Apocalypse Now!

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Eliot

Until now, with plenty of time to kill due to the pandemic, I’d never watched Francis Ford Coppola’s 153-minute epic “Apocalypse Now” (1979) in its entirety. I’d shown excerpts in my Vietnam War class of scenes depicting American troops under commander Kilgore on a Search and Destroy mission, uprooting survivors from their ancestral villages while a chaplain says a meaningless prayer.  I’d seen highlights of Marlon Brando as Kurtz reciting T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Man” but shrank from digesting the entire nightmarish action, based in part on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” which was required reading for an English course at Bucknell.  I was surprised to discover Dennis Hopper playing a hippie photographer at Colonel Kurtz’s Montagnard camp and moved to read “The Hollow Man” when learning its opening line was “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” and closing refrain “This is the way the world would end, not with a bang but a whimper.”

 

High school English teacher Delphine Vandling, I suddenly remembered, recited “The Hollow Man” to us very movingly. Like me a Bucknell graduate, she had the rare ability to convey an appreciation of things not immediately obvious. Mrs. Vandling told us that Eliot was born in St. Louis but became a British citizen and developed a British accent, so I tended to regard him as a phony, not understanding the depths of disillusionment that the Great War had caused. I never made it through “The Waste Land” and though I recall its opening line, “April is the cruelest month,” I have no idea why Eliot might have believed such a thing. Until now.

 

It was Upper Dublin English teacher Delphine Vandling who taught me to appreciate literature, not necessarily at the time (and I still don’t like Shakespeare, despite her best efforts) but that it had the potential to teach us about life and even hints about life’s meaning. Though poetry is not my cup of tea ordinarily, the keenest insights are often hidden in its verses.  When Vandling read “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll, it hooked me.  Delphine used a Word Power book, and we learned ten new words each week. Not only did we have to use them in sentences, she made us say them out loud for emphasis.  I hated the I’s and still think of her when I use indomitable, indefatigable, inimitable, or ineffable. I was very envious when Vince Curll told me that he and Wendy had been at Vandling’s house and been offered wine.

 

Some years ago, I went on an Indiana Association of Historians conference tour of Indiana University’s Alfred Kinsey Sex Institute. Our tour guide was a fifty-ish woman in high boots and stylish clothes whose features reminded me of Mrs. Vandling.  As she showed the historians X-rated 8-pagers (one featured Mickey, Minnie and Goofy, another famous actors) and Japanese dolls meant for virginal brides on their wedding night whose private parts showed when turned over, her expression bore a resemblance to Delphine reading “Jabberwocky.”

    Beware the Jabberwocky, my son!

    The jaws that bite, the claws that catch

    Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

    The fruminous Bandersnatch!

After I posted these impressions on my blog, I received an angry email from the daughter of Delphine, who had recently passed away. I replied that I had nothing but respect for her mother, who was a great, passionate, dedicated teacher.  She thanked me and told me her mom would have enjoyed what I wrote.

 

John Prine is the latest coronavirus casualty after twice surviving cancer. I’ve been watching YouTube videos of sessions he performed two years ago at West 54^th. The former Chicago mailman was a truly great singer-songwriter, humble and wise who sang of “broken hearts and dirty windows,” of memories that couldn’t be bought and souvenirs that took him years to get.  Jerry Davich started a post with these lines:

    Just give me one thing that I can hold on to

    To believe in this living is just a hard way to go

A co-host of the CBS morning news, broadcasting from his home, recently interviewed Prine and said his favorite number was “In Spite of Ourselves.”  The last song on Prine’s final album is “When I Get to Heaven.”  He vows that after shaking God’s hand and thanking him for all his blessings, he’ll start a rock-n-roll band, smoke a cigarette nine miles long, and “kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl.”  Darcey Wade posted a video of a young John Prine singing “Hello in There” about an old couple living in an apartment in the city, there kids grown up and elsewhere or, in the case of Davy, “lost in the Korean, war, and I still don’t know what for.” The chorus includes these poignant lines

    Old people just grow lonesome

    Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in There.”

 

Also dead: Detroit Tiger outfielder for 22 seasons Al Kaline, a Hall of Famer who became my favorite player after my family moved to a Detroit suburb in 1955.  Kaline hit .340 that season, becoming the youngest batting champ (by two days over Ty Cobb) ever. A consummate team player, he finally was rewarded when Detroit became champs in 1968 with Kaline batting .379 in the World Series. He ended his career with over 3,000 hits and 399 Home Runs (it would have been 400, but one was erased due to a rainout). In retirement he became a Tiger broadcaster and mentor to young players.

 

East Chicago Central social studies teacher Michelle Horst sent a note thanking me for the copy of “Jacob A. Riis and the American City” that Dave passed on to her and wanted to send me a gift card as a token of appreciation.  I emailed back:

    Thanks for the nice note, which is better than any gift card you could give me.  The book was an outgrowth of my PHD thesis at the U. of Maryland.  My adviser suggested the topic because the Jacob Riis papers were located at the Library of Congress not far from College Park.  What I particularly admired about Riis was his concern for children and the environment and how he evolved into someone much more tolerant of other cultures than the common perception one gets only from reading “How the other Half Lives.”

High school friend Suzanna Murphy wrote:

  The year was 1919.  My grandmother Jane Hook Scott was in Hang Chow China with her husband Reverend Dr. Frank D. Scott serving a mission.  They had decided she should return to the United States because of the health of my mother who had been born the year before.  She was allergic to milk and had been needing to milk a buffalo daily! Needless to say that was tedious and dangerous. There were other dangers such as once being accused of killing a sacred pig when the rickshaw in front of them ran over it. Aside from that there were many wonderful experiences there which they shared with a companion couple, the Hales. My grandfather stayed on and my grandmother took a slow boat from China to California and then a train all the way from California to Pennsylvania and cared the children until she could return and pastor a church again.  She was very courageous indeed. 

 

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.