Beds Are Burning

“How do we sleep

While our beds are burning

The time has come

To say fair's fair”

    Midnight Oil

Every time I hear Australian band Midnight Oil’s anthem on behalf of aborigine peoples I think back 25 years ago to an oral history conference in Brisbane where I learned that in my lifetime Native Australians were forcibly taken from their parents be the Aussie equivalent of Americanized by families free to treat them like servants. Just a generation or two before that native American children were shipped off to “Indian schools” like one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where many died of tuberculosis and other contagious diseases while others were stripped of their long hair and native dress.

Bubba Wallace

The recent actions of Trump seem politically suicidal – what pundits said about many things he did four years ago.  Then he branded Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, now he’s defending Confederate statues, calling the noose found in Black NASCAR racer Bubba Watson’s garage a hoax, and ridiculing as “political correctness” the efforts to change the nicknames and logos of the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians.  As a Washington football fan, I agree with the fan who thought the new logo could be the skin of a red potato.  Ray Smock worries that Trump’s strategy of holding onto his base could work if he can convince another 20 percent to stay home through smear tactics against his opponent or otherwise deny them the vote through various nefarious means. Trump has gotten away with so many lies, and like totalitarian rulers everywhere tries to brainwash followers into believing that any critical story in the mainstream press is suspect a HOAX.




Post-Trib contributor Jerry Davich wrote a column headlined: “Trump versus Biden, a disappointing decision for voters.”  I replied: “Wrong! It’s an obvious choice at a time when we need steady at the helm.  Trump will use any smear tactic to make people believe the candidates are equally “disappointing.”  It worked in 2016.

 

In the “Forum” section of the Sunday, July 5, Northwest Indiana Times appeared a column by Inez Feltscher Stepman (above) titled “Revisionist history tries to discredit rich legacy.” As a historian who holds the U.S. Constitution in high esteem, has no quarrel with July Fourth patriotic celebrations, and bemoans the excesses of those defacing monuments honoring George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, I must take exception to her mischaracterization of revisionist historians who have attempted to redress gaps in the story of the American experience.  Stepman admits that the Founding Fathers, like men in all eras, were flawed and at times made terrible mistakes. Yet to claim, as she does, that the American Revolution was fought simply for liberty and independence is to ignore the complexities of history.  Foremost among the colonists’ grievances against Great Britain prior to 1776, along with taxation without representation and the quartering of foreign (Hessian) troops on American soil, was the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which prevented colonization beyond the Appalachians and reserved that territory for Native American tribes. So far as whether or not the Constitution was a slave document, one need look no further than the three-fifths compromise than gave slave states representation in the House of Representatives by counting their human property as that percentage of a human being.

 

In the 1960s I visited Monticello and Mount Vernon, as did thousands of tourists, and saw no evidence that Thomas Jefferson or George Washington were slaveholders.  School textbooks made no mention of Christopher Columbus having enslaved indigenous people and tended to emphasize States Rights rather than slavery as the underlying cause of the Civil War. Rather than disparaging educators and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies responsible for pressuring states to remove Confederate Battle flags and statues of rebel leaders from government property, including military installations, we should be celebrating this belated recognition that justice too long delayed is justice denied.  We can still celebrate the Fourth of July while finally acknowledging that Juneteenth is a more appropriate “Independence Day” for African Americans.  And, parenthetically, for the President to go the sacred (for Lakota people) Black Hills and label protestors looters and fascists while not even consulting with tribal leaders whose land, according to a 1980 Supreme Court decision, they are rightful guardians, and uttering nary a word about a pandemic that especially threatens poor people living in nearby areas is beyond obscene. Little wonder his pledge, if re-elected, to create a monument park honoring 25 American heroes contained not a single Hispanic or Native American.

 
I concede that the USA may have been a land of opportunity for Inez Feltscher Stepman, a self-described first-generation American; but I wish she showed a measure of compassion for the ancestors of people brought to our country in chains who still endure police harassment or understanding of acts by which our Founding Fathers, and Trump’s favorite President, Andrew Jackson, stole our land from the original inhabitants.

18th birthday

With the coronavirus spreading due to Trump’s incompetence, educators are grappling with how to deal with fall classes.  Unlike many private universities, IUN is in relatively good shape, having launched quality online “distance education” courses almost a decade ago. Granddaughter Becca missed the final month of her senior year and wonders whether she’ll be able to go off for college. Her friends at Chesterton H.S. have made due with, for example, a mini-prom outside with about 2 dozen classmates. She’s done other group activities and even held an outdoor party at home when unable to have her open house at the American Legion Hall.

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. 

 

Plague Journals

 Indiana Historical Society is encouraging Hoosiers to document what it’s like experiencing this unique moment with an initiative called “Telling Your Story: Documenting COVID-19 in Indiana.”  In a sense, this is what I’ve been doing in my blog and occasional Facebook ramblings.  Post-Trib columnist Jerry Davich has endorsed the concept and publicized a Facebook site urging a similar practice. Former Valpo teacher Jerry Hager suggested starting by writing down 20 thoughts about something or someone. 

 

“Dear Amy” devoted her advice column to coping with the new reality and urged readers to provide anecdotes on plans postponed, cancelled or otherwise upset and creative activities substituted for them. She wrote:

    When you have so many externals stripped away, it is the basics that quickly emerge as daily blessings: Good neighbors.  Mostly reliable wireless service. Drive-thru Dunkin’

    For me, visits to the gym 10 miles away have been replaced by solitary walks in the woods.  Yesterday I saw the first signs of fiddle-head fern breaking through the forest floor.

    Faced with an empty facility, workers at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago released the penguins to roam the halls – and filmed their adorable escapades, as they went on a “field trip” to meet other animals.

 

Several people are posting photos of places they’ve traveled to, such as San Antonio (Dave), Iceland (Lisa Teuscher), Cabo observing humpback whales (Shannon Bayer), and a Long Beach Pow-Wow (John Attinasi).  Stay-at-home massages are prominent: Ray Gapinski showed Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” farm couple inside and a pitchfork lying unattended outside. Paul Kaczocha is still posting shots of Comet and Tamale romping by themselves on Sullivan Street beach. I have not yet mastered posting photos with my borrowed laptop (should have gotten a MAC if one were available).  I’m happy to do what I can, thanks to IUN’s Help Desk folks, Larry, Missy, Tony, Roger, and others.

 

My life has settled into a routine that includes watching daily a free OnDemand movie (preferably one with Scarlett Johansen, Ethan Hawke, or Richard Gere) and a documentary.  ESPN has some good ones; one I enjoyed documented the NBA Celtics-Lakers rivalry of the 1980s.  It helped that I had forgotten which team won the 3 featured championship series.  Having rooted against Boston during the era when Bill Russell-led teams almost always triumphed over Wilt Chamberlain’s squad, I naturally was pulling for L.A., especially since the Celtics employed dirty play to make up for being less talented than Kareem Abdul Jabbar and company.  What made it especially compelling was that both Magic Johnson and Larry Byrd were such great players and fierce competitors.

Toni has started a puzzle of Van Gogh’s “Starry Starry Night” that looks to me to be impossible.  She has completed the outside pieces and one corner.  I have contributed exactly one piece despite poring over it on several occasions.


I have completed the two books I got from Banta Center, B.B. King’s excellent autobiography and Len O’Connor’s “Requiem: The Decline and Demise of Mayor Daley and His Era.”  The latter got somewhat repetitive, as if the author had put the manuscript together from columns. Demonstrations of Daley’s oversized ego took priority over analysis, and even though Hizzoner suffered humiliation over Democrats faring badly in the 1976 election (Jimmy Carter losing Illinois, for example, to Gerald Ford), Daley’s grip on Chicago remained strong despite grumbling in black wards. Next up: rereading John Updike’s “Rabbit” series

 

Here’s hoping and knocking on wood that most journals, including mine, avoid having to document actually coming down with the virus.  Many years ago, Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop wrote about living with a terminal disease.  My friend Dave Malham reported on learning h had ALS.  As instructive as these were, not to mention brave, I do not wish to travel down that path.

 

Wishlist

“I wish I was a messenger and all the news was good,

I wish I was the full moon shining off a Camaro’s hood.”

    “Wishlist,” Pearl Jam

 59-year veteran steelworker John Gold; photos by Jerry Davich

Jerry Davich wrote a Post-Tribunecolumn on steelworkers who put in 50 years at the mill, despite the dirty, unhealthy, dangerous environment, forced overtime, and constant shift work that, as one veteran exclaimed, took ten years out of your life. Why would someone do that, he wondered. Some feared they’d soon die if they retired.  Others, proud to be called steelworkers, claimed to like the workplace camaraderie and being productive.  Others didn’t have much of a home life and preferred not to be in the house all high wages that paid for maintaining a middle-class lifestyle, including the ability to send children and grandchildren to college.  Replying the Davich’s column, Carla Waters Spencer stressed the economic security a mill job provided her family: “My dad worked at US Steel for 52 years in the coke plant, retiring after my mom was diagnosed with cancer because she needed his help at home. Mom and Dad were able to raise the four of us kids, pretty much on his income, and we wanted for nothing.”Valerie Dixon commented:

  My dad worked at USS for 46 years! He started out in a dirty section and moved to an overhead crane in shipping at the sheet and tin mill; loading coils. He had health problems for as long as I can remember; one being thyroid problems. They didn’t use hearing protection back then either and the damage was done by the time he started wearing ear plugs. The shifts they had them work were stressful: 1 week days,1 week 4 to 12’s, 1 week midnights; alternating until a vacation. They did have great vacation benefits back then; 13 weeks every so many years. Traveling the country during those paid weeks off were the best childhood memories.

Cindy C. Bean posted a photo of hubby Larry posing with Jerry Davich’s “Lost Gary” at Sam’s Club and one she took of a window in an abandoned church. 

 Cubs fan Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam

I’m approaching my golden anniversary being associated with IU Northwest.  I still go in to the office four days a week and keep active intellectually guest lecturing and writing a blog.  I am vain enough to believe that my Steel Shavingsmagazine and work with the Calumet Regional Archives has lasting value. There are no exotic vacation spots or adventurous feats on my wish or bucket list beyond continuing what I do now, including travel to scholarly conferences.  Like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, in 2016 I witnessed the Chicago Cubs win the World Series for the first time in our lifetimes, near the top of both our wish lists. Recently, Vedder talked about his love affair with the Cubbies:

  It probably started because my grandpa took me to Wrigley Field. The first day I was about 4 and a half or 5, we saw the Pirates play the Cubs. When we came up the bleachers, you could smell the stench of one of those white capsules in the piss thing. That was the smell, mix it with hot dog, and walking up the ramp and I could hear the pop of the gloves, it was a Wizard of Oz moment to see that field for the first time.  It was the greenest green I ever, the whitest white, Jose Cardenal, the coolest afro. That moment I feel something inside changed, and a fire was lit. 

 Brandy Halladay at Hall of fame ceremony

Inducted into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, were six worthy candidates, including Cub reliever Lee Smith, White Sox clutch hitter Harold Baines, and Phillies ace Ray “Doc” Holladay, who died two years ago when his small plane crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.  He’d been suffering from depression and addiction to pain medication and may have taken his own life.  Joining Philadelphia in 2010, Holladay pitched a perfect game that May and won postseason contests against Cincinnati and San Francisco, the eventual World Series champs.  Lee Smith thanked his Castor, Louisiana, school principal for buying equipment his family couldn’t afford, enabling him to play baseball. Yankee closer Mariano Rivera, the Hall of Fame’s first unanimous selection and final speaker, joked that he’s always the last one called on.

 army troops march down Broadway in Gary during 1919 steel strike

Robert Blaszkiewicz’s mention of the 1919 Chicago Race Riot reminded me that I taught an entire course about that fateful year and used William M. Tuttle’s “Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919.”  Racial disturbances also erupted in Washington, D.C., Omaha, Nebraska, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and throughout the South.  Required reading included Robert K. Murray’s “Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria” and David Brody’s “Labor in Crisis,” about a nationwide steel strike during which army troops invaded Gary at pro-business Mayor William Hodges’s invitation, jailing union leaders, and crushing the strike.   The class read the coming-of-age novel “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson and Gene Smith’s “When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson,” which details the President’s incapacitation during the Versailles Treaty ratification fight. I offered the course 55 years after these events, which seemed like ancient history – about the same number of years past as the March on Washington and John F. Kennedy’s assassination. An older student recalled listening to news of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic.

Momma Mia! cast: Kolsch front, middle; Romersberger back, third from left

Toni and I thoroughly enjoyed “Momma Mia!” at Memorial Opera House.  We first saw the play in Las Vegas and enjoyed both the movie starring Meryl Streep and its sequel, featuring an iconic cameo by Cher singing “Fernando.”  The best numbers were the upbeat ones involving the entire cast, including lively dancers led by long-legged Jordyn Romersberger (an instructor at Mirror Image Studio) and athletic, blond-wigged VU grad Carley Kolsch.  Bobbie Sue Kvachkoff shined as Tanya and Mark Williams as rich Englishman Harry, one of momma Donna’s three former lovers.  That fling was his last heterosexual affair, Harry confided.

“We lived poor as dump dogs,”a character declares in John Updike’s “My Father on the Vege of Disgrace,” a great expression I’d never heard before. The short story, from “Licks of Love” (2000), takes place in a town west of Philadelphia not unlike my hometown, Fort Washington, six decades before:

    In this present day of strip malls and towns that are mere boundaries on a developer’s map, it is hard to imagine the core of authority that existed then in small towns, at least in the view of a child – the power of righteousness and enforcement that radiated from the humorless miens of the central men.  They were not necessarily officials; our town was too small to have many of them.  But certain local merchants, a clergyman or two, the undertaker whose green-awninged mansion dominated the main intersection, across from a tavern and a drugstore, not to mention the druggist and the supervising principal of the school, projected a potential for condemnation and banishment.

One of Midge’s chief concerns concerning my aberrant youthful behavior could be summed up by the warning, “What would neighbors think?”  When I came home from college, she’d always drag me to church until I showed up with a beard.  That Sunday, church was never mentioned. Unlike Toni, whose Catholic upbringing fostered feelings of guilt, for me the emotion was shame, not so much what I did but how it would look.

Time’s Lucy Feldman interviewed Richard Russo, about his new novel, “Chances Are.” Responding to a critic who unfairly called him a misogynist, Russo said, “I have to admit, having been raised a Catholic, my first instinct when anybody says anything bad about me is always to say, ‘God, is that true?’”   Attending the University of Arizona in 1969 at the time of the first draft lottery, he recalled joking around with friends initially and then everyone drifting away to call home. His number was 332, which he gave to a character that also inherited some of his idiosyncrasies.  Ruminating over his own fate, Russo stated: “There are certain times when it’s good to be industrious, but that night it was good to be lucky.”  He elaborated:

 There are certain things that are fated, that no matter how hard we try are beyond our ability to alter or shape. There are certain things over which we do have agency.  And then of course there is dumb luck.  But suppose you put me in the exact same place where I started, with the same parents, living on the same street and you give me 99 more tries.  There would be 99 different outcomes.

 

The town of Highlight’s Pride Day celebration featured entertainment (including Eve Bottando playing accordion), interesting displays of all sorts, and spontaneous outbursts of enthusiasm among the LGBTQ participants and supporters. One couple getting married changed in a dressing room along with drag queen who made a big fuss over them.

Dave is attending a conference for teachers in San Antonio, a place I wouldn’t mind visiting that’s evidently been well-governed by Henry Cisneros during the 1980s and, between 2009 and 2014, Julian Castro, whom I hope is on the 2020 Democratic Presidential ticket. 

 

On Jeopardy nobody knew what Kurt Vonnegut novel time traveler Billy Pilgrim was in (easy, “Slaughterhouse Five”) or, on Final Jeopardy, which landmark African explorer David Livingston discovered. I figured it was either Mount Kilimanjaro or Victoria Falls and correctly guessed the latter. The guesses included Mount Kilimanjaro, sources of the Nile, and Timbuctoo.

Growing Up

“Growing Up in Stages

Livin’ life in phases

And I’m running out of pages

Growin’ up.”

         “Patience,” Tame Impala

Tame Impala, an Australian psychedelic rock band reminiscent of MGMT, played “Borderline” and “Patience” on “Saturday Night Live.” I was not familiar with many Tame Impala songs other than “Let It Happen” but was impressed.  Sandra Oh hosted, and the show opened with a sketch featuring Robert DeNiro as Robert Mueller, Aidy Bryant as William Barr, Kate McKinnon as Rudy Giuliani, and Alec Baldwin as Trump, whose best line was that Roseanne was coming back on TV in a show called “The Barrs.”  

Kurt Varricchio’s “Behind in the Count: My Journey from Juvenile Delinquent to Baseball Agent” (2018) is an inspirational tale of an abused child overcoming a troubled adolescence.  Varricchio turned his life around after repeatedly being told that he’d be dead or in jail by the time  he turned 21. Dr. Juan Anaya, the son of Mexican immigrants who became an East Chicago school principal, told me on a drive to Terre Haute for his PhD dissertation defense (I was on his committee) that a teacher once scoffed at his wanting to attend college and it motivated him to prove her wrong. 

Baseball season has begun.  The Phillies swept a series from Atlanta with new superstar acquisition Bryce Harper pounding out two home runs.  On the other hand, despite scoring 26 runs, the Cubs won just one of three games from the Rangers as, aside from ace Jon Lester, their pitchers sucked big time. I frequently switched to NCAA basketball.  Only one number 1 seed, Virginia, made it to the Final Four, and the Cavaliers needed a miracle shot at the buzzer of regulation to prevail over Purdue in overtime. Most fun was watching Michigan State defeat Duke by repeatedly denying Zion Williamson the ball.

A study in the International Journal of Sexual Health documented examples of nonsexual orgasm.  Not surprisingly, some had to do with dancing, listening to live music, or reading a graphic novel. Others involved eating succulent food such as rich chocolate or a ripe cherry tomato.  Responders mentioned shoplifting, breastfeeding, getting a tattoo, and itching a mosquito bite.  One person confessed: “I have orgasmed when my cats have climbed on my lower back and kneaded my skin and purred.  I’ve always felt very weird about that, and it doesn’t happen often because I don’t let them lie on me like that anymore.”  Here’s my favorite: “I once stuck my foot out the window of a moving car.  The wind tickled them, and I had an orgasm.”

In Anne Tyler’s gracefully written “A Patchwork Planet” (1998) onetime juvenile delinquent Barnaby Gaitlin works for Rent-a-Back.  Partner Martine is tiny but tough, a Sparrows Point steelworker’s daughter. At Baltimore’s Penn Station, Barnaby, on his way to visit a daughter in Philadelphia, spots an older couple “hauling their wheeled bags behind them, like big, meek pets on leashes.”  Nice comparison. The train speeds past row houses and factories before the scenery changes to farmland and matted woods.  At Thirtieth Street Station (where I often exited a Pennsylvania Railroad coach on the way to Phillies games at Connie Mack Stadium) one could hear, as Tyler noted, echoes of voices due to the high ceiling and the clatter of footsteps on the marble floors.

 photos by Post-Trib's Kyle Telethon

Bill Pelke gave a moving talk to kick off SPEA’s Public Affairs month, recounting his grandmother Ruth Pelke’s murder in 1985 and his transformation from wanting killer Paula Cooper executed to forgiving her and working to have her life spared.  The former Bethlehem Steel crane operator has been crusading to abolish the death penalty in all 50 states and throughout the world through such organizations as Journey of Hope . . . From Violence to Healing and Murder Victims Families for Human Rights.  Criminal Justice instructor John Tsolakos, a former policeman who had been friends with his IUN predecessor Gary Martin, brought his class.  Several area residents whose loved ones were murdered were in the audience. One noted that many on death row are mentally ill; Bill added that some felons go years before becoming truly sorry for their crime.

above, Pelke and Rhonda LeBroi; below, with great-grandchild, by Elizabeth Ashley

During Q and A Pelke introduced Paula Cooper’s older sister Rhonda LaBroi, who gave him a big hug and encouraged everyone to support the Journey of Hope. Knowing that Bill’s father had wanted Paula executed and initially resented his son’s change of heart, I asked him about the matter.  Bill showed his father the first letter he sent to Paula, and the conversation did not go well but his father eventually muttered,“Do what you have to do.”  Later, Bill added, his father forgave him for forgiving Paula. Asked his reaction to Paula’s suicide after being released from jail, Bill, fighting back tears, replied that he went from disbelief to being devastated and speculated that she could never forgive herself for what she had done.

After I told Jerry Davich about Pelke’s appearance, he promised to urge the Post-Tribto cover the event. In fact, they sent ace reporter Carole Carlson and top-notch photographer Kyle Telechan. Carlson’s front page article mentioned that according to Prosecutor Jack Crawford, Ruth Pelke recited the Lord’s Prayer as she was repeatedly stabbed, something Carlson must have found researching the case since Bill didn’t offer that information.

Jerry Davich posted a photo of the vacant Slovak Club on Eleventh Avenue in its present condition and speculated that “deceased hunkies must be rolling over in their grave” because of its current condition.  I sampled homemade pierogis there while writing about Anna Yurin, whose mother was a cook.  Stevie Kokos recalled:     

 My Baba would be in the pierogi prep army there for the Friday sell outs back in the day. That’s where I was raised on them as a real young kid. I remember the Fallout Shelter signs there and at the K of C building. Won’t be easy to raze that structure.  I also recall going there from the Primich grocery shop at 11th and Polk. I would drive my 91-year-old father passed there if I knew he would not get depressed at seeing his city in ruins.

Francisco Cantu’s “A Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border” (2018) arrived via inter-library loan from Bluffton, Indiana, of all places, where Gary’s first School Superintendent, William A. Wirt, attended school. Gaard Murphy Logan recommended it, and it appears to be a tear-jerker.  The book jacket calls it an empathetic look at both border police and migrants who seek a better life in America. Reviewer Barry Lopez wrote that Cantu calls for clarity and compassion in place of xenophobia and uninformed rhetoric.

Joe Biden is under attack from a women who claims he put his hands on her shoulders and kissed the top of her head.  A second accuser then came forward to charge that he leaned in so close to her that their noses rubbed.  Suddenly this nonsense has become the top story on the evening news.  Is there any sense of proportionality?  

I distributed the new Steel Shavingsto a half=dozen bridge players interviewed in the past year by IUN students. Helen Booth first with a score of exactly 50 percent and each earned .28 of a master point.  When I mentioned Bill Pelke’s IUN appearance, she knew what a wonderful guy he was. She belongs to an anti-death penalty organization and said Bill had been top her house several times, once with “Dead Man Walking” author Sister Helen Prejean, who, she said, slept on the floor because there were so many house guests.  My best hand came after Helen opened I Club.  With just 5 points I almost passed but said a No trump.  Helen jumped to 3 No Trump, and I took 11 tricks.

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.