Changes

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.  Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow.” Lao Tzu

In an email titled “Change Is Coming” bridge Newsletter editor Barbara Walczak (above) announced that she is ending her tenure after 1000 issues.  While she hopes someone will take over what seems like a herculean task, that seems unlikely. Admitting that she is “worn out,” Barbara wrote: “I have begun this labor of love 14 years ago, and I’ve come to a time when I wish to pursue interests other than concentrating so heavily on bridge.  There are so many other things to do in life.”  I responded: “Say it ain’t so!  We’re losing a vital historical source.  Let me know if you wish to deposit your photo files or other items to your collection in the Calumet Regional Archives.”

Completing Ralph Kiner’s “Baseball Forever,” I noticed the word DISCARDED on the front cover.  The culprit: Valpo Public Library, just 15 years after the book’s publication.  Kiner had harsh words for executive Branch Rickey, who broke the color line while with the Brooklyn Dodgers but did not add any African-American players to the Pirates roster during his unsuccessful five-year tenure in Pittsburgh.  After the 1952 season, during which the Pirates finished the cellar, he wanted to cut the slugger’s $90,000 salary 25% despite his having led the National League in home runs, saying, “We can finish last without you.” Rickey ended up trading Kiner to the Cubs.  Kiner admits that when a Mets broadcaster, he was known for malaprops, such as calling his press box sidekick Tim MacArthur rather than McCarver, catcher Gary Carter Gary Cooper, and sponsor American Cyanmid American Cyanide.  Oops!  He once claimed that “if Casey Stengel were alive today, he’d be spinning in his grave.”  

 Ralph Kiner and first wife, tennis star Nancy Chaffee

Thrice married, Kiner also dated actress Janet Leigh for three weeks until a jealous Tony Curtis returned from a movie set and reclaimed her.  Years later, Kiner ran into Jamie Lee Curtis, and without missing a beat she exclaimed, “Daddy!”  That night, Kiner did the math and realized that Jamie Lee was joking.  Kiner became friends with many Hollywood celebrities, including Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and like them, made his home in Rancho Mirage near Palm Springs, where my mother spent her final years.

 

On HBO Saturday I watched “The Horse Whisperer” (1998) starring irresistibly sexy Robert Redford, Kristin Scott Thomas as his love interest, and Scarlett Johansson (I was delighted to discover) as a 13-year-old who became traumatized after a riding accident that killed her best friend, caused her leg to be amputated, and severely injured her horse Pilgrim.  Later Toni and I braved the snow to dine with the Hagelbergs at Longhorn Steakhouse, finally exchanging Christmas presents after a month of being unable to find a mutually agreeable date.

Sunday I went to an Aquatorium fundraising event, the screening of “The Bridges of Toko-Ri” (1954), starring William Holden as Navy Lieutenant Harry Brubaker and classy Grace Kelly as wife Nancy.  One of the few movies dealing with the unpopular, inconclusive Korean War, it focused on a World War II bomber pilot unwillingly called back to active service despite having a wife and two daughters and a successful practice as an attorney.  For comic relief 5’2” Mickey Rooney plays a pugnacious helicopter pilot; for gravitas the veteran Frederic March was Rear Admiral George Tarrant.  In one hilarious scene the Brubakers visit a Japanese bath house, and uptight Nancy makes Harry get in the water before the kids can see him naked.  To their surprise a Japanese family arrive to use the adjacent pool; when they disrobe, Nancy shields the girls until they are in the water.  Soon the two families exchange pleasantries, with the children, unlike Nancy, unconcerned about skinny-dipping.

 Ted Williams; below, John Rudd senior yearbook picture

Beforehand, host Greg Reising explained that like the main character, many pilots, known as “dual draftees,” were called on to serve both in World War II and Korea. One of these was baseball great Ted Williams. I chatted with several familiar Millerites, including realtor Gene Ayers (who recently met with IUN student Casey King to discuss Frank-N-Stein Restaurant), Nelson Algren museum founders Sue Rutsen and George Rogge (about an April speaker's new book on photographer Art Shay), and John and Catherine Rudd, a couple I introduced myself to, who turned out to be 1976 Lew Wallace grads.  John was wearing a Wallace swim team jersey, and we discussed past Hornet basketball stars, such as Jerome Harmon, Tellis Frank, and Branden Dawson.  I told them that in 1976 IUN held its commencement ceremony in the Wallace gym.

 MJ and Kobe

In the car I learned the shocking news about basketball great Kobe Bryant, 41, dying in a helicopter crash, along with eight others, including his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, who had hoped one day to play in the WNBA and whom Kobe coached in a league he’d founded.  They were on their way to a game despite heavy fog.  A quarter century ago, Bryant had gone right into the pros from Lower Merion High School in the Philadelphia area and tried to emulate his hero Michael Jordan in the way he talked, dressed, practiced, and played through illness and injury. In a moving eulogy Jordan wrote: “I loved Kobe – he was like a little brother to me.” Some criticized the NBA for not cancelling games later that day, but players honored his memory in gestures of respect on the court and in public statements.

That evening the GRAMMY awards took place at the Staples Center, where Kobe played his entire 20-year NBA career; his jersey, number 24, stayed illuminated throughout the show.  Hostess Alicia Keys and Boys to Men sang a special tribute to Bryant’s memory.  The live performances were awesome and included a few old-timers, including Billy Ray Cyrus in a Lil Nas X number, Gwen Stefano in a duet with Blake Shelton, Tanya Tucker backed by Brandi Carlile, and Arrowsmith performing “Walk This Way” with Run-D.M.C. Lizzo, as always, was incandescent and obviously shaken by Kobe’s death.  Honoring the lifetime achievements of Chicagoan John Prine, Bonnie Raitt sang “Angel from Montgomery,” whose chorus goes like this:

Make me an angel that flies from Montgom'ry
Make me a poster of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing that I can hold on to
To believe in this living is just a hard way to go

While Vampire Weekend won a GRAMMY for best alternative album, my choice would have been Jeff Tweedy and Wilco’s latest, “Ode to Joy.” I particularly like “An Empty Corner,” which includes this verse:

Now that I’m not longed for

Wild life seems wrong

Won’t care, won’t stare

You’ve got family out there

“Everybody hides,” Tweedy sings in one of the album’s best songs, but the folky selections are surprisingly candid at times.

 Michael Griffin, George Van Til, Richard Hatcher, 2018

Assisted by Samantha Gauer, I interviewed former IUN student and Lake County surveyor George Van Til for a second time, in the Calumet Regional Archives. We covered his introduction to politics at age 23 in Highland town government and years of service as a precinct committeeman, learning lessons that facilitated his becoming county surveyor and proved useful on the way to winning 16 of the 17 times he ran for elected office.  The one loss came early in his career as a result of the last-minute entry of a spoiler candidate.  He later had the pleasure of handily defeating that person.  The 60 minutes flew by.  George considered it good preparation for his February book club appearance and motivation to resume working on an upcoming autobiography.

 

Timothy Vassar’s “Jeremiah Wasn’t Just a Bullfrog: A Story of Passion, Pursuit, Perseverance . . . and Polliwogs” contained a 1974 photo of him wearing a Mayor Hatcher Youth Foundation t-shirt with nine African-American AAU summer track and field teammates.  Vassar explained: “I was recruited out of Highland [after his sophomore year] to be part of this team and was honored to be part of an exceptional group of athletes.”  In the book he described being on the 880-yard relay team with athletes from Gary Roosevelt and West Side, track and field powerhouses coached by Willie Wilson and John Campbell:

    All of the team members were black.  Except one.  I felt like the middle layer of an Oreo cookie.  Practices were held at Gary Roosevelt in the “Midtown” section of Gary.  At that time, Gar had a reputation as a violent, crime-ridden city.  As I was warming up during the first practice, I carried my “spikes” with me.  One of my teammates, Jimmie Williams, began to jog with me and asked why I was carrying my spiked shoes.  I told him I didn’t want anyone to take them.  He told me that wasn’t a problem because “Track is sacred in Gary.” I dropped my spikes right then and never worried about them again. As the summer season progressed, our relay team of Michael Johnson, Lawrence Johnson, Robert Buckingham, and I qualified for the state championship.  As we were warming up for the event, I asked Michael, a 9.6 sprinter, what he needed from me.  He simply said, Just get me the baton.”  I did just that.  It was awesome to see Michael, Lawrence, and Robert finish out the race with a huge lead.  Lawrence went on to play football for the Cleveland Browns during the “Kardiac Kids” days.  All three of my teammates were far more talented than I was, and it was a blessing to be part of that relay team.

Jerry Davich wrote a Post-Tribune column on Brent Schroeder, 55, who during the 1980s and 1990s played with such heavy metal bands as Prisoner and Hap Hazzard. Schroeder grew up in Boone Grove idolizing KISS and AC/DC and in high school formed the band Panama Red, which learned such numbers as “Cocaine” and “Highway to Hell” and got banned from a local talent show. After working as a welder in Chicago and playing area bars, Brent took his band to Hollywood, “flirted with success” (Davich’s words), and came back to the Region to sober up and eventually form a new band Midwest Cartel.  After suffering a stroke in 2011, brent wrote a memoir titled “Heaven Became Hell.” He’s been shot by Los Angeles gang members and stabbed and hit with a broken bottle while flirting with a guy’s girlfriend. Commenting on his shaved head, Schroeder remarked: “I see guys with long hair like that, I say, ‘Hey dude, the ‘80s are over.’”  At present Schroeder is back in Boone Grove living with his 83-year-old father who, wrote Davich, “never quite understood his son’s lust for life as a brash young rock’n’roller.”

Ray Smock wrote:

  Taking notes as Trump attorneys create alternative narrative. Was amused by argument that Trump did not go to Warsaw, Poland to meet President Zelensky on Sept. 1 because he had to manage Hurricane Dorian. You will recall that Trump used a Sharpie to show the hurricane would hit Alabama and spent the next 4 days in a tweet fight with our own weather experts. He can sure manage a disaster!

Jonathyne Briggs invited me to his freshman seminar class on Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.  The reading assignment included excerpts from Norman Mailer’s “Miami and the Siege of Chicago.”  The students were soft-spoken and reticent about discussing an event that must have seemed to them like ancient history.  Briggs engaged them by relating what happened to things students were familiar with, such as recent protests over abortion and gun control, the death of Kobe Bryant, and contemporary TV programs. I mentioned that Gary was one of the few cities that avoided rioting following the assassination of Martin Luther King and that I cast my first vote in 1964 for Lyndon Johnson because he promised “no wider war.”  

Because students seemed unfamiliar with Mailer, I mentioned that beginning with a 1960 Esquire article on John Kennedy, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” the novelist began to concentrate on what became known as “New Journalism” that made no pretense of objectivity and that his account of the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, “The Armies of the Night” was an instant classic.  I stifled a desire to read my favorite paragraph from “Armies” describing what he (and I, marching with fellow Marylanders Ray Smock, Pete Daniel, and Sam Merrill) witnessed on that memorable day:

    The trumpet sounded again. It was calling the troops. "Come here," it called from the steps of Lincoln Memorial over the two furlongs of the long reflecting pool, out to the swell of the hill at the base of Washington Monument, "come here, come here. come here. The rally is on!" And from the north and the east, from the direction of the White House and the Smithsonian and the Capitol, from Union Station and the Department of Justice the troops were coming in, the volunteers were answering the call. They came walking up in all sizes, a citizens' army not ranked yet by height, an army of both sexes in numbers almost equal, and of all ages, although most were young. Some were well-dressed, some were poor, many were conventional in appearance, as many were not. The hippies were there in great number, perambulating down the hill, many dressed like the legions of Sgt. Pepper's Band, some were gotten up like Arab sheiks, or in Park Avenue doormen's greatcoats, others like Rogers and Clark of the West, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone in buckskin, some had grown moustaches to look like Have Gun, Will Travel-Paladin's surrogate was here!-and wild Indians with feathers, a hippie gotten up like Batman, another like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man-his face wrapped in a turban of bandages and he wore a black satin top hat. A host of these troops wore capes, beat-up khaki capes, slept on, used as blankets, towels, improvised duffel bags; or fine capes, orange linings, or luminous rose linings, the edges ragged, near a tatter, the threads ready to feather, but a musketeer's hat on their head. One hippie may have been dressed like Charlie Chaplin; Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields could have come to the ball; there were Martians and Moon-men and a knight unhorsed who stalked about in the weight of real armor. There were to be seen a hundred soldiers in Confederate gray, and maybe there were two or three hundred hippies in officer's coats of Union dark-blue. They had picked up their costumes where they could, in sur- plus stores, and Blow-your-mind shops, Digger free emporiums, and psychedelic caches of Hindu junk. There were soldiers in Foreign Legion uniforms, and tropical bush jackets, San Quentin and Chino, California striped shirt and pants, British copies of Eisenhower jackets, hippies dressed like Turkish shepherds and Roman senators, gurus, and samurai in dirty smocks. They were close to being assembled from all the intersections between history and the comic books, between legend and television, the Biblical archetypes and the movies. The sight of these troops, this army with a thousand costumes, fulfilled to the hilt our General's oldest idea of war which is that every man should dress as he pleases if he is going into battle, for that is his right, and variety never hurts the zest of the hardiest workers in every battalion. 

Switching to Glide

Everybody gets the no-no
Hear it ringing in their ears
Lots of ways that you can go GO!
Look around NO disappears 

         “The Beat Goes On/Switching to Glide,” The Kings

Pulling into an IUN parking lot, I heard the 1980 double-A-side hit “The Beat Goes On/Switching to Glide,” for the first time in a long while.  Of course, I stayed in the car for its entirety, singing along. It’s pure rock and roll, with perhaps a philosophical message about keeping on keeping on that seemed appropriate as I stared my 76th birthday in the face.  After bowling two above-average games at Hobart Lanes, a hip muscle began hurting, but I foolishly toughed out the third, which we would have lost even had I rolled a 200.  I am paying the price.  Yet, as the song says, this geezer can go-go.  Here’s hoping I’m ready to go next Thursday, as teammate Dick Maloney is on the DL, perhaps permanently, with macular degeneration.

On a birthday card signed by the Michigan Lanes, Phil called me “Daddio” (in person it’s usually Pop or Poppa, like in the movie “Breaking Away”) Miranda claimed she couldn’t imagine life without me, and Tori addressing me as J-bo, referred to me as “the light” (hopefully not dimming). Toni made steak with all the trimmings as Dave’s family came over.

On Facebook came birthday greetings from many sources, including high school classmate Suzy Hummel Slack, whom I hadn’t heard from in years.  Conservative Phil Arnold posted an image of Trump saying “Happy Birthday, Jimbo,” causing good liberal LeeLee Minehart Devenney to retort that her mom taught her that if she couldn’t say anything nice, to say nothing at all.  Arnold then sent one of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi with the message, “Like this one better?” causing Barbara Ricketts to write, “Gag.”  More uplifting was a note from anti-death penalty advocate Bill Pelke, who wrote: “Help me in 2018 to continue to say to the World that the answer is love and compassion for all of Humanity.”  On Suzy Slack’s Facebook site I found this article by Martin Gould about Marjory Stoneman Douglas:

      If you've been wondering why so many students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have become such effective political activists, so quickly, it's probably because they got it directly from their school's namesake, who made political activism her calling right up until the day she died at the age of 108. Her father owned the Miami Herald and she became a reporter there, way back in 1912. She fought for women’s suffrage, joined the Red Cross to take care of wounded soldiers in World War I, and then refugees in Paris after the Great War ended. But her greatest works came much later. In 1947, she wrote the groundbreaking book, River of Grass, the story of the Florida Everglades. In it she explained how the Everglades functioned and its vital importance to our entire ecological system. She was the primary activist who rose up to protect the Everglades from destruction. She fought Big Sugar on dumping toxic waste water into the Everglades. She fought the Army Corps of Engineers to block the straightening of the Kissimmee River, explaining how the wandering, winding river filtered water on its journey from Central Florida to the Everglades. The "ditch," as she called it, eliminated that filtering system and turned the Everglades into a toilet of sorts. 

She fought the South Florida Water Management District when they allowed water levels in the Everglades to rise dangerously high, killing off the native deer population and other species of wildlife. She was a fighter and an activist for protecting things valuable to our planet and its inhabitants. 

        She would be proud of the students who are now standing up to fight for a cause in which they deeply believe. She would have been standing right with them, demanding action and action now. She would have carried those kids on her back to Tallahassee and Washington, DC to make sure those in power use that power for the greater good. It was in her own DNA, now transferred to these courageous students.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Former neighbor and Post-Trib editor Dean Bottorff posted a 40-year-old photo, along with this note: “Another picture from the far, far away and long, long ago file. Who says the internet can't haunt you for the rest of your life! Not sure who these people are but this looks a lot like James Lane and some hippie girl.”

 Jimbo and Toni, circa 1978 by Dean Bottorff

Environmentalist Lee Botts celebrated her 90th birthday.  Switching to glide, she recently moved from her home in Miller (above) to an assisted living facility in Illinois near her daughter.  She told Post-Tribune reporter Amy Lavalley that one of her proudest accomplishments was helping to establish Dunes Learning Center on National Lakeshore property in Miller, which enabled many Gary school children to explore the dunes for the first time.  As soon as the weather warmed up, she vowed to organize a dunes trip for the seniors at her new home. 

Awaiting me at the Archives was this email from Flemming Just:

Dear Professor Lane,

  Perhaps this mail will reach you as a bit of surprise, but I want to let you know that I’ve just read your book about Jacob A. Riis. It is indeed a well-researched and well-written analysis and narrative about Riis, and I fully agree with your characterizations.

  I share your former interest in the social reformer. I’m director of Museum of South West Jutland, which also encompasses wonderful Ribe, the hometown of Riis. In his childhood home we are now about to establish a Jacob A. Riis Museum. It will not be a memorial museum – the less so as we only have very few artefacts. Instead we will focus on his achievements and legacy. Thus, the ground floor will have the theme: How the Other Half Lives, whereas the first floor will concentrate on the theme: The Making of an American with focus on (national) identity and his background in small town Ribe.

  The museum will be oriented towards an international audience and will open June 2019. We have received funds for restauration of the old and adjacent buildings and to establish an exciting museum.  Through the years I have done my own research on Riis and am about to write a book about him. And this brings me back to your book. A lot has been written about Riis, however, your book rates among the best two.

  If you should ever want to go to Europe, I would be happy to welcome you in Ribe.

Jacob A. Riis

I thanked Flemming Just for the nice note and told him visiting Ribe, Denmark was on my bucket list.  Riis was a true environmentalist, both in terms of what molds a person’s character and the vital importance of respecting nature.  He helped start the Boy Scouts and the Fresh Air Fund, which provided camping vacations for slum children.  This 1975 Kirkus Review ably summarized “Jacob A. Riis and the American City” although Riis believed immigrants could be proud both to be an American and of their native roots and culture:

An earnest, straightforward biography of Jacob Riis and his lifelong efforts to focus attention on the plight of urban slum dwellers. Riis, a Danish immigrant who spent several years living from hand to mouth and working at a series of manual jobs, became fascinated and appalled by New York's Lower East Side tenements when he became a police reporter for the Herald working out of Mulberry Street. In 1890 he published How The Other Half Lives, a stark and moving account of the overcrowded, unsanitary and rat-infested tenements where babies died of malnutrition and exposure. A muckraker before the word was coined, Riis was convinced that environment, not innate vice, caused urban crime and depravity. Yet he was a product of his age, sharing the prejudices of reformers and Progressives of the day. Lane admires him but recognizes his ""partial acceptance of racial stereotypes"" -- he slandered the Chinese in particular -- and his middle-class burgher values which stressed hard work and self-help. ("As to the man who will not work, let him starve.") As portrayed by Lane, Riis was a contentious, effusive but compassionate man who mixed sentimentality and outrage in about equal portions.

Siobhan Neela-Stock, a Northwestern journalism professor, wants me to provide background information for a documentary about the pollution crisis in East Chicago at the former West Calumet Housing Complex.  I offered to talk about the industrialization of the Calumet Region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and have written about Local 1010 rank and file unionists at Inland Steel and Latino steelworkers who settled in Indiana Harbor.  I gave Siobhan the name of Whiting historian John Hmurovic; too bad Region historians Archibald McKinlay and Lance Trusty, both recently died.

Jacqueline Russell visited the Archives hoping to find in our Post-Tribune collection an obit of her mother, who died in the early 1970s when Jacqueline was 10 or 11.  She learned about the Archives from volunteer Maurice Yancy, a frequent bus companion.  The first day she fruitlessly searched for several hours; she struck pay dirt on day two and broke down in tears.

With Samantha Gauer on camera I interviewed IUN grad Wayne Carpenter, who between 1965 and 1974 completed a BA degree while working as a U.S. Steel supervisor.  He witnessed the construction of Moraine Student Union and Raintree Hall and had classes in temporary facilities that he described as frigid in winter.  Majoring in Theater and Communication, Carpenter recalled charismatic Speech teacher Lee Martin and memorable Theater professors Colin Black and Bob Foor.  The latter also provided valuable counsel as his adviser.  Learning set design paid dividends later when he built a house and appearing on stage in several productions buttressed his confidence as a leader in the mill.  In IUN’s Gary Main cafeteria, he and his friends played bridge for a quarter of a penny a point.  They didn’t know the finer points of bidding and would do things considered cheating - for instance, say one Club meaning one thing and “a” Club signifying something else.  One of the area’s best duplicate bridge players, Carpenter directs games in Portage and Michigan City.

For “Education the Calumet Region: A History of Indiana University Northwest,”  I interviewed Bob Foor, who became Dean of Students on condition that administrators hire a full-time Theater department replacement.  He recalled:

  Colin Black, who had worked for me, had gone off to the University of Texas to get an MFA.  He was looking for a job.  So he moved into my slot.  A year later he directed Marat/Sade.  It was the first nudity we had in the theater.  There was no negative reaction as far as I know.

Around this time, Ken Schoon joined the IUN chorus and had a small role in the musical Kiss me Kate after an actor suddenly quit.  He recalled:

     I had a 45-second solo, my brief moment in the spotlight.  My sophomore year I did lighting and other backstage duties under Bob Foor, a fun person.  My social life was tied to the theater.  There were Sunday dinners at professors’ homes and cast parties.  Sally and Colin Black were very active.  Some dress rehearsals conflicted with my classes, and grades suffered a bit.  Lee Martin was an exceptionally able Speech teacher who emphasized that it was up to the speaker, not the listener, to make sure he’s understood.  If there is miscommunication, the speaker needs to change the vocabulary or do whatever necessary so the listener understands.  That advice helped me tremendously.  Unfortunately, some professors didn’t practice it.

Unable to find Oscar-nominated “Lady Bird,” “The Post,” or “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” at local theaters, I settled on Guilermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” a science fiction tale about a lonely maid bonding with a sentient amphibious creature held captive at a top-secret government facility.  What really shined were performances by Octavia Spencer and Richard Jenkins (both Academy Award nominees).  Michael Shannon, agent Van Alden in Broadway Empire, was the heavy, Strictland, in ways that made you want to both cringe and laugh. A couple inept Russian agents provided comic relief, so I was entertained despite the rather pedestrian plot and ambiguous and implausible denouement.

We dined at Captain’s House in Miller prior to bridge at Dick and Cheryl Hagelberg’s.  As always, owner-chef Angela McCrovitz provided a delicious and bountiful feast.   I started with delightful pastry appetizers and salad with croutons that literally melted in your mouth, barely put a dent in my meatloaf entry, and ended by treating my palette to berry-flavored gelato.  Leftovers fed both Toni and me the following day with enough left for lunch.  I ran into Ruth Needleman, still recovering from a nasty spill but present at Friday’s Gary Airport demonstration against the deportation of undocumented workers.  She groused that the press misrepresented the crowd size.

 Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson; NWI Time photo by Marc Chase

scene from "The Wiz" at IUN

Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson’s State of the City address at the Genesis Center touted IUN’s new Arts and Sciences Building. That evening she was in its theater to attend a production of “The Wiz.”   Sunday she was at the Aquatorium for the premiere of “Gary, Indiana,” an upbeat, 90-minute documentary.  Filmmaker Brandon Bowens, a Gary West Side grad, said he was tired of his city being portrayed simply as a collection of abandoned buildings.  The opening scene showed the Aquatorium, with its statue of Octave Chanute and model of a plane flown by Tuskegee Airmen. 

Rozelle Hammonds of Esquire Clothing Store

Bowens interviewed Rozelle Hammonds on camera, who for over 70 years worked at Esquire Men’s Store at 1536 Broadway, first as a stock boy and eventually as its owner.  In Gary’s heyday, shoppers from as far away as Michigan City and South Bend would patronize the store.  Bowens himself was wearing a hat from Esquire, which went out of business a year ago when Hammonds retired. The film contained clips from the Calumet Regional Archives of Village Shopping Center 60 years ago when crowds flocked to its many fashionable store, including Montgomery Ward and JC Penney.  I was pleased to see both my name and Steve McShane’s in the credits.

Brandon Bowers with Host Greg Reising and in director's chair

Aquarium audience; David Hess and Mayor Freeman-Wilson in back row, Jimbo in front, left, near curtain

Host Greg Reising had promised some “pretty good cookies and pretty bad punch,” so I partook of the former but not the latter.  Gary librarian David Hess invited me to the newly re-opened Indiana Room downtown, and George Rogge informed me of an upcoming event at the Nelson Algren Museum.  I complemented Judy Ayers on her latest Ayers Realty Newsletter column about snatching an abandoned car seat near someone’s trash when a little girl. When Phil was young, he loved to rummage through others’ garbage and once found Christmas tree ornaments and a Ku Klux Klan hood and pin, which I foolishly insisted he throw away rather than save for the Archives.  When we took the boys to the circus at Chicago Stadium, Phil loved seeing all the trash by the neighborhood street curbs.

Driving through Marquette Park and past soon-to-be-closed Wirt/Emerson High School, I thought of “My Name Is Gary” (2014), by French filmmakers Blandine Huk and Frederic Cousseau, which used multiple images of Lake Michigan beach scenes and trains passing through the city to and from the mill.  It struck me that, having been denied access to Miller beaches until the mid-1960s, African Americans, by and large, don’t have as close a kinship with the lake as whites.  Even those black residents in the audience who moved to Miller, in all likelihood, were motivated by more important factors than a desire to be near the lake. Both films stressed, as did Greg Reising in his introduction, that Mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher’s election in 1967 was a pivotal event the city’s history, and both portrayed Hatcher in a positive light.  Bowens included a wonderful scene of historian Dolly Millender speaking at a Gary Historical and Cultural Society event and emphasizing that Hatcher did nothing to drive away whites.  Vernon Smith explained how Gary became landlocked to the south when racist Indiana legislators allowed the town of Merrillville to incorporate despite the existence of a buffer zone law.