"Bubbie"

“Once you’re gone you can never come back

When you’re out of the blue and into the black”

         Neil Young, “My My, Hey Hey”

Ann “Bubbie” Zucker passed away at age 99.  She was born at the dawn of the modern era, January 1, 1920, in Geisin, Russia. She and her parents, Gertrude and Chaim Stookal, left their native country shortly after the Bolsheviks came to power, then made their way to Chicago.  Ann’s family history reminded me of Gary attorney Paul Glaser, the son of impoverished Jews who came to America after participating in a failed 1905 uprising against Czar Nicholas II.  She and three siblings grew up in the Windy City, and Ann became a secretary after high school.  In 1953 she married Dr. Edward Zucker and served as his office manager. Her obituary stated: “She was a devoted mother to her loving children Victor (Eva), Eric (Haengmi) and Amy (Tim) as well as her four grandchildren Jessica, Andrew, Melissa, and Zoe.”  Former neighbor Mona Stern recalled the time long ago “when we lived next door to Ann and Ed and our kids played together.”

Coming across Ann Zucker’s obit, I found myself wondering how she got the nickname “Bubbie.”  On the same page was an “In Loving Memory” announcement for Christopher “Cricker” Smith of Valparaiso on the fourth anniversary of his death at age 28.  His dad wrote: “You told me that your biggest fear was that people would forget you after you were gone.  We will not let that happen!”  

When my great-aunt Ida Frace Gordon lived with my family, she subscribed to her hometown paper, the Easton Express, for the express purpose of checking the obits for any mention of past friends and acquaintances. My interest is more from a historic perspective, but I get a kick out of coming across colorful nicknames and anecdotes among the solemn words and list of loved ones.  My centennial history of Gary contains a section titled “Ides of March 2003” where I mentioned notices for two St. Timothy’s Church mainstays, Leona Hill and Ophelia Marsh Davis, as well as Lucille “Sweet” Ford-Burnell, a soprano in the Jerusalem Baptist Church choir.  I noted: 

 The write-ups in the Post-Tribune included nicknames (often “papa” or “momma”) and special talents (poet, southern cooking, fisherman) but few clues about the cause of death beyond the ubiquitous “after a brief illness.”  One was left to speculate over the passing of 19-year-old West Side grad Angela Lorraine Windom-Robinson, 27-year-old Wallace grad Rodney L. Pace, Jr., and 30-year-old Wirt grad Terrance “Sean” Ligé.

Timemagazine referred to actress Tessa Thompson as “a queer woman of color”who’d been in tentpole films, an expression unfamiliar to me.  I have since learned that the phrase describes movies (in Thompson’s case, as Valkyrie in Marvel’s “Avenger” series) that have as an ancillary purpose the advertising of toys, games, and other products sold by the franchise.  

In the Post-Tribune an anonymous Quickly submission used the phrase “Crimea River”(i.e., “cry me a river”)about Russian Maria Butina, imprisoned for conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent. In addition to being a song by Justin Timberlake, the expression “cry me a river,”according to Urban Dictionary, is a sarcastic reference to someone who is being a drama queen.  Since many call in Quickly comments, one wonders if the author wanted it printed as “Crimea River” or the Quickly editor was being clever.

 Jim and Marcia Carson

"Marsha" from Pillow Drawings by Larry Kaufman

At bridge I complimented Marcia Carson on her Art in Focus talk about paintings of mothers and children and mentioned one piece that reminded me of drawings by Larry Kaufman, a photo-realist whom Toni studied under at IUN and a close friend during the 1970s.  It turned out that Marcia had taken classes with Kaufman at Bloomington and again while completing a master’s degree at IUN.  Marcia worked on a mural painted on the side of Jenny’s Café next door to where the Fine Arts department was then housed.  One night a dog got into the building and took a leak on a drawing Toni had done of industrial pipes, confirming, Larry quipped, that it was a realistic rendering.

A man bridge buddy Helen Boothe knew well attempted to commit suicide by drinking anti-freeze.  Ugh!   Helen noted that while there had been times when she felt melancholy, she had difficulty understanding depression. Her partner Dottie Hart and I felt the same way.  No matter how down in the dumps, there’s never been a time when I couldn’t think of something to live for.  I told Helen and Dottie that when my dad dropped dead at age 50 from a sudden heart attack, I kept my grief bottled up inside until a few months later, when Toni placed a photo of Vic in a prominent place.  Gradually I began to recall happy memories instead of focusing on regrets, like when I was at the University of Maryland and Vic called from the Baltimore airport, saying that he had a two-hour layover and wondered if I wanted to join him.  I begged off, saying I was busy, and never saw him again. 

Helen brought up that her husband suffered from Alzheimer’s the last 14 years of his life, so I mentioned that Midge’s assisted living facility in California brought patients from the euphemistically named “memory care” ward to Friday afternoon entertainment.  Many mouthed the lyrics of old standards that the piano player was singing.  Helen recollected that she and her husband were at a church service, and he knew the words to the hymns, even the second, less familiar stanzas.  Former Chicago Bears football player Ted Karras flowered after moving to a Memory Care facility.  “He’s even singing again,”wife Anna told me. Helen knew Ted’s sister Helene, whom I interviewed for a Traces article about brother Alex Karras.

Ted Karras honored at Bears game; below Charlie Halberstadt

I partnered with best friend Charlie Halberstadt both at the Chesterton game and one next day at Banta Center in Valpo, which Charlie directs. He guarantees that nobody sits out, so I’d have been paired with someone else had there not been an even number of participants.  In both games we finished above 50% and earned master points. I wish I could have bid or played a couple hands differently, but neither hurt us all that much.

 Viceroy Louis Mountbatten

Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance” has this acerbic comment on how the 1947 partition of India, which Mahatma Gandhi vociferously opposed, impacted the family fortunes of main character Maneck Kohlah:

   Maneck’s family had once been extremely wealthy.  Fields of grain, orchards of apple and peach, a lucrative contract to supply provisions to cantonments along the frontier – all this was among the inheritance of Farokh Kohlah, and he tended it well, making it increase and multiply for the wife he was to marry and the son who would be born.

   But long before that eagerly awaited birth, there was another, gorier parturition, when two nations incarnated out of one.  A foreigner (Viceroy Louis Mountbatten) drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth.  And the orchards, fields, factories, businesses, all on the wrong side of that line, vanished with a wave of the pale conjuror’s wand.

Dean Bottorff in Loogootee, Indiana

Former Maple Place neighbor Dean Bottorff posted a photo Jonell took of him and his motorcycle in Loogootee, Indiana.  When I suggested they drop by, he replied:

We thought about visiting you but we were on a somewhat tight schedule with some 3,000 miles to cover in eight days. Our goal in Indiana was Clark County to visit the monument of John Henry Bottorff who was an Ensign in Capt. Michael Wolf's Company of the Berks County Pennsylvania Militia in the Revolutionary War ... the namesake of all Bottorffs after having changed his name from Johannes Heinrich Batdorf ... perhaps because of anti-German sentiment during the Revolution. Clark County was heavily populated with Bottorffs who were among the first settlers there in the very early 1800s.  Rich Bottorff is now very fond of this quote [from Baird’s history of Clark County]: “It is seldom indeed that a Bottorff is found who is not well-to-do and the name has become synonymous with thrift and industry. Originating in Germany representatives of this family became identified with Indiana at an early day.”

Granddaughter Becca asked for advice for a school project on the subject of how the Cold War affected American popular music during the 1980s.  I suggested analyzing Jackson Browne’s 1986 album “Lives in the Balance,” which during a time when the Ronald Reagan administration was aiding murderous Contra counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua against the socialist Sandinistas warned against the country “drifting toward war” in order to defend business interests.  One line charged that the government was using Cold war rhetoric to justify supporting groups that kill their own people and employing propaganda to sell the American people wars the same way as advertisers sell us clothes and cars. Fortunately, memories of the Vietnam fiasco were still vivid, putting a damper on Reagan’s options.  At a time when National Security Council director for political-military affairs Oliver North and other rightwing operatives were breaking the law to secretly provide weapons to the Contras, Jackson Browne concluded “Lives in the Balance” with these words:

I want to know who the men in the shadows are

I want to hear somebody asking them why

They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are

But they're never the ones to fight or to die

And there are lives in the balance

There are people under fire

There are children at the cannons

And there is blood on the wire

Mueller Report

“Attorney General WilliamBarr is not fazed by the demands of Congress. An aspiring autocrat like Trump, a would-be King of America, has at last found a man who understands his need for protection.” Ray Smock

 Robert Mueller and William Barr

After a 22-month investigation and 27 days during which Attorney General William Barr has withheld the report from the public and Congress in order to redact material he deems appropriate, the public finally got a look at the Mueller Report.  Trump has already declared “total exoneration” and Barr weeks ago issued a four-page brief instead of Mueller’s summary putting the best possible spin on things embarrassing to the President.  The primary Republican arguments seem to be that if Trump did things openly, such as pressuring officials to resign, or suggested actions that people under him ignored, these should not be considered collusion or obstruction of justice.  We shall see.

Here is an excerpt from Ray Smock’s essay, “The Barr Blunder.  Or is it a pattern?”:

   Who is William Barr and how has he managed so far to stonewall the entire federal government in his protection of the president? He served for about 18 months as George H. W. Bush’s attorney general back in 1991-92. He is a staunch conservative Republican with the typical views of the Constitution that come from places like the Federalist Society, where the “original intent” of the Founders should determine our views of the Constitution.

    Barr supported Trump’s ban on Muslims entering the country, the one the courts threw out. He claims the Founders didn’t think abortion was a good idea, even though they never wrote or spoke about the issue. Beware of people who tell you what the Founders said and thought unless you can find documentary evidence. Barr says Roe v. Wade is settled law and he was not going to challenge it. But given his views on abortion, why wouldn’t he find an opportunity to open this again, especially if President Trump wants this as a campaign issue in 2020?

    In his earlier stint as AG, Barr took a hard line on criminals and believed the United States, the nation with more people incarcerated than any other, should lock up even more criminals to deter crime. We have seen in subsequent decades the bitter fruit of his position with the massive expansion of incarceration and the rise of a private, for-profit jail system that depends on a steady stream of inmates to make it profitable. Whether we like it or not, this is the prevailing attitude of the Republican Party and most Republican senators, and even some Democrats seem unwilling to buck Barr’s hard-liner positions and his narrow view of constitutional law.

                                          IUN student Iris Contreras and Helen Boothe

above, bridge exhibit at IUN; below, Joe Chin bridge lesson

After a run of bad luck, Helen Boothe and I finished strong in duplicate bridge to finish slightly above average (53 percent).  She mentioned a clip on MSNBC where a Parisian reporter asked Pete Buttigieg a question about the Notre dame cathedral fire, and he answered in fluent French.  We bid and made a small slam, as, holding a Diamond singleton, I got the King of Diamonds to fall on my third lead from the board, making my Queen good.  Against a top couple I held 6 Clubs and 6 Hearts and was doubled in five Clubs.  I made an overtrick for top board. Googling Helen’s name, I came across these photos and an article entitled “Sharing bridge and Oral History” in the Unit 154 “Recap Sheet” edited by Kim Grant in Fort Wayne:

    Bridge players and an IU Northwest Oral Indiana History class have been paired together during this fall semester to share bridge experiences and Northwest Indiana days of yore in a weekly correspondence. The students’ journals will be filed in the IU Northwest Calumet Regional Archives as part of the bridge collection. Dr. James Lane is spearheading this unique plan to involve university students in the bridge experience and bridge players to become more familiar with Indiana’s past.  Joe Chin has spoken to the IU oral history students and has given them a beginning lesson about bridge. Joe’s lessons are sprinkled with humor and always have the participants enjoying his thoughtful and worthwhile presentations. We hope that some students will be encouraged to develop an interest in this intriguing game. We have seen several IU students coming to our games — shadowing their assigned partners from the bridge community.

In “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” Saidiya Hartman used the expression “bull dagger” to describe black butch lesbians.  From Sasha Goldberg’s paper at the Oral History Association conference in Montreal last October I learned that it was Southern slang for what some crudely call bull dikes.  Describing the “beautiful anarchy” on the corner of Seventh and Lombard in Philadelphia, where W.E.B. DuBois did field work for “The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study” (1899), Hartman wrote:

 Slick, fresh-mouthed boys, comely, buxom girls, policy runners, ne’er-do-wells, petty gangsters, domestics, longshoremen, and whores – the young and the striving, the old and the dissipated – gathered. The air was thick with laughter, boasts of conquest, lies bigger than the men who told them.  Idlers loud-talked one another in an orchestrated battle of words.  Pimps crooned, “Hey girl, send it on” to each and every woman under thirty who strolled by. Bull daggers undressed the pretty ones with a glance. . . .  Free association was the only rule and promiscuous social life its defining character. Newcomers refreshed the crowd; strangers became intimates.

 Diana Chen-lin (left) promoted to full professor, 2017

Leaving IUN’s library, I ran into Diana Chen-lin, attending a luncheon honoring faculty whose years of service were multiples of five, in her case 25 years – hard to believe.  Next year will mark 50 years I’ve been associated with the university. I told Diana that if I’m not invited, being officially retired, I plan to come anyway. Coincidentally, Diana had sent me this email earlier in the day:

 Thanks for the latest issue of Steel Shavings! I am going through it slowly and savoring the details about people I know and about the region. It was good to see Toni's picture--she looks really good! And it was good to see Ron Cohen mentioned. I am on a page where you were discussing Tiger Woods' second place finish in the Valspar Championship last year, which seemed to promise Woods would be making a bigger comeback, which he just did. I also found your quote on David Letterman very interesting, having watched Letterman on and off for years. I will continue slowly through the journal and enjoy the reading.

 Kerns at Lake Junaluska, July 10, 2016

Paul Kern, back in Florida after a cross-country drive to see son Colin in California, sent a much longer response; here are highlights:

  I enjoy the references to students from the early days: Jim Reha, Al Renslow, George McGuan, Fred McColly, Dan Simon.  They’re old men now.  I was sorry to see that Tom Eaton died. I didn't know him, but saw him often at Gary high school basketball games in the 70s. He stood out because he never took off his coat, no matter how hot it was in the gym. Lance Trusty was another person I did not get to know, but wish I had.  Every once in a while an event shakes me to the core. Phil turning fifty is one of those events

  McKinney Springs, where your friend Aaron Davis camped on his bicycle trip, is in the Big Bend National Park, our favorite Park. We went there twice and encountered bicyclers both times. Sanderson, where I lived for a few years (first through third grades), is nearby. It was a railroad town and when the Southern Pacific pulled the plug it no longer had any reason to be. Only a few railroad retirees are left. No Country for Old Men was filmed there, but I never watched it because I heard it was very violent. I did read Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.

  I was glad to read that the Gary Public Library is reopening and sad to hear that Wirt-Emerson is closing. Is Westside the only public high school left in Gary? The gutting of public schooling in America is sickening to watch.

  Allow me to come to the defense of Maximilien Robespierre, not the “architect” of the Terror but, as the spokesman of the Committee of Public Safety in the Convention, it did fall to him to defend the policy, something he did very ably. In the 1950s, inspired by NATO, some American historians, most notably R.R. Palmer, rejected the contrast between the “good” moderate American Revolution and the “bad” radical French Revolution and argued that there had been an age of “Atlantic Revolutions” that had established modern western political values. He called Robespierre one of the great democratic prophets of the eighteenth century, pointing to his belief in equality, including for the slaves in the French West Indies (whom the French Revolution emancipated in contrast to you know who), his belief that democracy required some degree of economic equality that anticipated the modern welfare state, and his suspicion of representative democracy, insisting that elected officials had to be held strictly accountable to the people through frequent elections, recalls, etc. Without quite approving of the policy of Terror, Palmer and others pointed to the relatively small number of deaths and cautioned against exaggerating its violence.

  Vic Bubas may have started Duke's basketball greatness, but more important to the ACC was Everett Case who coached NC State from 1946 into the 60s. Case had coached the Frankfort Hotdogs to four Indiana state championships in the 20s and 30s before he went to NC State. He brought Indiana players to NC State, forcing arch rival North Carolina to hire Frank McGuire from New York and Duke to hire Vic Bubas (one of the Indiana basketball players Case had recruited to NC State) to keep pace.

  I'll have to warn Colin about the pick pockets in Barcelona. He and his girlfriend Kelly are going there for a conference in July. Like you, Colin has become quite the international scholar, having attended conferences in Ireland and Australia the last two years. It sounds like you and Dave had a great trip to Finland.  Reading in “Air” Keller's journal that she has a collection of manga reminds me that Chris had a large collection of manga also. When he graduated from Ohio State, he donated them to the library. They cataloged them as the “Chris Kern Collection.”

  You mention the specter of an unaffiliated historian at the OHA meeting and use the words ominous and tragic to describe the tight academic job market. Exactly. Chris is on a treadmill of one-year gigs and is beginning to wonder if he will have to pursue some other career path. No one wants someone in pre-modern Japanese in an atmosphere in which everyone is paranoid about enrollment. He starts a three-year non tenure track appointment at Auburn in the fall and if nothing pans out by that time it could be his last hurrah.

  There was this period of time during the 1970s when the old sexual morality embodied in the concept of moral turpitude had died but the new morality embodied in concepts of sexual harassment had not been born. You attempt to exonerate faculty who married students by saying that the students took the initiative but by today's standards the relationships would have been highly suspect.

Here is part of my reply: “Thanks so much for the comments about Steel Shavings.  It was great reading names I had not thought about in many years, like student Phil Oretsky and English professor Richard Hull.  I’m always interested in how your sons are doing.  I exchanged emails with Chris after the student wrote about manga. Thanks for telling me about North Carolina State coach Everett Case; I’ll have to learn more about him.  Interesting take on Robespierre; I planned to audit Jonathyne Briggs’ course on the French Revolution but he taught it on line, an unfortunate trend in higher education. Did I write about running into our old colleague Mark Sheldon on campus, dressed nattily as always?  He poked fun of my winter coat (“Are you going hunting?”he said); I replied, “Are you wearing a hat because you’ve gone bald?”  He took it off and was indeed bald.  Later I worried needlessly that he had cancer.

Because of bowling, I missed Billy Foster’s Senior College talk on Big Band vocalists and the film noir event at Valpo U that Peter Aglinskas hosts.  He’s showing “Nightfall” (1957), which co-stars the still lovely Ann Bancroft as a model whose life is in jeopardy after she gives someone wanted by hit men her address. According to reviews, “Nightfall” featured innovative work by cinematographer Burnett Guffey and the skillful use of flashbacks by director Jacques Torneur.  The Engineers won just one game but got free beers because we all struck during the fifth frame; I didn’t even know about that since it’s never happened to us before. Terry Kegebein, a Steel Shavingsrecipient last week, asked how I knew Game Weekend host Jef Halberstadt.  They worked together at Bethlehem Steel (now ArcelorMittal). He took my summer Sixties class 40 years ago and invited me.  I’ve been a regular ever since.

 art by Casey King; below, "Norman the Animal"

IUN student Casey King dropped by to pick up Steel Shavings, which includes excerpts from his journal about being an artist and and examples of his work.  When I mentioned the upcoming Dave Davies concert in Hobart, he said his work was on display right next to the Art Theater at Green Door Books (below).  I dropped by there on the way to bowling and was impressed with the variety and cleverness of Casey’s work. The used books all sell for a dollar, and I hope to drop in before the concert with Josh and Alissa. The owner is an IVY Tech professor.

 Bogazici University overlooking Bosporus

Former IUN Chemistry professor Atilla Tuncay joined Mike Olszanski and me for lunch at Little Redhawk Café.  During the 1960s Tuncay received a degree from Roberts College in Istanbul, renamed Bogazici (Bosporus) University in 1971.  I stayed on its campus 19 years ago while attending an International Oral History Association conference.  Each morning I’d walk down a steep incline, buy coffee at a MacDonald’s, and, seated on a bench, look out on the Bosporus Strait.  When a student, Tuncay said, he’d often see Soviet ships passing by from the Black Sea on their way to the Mediterranean.  Every so often a sailor seeking asylum would jump overboard and attempt to swim to shore.  At its narrowest point the body of water was just a few hundred feet wide.

Jeopardy champ James Holzhauer, a sports gambler, won a one-day record $131,131, breaking his own former total. Having accumulated more than $71,000 prior to Final Jeopardy, he could wager $60,000 without fear of being dethroned after nine days.

Hard Candy

“Hey farmer farmer

Put away that D.D.T. now

Give me spots on my apples

But leave the birds and the bees.”

         Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970)

I was listening to the Counting Crows CD “Hard Candy” and after a minute’s silence at the end on came a hidden track, “Big Yellow Taxi,” a Joni Mitchell cover with Vanessa Carlton on backing vocals. The most famous line is, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Helping Adam Duritz out on other tracks were Ryan Adams, Matthew Sweet, and Cheryl Crowe.  In the lyrics to “Hard Candy” someone is dreaming of better days and lost loved ones who fade just out of sight and then in the morning, “it’s just the same hard candy you’re remembering again.”

I gave the new edition of “Gary: A Pictorial History” to Chancellor Bill Lowe; we used a photo of him peering through a telescope on campus during the solar eclipse of 21 August 2017.  Spotting one of the IUN Lady Redhawks celebrating a second straight AII (Association of Independent Institutions) championship on 27 February 2011, Lowe, a frequent spectator at university basketball games, exclaimed, “I’d have been in that one also if it hadn’t been cropped.”  He inquired about Ron Cohen acquiring the William A. Wirt bust, I invited him to come see it at the Archives. Nearby, in the library/conference hallway was a compelling glass case exhibit Steve McShane put together on IUN’s predecessor, Gary College. 

Kyle Telechan posted photos from last weekend’s second annual Mexican Independence Day parade in Hammond, hosted by the HUGS Cultural Committee and coordinated by Rosa Maria Rodgriguez. Ron Cohen and I used a Times photo by Jonathan Miano of Rodriguez outside Gary City Council chambers protesting efforts by GEO to build an immigrant detention center near Gary Airport.  She once worked as a security guard for the School City of East Chicago.  Son Dave knows her and praised her dedication to bettering the community.

Huffington Post reporter David Uberti, a young, confident Detroit native, interviewed me for 90 minutes about housing in Gary, frequently checking his recording device to make sure it was still working.  He had read “Gary’s First Hundred Years” beforehand and seemed knowledgeable about current developments regarding abandoned buildings and community efforts to jumpstart development.  I provided a historic overview of steel mill employment, unionization, the GI Bill, and suburbanization. I showed him pages from the pictorial history about urban gardens and discussed City Hall initiatives, such as the Blight Elimination Program. He’ll meet with Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson and Pastor Curtis Whitaker of Progressive Community Church, who has learned how to make soil healthy and fertile; other urban gardens use raised beds.  I suggested contacting, if possible, former mayor Richard Hatcher and someone from the Latino community, often ignored by national correspondents.

 Karla and Craig Hoskins courthouse ceremony in 2014; Times photo by Jonathan Miano

Couples getting hitched at Crown Point courthouse, once branded a “Marriage Mill,” has become an integral feature of Crown Point Hometown Festival Days.  For a half-century, until a 1952 ordinance forbade clerks from issuing licenses to women who did not reside in Lake County, there was no waiting period, unlike in Illinois, which, beginning in the 1930s, also required blood tests for communicable sexual diseases.  Justices of the Peace charged $2.50 during day, $8 after hours, $10 between midnight and dawn.  Crown Point hosted the nuptials of actors Tom Mix, Rudolph Valentino (Rodolfe Guglielmo), and Ronald Reagan (to first wife Jane Wyman), comedian Red Skelton, and film producer Mike Todd. 

circa 1930

Lake County historian Bruce Woods told the Post-Tribune that the 24/7 operation at one time required a half dozen JPs: “There were certain restrictions, but the clerks did not always follow them.  The male had to be 21 and the female 18, but they could be younger with parental consent.  And they had to be sober, although there was one justice of the peace who had an office on the second floor who said, ‘If they could get up to the second floor, they could get married.’”Wedding parties arrived by the busload, and local jewelers offered a wide variety of rings to those who came unprepared. Florists and tuxedo rental establishments also flourished.  Muhammad Ali got married there during the 1960s. 

In Laredo, Texas, U.S. Border Patrol agent Juan David Ortiz has been arrested  for allegedly murdering four sex workers following the escape of a fifth, who fled to authorities.  District Attorney Isidro Alaniz branded Ortiz a serial killer.  Nicholas Villanueva Jr.’s “The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands” (2017) documented the increase in vigilante murders a century ago, beginning in 1910 when a suspected felon was dragged from jail and burned alive.  The most horrendous incident occurred in 1918 after refugees who’d fled the Mexican Revolution were mistaken for bandits who had recently pillaged Texas ranches. Journal of American History reviewer Tim Bowman wrote:

  A confluence of events caused a drastic decline in the number of ethnic lynchings in Texas via a transference of public suspicions from Mexicans to Germans; the onset of political stability in Mexico; and Texas state legislature investigations into depredations committed against ethnic Mexicans by Texas Rangers.

above, Anne and Michelle

Anne Balay reported: “I spent the weekend having awesome trucker adventures.”  Anne participated in a truck parade across to Macinaw Island.  Michelle Kitchin, whose rig for the excursion was loaded with pineapples picked up in Trenton, New Jersey, wrote “We were the only truck full of women. Haha!”  They also took in the St. Ignace, Michigan, truck show, a three-day event held at the Little Bear East Arena.  

Helen Boothe and I finished third in the Chesterton bridge club championship, earning 1.15 master points each. An aggressive bidder, Helen twice successfully put us in slam where I would have been too cautious. We went down one bidding 2 No-Trump only because she had an Ace-King doubleton and I held a bare Queen-Jack, wasting two honors.  Had either of us held a third Club, we’d have made the contract. Sitting North-South in another key hand against winners John and Karen Fieldhouse, we were bidding Hearts and our opponents Spades.  We went down one at 4 Hearts for minus 50, while all other East-West couples went to 4 Spades and got set. Thus, another low board through no fault of our own. Helen, 87, will soon board a train at Chicago’s Union Station and travel overnight to West Virginia for a family reunion.

 Sara Jane Moore

In 2005, when Martha Stewart was released from Alderson federal prison in West Virginia after serving five months for giving false testimony about an insider stock deal, Helen Boothe’s brother-in-law, James A. Haught, wrote a Charleston Gazettecolumn about previous celebrities incarcerated there. These included radical Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, jailed during the McCarthy witch hunts, Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron, who participated in a 1954 attack on Congress, and pacifist Claire Hanrahan for trespassing at an army school that trained military operatives for Latin American dictators.  Blues singer Billie Holiday landed in Alderson in 1947 for possession of heroin, Mildred “Axis Sally” Gillars for treason, and Charleston native Sarah Jane Moore for firing at President Gerald R. Ford outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. Decorated Vietnam War marine veteran Oliver Sipple grabbed her pistol and deflected the shot.  Haught wrote, “Ford did little to thank the man because reports said he was gay.” Moore, like fellow inmate and would-be presidential assassin Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, escaped from Alderson but was caught and transferred to a more secure facility.

 Buffalo Creek flood damage, 1972

Helen Boothe told me about former West Virginia governor William C. Marland, a progressive Democrat, who became a taxi driver in Chicago after he left office in 1957 and overcame alcohol addiction. While governor, Marland took on coal companies that depleted the state’s natural resources and attempted to implement school desegregation at a time other Southern governors were defying federal mandates.  More popular was three-term Republican governor Arch Moore who in 1990, a year after leaving office, pled guilty to accepting bribes from coal company moguls, including Buffalo Mining Company executives responsible for the 1972 Buffalo Creek tragedy. James Haught wrote:

  The historic flood – caused by rupture of the coal company’s illegal, makeshift, unlicensed, unstable chain of “gob pile” dams – killed 125 Logan countians, injured 1,000 and left 4,000 homeless amid sodden debris.  It destroyed a 15-mile valley, wrecking more than 1,000 homes, 1,000 vehicles, 30 businesses, 10 bridges and miles of roads.  Arch Moore accepted a $1 million settlement as complete payment for the state government’s loss in the disaster, leaving West Virginia taxpayers stuck for up to $13 million in unpaid costs.

Moore served three years in prison in Petersburg, Virginia.

Corey Hagelberg picked up a copy of “Gary: A Pictorial History” and offered to donate the woodcut “We All Share the Roots,” which appears in the third edition, to the Archives.  He was pumped up over a decision by NIPSCO to phase out coal within ten years, something he has been working on in connection with the Prairie Club.