Peaceful Easy Feeling

“I got a peaceful easy feeling,

And I know you won’t let me down

‘cause I’m already standing on the ground.”

         “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” Jack Tempchin, recorded by Eagles

Toni flanked by granddaughters Alissa and Miranda

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The family celebrated Toni’s 72^nd birthday at Applebee’s Saturday and with spring rolls Sunday, joined by Alissa and Miranda as well as Marianne and Missy Brush, who brought a cake and bottle of wine.  Missy went through albums that Dave and I didn’t want and picked out several, including one by the Eighties L.A. punk band X.  I learned that Missy’s dad Tim Brush (Big Voodoo Daddy) liked Jim Croce and the soft-rock group Bread (he and Marianne danced to “Make It with You” at their wedding).  Missy is a huge David Bowie fan, and she got so excited when I showed her my “Ziggy Stardust” album (“The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”), that I gave it to her.  She was quite overwhelmed; when Dave told her she could get lots of money for it, she replied touchingly, “I’ll be buried with it.” 

I called Terry Jenkins to tell him I used a quote from “Stories of the Street” by Leonard Cohen, one of his favorite singers, in my blog and urged him to watch the Grammy tributes to Glenn Frey, Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire, and David Bowie.  He told me that he took his daughter Lorraine to see him at a concert in Philadelphia.  Sporting a garish red pompadour, Lady Gaga did a ten-song Bowie medley, beginning with “Space Oddity,” and complete with psychedelic effects.  It was impressive, but I was hoping for a surprise appearance by Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Bono or Iggy Pop.  The Grammy highlight for me was ageless Jackson Browne singing “Peaceful Easy Feeling” with the surviving Eagles, including Don Henley on drums.  If Browne was 21 in ’69, as the “Running On Empty” lyrics indicate, he’d be just six years my junior.

Rapper Kendrick Lamar won five Grammys and performed “The Blacker the Berry (the sweeter the juice)” dressed as a jailbird in chains.  The final lines go:

So don't matter how much I say I like to preach with the Panthers

Or tell Georgia State "Marcus Garvey got all the answers"

Or try to celebrate February like it's my B-Day

Or eat watermelon, chicken, and Kool-Aid on weekdays

Or jump high enough to get Michael Jordan endorsements

Or watch BET cause urban support is important

So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street?

When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?

Hypocrite!

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Conspiracy theories have sprung up over the death of reactionary Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a luxury Texas hunting resort.  Donald Trump couldn’t resist telling rightwing radio host Michael Savage, “They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.”  Some crazies are pointing the finger at Obama, while others suggest the Bush family poisoned him because he was about to implicate George W. in the September 11 attacks.  What hogwash.  Republicans vow to block any SCOTUS appointment until after the November election, even should Obama nominate a moderate.  They may regret the strategy.  Indian-American B.N. “Sri” Srikrishna, below, is a leading candidate.

Valerie Abalos Pettovello came across my blog and sought my help in corroborating a family story about her grandfather, a Mexican immigrant living in Indiana Harbor during the 1920s.  I told her that her best bets were two contemporary newspapers, the East Chicago Calumet News and El Amigo del Holgar.  With her permission I’m disseminating her email.  She wrote:

    My grandfather was in a bar when he got in an altercation with an off-duty police officer. Supposedly the officer pulled out his revolver and shot my grandfather in the stomach. He survived the gunshot. The family story is that the officer lost his badge over this. I would assume that this made the newspaper.

  My grandparents moved to Detroit after this and my grandfather died of pneumonia in 1942. My father was 6 years old when he died and remembers the gunshot wound very vividly.  

  The only record of this is family lore. I want to try to find an article or police report to find out what actually happened. 

  It had to have happened before 1930 because he is listed as living in Detroit in the 1930 census. The earliest he could have immigrated would have been 1924, because my aunt was born in 1924 and my grandmother stayed in Mexico until 1927. My guess is that this incident happened after she arrived (but I am not sure).

  My grandfather went by several names: Louis or Joseph Abalos or Avalos.

Seeing Kathi “Kat” Wellington at Portage Library on Saturday reminded me of a book she and 14 other steelworkers contributed to called “The Heat: Steelworker Lives and Legends” (2001).  In “Remembering What’s Important” she wrote about descending into a greasy pit under the roll line to wrestle pieces of scrap steel that had slipped off the conveyor belt with an old-timer nicknamed Moe.  Two other guys with them puked, the smell was so bad, but Moe had stuck earplugs up his nose, and a childhood accident had taken away Kat’s sense of smell.  Kat’s story concludes: “We all made it through our first turn in the mill. As we came out of the pit and into the sunshine, squinting from the dark, Moe laughed out loud and said, ‘Mole People!’”

In “The Heat” Joe Gutierrez (above), who appears in several Studs Terkel oral history volumes, authored “Alan Kepler,” which reminded me of John A. Fitch’s century-old article about steelworkers entitled “Old Age at Forty”.  Gutierrez wrote:

  Alan was 55 years old, but with his white receding hair and his slow walk, he seemed much older. His hands were gnarled with arthritis. He said he soaked them for hours in hot paraffin wax. Then he'd laugh and say it didn’t help much, but it took his mind off his knees, which weren’t much better. 

His back ached like all the old backs in the galvanize line, especially when he had to skim the heavy hot slag off the surface of the molten zinc melted to the 850th degree. The long, 90-pound iron spoons wreaked havoc on old tendons and weak, calcium-deprived bones 



  It all added up to pain, but Al never really complained. The guys who worked with him never complained either. Al did his job the best he could. But there was a lot he couldn’t do, and most everybody went out of their way to help him. He told me once that we go as far as we can go, then God takes us the rest of the way. 



  I never thought about that too much, until later.

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Ron Cohen and I took over Steve McShane’s Indiana History class while his wife Cindy was having an operation.  Beforehand, Jonathyne Briggs saw me in a tie and dress shirt and quipped, “I see you got the dress code memo.”  For a split second I thought maybe he was serious.  Briggs is participating in an upcoming program at Northwestern.  I fear he has too much on his plate, having taken over the chairmanship of the History and Philosophy Department from Gianluca DiMuzio.

Before students arrived, O made preparations to show a 15-minute documentary on early Gary’s world-famous unit schools.  I began by talking about Gary’s antecedents, such as removal of the Potawatomi, the coming of the railroads that gave birth to Tolleston and Miller, the migration of Swedes, the Aetna Powder Plant, and the decision by US Steel to buy up 9,000 acres, including seven miles of shoreline, for Gary Works and an adjacent town.  I talked about remarkable progressive Tom Knotts, elected Gary’s first mayor despite the opposition of Steel forces, and his defeat in 1913, the result of bribery, intimidation, and character assassination.  After describing working and housing conditions for blacks and white ethnics, I discussed early residents I interviewed, including sports hero Johnny Kyle and the sons of pioneer Italian-born Antonio Giorgi and Serbian grocer Jovo Krstovich.  After I brought up the activities of Gary Neighborhood House, Ron explained how he and I rescued valuable settlement records after a fire gutted the abandoned building and water damage threatened to ruin documents dating back to Gary’s pioneer era.  In the second half of the class Ron discussed School Superintendent William A. Wirt, who had a rare opportunity to design, virtually from scratch, the Gary schools.  

 Dr. William A. Wirt

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Ron Cohen loaned me Robert J. Norrell’s “Alex Haley and the Books that Changed a Nation.”  The reference is to “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which Haley put together from interviews, and “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” which allegedly traced Haley’s family history back to Kunte Kinte, from a Gambian village in Africa, and spawned the most-watched mini-series in TV history.  Norrell wrote: “Haley taught us that families’ experiences actually composed the nation’s history.”  I agree.

Already Gone

“Remember this, when you look up in the sky

You can see the stars and still not see the light,”

         “Already Gone,” Eagles

Glenn Frey of the Eagles passed away at age 67.  Although “Already Gone” is about a guy breaking up with his girlfriend after hearing she planned to leave him, it’s the headline many newspapers used to announce his death.  “Already Gone,” sung by Frey, was the first cut on the classic 1974 album “On the Border,” which also contained “James Dean” and “Best of My Love.”  In addition to a solo career after the Eagles broke up in 1980, Frey appeared in episodes of Miami Vice and as an agent in Jerry Maguire.

At Inman’s where James now bowls, a thin layer of ice almost caused me to fall in the parking lot.  James rolled a 440 series, better than my average these days, and I was happy to see many familiar faces, including Chris Lugo’s and Tom Dick’s families.  A couple Christmases ago at Inman’s I couldn’t find my car for some anxious minutes, as I exited from a different door than the one I first entered.

 

above, cast of "Young Frankenstein"; below, Angie and Becca

Sunday we braved arctic conditions to see the Mel Brooks musical “Young Frankenstein” at the Star Plaza.”  Becca was in the chorus and had several tricky dance numbers, including “Puttin’ On the Ritz.”  Ribald songs included “Deep Love” and “Roll in the Hay” featuring sexy Inga (Rachel Livingston) and Frederick Frankenstein (Justin Williams).  The show, first presented at Valpo’s Chicago Street Theatre, so impressed Star Plaza CEO Charlie Blum that he booked an enhanced version into the much larger venue.  Before the curtain went up Robin Halberstadt introduced me to a half dozen friends, including the sister of the person from whom we bought our condo, and I chatted with Stevie Kokos, a former softball teammate who has worked at the Star Plaza since majoring in Performing Arts at IUN.

On Jeopardy all three contestants bet everything on the final question and guessed incorrectly, leaving them with no money.  The category was State Capitals and the clue was: A 1957 event led to the creation of a national historic site in this city, signed into law by a president whose library is now there too.  Guesses were Atlanta, Montgomery, and Springfield.  Realizing that the desegregation of Central High School took place then and that Bill Clinton’s Presidential library is in Little Rock, Arkansas, I knew the answer.  None of the contestants would return.  Two of them had tied for the lead, so their bets were understandable, but the third person really blew it.

 above, Debra Dubovich; below, Daddy King

On Martin Luther King Day at Gino’s Debra Dubovich ably reported on Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters,” volume one of the 2,912-page trilogy “America in the King Years.”  King’s first name was originally Michael, and he became Martin Luther King, Jr., after “Daddy” King changed their names when he was five.  Married to Alberta Williams, the daughter of the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the elder King restored it to financial solvency after Reverend A.D. Williams died in 1931.  Dubovich concentrated on the Montgomery Bus Boycott and mentioned the role E.D. Nixon played as President of the Montgomery NAACP whom Rosa Parks worked for.  Jailed, Nixon acted like it was a badge of pride, inspiring others not to fear the many harassment tactics.  Brian and Connie Barnes mentioned that Richard Morrisroe spoke at Hobart Unitarian Church the previous day about being gravely wounded in Lowndes County 50 years ago.  Morrisrroe figures prominently in Taylor Branch’s “At Canaan’s Edge: America during the King Years, 1965-1968.”

Explaining to Steve McShane’s students to explain their oral history assignment -  to interview someone from Northwest Indiana who was a teenager during the 1980s -  I read excerpts from two articles in my Eighties Shavings (volume 38, 2007), “The Uncertainty of Everyday Life.” Rebecca Sanders wrote about 1989 Hammond High grad Jered, whose dad took him to wrestling matches at Hammond Civic Center.  Jered enjoyed going to Woodmar Mall, where he and his best friend hung out at Radio Shack and a record store and tried to pick up girls. Stephanie Short wrote about LaCretia Tucker, who got pregnant her senior year after a December turnabout dance.  Short wrote:

  LaCretia had planned to go into the marines, and her biggest regret is the derailing of those plans.  She kept her pregnancy secret even from her parents.  At graduation they gave her a dozen roses in a presentation bouquet.  As she sat through the ceremony with the flowers on her lap, she watched them move around as the baby was going “kick, kick, kick.”

        

Duplicate bridge partners with Charlie Halberstadt at Duneland YMCA in Chesterton, my low point was going down four in four spades.  It turned out, however, that it was a good sacrifice bid because it kept our opponents out of game.  Seventeen people showed up, so director Alan Ynve played with someone without a partner and one of the nine pairs sat out each round.   If 16 or 20 folks show up Alan doesn’t play.  If there are 18, he calls our neighbor Janice Custer, who lives minutes away, and plays with her.  If there are 15 or 19, Alan plays and no team has to sit out.

Jeff Manes profiled Miller Beach mainstay George Rogge, president of the Miller Citizens Corporation and active in a half-dozen other civic groups.  Rogge discussed the threat to homeowners a decade ago when U.S. Steel’s tax assessment got reduced from $248 million to $113 million, the epitome of corporate irresponsibility.

  All of a sudden, people were about to get a bill for 9 percent of their assessed valuation for their market price. Some people bought their houses for cheaper than that.

  I put together a small group, and we put together a three-pronged plan. The first prong was that we would sue the state. The second prong was the legislature. I said that we should cap the rate at 2 percent, which was higher than the rest of what the state was paying, anyway. We settled on that.

  I went down to Indianapolis and actually bought a condo. I spent the entire time down there. The third prong was we put together a group that was really affected, liked retired teachers. 

The bill eventually was written up: 1 percent for homeowners, 2 percent for rental, and 3 percent for commercial. Those were the caps. The bill was passed, and it is now in the state constitution. It's the biggest thing I ever did.

At a condo owners meeting the hot topics were tree trimming and how to stop woodpeckers from drilling holes in people’s units.  One person recommended buying plastic owls and filling them with sand.  Another suggested pie tins that reflected.  By the time I got back home Golden State was blowing out the Bulls.

I was unable to edit my blog or make a new post until Augie Reyes from IUN tech services connected it to the Foxfire.  It appears that the latest Safari update made the blog incompatible with my MAC.

I started reading Sean Wilentz’s 2005 biography of Andrew Jackson, shorter but more scholarly than Jon Meacham’s “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.”  Wilentz wrote that “the charismatic general and hero of the War of 1812 embodied the hopes of ordinary citizens” and that his presidency was “a hinge between the founding of the republic and its rebirth in the Civil War.”

I bowled my best game all season, a 190, enabling the Engineers to win game two, and finished with a 483 series.  Opponent Judy Sheriff threw a ball that broke sharply to the left, necessitating that she throw it perilously close to the right gutter.  After one of her strikes, the octogenarian exclaimed, “I’m a happy hooker.”

Gary Roosevelt student Cary Martin protests conditions at school; NWI Times photo by Carmen McCollum

Gary Roosevelt students protested the lack of heat and other problems that have kept the school closed much of the time since Christmas.  He once-proud school has fallen on tough times, exacerbated by being taken over and run as a charter school.