“Lord, I was
born a ramblin’ man
Tryin’ to make
a living and doin’ the best I can.”
“Ramblin’ Man,” Allman Brothers
Band
On the cover
of Rolling Stone is Obama interviewed
by publisher Jann Wenner. Also is
the issue is a tribute to Levon Helm of The Band and an excerpt from Gregg
Allman’s “My Cross to Bear.” A
hitchhiker killed Allman’s dad when he was a toddler, and brother Duane died in
1971 in a motorcycle accident.
Gregg admits that his drug and alcohol addiction torpedoed his marriage to
Cher. No mention how they got
tattoos from Glen Park’s Roy Boy. In
1973 “Ramblin’ Man,” written and sung by Dickey Betts, became the Allman Brothers
Band’s biggest hit. Based on a
song of the same name by Hank Williams, Sr. The single reached number two,
surpassed only by Cher’s lame “Half-Breed.”
On the
anniversary of Navy SEALSs killing Osama bin Laden President Obama flew to
Kabul to announce victory over al-Qaeda is within reach and that our primary
mission will be to train Afghan troops.
Republicans, who had been criticizing Democrats for supposedly
politicizing the death of bin Laden, mostly kept their mouths shut. Nine years ago Bush declared “Mission
Accomplished” on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, a gesture he later
regretted. Romney, contrary to statements he made
in 2007 that he wouldn’t have violated Pakistan sovereignty to strike at bin
Laden, quipped that “even Jimmy Carter” would have approved the mission – a
crack that even Republican Joe Scarborough thought unfair and misleading. In truth both Vice President Joe Biden
and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had misgivings about giving the OK to
the SEALs mission.
Robert Caro’s
“The Passage of Power,” covering the years of LBJ’s vice presidency and first
months as president, got a big splash in “The Smithsonian” and the Sunday “New
York Times Magazine.” Caro despises
Lyndon the person but admires his skill following JFK’s assassination and
shepherding liberal legislation through Congress. Caro is in his mod-Eighties, so one doubts if he’ll ever
complete the biography.
Getting my PSA
blood work done took about an hour.
An 88 year-old WW II air force guy starving for company started up a
conversation. Delia’s Aunt Elba
checked me in. Last time I hardly
felt the prick, but the nurse did three or four unsuccessful probes in my arm
before asking if I mined her using my hand.
Proofreading
Henry Farag’s “The Signal” in preparing for it to become an eBook renewed my
appreciation of his unique talents as a writer, performer, and producer. His account of growing up in the
Tolleston neighborhood of Gary is also great social history, dealing with
gangs, teenage haunts, relationships between the sexes, politics, and
race-relations. The program
Henry’s son Ryan used to create a word document was remarkably efficient. Except for mistaking “rn” for “m,”
(i.e., tumed instead of turned) and capital “O” for zero (0), the main errors were
too many spaces between words.
Angie bought
odometers for herself and the kids.
Doctors recommend that adults walk about ten miles a day. I’m probably good for about half that.
I’m pondering
having Fall students keep a daily log of how many miles they drove and to
where. Here’s what one of mine would look like: Thursday, May 3, drove to Jewel
and back (one mile) for ice cream, beer, and ingredients for tuna and macaroni
casserole; took back “City of Fortune” to Chesterton library and picked up a
Subway cold cut foot-long before arriving at IUN (total of 20 miles); visited
W.E.B. DuBois library on Eighteenth and Broadway (one mile) to peruse a 1942
Roosevelt yearbook for information about William Marshall; drove 16 miles to
East Chicago Central for tennis match against Hanover Central (a 3-2 victory
for the Lady Cardinals with four of the five matches going three sets and the
number one doubles team of Katie Lipa and Jackeline Fernandez winning on a
third-set tie breaker); arrived back in Chesterton in time for Flyers OT loss
to Jersey Devils (25 miles).
I’m having
trouble in my research into Gary actor William Marshall. His nephew was helpful on the phone but
hasn’t answered my written queries.
The FBI has been giving me the runaround regarding my Freedom of
Information Act request. He’s
mentioned in a file pertaining to a so-called Communist Front group, the
Committee of the Arts Against Repression but for some reason I can’t see the
documents. The Roosevelt yearbook
I looked at belonging to the Gary library’s local history room is missing the
page containing Marshall’s senior photo.
I did find him, however, in a Men’s Glee Club photo and in a senior play
cast photo of “Our Town.”
The May
history book club will meet at Gino’s in Merrillville, where I had lunch with
the son of former Indiana attorney-general Theofore Sendak’s son. We’ll discuss a
biography of Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff.
I found a 1972 scholarly work by Michael Grant that mentions that her
lineage was Greek, not Egyptian, a descendent of Alexander the Great. First married to a kid brother (incest
being royal tradition), she had affairs both with Julius Caesar and Mark
Antony. Her elaborate spectacles
were held not out of decadence but to cement the loyalty of subjects as the
earthly embodiment of goddess Isis.
In 33 B.C. Mark Anthony stabbed himself after losing the naval battle of
Actium and Cleopatra then succumbed from a self-inflicted deadly bite of a
cobra.
Finally emailed
Marylander Sam Walker, who wrote a history of the early years of ACC basketball
between 1953 and 1972, after finding his address in the sports jacket I wore to
Ray Smock’s Distinguished Alumni lecture.
The ACC was formed with
football in mind, but in time the basketball rivalries were much more
intense. Sam wrote an excellent
account of 1944 Gary Lew Wallace grad Vic Bubas, who played for North Carolina
State and then coached Duke for 11 years beginning in 1959. Bubas started out as assistant at NC
State to Everett Case, whom Sam calls “the man who made ACC basketball” because
he inherited a mediocre program and made it so competitive that rivals had to
up their efforts to keep up. Bubas
was a great recruiter, working on prospects early in their high school careers
and snagging such All-Americans as Art Heyman and Jeff Mullins. His Blue Devils teams won 213 games,
and made three Final Four NCAA appearances. Contemporaries included coaches Bones McKinney at Wake
Forest and Frank McGuire at North Carolina. The 85 year-old Bubas went on to become commissioner of the
Sun Belt Conference for some 15 years.
Aaron Pigors
taped me at the Archives in connection with the time capsule opening next
week. Jack Buhner, who’s attending
the graduation day events, started teaching at the old IU Extension in 1948 and
helped secure the present location of the campus in what was then Gleason Park. While I got in some information about
Buhner, most of Chris Sheid’s questions had to do with my memories of Tamarack
Hall (originally Gary Main), which was recently razed and whose cornerstone contained
the time capsule. I mentioned summer musicals Phil and Dave were in as kids,
including “Hello Dolly” and “Finnegan’s Rainbow,” and lively lunch discussions
in the lounge adjacent to my office with the likes of George Roberts and Leslie
Singer.
Exactly 70
years ago 26 year-old Charles Kikuchi wrote from Tanforan, California: “I saw a
soldier in a tall guardhouse near the barbed wire and did not like it because
it reminds me of a concentration camp.
I feel like a foreigner in this [internment] camp hearing so much
Japanese although our family uses English almost exclusively.”
Vietnam vet Jay
Keck sent me a book of poetry put out at IU-PU at Fort Wayne entitled “Confluence.”
He liked Jessica Wilson’s untitled poem that contains these lines: “There’s
nothing you can do but keep on holdin’ your ground/ Keep your head up and get
ready for the next round/ Count your blessings and be thankful for today/
Because we all know tomorrow’s not guaranteed anyway.”
