ever entered Trump’s head. He was and is thinking about personal riches from Russia. He thinks in transactions, not in long-term strategies. He likes the exotic thrills of a country where the rich and powerful don’t have to play by all the rules and laws of the United States. He sees himself as the American version of an unfettered Russian oligarch. He likes people who bully their way through life with their money and their power. He has a natural affinity for Russia. Russia treats him nice.

 front, Wayne Carpenter, Laverne Niksch; back, Yuan Hsu, Dave Bigler

Laverne Niksch achieved the rank of Ruby Life Master, having accumulated over 1,000 master points. Fellow bridge players celebrated with a cake provided by Trudi McKamey.  His partner Wayne Carpenter told Newsletter editor Barbara Walczak: “We started out playing bridge in college and played party bridge for over 30 years with our long-time friends. After graduating with a degree in “retirement,” we play as partners two or three times a week and plan on playing until we get it right. This has been a great ride, and I can’t think of a more deserving person.”

 Portage lakefront erosion by Kyle Telechan

Meteorologists are predicting that a monster blizzard is on its way over the weekend, with snowfall reaching 12 inches including lake effect.  So far, ice mounds have not formed on Lake Michigan’s southern shore but that may change with temperatures plunging into the single digits.  Lakefront erosion has already decimated beaches in Portage and Ogden Dunes, with man-made development hindering the ability of nature to replenish itself.

I might teach a once-a-week Fall History seminar at Valparaiso University dealing with the Calumet Region.  I have already spoken to VU classes taught by Liz Wuerffel and Heath Carter and will be lecturing this semester in a Sociology course and next semester in one of Allison Schuette’s.  I’d assign Powell A. Moore’s “The Calumet Region: Indiana’s Last Frontier” and Ramon and Trisha Arredondo’s “Maria’s Journey” and give students Shavingsissues on Gary, Portage, Cedar Lake, and Hammond.  They’d do a paper on a key event in one particular community’s history.  A second paper, a family history, would cover three generations and fit in with VU’s Flight Paths project, of which I am a consultant. I envision first summarizing topics such as the Region’s place in Indiana history and the coming of industrialization, and then have sessions on Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, Whiting, Cedar Lake, Chesterton, Portage, and Valparaiso with guest appearances and student presentations.  There will be a class devoted to family history and a possible field trip to Gary and perhaps Cedar Lake’s museum at the old Lassen Hotel.  

Jonathyne Briggs invited me to attend a History department meeting.  I replied in the affirmative and added that whenI saw him and others at the December Holiday celebration, it hit me how much I missed running my old colleagues on a regular basis at Hawthorn Hall. I also plan to bring up these two topics:

1.   Calumet Regional Archives: As I’m sure you know, the Archives is in disarray due to plans to fix the antiquated library heating and cooling system, but plans are afoot to open up some space for researchers on the second floor.  This is the latest from Steve McShane:

Due to the high costs of moving to Arts on Grant, that plan has been scratched.  The latest plan is to move the entire Archives to the library's second floor.  We mapped it out yesterday, and there appears to be enough square footage.  Physical Plant would create two "rooms", one very large, and one somewhat smaller.  They would be secured with locked doors and accessible, including a small space for our researchers to use the materials.  Before that plan can be enacted, however, the folks at IUB have to be satisfied that the temperature/humidity environment would be acceptable for archival materials.  Our head of Physical Plant, Gary Greiner, said he can provide data on the second floor's environment, but he hasn't sent it out yet.  Also, the space person from Bloomington is coming up next week, along with a rep from Iron Mountain, a company specializing in moving archives, to look over the situation.

2.   Indiana History course: I was disappointed that Steve McShane decided to cease teaching the course and that the replacements are only of the on-line variety.  Neither instructor has bothered consulting McShane or me regarding the content or research possibilities in the Archives, and I suspect that there is no longer emphasis on Northwest Indiana, as before.  I may be teaching a History seminar on the Calumet Region at Valparaiso University in the Fall.  Several instructors have made Gary and nearby communities an integral part of their course and already have had me as a guest lecturer.  Perhaps in the future I might consider teaching a similar course at IUN, maybe in conjunction with Chris Young,  although a previous effort to offer a Liberal Studies course died on the vine.  It had been my hope that Young’s interest in Hoosier history might eventually lead him to teach that subject, but his present duties apparently make that impractical, given the need to offer other upper division courses in his area of specialization