Green Feather

“Rise and rise again until lambs become lions,” Robin Hood

seventeenth-century woodcut

During the 1950s Red Scare a zealous anticommunist on the Indiana textbook commission demanded that public schools purge any books that mentioned Robin Hood.  Reason: the heroic outlaw of English folklore and his merry band robbed the rich to give to the poor and must have been commies.  In reaction, Blas Davis from Gary and four other students, Ed Napier, Bernard Bray, Mary Dawson, and Jeanine Carter, belonging to a Baptist youth group, Roger Williams Fellowship, rose to defend free speech and academic freedom. In the Indiana University bicentennial magazine 200, Mary Ann Wynkook wrote:

   They began their campaign in Spring 1954, by dyeing some chicken feathers green (a reference to Robin Hood) and attaching them to white buttons with slogans like “They’re your books; don’t let McCarthyism burn them” that they handed out to students across campus.

While supported by the campus newspaper and local American Civil Liberties Union chapter, the Bloomington Herald-Telephone labeled the ringleaders “dupes,” “puppets,” and “long hairs.” Students at several other campuses, including Purdue, took up the cause. McCarthy’s popularity suddenly plummeted in the wake of the Army-McCarthy hearings. By year’s end, the ludicrous efforts to eradicate the legend of Robin Hood ceased.

IU’s bicentennial magazine also contained Dina Kellams’ article on Preston Eagleson, Indiana University’s first African-American football player, beginning in 1883.  Son of a prominent Bloomington barber, Eagleson apparently was accepted by teammates but mistreated by opposing players and fans during contests at Butler and Wabash College.  Traveling to Crawfordsville, the team was turned away at two hotels. Eagleson’s father successfully sued the racist owners.

above, Preston Eagleson; below, Herman Wells

200 editor Sarah Jacobi asked if I’d write an article about IU President Herman Wells and the censoring of sociologist Edwin Sutherland’s White-Collar Crime (1949).  Under pressure from Wells and his publisher, the Bloomington professor deleted material referring to several prominent corporations as criminals. Finally, in 1983, Yale University Press published a third edition which restored the excised chapter, “Three Case Histories,” that named American Smelting and Refining Company, Pittsburgh Coal Company, and United States Rubber Company as lawbreakers.  Being unfamiliar with the exact  role of Herman Wells in the matter, I offered instead to submit a sidebar about Wells pressuring IUN director Jack Buhner to fire English professor Saul Maloff, who had once been active in an organization that detractors claimed was a communist-front group. Though staunch in his support of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and efforts to desegregate campus facilities, Wells was fearful that reactionary IU trustees and legislators might retaliate and bowed to Hoosier Red Baiters.

After a week away from duplicate bridge competition, I finished first partnering with Joel Charpentier and in the middle of the pack with Charlie Halberstadt.  Charlie and I were doing great until Terry Brendel and Fred Green cleaned our clock in four straight hands – through no fault on our part. At Hobart Lanes I struggled the first six frames until opponent Gene Clifford advised facing the pins on spares.   I promptly converted four in a row and then rolled a 182, causing Gene’s teammate Gregg Halaburt to joke, “Don’t give him any more tips.”

above, Gene Clifford; below, Cora DuBois

In the “What I’m Reading” section of Bucknell’s alumni magazine Anthropology professor Michelle Johnson cited Susan Seymour’s “Cora DuBois: Anthropologist, Diplomat, Agent.”  An expert on East Indian tribes, DuBois (1903-1991) served during World War II with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA.  In 1950 she turned down an offer to head up Berkeley’s anthropology department because state law would have required her to sign a loyalty oath. She went on to teach at Harvard and Cornell and enjoyed a long-term lesbian relationship with Jeanne Taylor, whom she met in 1944 in Sri Lanka.  DuBois was the first tenured woman professor at Harvard and only permitted to enter Harvard’s faculty club through a side door. Imagine.

At Chesterton library I added my name to a list of those wishing to reserve Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Again” (a sequel to her acclaimed “Olive Kitteridge”) and checked out her first novel, “Amy and Isabelle.”  Set in Shirley Falls, a New England mill town, it begins:

  It was terribly hot that summer.  Mr. Robinson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead.  Just a dead brown snake of a thing lying flat through the center of town, dirty yellow foam collecting at its edge.  Strangers driving by on the turnpike rolled up their windows at the gagging sulfurous smell and wondered how anyone could live with that kind of stench coming from the river and the mill.

I also picked up the Lumineers’ new CD, III, which includes their smash hit “Gloria” and the bonus track “Democracy.”  One verse goes:

Sail on, sail on

O mighty ship of state

To the shores of need

Past the reefs of greed

Through the squalls of hate

Sail on, sail on, sail on

And these lines: “I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean/ I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.”

 Natasha Varner, Geoff Froh and Micah Mizukami at OHA session

OHA member Micah Mizukami, whom I met at a session on Hawai’ian customs and cowboys, wrote to say he enjoyed meeting me and hearing about my time at the University of Hawaii, where he teaches at the Center for Ethnic Studies.  He stated: “Although I had only met the Hawaiʻi panel just an hour earlier, I could feel their aloha. Here’s a photo of me with the presenters from Denshō -- they had a great session about the mass incarceration of the Japanese-Americans (at Topaz internment camp in Utah) and how to incorporate it into classroom curriculum.”

Close to 20 oldtimers attended the Chancellor’s annual emeritus faculty lunch.  I sat next to John Ban, looking fit at age 87, and Mike Certa, who recently ushered his 365th Chicago theatrical production (an average on one every ten days since his retirement).  Other usual suspects in attendance were Rick Hug, Ron Cohen, Margaret Skurka, and Ken Schoon.  Lowe announced he’s retiring in eight months but is presently teaching a seminar on Irish history and plans to return after a year’s leave.

 above, Margaret Skurka; below, Joe Madden

Angels manager Joe Madden said his pipe dream is that his new team defeat his former employer, the Cubs, in the World Series.  Sports jock Mike Mulligan of The SCORE blasted Madden for using a word that initially derived from opium-inspired visions not long after Angels player Tyler Skaggs died from a drug overdose.  How dumb of “Mully” to bring such a thing up!

Scapegoats

“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” Edward R. Morrow

Scapegoats are those blamed for the wrongdoings or mistakes of others.  According to the Bible, Jewish priests during Yom Kippur sent goats into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people. Leviticus 16:8 states: “And Aaron cast lots upon the two goats: one for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel.”  Azazel is evidently a fallen angel, according to Jewish tradition, and there is a Mount Azazel in the Judean Desert where demons of old supposedly dwelled.

In “200: The IU Bicentennial Magazine” is an article by Kelly Kish entitled “Reds among the Cream and Crimson.” Three law professors got in hot water for signing a letter on July 29, 1946, advocating that candidates of the Communist Party be included on the state voting ballot.  While the governor and Board of Election Commissioners agreed, with one candidate receiving 900 votes, law professors Bernard Gavit, Fowler Harper, and Howard Mann found themselves Red-baited by the American Legion. Under pressure from IU Board of Trustees president Ora Wildermuth, a rightwing segregationist from Gary, IU president Herman Wells held hearings to determine whether the three law professors or any other faculty were promoting “any communistic, un-American, unpatriotic or subversive philosophy.”  During the 30-hour investigation Wells and the Board of Trustees heard from 29 witnesses. Professor Harper’s testimony concluded:

  I wish only to affirm that I am not a political sympathizer with the Communist Party nor have I ever been in sympathy with its political philosophy, practices or objectives. I believe with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that the “ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,”and I support the right of all Americans to use the ballot to express their political convictions.

Most Board members believed the episode to be “a tempest in a teapot.”Its report found no evidence of communism among students or faculty.  Regarding Harper, Gavit, and Mann, they noted that all three were war veterans and concluded : “Each earnestly asserted his profound admiration for the Constitution and the American way of life.”

The Postwar Red Scare hysteria died down after Senator Joe McCarthy’s demagoguery was exposed as a fraud in 1954 but remained a tool in reactionary politicians’ arsenals until the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Kelly Kish interviewed me regarding an IUN professor, Saul Maloff, who was terminated during the 1960s due to pressure from Bloomington and an anti-communist IU Trustee and may write about the case in a forthcoming issue.  Listening to Professor Abdul Alkalimat quote Karl Marx and openly advocate socialism during the Black History Month celebration, I pondered what his fate might have been had he uttered those words 70 years before, when freedom fighters Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, whom Abdul Alkalimat praised as Black Studies pioneers, were ostracized as subversives.

 IU President Herman Wells meets with SDS students in 1969

Other articles appearing in“200: The IU Bicentennial Magazine” were “IU’s Original Squirrel Colony,” “A Look Inside IU’s Post-WWII Trailer Towns,” “A Big Bang” (about a 1957 chemistry demonstration gone awry, injuring 16), “Protesting the Student Fee Hike of 1969” by former student leader Paul Helmke, who led an 11-day strike, and “Hidden IU: The Scandal that Led to the Resignation of Reverend William M. Daily, IU’s Third President.”  After serving for six years beginning in 1853, Daily was accused of lewdness and drunkenness and forced to resign.  The Methodist minister went on to serve with distinction as a hospital chaplain during the Civil War.

 John Beecher

In the Journal of American History Rien Fertel reviewed “Here I Stand: The Life and Legacy of John Beecher” by Angela J. Smith. A poet and activist who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, Beecher (1904-1980) served in the merchant marines during World War II and in 1948 took a position as a Sociology professor at San Francisco State.  Two year later, he was fired for refusing to sign a state-mandated loyalty oath. Blacklisted, he became a civil rights correspondent and activist and founded a publishing house that was the forerunner to Ramparts Press. While Beecher was covering Freedom Summer, Alabama governor George Wallace branded him a communist on NBC’s Today show. He taught at various institutions before finally being reinstated in 1977 by San Francisco State. Calling Beecher a twentieth-century abolitionist, Fertel concluded: “His great-great aunt [Harriet Beecher Stowe] would no doubt be proud.”

In “Slaughterhouse Five” time traveler Billy Pilgrim is at his son’s Little League banquet. Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “The coach, who had never been married, was speaking. He was all choked up.  ‘Honest to God,’ he was saying, ‘I’d consider it an honor just to be water boy for these kids.’”  As a former Little League coach, I could identify with the sentiment even as I laughed at the awkward way it was conveyed.  Captured by Germans, Billy next traveled ahead 23 years to Ilium, Ohio, where he was an optometrist on the way to a Lions Club luncheon. Vonnegut wrote:

  He was stopped by a signal in the middle of Ilium’s black ghetto.  The people who lived here hated it so much they had burned down a lot of it a month before.  It was all they had, and they’d wrecked it.  The neighborhood reminded Billy of some of the towns he had seen in the war. The curbs and sidewalks were crushed in many places, showing where the National Guard tanks and half-tracks had been.

  “Blood brother,” said a message written in pink paint on the side of a shattered grocery store.

 Members of Congress during State of the Union speech

Trump’s State of the Union address mixed patriotic platitudes with veiled threats should he not get his way regarding funding for his damn wall.  Republicans rose to cheer as he praised capitalism and equated socialism with the failed regime in Venezuela.  Women legislators were dressed in white, symbolic of women’s suffrage established by the Nineteenth Amendment, passed by Congress 100 years ago, and ratified within a year.  Trump got the most applause when he congratulated the record number of women members of Congress.  Ironically, the backlash against him motivated many to enter politics. Ray Smock wrote:

    A nice tradition was started by Ronald Reagan in 1982, when he had one hero in the gallery, a government worker, Lenny Skutnik, who helped save victims of a plane crash in the icy Potomac River basin. That plane crash was two weeks before Reagan's address. The tragedy was on everyone's mind and Skutnik was a true citizen hero of the moment. Since then every president has had a few “Lenny Skutniks”as the gallery heroes are sometimes referred to by the more cynical types in DC.  Trump, in good demagogic style, likes to keep the crowd on its feet applauding, and turning to the gallery for heart rending stories works like magic on TV and Trump knows it. These addresses are high political theater. Trump puts on a show. But this one went overboard in time and in a disjointed presentation. 

  The speech had all the earmarks of Stephen Miller, the rabid anti-immigrant aid in the White House, and the stuff on foreign policy, including the president's withdrawal from the INF Treaty with Russia smacks of John Bolton. I guess Trump needed to look tough on Russia, but I am sure Putin is laughing once more at how this treaty withdrawal works to his advantage, not to the advantage of the United States.  Some of the lines were terribly bad: We should have peace and legislation, not war and investigation. Or if that one didn't inspire you, how about: Greatness or Gridlock or Vision or Vengeance.

Post-Trib columnist Jerry Davich has weighed in on the controversy swirling around Democratic governor of Virginia, who first admitted being in a 25-year-old racist photograph and a day later denied it. He did admit to playing Michael Jackson in black face for a lip synch contest. Davich wrote:

  I’ve never dressed in blackface as a prank. I’ve never draped a white sheet over my head to pose as a Ku Klux Klan member. And I’ve never been photographed or video-recorded doing anything in my past with such racist, prejudiced or racially-insensitive intentions.  The same can’t be said for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who is clinging to his public office despite nearly unanimous calls for him to resign over a racist photo in his 1984 medical school yearbook.  But I’ve done so many other stupid, clueless, regrettable, insensitive things when I was much younger. Nothing with blackface. Yet acts that would leave me red-faced if they were captured on photos or on video and resurrected today

Dennis Wood wondered on Facebook if this were an isolated incident or part of a pattern, adding, “What has the man's behavior been like since then? I think that would be more telling of his attitudes.” If indeed it was an isolated incident, I would not insist that he leave office.  A rightwing group, upset over the Governor’s position on abortion, publicized the yearbook photo, which may have been a fake.  Already the group is spreading unverified allegations against the Lieutenant-Governor, an African American. The Attorney-General, meanwhile, admitted he had worn black face and a wig to perform as a rapper he admired. During the mid-1980s Phil performed as James Brown in a lip synch contest but not in black face, unlike another contestant.  Should such an action destroy someone’s political career?  I don’t think so.

 Mary Kate Blake; below, mural by Felix "Flex" Maldonado

Valparaiso University Sociology professor Mary Kate Blake invited me to speak to her students in six weeks on Gary.  I gave her copies of my Eighties Steel Shavings(volume 38, 2007) for her students, which contains interviews with laid off steelworkers and the 1986-87 USX lockout.  It also includes my oral history of the Richard Hatcher administration during the Mayor’s fourth and fifth terms (1981-1987), as he coped with the effects of deindustrialization and the drying up of federal help during the Ronald Reagan presidency. Blake is assigning several chapters of “Gary’s First Hundred Years” and sought my advice concerning a Gary tour for her 19 students. I suggested visiting the old Union Station (which the Decay Devils spruced up), Gary Library (to see Flex Maldonado’s history of Gary mural), the Progressive Community Church urban gardens at 656 Carolina, across from abandoned Emerson School, and the Aquatorium in Miller. She knew about the Urban Legends exhibit in Munster that will be at the Gardner Center beginning on Friday. Blake is familiar with the VU Welcome Project and has solicited Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette’s advice.

At bowling I rolled a 465 series with a high game of 178.  Dick Maloney, carrying a 136 average, had a 200 game despite being unable to see the pins.  We started the afternoon tied with Pin Chasers and won 5 of 7 points, same as they did.  George Leach saw our old auto mechanic Frank Renner’s name in the Steel Shavings I gave him and said he worked at Frank’s garage during the 1970s.  Frank and wife Peggy probably averaged close to 70 hours a week at his shop and gave his regular customers special treatment.  When our Mercury Comet was getting old, I’d ask him to alert me if a job was going to cost much more than $200; otherwise we’d get a new one.  He’d keep the bill to $200 no matter how long he worked on it.  He kept that car on the road until it finally rusted out.  Frank’s one passion outside work was snowmobiling in Michigan on winter weekends. After his first heart attack, Frank was unable to obtain decent insurance, and when he suffered another one, Peg was afraid he’d lose his business, such was the sad state of health care in the country he put such faith in.

This from Ray Gapinski:

  A kindergarten student was having trouble putting on his boots, and asked his teacher for help. Even with her pulling and him pushing, the boots still didn't want to go on. Finally they got both boots on. She grimaced when the little boy said, “They're on the wrong feet.”

  Sure enough, they were. The teacher kept her cool as together they worked to get the boots back on - this time on the correct feet. The little boy then announced, “These aren't my boots.” 

  The teacher sighed and pulled the boots off.
  The boy then said, “They're my brother's boots. My Mom made me wear them.”

  The teacher felt like crying, but she mustered up the strength to wrestle the boots back onto his feet. “Now,”she said, “where are your mittens?”

The boy replied, “I stuffed them in my boots.”

Here is Jim Spicer’s witticism of the week:

  This guy goes to his barber, and he’s all excited. He says, “I’m going to go to Rome. I’m flying on Alitalia and staying at the Rome Hilton, and I’m going to see the Pope.” The barber says, “Ha! Alitalia is a terrible airline, the Rome Hilton is a dump, and when you see the Pope, you’ll probably be standing in back of about 10,000 people.”
  So the guy goes to Rome and comes back. His barber asks, “How was it?”
“Great,”he says. “Alitalia was a wonderful airline. The hotel was great. And I got to meet the Pope.”
  “You met the Pope?”said the barber.
  “I bent down to kiss the Pope’s ring.”
  “And what did he say?”
  He said, “Where did you get that crummy haircut?”

 

Baseball great Frank Robinson passed away at age 83.  Growing up in Oakland, he was a high school classmate of Bill Russell, outscoring him in basketball.  He was National League MVP in 1961 while playing for the Cincinnati Reds and then American League MVP in 1966 with the Baltimore Orioles, leading the league in batting average, RBIs, and home runs and elevating the Orioles to their first World Series championship. Robinson became the first African-American baseball manager, first with Cleveland and then with four other teams, including the Orioles.

Lash Out

“I can feel it on the back of my tongue
All of the words getting trapped in my lungs
Heavy like a stone, waiting for the river to run
I wanna lash out”

         Alice Merton, “Lash Out”

In 2017 German-born Canadian Alice Merton scored an international hit with “No Roots.” I like her more recent “Lash Out” even better.  I once had a short fuse.  Now I claim to be “mellow Jimbo,” and Toni just snickers, unerringly aware of my inner thoughts. Every once in a while, I need to give vent to the frustration and lash out, often with a loud “goddammit,” as when the computer is giving me trouble right before I want to leave school.  The first two lines of “No Roots” go:
                    I like digging holes and hiding things inside them
                    When I'll grow old I hope I won't forget to find them

When we were kids, Terry Jenkins and I buried a bottle containing private thoughts in his side yard, hoping someone would come upon it years later. Three years ago, we passed by the site on a tour of our old Fort Washington haunts.  I have no idea what we might have written.

 Maria McGrath at Dickinson College in carlyle, PA, alma mater of Pres. James Buchanan

I told Terry and Gayle Jenkins about meeting food historian Maria McGrath, a professor at Bucks County Community College and daughter of Upper Dublin classmate Susan Floyd, in Montreal at the Oral History Association conference, first at her session on “Queer Voices, Queer Lives,” then at a reception with Anne Balay and her Haverford student Phil Reid. Since then Maria and I have exchanged several emails.  For example, I wrote:

 I  thoroughly enjoyed your excellent paper on Bloodroot Restaurant and the opportunity to talk with you at the conference diversity reception.  What an unexpected and delightful experience, especially since you got to meet Anne Balay, whom I’m so proud to have been part of her scholarly growth.  Here are two books that I recommend if you haven’t read them:Howard Markel’s recently published “The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek” is absolutely fascinating (the brothers would turn over in their graves at Kelloggs now selling sugar-coated cereals).Harvey Greene’s “The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945” has wonderful social history material, and the chapter on the food revolution of the 1920s was the basis for an entire lecture in my Twenties course.  By the way, one of my friends in school was Eddie Piszek, whose dad founded Mrs. Paul’s frozen foods.  He’s from Port Richmond, the same Polish neighborhood in Philly my wife Toni is from and started out peddling crab cakes. They lived in a mansion off Pennsylvania Avenue between Fort Washington and East Oreland, and the Piszek chauffeur took Eddie and me to U.D. basketball games before we could drive.

She replied:   

  I'm so pleased that you were able to attend my talk and that we could hang out later that evening. Anne is a fascinating person, I certainly hope someone hires her soon. As far as I can tell, she is a real scholarly "catch."  I've read other Harvey Greene books, but not the one on Everyday Life. I will have to look that one and your other recommendation up.  Make sure you let me know when you are in Philly area. We will have to have a multi-generational reunion. Best, Maria 

Don Cornelius; below, Barry White singing "I Can't Get Enough of You, Baby"

Like Anne, Maria would be a good scholarly catch, especially after the publication of her forthcoming book “Food for Dissent: Natural Food Politics and Cultures Since the 1960s.”  During our two-hour conversation in Montreal, she mentioned learning dance moves on “Soul Train” that she still uses.  I wrote back:

  Chicagoan Don Cornelius started “Soul Train” and TV doesn’t get any better than seeing Stevie Wonder singing "Superstition" or Barry White (“the world’s sexiest fat man”) perform with “Soul Train” dancers  in the background. I would love to see you again in Philadelphia.  Terry Jenkins and I talked about going to a Phillies game with your dad last summer, but the only time the Cubs came to Philadelphia was late August, a bad time for my son Dave to come since he was already in school and coaching tennis.  Terry and Gayle were excited when I told them about meeting you.  I claimed I was a little reticent, wanting to get to know you as a history colleague and not just a friend’s daughter, but when I think about our long chat, I guess the “real Jimbo” came out, as Terry would say.

I recall describing a visit to IU’s Kinsey sex institute, lashing out at IUN’s “old boys” who cheated Anne Balay of tenure, and describing a block party in Miller that terry and Gayle attended and Dave’s band Voodoo Chili played at where an over-exuberant dancer bumped against me and her teeth drew blood from my forehead.

On the radio I heard “A Million to One” by Jimmy Charles. The summer of 1962, when I met Toni, “A Million to One” was playing on my 1956 Buick car radio the night before I was to return to Bucknell for my junior year.  We got out of the car and danced to the lament, performed in Jimmy’s distinctive crying style, which begins:

A million to one
That's what our folks think about this love of ours
A million to one
They say that our love will fade like yesterday's flowers
They're betting everything that our love won't survive

At the time Toni was Catholic and I was Lutheran, and both our mothers were leery of the romance and skeptical that we’d stay in touch. Well, we did, often long distance, fell in love, and beat the odds. Two years earlier, I had said goodbye to my summer girlfriend, said goodbye, and never looked back.

 James Dye

At the bequest of IU’s Bicentennial Committee I interviewed former IU trustee James Dye, 87, a retired builder and large university donor. Since virtually the entire Instructional Media Center staff was at a conference downstate, the camera person was late arriving and we had to halt twice because of a low battery.  It was maddening, but I didn’t lash out at the culprits who didn’t check the battery and then went to the wrong room.  Dye didn’t complain and the interruptions were a blessing in disguise, as Steve took the opportunity to inform him about the Archives and I showed him the Rev. Robert Lowery library study area that the James and Betty Dye Foundation funded.  It also offers scholarships to many IUN students. Like Bernie Konrady Jr., founder of Konrady Plastics, Dye was an imaginative entrepreneur who built his first house virtually by himself at age 20.  

Manager for IU’s football and basketball teams in the early 1950s, Dye recalled a Sigma Chi fraternity party that lasted 48 hours after the Hoosiers beat Notre Dame and then Kansas for the 1953 NCAA championship. He joked that IU probably gave him an honorary degree for attending so many losing gridiron contests. His company built Mansards Apartments in Griffith where Toni and I played tennis and Dye competed with former Gary mayor George Chacharis and his driver John Diamond.  I kept silent when Dye, a fiscal conservative expressed admiration for Purdue president Mitch Daniels, who seems to care more about profits than academic freedom.  He praised IUN past IUN chancellors Dan Orescanin and Peggy Elliott and asked me about Chancellor Lowe. I lauded Lowe’s participation in community affairs, History Department functions, and IUN student functions.

 Lowe at Chancellor's forum Oct. 17, 2018; below, controlled burn in Miller; photos by Kyle Telechan 

An editor of IU’s Bicentennial magazine, “IU200,” is preparing an article about Red Scare victims, including Saul Maloff, an IUN English professor once active in an organization later deemed a communist front group.  I sent her Paul Kern and my history of IUN that includes an interview with then-director Jack Buehner, who received orders from Bloomington not to renew Maloff’s contract at a time when IU administrators basically controlled regional campuses.  Buehner told me:

  Under pressure from IU president Herman Wells and Trustee Ray Thomas, I asked Saul Maloff, a marvelous conversationalist, to tell me straight out the full story so that I’d know how to defend him. He refused to level with me.  I’m sure he had his reasons, but I was not prepared to go to bat for him on blind faith alone.  I deserved to know what I was defending.  It was a very upsetting experience.  Maloff’s wife had a nervous breakdown.  It was an infringement of academic freedom, but the only one that occurred under me.

During this time Herman Wells was taking heat for defending sex therapist Alfred Kinsey and bent on desegregating the campus, so he already had his hands full dealing with disgruntled trustees and legislators on those fronts and thus made defending accused communist sympathizers a lower priority.  

The Bicentennial magazine editor hoped I’d consider contributing an article. I’m thinking of updating one written 20 years ago entitled, “The Professor Wore a Cowboy Hat (and nothing else): Ethical Issues in handling Matters of Sex in Institutional Oral Histories: IU Northwest as a Case Study.”  It centered on four male professors accused of sexual indiscretions, two with coeds, who got off lightly, the others involving alleged gay activity were treated more severely and, in one case, with tragic consequences.  I wrote about the first two, which became cause celebresbut not the two others, which were hushed up and not public knowledge.  During the 1970s virtually all History colleagues of my generation got divorced and later married former students – albeit the women well into their 20s who almost always initiated the relationship.  Since then, with a much older faculty, I presume that less student-teacher sex takes place, but discrimination against LGBTQs remains troublesome. Gay faculty who didn’t remain in the until securing tenure were likely not retained, with Anne Balay’s case being the most glaring example.

Anne Balay in truckers parade over Mackinac Bridge

This from Jim Spicer:

  The year is 2020 and the United States has elected the first woman as well as the first Jewish president, Susan Goldstein. She calls up her mother a few weeks after Election Day and says: "So, Mom, I assume you'll be coming to my inauguration?"
"I don't think so. It's a ten hour drive, your father isn't as young as he used to be, and my arthritis is acting up again."
"Don't worry about it Mom, I'll send Air Force One to pick you up and take you home, and a limousine will pick you up at your door."
"I don't know, everybody will be so fancy-schmaltzy, what on earth would I wear?"
Susan replies, "I'll make sure you have a wonderful gown custom-made by the best designer in New York."
"Honey,"Mom complains,"you know I can't eat those rich foods you and your friends like to eat."
The President Elect says, "Don't worry Mom. The entire affair is going to be handled by the best caterer in New York; kosher all the way. Mom, I really want you to come."
So Mom reluctantly agrees and on January 20, 202 Susan Goldstein is being sworn in as President of the United States. In the front row sits the new President's mother, who leans over to a senator sitting next to her and says, "You see that woman over there with her hand on the Torah, becoming President of the United States?"The Senator whispers back, "Yes, I do."
Mom says proudly, "Her brother is a doctor."

In a position round to determine first place in my senior bowling league, the Electrical Engineers took two games and series from Just Friends, whose team includes two mid-Fifties Gary Horace Mann graduates. I had trouble picking up spares but rolled my average thanks to a two-bagger and a turkey (three strikes in a row).  In the only close game, opponent Dennis Cavanaugh struck out, Frank Shufran needed a mark for us to win.  He picked up a ten-pin (often difficult for him) for a spare and the game.  Miket Wardell had all sorts of trouble for 20 frames but rebounded with a 209.  During the first 2 games he exhibited facial and body expressions ranging from anger to bewilderment but unlike me in that situation, no profanities.  The week before, Dick Maloney, so blind teammates had to tell him which pins remained standing after his first shot, bowled well over average against the same team.

Nicked myself shaving this morning, right under my lip, something that rarely happens with anymore with modern blades. It bled like a sonuvabitch – serves me right for shaving first thing in the morning.

A Day in the Life

Yesterday the Today show had “exclusive” interviews with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and blowhard Rush Limbaugh. Asked whether she thought she had been marginalized (as someone suggested in the Washington Post), Hillary said that was ridiculous. Asked whether he thought Obama had done anything right since taking office, Rush pretended to think for ten seconds or so and then said, “He sure can read a teleprompter.”

At IU Northwest put together a lecture on Gary in the Sixties for Nicole Anslover’s class on October 21. I’m going to have students read quotes from the oral histories from my Steel Shavings issue (volume 25) on “Social Trends and Racial Tensions.” Here’s an example from Alma Furnish, who grew up in central Kentucky and moved to Gary after marrying a Region steelworker who was the brother of her best friend. Alma recalled: “I’ll never forget my first visit coming up Highway 41. About 50 miles from Gary I noticed the sky. I had never seen or smelled anything like it. Every night for the first few months, just like clockwork I’d wake up at two a.m. The smell would almost knock me out. Some company must have been releasing pollutants into the air. When I’d take my daughter to the park, our legs would be black by the time we got home, like we’d been standing in coal soot. The Lake Michigan beach smelled so bad as to almost make you gag. We didn’t go there often. How could you even think about swimming with hundreds of dead fish up on the beach. The alewives were all over the place and attracted horseflies that attacked you unmercifully.”

One of my students interviewed a former hippie named Laurie, who recalled: “One day my friends and I met a few hippies on the beach who asked us if we’d like to party. Of course, we said yes. The guys had bell bottom jeans on and no shirts. They had long hair, and some were wearing headbands. They took us to an apartment that was on the top floor of a two-story house. I will never forget what it looked like. There were beads in the doorways separating the rooms. They had black light posters highlighted with black lights and strobe lights. Several folks were already there, sitting in the living room on big pillows, smoking pot out of this big water pipe. They offered us some, and we said yes. When it was time to go home, I had a lot of difficulty walking down the stairs. One of the guys took me home, and for the first time I experiences a French kiss. I thought it was gross. In the summer of 1969 I bought a ring bikini. The top was held together in the middle by a plastic ring, and the bottom was held together at each side by plastic rings. One day in Lake Michigan both bottom rings broke. I had to wear a towel home.”

Bette Julkes was a student at all-Black Gary Roosevelt High School in 1967, a year when Afros were in vogue and girls could wear pants for the for first time. This remembrance of hers always brings tears to my eyes: “A shy, young, white student teacher was assigned to my Biology class. Some students were irate, but to my surprise I liked him right away. In fact, after initial reservations, most of my classmates accepted him. We had a lot of fun, perhaps because he was closer to our age than our regular teacher. When his teaching time was drawing to an end, we decided to buy him a ten-dollar briefcase. On his last day he spent the last 15 minutes telling us how sorry he was to be leaving. When we gave him our gift, his eyes filled with tears as he managed to mutter a thank-you. It was sort of a great release. At that moment I loved him for liking us so much to cry and for being so different from what we had been conditioned to expect.”

Had lunch with Garrett Cope, still working at IU Northwest at age 81. His parents were cook and chauffeur for H.B. Snyder, who owned the Post-Tribune during the 1940s. Garrett went to Froebel School during the infamous 1945 strike and then to Bloomington at a time when African-American students weren’t allowed in the new dorms. He was the only “colored” (as Blacks were called then) student in a touring choral group. Once after a performance in southern Indiana their bus stopped at a restaurant and weren’t served because of him. Sensing what was going on, he pretended he wasn’t feeling well and went back to the bus, but the choral director caught on and had everyone leave. Garrett was embarrassed to tears but grateful that the professor stood up for him. Around this time President Herman Wells ended segregation on campus.

Stopped at the Portage library prior to a visit to the dentist and then Quick Cut. Checked out the new TRACES, which has Wendell Wilkie on the cover and a nice essay on the 1940 Republican Presidential candidate by editor Ray Boomhower. The new Esquire has an interview with 51 year-old rocker Joan Jett, most famous for the song “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll.” I saw her live at a Hobart Jaycees summer fest held in the Strack & Van Til parking lot. She was a platinum blond then (punk style), unlike her normal jet black hair. A supporter of Howard Dean in 2004, she was present when he gave his over-the-top yell speaking to supporters (Deaniacs) after finishing third in the Iowa caucuses and claimed the press made way too much out of it.

Watched a movie Dave got from Netflick called “ANVIL,” about an 80s Canadian heavy metal band that never quite made it like such contemporary groups as Slayer and Megadeth but stayed together and even attempted a comeback in Europe. It’s sort of like a straight version of the spoof “Spinal Tap” and surprisingly poignant as it follows two of the founding members of the band, Lips Kudlow and Robb Reiner. I recommended it to nephew Joe Robinson.

Phillies beat the Rockies to advance to the National League Championship series against the Dodgers. Sunday they played in subfreezing weather and won thanks in part to an errant umpire’s call. This time the heroes were sluggers Ryan Howard and Jayson Werth. Brad Lidge, inconsistent all season, got his second save in as many days.

David Pietrusca saw mention of his book about the 1960 election in one of my blogs and asked how he could find the full review. I replied: “Salem Press contracted me to do the short review for Magill Book Reviews, which appears on MagillOnLiterature and Literary Reference Center hosted by EBSCOhost. Glad you found my blog.” I’ve never gone to those sites but think they are used by libraries.