Homefront

 “Baby baby baby, what's wrong with Uncle Sam?

He's cut down on my sugar, now he's messin' with my ham
I got the ration blues, blue as I can be
Oh me, I've got those ration blues”

         Ration Blues,” Louis Jordan

In Nicole Anslover’s World War II class I passed out copies of Steel Shavings, volume 46 in preparation for my appearance next week to discuss the Gary Homefront. I pointed out short sections for them to read beforehand on Pearl Harbor memories, civil rights activist L.K. Jackson, and Gary in 1942 as portrayed in Kendall Svengalis’ novel “The Great Emerson Art Heist.”  The Pearl Harbor section makes mention of Vic and Midge, 25 on Pearl Harbor Day, and awaiting my birth some two months later.  A fourth selection by IUN student Jessica Nieman about farm girl Jean Schultz Ellis demonstrated that much of Lake and Porter County was rural in those days.  Nieman wrote:

 The youngest of six, Jean gathered eggs, fed the chickens, and brought in the cows.  When Jean was 14, she had her eyebrows done for school picture day, and they swelled up.  “My mom was pissed,” she recalled.  Jean was first in her family to graduate high school.   She said, “At 16 you could stop going.  My older sister would buy me clothes to keep me in school. She wanted me to succeed.”  She was one of 28 graduates in Chesterton’s class of 1943.  Jean had started waitressing at Edward’s Barbecue when just 14.   She learned to drive in her mother’s 1934 Ford.   A Chesterton movie theater had midweek dime shows, which made for an affordable evening out. Jean also loved roller-skating.

above, Jean Shultz at 14; below, Jessica Nieman with "Pally" and Jean

Next I read several passages to demonstrate the city’s wartime blue collar nature and being home to dozens of ethnic groups, as well as Southern white and black newcomers needed in the mills and defense plants.  First I recited Robert Buzecky’s “Steel City, Stone City,” which begins: 

Buzecky, Militich, Rodriguez, Kowalak,

Thousands of Somebodies

From all over the planet.

Names make them different

Blue shirts and steel made them family.

I read brief excerpts from student articles by Lori Van Gorp (about Florence Medellin living in the heart of Gary’s red-light district) and Kristin MacPherson, who learned about her Italian grandparents Wilbur and Margaret from her father Donald Rettig.  Wilbur worked at a title company, drove a taxi, and kept the books for a bowling league.  Margaret worked part-time in the bowling alley kitchen and was famous for a cinnamon streusel coffee cake.  Donald told Kristin:

    My mom loved Dean Martin and Perry Como. The aroma of food was always in the air, with a pot of spaghetti sauce or soup on the stove. Noodles might be drying over chairs or homemade ravioli scattered over the dining room table. I will never forget my mom wringing a chicken’s neck and nailing it to the garage to clean it.  We had the biggest garden in the neighborhood. Everyone helped.  Mom canned tomatoes, beans, and beets and made pickles, jellies, and jams.  At Easter there’d be a lamb cake, and at Christmas containers of cookies were on each step going upstairs. No one ever left hungry.  

    My mother’s sisters would come over to play cards.  They’d speak Italian and laugh for hours.  We’d sneak under the big dining room table in hopes they’d drop some coins.  After bedtime we’d peek through the floor grate and watch them.

 Wilbur, Margaret and Don Rettig

Since Vee-Jay Records co-founder Vivian Carter was on the cover, I explained that during the war she joined the Quartermaster Corps and was stationed in Washington. D.C., broadening her horizons and discovering  musicians that she later recorded.  I explained that many black performers in the 1940s had crossover hits and were popular with white audiences, not only jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington but vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole (my father’s favorite) and harmony groups such the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots that influenced Gary’s own Spaniels, pictured on the back cover. Up-tempo band leaders such as Cab Calloway (who appears in the 1980 “Blues Brothers” film performing “Minnie the Moocher”) and Louis Jordan belted out “jump” music that presaged rock and roll. I had Nicole play YouTube excerpts from “If I Didn’t Care” by the Ink Spots and “Caldonia” by Louis Jordon and the Tympany Five.  The latter begins:

Walkin’ with my baby she's got great big feet
She’s long, lean, and lanky and ain’t had nothing to eat
She’s my baby and I love her just the same
Crazy ’bout that woman cause Caldonia is her name

Next week, I’ll play “Ration Blues” by Louis Jordan, which contains this verse:

They reduced my meat and sugar
And rubber's disappearing fast
You can't ride no more with poppa
'Cause Uncle Sam wants my gas

Speaking about the war in the Pacific, Nicole brought up the army’s use of Navaho code talkers (above) to communicate in the field, since almost nobody outside the tribe could speak their unique language.   The Japanese could never crack it.  After class a student named Heather had the magazine open to a page containing a photo of M to F transgender Dakota Yorke, a 2016 Portage High School homecoming queen finalist.  “Dakota’s my best friend,”Heather exclaimed, and showed me that she had sent a photo of the page to Dakota, who texted back that she was really excited and anxious to read what I’d written.

above, Dakota; below, woodcut by Corey Hagelberg

At bridge Dick and Cheryl had noticed a photo of son Corey’s woodcut “We All Share the Same Roots” in the new edition of “Gary: A Pictorial History” and inquired about obtaining it.  I offered to trade one for an out-of-print copy of the “Tales of Lake Michigan and the Northwest Indiana Dunelands” Steel Shavings (volume 28, 1998), which they produced three days later.  It contains an interview with a former bowling acquaintance whom I nicknamed “Slick Tom” where he talked about picking up girls along the Lake Michigan shoreline in his cabin cruiser.  The steelworker bragged:

 In the summer I’d trade with everybody to get on straight midnights so I could cruise the beach to see who I could pick up.  A good spot was Lake Street.  Usually I’d take a friend.  By 11 or 12 o’clock, girls would be out sunbathing.  You might pick up one, two, three or four girls.  It was easy.  You just looked to see who was waving their arms.  When a girl starts flagging down a boat, it usually sends a signal that they are ready to party.  You pulled in, and if they weren’t good-looking, you pulled back away.

 Once my cousin and I picked up two pretty-looking girls.  We thought they were in their mid-20s.  We zoomed out about a mile and a half and started drinking some wine.  We were getting out of our bathing suits when I asked one girl how old she was.  I found out the two girls were 14 and 15 years old.  Needless to say, we got them dressed very quickly and rushed them back to shore.

 If we saw a good-looking girl who didn’t wave, we’d get out the inner tube and tie it to the back of the boat. I’d get on it.  Then my buddy would race in close towards shore and spin the boat and make the tube go right into the beach.  I’d stumble up on shore and say, “Hey, my name’s Tom.  We need three people to water ski.  Would you like a boat ride and be an observer?”  That worked like a champ.  Initially, they might say no, they were engaged or married.  Once they were on the boat for a few hours, after some persuasion and some drink, the changes in their demeanor were amazing.

“Tales of Lake Michigan” also contains my interview with Region Dunes artist David Sander (1923-1999), who told me:

 I was in the navy during World War II. After my discharge, I went back to the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill.  I met and married a classical language student, who was not familiar with the Dunes.  One day we drove to have a look at them.  It just happened that we parked next to a station wagon that had a Chesterton real estate address.  We asked the lady to show us some land.  The first place she showed us, we bought, a 40-acre tract in Beverly Shores at the end of a road that had a house, a barn, and a set of batteries because we were too far for city electricity.

 The former owner was an old Hungarian farmer.  He and his wife lived in a little milk house for several months after we purchased the land. She used to walk to Chesterton and try to sell articles they no longer needed, like a butter churn.  She’d be saying things in Hungarian, and people thought she was crazy.  Finally their son came and rescued them.

 I started painting again.  Lake Michigan became part of my nature.  Mostly I painted the Dunes.  Without people.  People-less dunes. I found the less I put into a painting, the more original it was.  After all, a painting is a rendering of a subject, not the subject itself.  The details are not the subject of a painting. The true artist creates something which is an amalgam, different and presumably greater than either him or his subject.

I vividly recall scores of dunes paintings scattered all over Sander’s home, seemingly discarded, and not having the nerve to ask him for one or two.  Not long afterwards, he was dead.

 Marcus Brown; photo by Beverly Brown

After winning the first game from 2 L’s and 2 R’s, the Engineers had only one strike in the entire second game and lost by 70 pins, as Marcus Brown bowled in the 240s,well above his average.  I had felt a twinge in my upper leg and briefly considered sitting out the finale.  Then, after a spare, split and missed 10-pin, I strung six strikes in a row and then converted a a spare, finishing with a 221, my highest score since I started at Hobart Lanes.  I got several fist bumps from bowlers nearby.  The Engineers picked up an amazing 17 strikes in that one game to win handily and garner 5 of 7 points.  I edged Joe Piunti, who won game one for us, for most pins over average by a mere 2 pins for the four-dollar pot.  Afterwards, I asked Dorothy Peterson and Gene Clifford how they liked “Shrek: The Musical” Sunday. They enjoyed it, but a woman near them with a young girl was complaining about hearing three curse words.  That was news to me.  They must have been pretty inoffensive.  Gene and Dorothy have tickets for “Million Dollar Quarter” at the Munster Theater.

Dorothy Peterson

Zion Williamson on ground

Nike stock fell more than 1% after Duke star Zion Williamson’s sneaker imploded 33 seconds into a game with North Carolina and he injured a knee.  Nike had signed a lucrative deal with the university that mandated players wear their brand even though they received nothing but free sneakers while Coach K’s annual salary rose to in the neighborhood of 10 million dollars. What a farce.

Coming of Age

“We’re all pretty bizarre.  Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.”  Andrew in “The Breakfast Club”

I spoke to Steve McShane’s class about their assignment to interview someone from the Calumet Region who was a teenager during the 1990s, then had them read excerpts from memoirs published in Steel Shavings (volume 31, 2001) by such memorable students as Highland skateboarder Craig McLain, West Side basketball player Rashon Davis, North Newton “wigger” Elizabeth Grzych, and Boone Grove graduate Marshall Lines, who talked a friend out of committing suicide and, like “nerdy Andrew in “The breakfast Club,” was a late bloomer.  Erin Hawkins had her tongue pierced on her eighteenth birthday, and Merrillville grad Anne Marie Laurel got jailed for underage drinking at a Portage trailer park.  I referenced Donny Hollandsworth, still a fanatical IU and Bears fan and presently in a poker group with Dave, and Samuel A. Love (then Sam Barnett, singer with the punk band Fuzz Factor), a Gary community organizer and close friend. The Nineties Shavings, titled “Shards and Midden Heaps” from a Jean Shepherd quote, contains William Buckley’s “Night Shift” about downtown Crown Point:

  Our sudden coolings in August

              When boys come flying

              on their rollerblades

              their arms stretched like wings

  Streets are empty, except for hard legs

              walking into Pete’s Irish Pub, and the movies

              are doing business with families, for “Die Hard.”

  Our boys lean for the wind, circle

              round the gingerbread courthouse on wheels

              like birds around the lawn, and cop cars

              cool their engines by the Triple Play Saloon.

  There’d been a street dance, before the rains.

              And the jail where John Dillinger carved his wood

              into a gun, has been saved for renovation.

 “Shards and Midden Heaps” examines coming-of-age” teen experiences of so-called Generation Xers or their younger siblings, sometimes nicknamed Generation Nexters or Generation Why? Volume 31’s chief merit, I still believe, may well be its anecdotal glimpses into the contemporary history of adolescence, at present a virtually virgin field.  Contributors recalled wild parties and car rides, body piercings and visits to tattoo parlors, color guard highlights and gridiron thrills, skateboarding feats and deaths coming too soon.  Adolescence was truly a period of danger.  Young people succumbed on the highway, at unprotected railway crossings, from drug overdoses, at the hands of predators, and from insidious diseases such as AIDS and asthma. The latter affected a disproportionately large number of residents living in the shadow of the mills.

One critic called Dan Wakefield’s coming-of-age novel “Going All the Way” (1970) the Midwest “Catcher in the Rye.” Kurt Vonnegut wrote that it “is really about a society so drab that sex seems to the young to be the only adventure with any magic to it.”  In the chapter on Sonny and Gunner’s 1954 visit to Calumet City, just across the Illinois state line, Wakefield wrote:

  There was this main street lit up like a carnival with flashing neon signs and barkers trying to get you in the strip joints, all of them saying the main attraction was just coming on no matter what was actually happening.  It was just a little country-town except that it was nothing but bars and strip joints and all that mothering neon glaring and blinking in the night, and behind it, in the sky, the reddish-orange glow from the steel mills, like the skyline of hell.

Driving through Gary, renown photographer Camilo Vergara, a frequent visitor to the “Steel City,” spotted a billboard at Fifteenth and Monroe soliciting  blood plasma donations and indicating that one could buy a motorcycle or snowmobile with the money.  It reminded me that right after Alaskans received oil-generated money from the state’s Permanent Fund (in 2015 the payout was $2,072), ads touting trips to Hawaii and other enticements began appearing for the exact amount allocated.

 Jessica Nieman with Pally and Jean

Jessica Nieman interviewed 90 year-old Alberta “Jean” Ellis in a house in Chesterton just down the street from where she grew up.  Jessica wrote:

Jean Shultz’s family farmed 27 acres.  When she was 11, her dad was struck dead by a truck while mowing grass. Jean’s mother Edith took over the farm with help from her children. Jean said, “We were all farmers, because that’s all that was around at that time here!”  The youngest of six, Jean gathered eggs, fed the chickens, and brought in the cows.  She said, “My mother was a great seamstress and made all my clothes. People would give her heavy overcoats, and she would tear them apart and make clothes for us.  My first store-bought coat was right after my father had passed.”  They traded farm produce for clothing.

  When Jean was 14, she had her eyebrows done for school picture day, and they swelled up.  “My mom was pissed,” she recalled.  Jean was first in her family to graduate high school.   She said, “At 16 you could stop going.  My older sister would buy me clothes to keep me in school. She wanted me to succeed.”  She was one of 28 graduates in Chesterton’s class of 1943.  Jean had started waitressing at Edward’s Barbecue when just 14.   She learned to drive in her mother’s 1934 Ford.   A Chesterton movie theater had midweek dime shows, which made for an affordable evening out. Jean also loved roller-skating.

At age 20 Jean married Earl Ellis. They had four children, Mark, David, Gwen, and Danny. In 1978 Earl passed away. Fifteen years later, at Moose Lodge on Thanksgiving, Jean ran into an old friend, recently widowed Lou “Pally” Gordon, and they have been inseparable ever since.  The October day I met with Jean she had just gone to Chesterton Farmers Market, as she does every Saturday, for cheese curds and coffee, and we sat and talked for two hours, with 94 year-old Pally sometimes joining in.

Joseph Mastej wrote about Elaine Brezovich Jamrose, who was born on February 28, 1937, at St. Katherine’s and grew up in Whiting.  Her parents, Tom and Ann Brezovich, were from Czechoslovakia.  Tom worked at Amoco (BP) refinery.  Mastej wrote:

              Elaine’s grandma owned a tavern and several adjacent apartments.  Elaine recalled, “On Fridays she’d have fish fries, and all these guys would come for her dinners. And all of her kids had to pitch in to help: fry the fish, make the coleslaw, and all of that.  My dad used to plop me on the barstool. I was like five or six. I’d sing in Polish or Croatian.  Guys got a big kick seeing this little girl sing and would tip me a dime or a quarter.”

Elaine’s older sister Carol ended up marrying, in Elaine’s words, “a big shot at Ford.”  Elaine’s favorite memory at St. Adalbert’s was wearing a beautiful dress in an ethnic pageant.  In fourth grade a nun locked her in “the dark closet,” as kids used to call it, for talking, and she came home crying.  Her dad went crazy and put her in public school.  In high school Elaine played the piano for the chorus and the viola in orchestra.  She was a cheerleader, on the yearbook committee, and participated in plays.  She lived near Lake George and played volleyball at the beach and ice-skated in winter. A favorite uncle often took her to Whiting beach.   Elaine recalled: “I used to go to a hamburger place after school, where there was a juke box.”

Elaine attended dances after basketball and football games and at Madura’s Danceland and St. John Panel Room.  After one game, she recalled: “I was waiting for my boyfriend to come and this boy from Tolleston asked me to dance.  His name was Paul Krysitch. I really liked him. He said why don’t you come visit me sometime, I work at this shoe store in Gary.  That Saturday I did, but he was off that day. I never went back but wish I had.  I only met him one night.”

  Elaine graduated in 1954 and intended to become an X-ray technician, but her boyfriend proposed to her so she got a job at American Trust and Savings until she got pregnant with son Danny.  She and her husband were married on October 13, 1956.  The reception was at St. John Panel Room, where she’d go for dances. The shower was at the Slovak Dome.  The couple moved to a part of Whiting called Goose Island.  She often took a bus to downtown Hammond and shopped at Goldblatt's.  A dozen cookies cost just a dollar.

Elaine’s marriage ended in 1969 when she caught her husband having an affair.  She summed up their 13 years of marriage, “The first ten were really happy.  My mother-in-law lived upstairs and was a good cook. She took my kids under her wing. Then the last three years I had a little bit of a suspicion and those weren’t good years.“  Elaine moved above her grandma’s tavern with Danny and Laura.  It was noisy, and drunks would stumble upstairs looking for the bathroom. She found work at Inland Steel and after five years moved to a nicer apartment.  She joined a bowling league with co-workers and said: “All the guys I worked with were married but tried to hit on the divorced women. They were tired of their old lady so figured, ‘Let’s try this one out.’”  She and her girlfriends traveled to Hawaii.  She recalled: “That was my first trip on an air plane. It was this great big 747 with all these people and their luggage, and we are going over the ocean. I was sitting there petrified, praying the rosary, as the plane bounced around.”

   

White Sox hurler Chris Sale won his ninth consecutive start, 2-1, with former Philly Jimmy Rollins scoring on a sacrifice fly after stealing second and advancing to third on a grounder.  Sale and Jake Arrieta of the Cubs are the best pitchers in their respective leagues.

Five days ago, on safari in Tanzania, Alissa wrote: “Josh and I are in the Serengeti (literally)! It's been the most amazing 48 hours! We watched a herd of elephants snacking on grass, ended up in the center of a circle of stampeding wildebeest, and a full-grown male lion came to visit us during our picnic lunch. We survived and are living in style in this crazy Serengeti paradise of a hotel.”  Today came this update:

Josh and I are back in Arusha! The safari was such an adventure! Our group spent a day with the Hadzabe tribe - they are Bushmen who have extremely little contact with the outside world. There are about 1,000 members of this tribe left in Tanzania. They live entirely off the land. In order to reach them, our guides had to call two local guys to find where they were that day. They are nomadic and move around every few weeks (depending on the hunting). Every day, the women gather, cook and take care of the children while the men go hunt. We drove deep into the remote bush of Tanzania (had to drive through a small river) and hiked to find them in a hollowed out bush. They speak in a language with a lot of clicking noises, which can't be written down so it's very hard to learn). They taught us to play their instruments and we danced. They taught us how to make fire (Josh was by far the best at it - he has been bragging ever since) and we got to go hunting with them! I was nervous about it at first because their favorite meat is baboon. Luckily, with 25+ loud Americans behind them, all they were able to catch were small birds and rats (which they shot with arrows!!!!) They also found us fresh honey in a huge tree and how to find fruit. To hunt, they run with a pack of pretty wild looking dogs that help them track animals; we had to sprint to keep up with them at times. It was one of the most exhausting, exciting, and mind-bogglingly awesome experiences of my life.