Fantasy Draft

    “Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”   Dr. Seuss

I just completed drafting my NFL Fantasy Football team for the upcoming 2020 season, due to begin in six days despite the pandemic necessitating empty stadiums.  It seems crazy to proceed; but billions in TV revenue are at stake, and in America that trump’s health concerns.  As customary, I was with Dave, who helped set up my computer and offered advice when it didn’t conflict with his desires. On zoom we chatted with nephew Bob’s family – Niki, Addie, and Crosby - in San Diego and met grandson Anthony’s new girlfriend.  In many ways the Lane family zoom interaction was the evening’s highlight.

California Lanes

Thanks to Carolina running back Christian McCaffrey’s 2019 heroics, I am the defending champ in our Lane league, now in its fifteenth year and recently expanded to ten teams. I had the number 2 pick and, as expected, McCaffrey went first to nephew Dave’s Bruisers.  So, Jimbo Jammers settled for running back Saquon Barkley (on right, below).  The consensus draft ratings recommendations are top heavy with running backs and wide receivers, but after securing Tampa Bay wide receiver Mike Evans with my second pick, I decided to opt for the best remaining choices in the other positions.  Thus, I drafted Eagle tight end Zach Ertz, Baltimore QB Lamar Jackson, and later, the top-ranked Steeler defense and the top-ranked kicker Justin Tucker (left) of Baltimore.

My prediction (hope I’m wrong): Covid-19 will wreak havoc on the gridiron, necessitating cancellations and possible derailment of the entire season. For the 90 minutes of socializing and strategizing, however, we allowed out football fantasies to prevail over the so-called new normal.

Within minutes of posting the above, Facebook Nick Mantis posted: “Your team is solid.”  I replied: “As you know, injuries play such a major role, running backs are the hardest to predict since they are injury-prone, age fast, and an unheralded one typically bursts on the scene in the first couple weeks.  Top-ranked running backs of the very recent past – David Johnson, Todd Gurley, Le’Veon Bell, Mark Ingram, Frank Gore – are far down on the list. 

While I didn’t miss sports that much when everything was on hold, now I’m enjoying the Cubs and Flyers and next week I expect to watch my share of NFL games.  Unless I’m rooting for a team, games bore me; so I haven’t been interested I NBA basketball since the 76ers got eliminated.  Ditto the Kentucky Derby, this year without fans at Churchill Downs. The Bayers used to have Derby parties complete with mint julips; and, more recently, when family was visiting, I’d arrange for everyone to throw in a dollar and have horses picked out of a hat.  My bowling league started up, but Frank Shufran and I decided to drop out and reassess next year if the pandemic is over. Last year, we were scrambling to find substitutes when two players went on the DL, and this year probably would have been just as bad, if not worse.

Stuck upstairs without reading material while the cleaners were at the condo, I found Sue Grafton’s mystery novel “P Is for Peril” in the bookcase and, 50 pages in, plan to finish it.  My dad Vic loved hat genre for work-related train or plane trips, but the private eyes were macho men, unlike Kinsey Millhorn, whom I find infinitely more interesting than a Sam Spade type. The missing person had been a nursing home administrator, a job rendered almost impossible by our current pandemic.  Kinsey found listings for 20 in the yellow pages.  Grafton wrote:

    Most facilities had names suggesting that the occupants pictured themselves in any place but where they were: Cedar Creek Estates, Green Briar Villa, Horizon View, Rolling Hills, the Gardens. Surely, no one envisioned being frail and fearful, abandoned, incapacitated, lonely, ill,  and incontinent in such poetic-sounding accommodations.

South Shore Arts director John Cain (on left) announced he’s retiring within the year. I first met him at a meeting and at first glance he resembled nothing more than a Truman Capote clone, complete with mannerisms. The first time he spoke, I realized he was someone I wanted to know better.  We’ve become friends and collaborators on several arts projects.  I wrote an essay for a booklet for an important show titled “Gary Haunts.”  I’ve given several talks on Rock and Roll music for the Munster Center’s Art in Focus series.  Toni and I are regulars at Cain’s annual Holiday reading, often a selection from his doppelganger Truman Capote.

Former Gary teacher Jim Spicer provided a history of “Joke Day.”  “Since the early 1970’s students in my classroom were taught that on Friday, with a minute remaining in the hour, their response to my question, “WHAT’S TODAY?” would be, “JOKE DAY!” Since retirement the Friday tradition continues. Here’s one of my favorites are repeated: “If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed?”

Eleanor Bailey wrote about childhood memories during World War II:

    In the mid-1940s, our family lived in the Newton County small town of Lake Village.  Playing with my friends and cousins was a lot of fun. We didn't know what being safe meant, it just was. It was war time. We had radios, but no televisions. News was not constantly replayed all day long. I remember as a child of five or six that my parents would put we three children to bed and late in the evening they would tune the radio to the Walter Winchell program. He would open his broadcast by saying, “Good Evening Mr. and Mrs America and all the ships at sea.” Lying in bed awake and secretly listening, I would wonder to myself, “Why is this man telling those terrible stories?” I knew that two of my uncles were away from home and they would write letters to the family. The letters came in special thin blue envelopes. Uncle Charles Bailey was in the Army Air Force and stationed in England. Uncle Paul Bailey was a Navy radioman on a ship that carried fuel and equipment to Murmansk in northern Russia. The Russians were our allies at that time.

    Dad and many other men drove every day to the steel mills and other factories in the north end of Lake County. They car-pooled and shared their ration stamps to buy gas. Dad worked at Harbison-Walker Refractories on Kennedy Avenue in East Chicago. Other men worked at Linde-Air, at one of the steel mills, or Pullman-Standard Company. All were making goods that were war-related.

   “Often we would go to Aunt Flora Iliff's restaurant on the south end of town. Town residents gathered there to drink coffee and discuss the latest news. When the bombs were dropped on Japan, their conversation turned to questions, such as, “What will happen now? Someone repeated what they had heard, "The oceans will come up and cover the earth!” This was a frightening time for a child whose only care had been which friends to spend the day with and whether to ride bikes, roller skate or play with our doll-houses.

On a hike along Lake Michigan Dorreen Carey photographed dragonflies mating and basking turtles.  Awesome!

Last Straw

 "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Nineteenth-century clergyman Theodore Parker, made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

The phrase “last straw” comes from the Arab proverb, “It is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back.” That’s what happened when the world witnessed the murder of George Floyd, whose life got snuffed out when a cop pinned his neck with his knee for 8 minutes and 43 seconds.  The entire world reacted with shock and anger. What a contrast with Barack Obama. Days later, Trump’s toadies ordered troops to assault peaceful demonstrators to make way for the President to hold up a Bible at a nearby historic church.  That was too much for decorated military leaders past and present and a few Republicans of good will, sadly a vanishing species

 

Chris Kern wrote: The rhetoric from Trump, Barr, Cotton, and the right wing media about "antifa" is more dangerous than people might realize if they don't follow any right wing media at all. Antifa does exist, but it has nothing to do with what Trump and cohort mean by the term. The right-wing world uses it to mean a vast network of Al-Qaeda like terrorist cells, funded and controlled by people like George Soros, Obama, Clinton, and other right wing boogeymen. This allows to them to label any protester as antifa no matter what they're doing. And when you have people in government calling the military to kill "antifa terrorists", what they really mean is use the military against anyone they don't agree with. Trump, as usual, is clueless and just flailing around trying to appeal to his base. But Barr is smart enough to know that this "antifa" doesn't really exist, but evil enough to understand how this can be used to increase his concept of the powerful executive branch.

From Casey King: “The black figure floating out of symmetry on the right was not intentionally placed. My intention was to create a perfectly mirrored image. I noticed it after I had shared the full artwork last night. Sometimes unplanned mistakes and imperfections are serendipitous. I believe my mistaken addition of that black figure on the right is saying something. I think the senseless and racist killing of George Floyd was a grandiose mistake: yet a spark that has ignited fires that will settle and ideally bring humanity closer to peace and understanding. I believe negativity breeds negativity. There is enough of that going around. Therefore, this is my means of caring and expressing empathy towards the matter at hand. I am also a recent Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate and I feel that responding to such a pivotal moment in our nation’s history through visual art is absolutely necessary. I cannot...not respond in such a way. I should not: not respond in such a way.”

I watched lectures by Hoosier Historians Jim Madison and Ray Boomhower online. Both discussed World War II, Madison covering the Indiana home front and Boomhower the wartime correspondence of Ernie Pyle. Though most of what they said was familiar, I enjoyed seeing them in action and envied them.  To of my spring talks were cancelled and two October conference appearances are in doubt as well as my maiden Saturday club lecture.  I might be emulating them, delivering my remarks via zoom.


Here are two other reasons I like Facebook:

Ava Meux, Chives and dillweed

Jim Spicer, dunes swallows nests

Laborers

“Unions were created to make living conditions just a little better than they were before they were created, and the union that does not manifest that kind of interest in human beings cannot endure, it cannot live.”  USWA President Philip Murray

 Philip Murray in 1936

Scottish-born Philip Murray (1886-1952) came to America in 1904 with his father, a coal miner. Young Philip also went to work in a mine, first in Scotland and then in the Pittsburgh area but was fired in 1904 for punching a manager who tried to cheat him by altering the weight of the coal he had mined.  He went on to become the president of a United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) local and in time a close associate of UMWA president John L. Lewis.  When Lewis formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), he tapped Murray to head up the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC).  He went on to succeed Lewis as CIO President and in 1942 transformed SWOC into the United Steel Workers of America (USWA), serving as its first president. 

 Lowell Labor Day parade photo by Post-Tribune's Suzanne Tennant

Becca as Mary Poppins; below, Dunes National Park site by George Sladic

The town of Lowell held its hundredth annual Labor Day parade, with Teamster Local 142 president Ted Bilski (also a Lake County Councilman) one of the planners.  Phil came in for the Labor Day weekend to attend a fantasy football draft at Robert Blaskiewicz’s. Toni hosted a sixty-ninth birthday party for Angie’s dad John Teague, who arrived with a cooler of beer left over from James’s graduation party. Beth, up from Carmel, contributed a rhubarb pie.  Toni served ribs, corn of the cob, and rice, plus special meals for Angie (a vegan) and Charles, who doesn’t eat pork.  Becca borrowed my umbrella for an upcoming benefit at which she’ll sing a number from “Mary Poppins.”  In the Hoosier Star vocal competition in LaPorte, next week, she’ll perform “At Last,” made famous by Etta James and covered by Beyonce. Sunday would have been a perfect beach day only I opted to watch the Cubs get shut out for the second day in a row.  Dave stopped in after dropping Phil off, and we got in Acquire and pinochle games – first time in quite a while.

steelworkers on strike in 1949 (above) and 1952 (below)

left, shooting pool at union hall

Philip Murray Building

John and Diane Trafny’s “Downtown Gary, Millrats, Politics, and US Steel” contains photos of Gary Works employees picketing during the 1949 and 1952 steel strikes, as well as two of Philip Murray union hall (exterior and interior) at Fifth and Massachusetts, headquarters for Local 1014 until the 1970s when replaced by McBride Hall on Texas Street near I-65.  In 1959 a 116-day strike ended after President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the Taft-Hartley Act. While those three job actions yielded beneficial resulted for workers, by the time of the 1986-87 USX lockout, the longest in steel industry history, union workers were on the defensive.  

Betty LaDuke

On the way to Valparaiso University’s College of Arts building to speak to Liz Wuerffel’s podcast class, I ran into Brauer Museum director Gregg Hertlieb and had time to check out the current gallery exhibit, entitled “Social Justice Revisited” and featuring the impressive work of Betty LaDuke.  The 86-year-old Oregon artist has traveled to 19 African nations and many other so-called Third World countries to learn about and portray regarding food production and migration.  

The podcast class met in a graphic design lab, and the 18 students had their own work stations. I introduced myself and asked each their name and where they from.  One said Peru – Indiana, not South America, I found out later. I discussed oral history as a vital tool for researching workers, immigrants, minority groups, and seniors.  The students’ first assignment is to interview someone from the Calumet Region, so I suggested talking to Regal Beloit workers who had been on strike since late-June or perhaps seniors who go to Banta Center.  I stressed not going into the interview with a long set of questions but rather engaging the subject in a conversation and being flexible and open to the unexpected. I cited mistakes I’d made such as failing to check my equipment and not asking my subject to turn off his TV.

Questioned about doing oral history and other matters, one student who had read the portions of Steel Shavings magazine I had assigned asked if I wrote persuasively.  I said that as a historian, I sought the truth but didn’t try to disguise my point of view.  As Alessandro Portelli put it, oral history must have as one purpose the advancement of social justice; otherwise, what’s the point?  A Korean-born student wondered what, if anything, scholars would find relevant about our present age.  I noted the climate change crisis, the changing nature of work, and ever-increasing advances in technology.  Asked if I thought Trump would get us into a war with Russia or China.  I declined to discuss Trump other than predict that if he thought he needed a war to get re-elected, he’d pick on a nearby weak country (like Reagan invading Grenada) rather than a superpower. I made several references to the VU Flight Paths Project, whose co-directors are Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette.

from left, Liz Wuerffel, Rebekah Arevalo, Christina Crawley, Allison Schuette

I showed a short clip from my interview of Martha Azcona, whose parents were migrant workers who moved to Gary in the early 1950s when she was a pre-schooler. The eldest of seven, Martha talked about hours spent cleaning her sisters’ cloth diapers, insisting on diaper service for her own children, and using disposables for the next generation.  Now that’s social history at its essence! Next came the main reason I brought the DVD.  Suddenly, Martha said, “I don’t know if I should say this but when I was 15, my parents split up because of another woman.” She explained that the “nice Jewish grocers”her dad worked for told him, who had relatives who perished in Nazi “Death Camps” and believed in family above everything, that they’d have to let him go if he didn’t reconcile with his wife.  He refused, and as a consequence, Martha had to delay graduating from Horace Mann high school to join her mother as a migrant worker.

I noticed a German-born student wearing a Philadelphia Eagles jacket.  He had enjoyed the section in Steel Shavings,volume 48, about the Eagles, led by QB Nick Foles, defeating Tom Brady and the New England Patriots to win the Superbowl and the raucous celebration afterwards.  I included this paragraph from a Sports Illustratedarticle:

  The Crisco that state police had lathered onto street poles two weeks earlier had been replaced by hydraulic fluid – so fans simply uprooted the poles from the ground and carried them down the streets on their shoulders.  Others climbed atop traffic lights and surveyed the unprecedented scene unfolding beneath them. Some 2,000 college students marched from Walnut to 30th Street and, en masse, chanted “Fuck Tom Brady” and “Big Dick Nick.”  Other revelers stood atop cars and threw dollar bills into the air.  One man dressed as Santa – a costume that evokes the most ignominious moment in franchise history – crowd-surfed down the road, not too far from where a Christmas tree was set afire. A police horse was stolen and trotted through the city.

I told the student that my fantasy football draft was that evening, and he nodded with approval. I stuck pretty close to what the experts recommended but consulted with Dave and took a couple personal favorites such as QB Carson Wentz and Bears running back Terik Cohen).  Nephew Garrett tried to persuade me to trade Wentz to him, but I replied, “No dice.”

Karen Freeman-Wilson (r) with Joe Buscaino, Kathy Maness, 
and NLC predecessor Mark Stodola, Mayor of Little Rock

IU Northwest hosted a three-day National League of Cities meeting of mayors, as Gary’s Karen Freeman-Wilson is finishing out her one-year term as president of the organization.  I saw nothing about it in either local paper.  In fact, The NWI Times, which opposed her bid for a third term, egregiously claimed it was a distraction from her mayoral duties. 

At Banta Center for duplicate bridge a guy with a guitar setting up to entertain seniors at lunch told me he mainly played upbeat 60s and 70s numbers.  Bridge opponent Ric Friedman recalled some good local bands back then.  I brought up Styx, and Ric claimed he bought a car previously owned by one of the band members with all sorts of special gadgets, including remote control for music. Dottie Hart and I each earned half a master point, finishing with 54% despite a couple hands I wish I could bid or play over.  When opponent Ed Hollander got set and said, “I was screwed,”Dottie replied “And you weren’t even kissed.”  I’d never heard that expression before.  Chuck Tomes mentioned a LaSalle College basketball player, and I noted that NBA great Tom Gola starred for the Philadelphia school when I was a kid and went on to lead the Philadelphia Warriors to a championship in 1956, six years before the franchise moved to San Francisco.

Learning that bridge opponent Don Giedemann was a bowler and that his partner, Judy Selund, was vacationing in Poland, I talked him into subbing for the Electrical Engineers since we were in desperate need for a fifth bowler.  He already knew many Mel Guth Seniors league bowlers. He started slowly but rolled a 230 second game and finished with a 198 average.  Don once carried a 210 average but took several years off when his wife became critically ill.  A 1955 Bishop Noll graduate, he recalled Noll’s basketball team barely losing to Indianapolis Attucks in front of 5,000 fans at Hammond Civic Center.  Led by Oscar Robertson, Attucks would go on to become state champion by defeating Gary Roosevelt, 97-74.  When he heard I’d spoken in a Valparaiso University class, Don said that for seven years he participated in one on public speaking for an exercise of one-on-one disputation.  The Purdue graduate was a manager at LTV and retired in 2001 after 44 years.

Jim Spicer, elated over Green Bay’s NFL victory, 10-3, over the pathetic Bears, posted his joke of the week:

    Doug lived all his life in the Florida Keys and while on his deathbed, knowing his life’s end was near, spoke to his wife, his daughter, two sons, and his doctor. He asked for two witnesses to be present and a lawyer so that he could place in record his last wishes.

    “My son, Andy, you take the Ocean Reef houses. My daughter, Sybil, take the apartments between mile markers 100 and the Tavernier. My son, Jamie, I want you to take the offices over in the Marathon Government Center. Sarah, my dear wife, please take all the residential buildings on the bayside on Blackwater Sound.”
    The lawyer and witnesses were blown away as they didn’t realize his extensive holdings. Doug slipped away and the lawyer said, “Mrs. Pender your husband must have been such a hard-working man to have accumulated all this property.”
    The wife replied, “No, the jerk had a paper route.”

Ron Cohen and I sent the following memo to Vicki Roman-Lagunas, IUN Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, and Latrice Rosana Booker, dean of the Library

  In the summer of 2020 IU Northwest Archivist Steve McShane will be retiring.  As co-founders and co-directors of the Calumet Regional Archives (CRA), we feel it is imperative to guarantee that he will be replaced by a full time, professional archivist in order to maintain the CRA’s excellence and importance as the most extensive professional Archive in Northwest Indiana, as well as implement plans to establish an IUN campus administrative archive. In order to make sure that Steve (right) will be on hand to acclimate his successor to the job, we are writing to urge that authorization for the position be made as soon as possible in order for a search to commence.        

   Note: Professor James Lane and Ronald Cohen (on left) joined the IUN History Dept. in September 1970. They soon began doing research on Gary and the Calumet Region’s history, which led to collecting historical materials that were initially stored in their offices. When the university began planning the new Library/Conference Center the administration agreed to include a space for the newly created Calumet Regional Archives (CRA). In 1982 the CRA was officially launched with the hiring of Stephen McShane as the full-time archivist. Lane and Cohen have long remained the CRA’s Co-Directors.  Over these last almost forty years the CRA has grown into a massive collection that has been used by countless historians, genealogists, and others from around the world in researching local history, as well as students and faculty. During this time the CRA also expanded its space on the 3rd floor to accommodate the always increasing number of collections.

Champs

“Huh! That’s nothing.  So do I – American, baseball, and poker!”  George F. Babbitt, responding to praise of a neighbor who spoke three languages, in Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt”

In “Babbitt” novelist Sinclair Lewis described how in 1921 residents in cities such as Zenith, Ohio, could track the progress of hometown baseball games on huge newspaper bulletin boards.  One afternoon, Lewis wrote, Babbitt “stood in the thickest and steamiest of the crowd and as the boy on the lofty platform recorded the achievements of Big Bill Bostick, the pitcher, Babbitt remarked to complete strangers, ‘Pretty Nice!” Good work!”  Babbitt also enjoyed silent films at the Chateau, a palatial 3,000-seat theater featuring a 50-piece orchestra.  Babbitt’s favorites were cowboy and cops-and-robbers shoot-em-ups and movies with fat comedians AND bare-legged bathing girls.

In “The Diagnostician and the National Pastime: Baseball as Metaphor in Sinclair Lewis’ ‘Babbitt,” Joe Webb viewed the novelist as an urban  anthropologist who documented why America’s most popular sport was so popular with sedentary businessmen.  Webb wrote: “Baseball ballparks became a symbolic link to the nation’s pastoral past in the midst of the modern, urban, technological city, but the game was symbolic of conquest.”  Babbitt’s Zenith Athletic Club exemplified the ailment of the tired businessman – inactivity: “It is not athletic and not exactly a club, but it is Zenith in its perfection; it is a place for men to gather and talk about the manly, sporting exploits of others.” Babbitt considered baseball one of the society’s pillars, like the Republican Party.  A fellow club member branded Babe Ruth a “noble man” due to his on-field exploits, never mind his less than reputable lifestyle. Speaking to the Zenith Real Estate Board, Babbitt read these lines from shallow pet/ad man Chum Frink:

          All the fellows standing round 

          a-talkin’ always, I’ll be bound

 About baseball players of renown

 That nice guys talk in my home town

The Boston Red Sox are World Series champs for the fourth time in 14 years since breaking the so-called curse of Babe Ruth having been traded to the Yankees a century ago.  I paid little interest in the playoffs after the Cubs were eliminated but did watch parts of Friday’s 18-inning marathon that lasted almost 8 hours, until 3 a.m., the lone Dodger victory. I hardly knew any players on either team except for ex-White Sox Chris Sale, who struck out the side to clinch the final game, and L.A. pitchers Clay Kershaw, Rich Hill (a former Cub), and  Walker Buehler (whose name announcers delighted in mimicking the nerdy economics teacher, played by Ben Stein, in “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off”).  

 Rich Hill in 2006

After game 5 Trump criticized manager Dave Roberts for going to his bullpen prematurely, tweeting: “It is amazing how a manager takes out a pitcher who is loose & dominating through almost 7 innings, Rich Hill of Dodgers, and brings in nervous reliever(s) who get shellacked. 4 run lead gone. Managers do it all the time, big mistake!” Referring to the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, Hill responded: “There was a mass shooting yesterday.  The focus, in my opinion, of the president is to be on the country, and not on moves that are made in a World Series game.”

 participant in White House vigil for Pittsburgh synagogue victims; below, Bob and Niki Lane

An anti-Semitic gunman armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle mowed down a dozen Tree of Life worshippers in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. This just days after a Trump supporter mailed packages containing bombs to a dozen Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as the offices of CNN.  Neither caused our heartless President to cancel campaign appearances.  Instead, he faulted the synagogue for not having armed guards and continues to rant against all critics.   One tweet stated, “The Fake News is doing everything in their power to blame Republicans, Conservatives and me for the division and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Country.” Mayor Bill Peduto called the senseless atrocity the “darkest day of Pittsburgh’s history.”  Nephew Bob Lane, whose brother Dave works just two blocks from Tree of Life synagogue, wrote:

This is not the first time I’ve been affected by gun violence but this is the first time it happened in my childhood neighborhood. To know this happened just two blocks from my childhood home in a place where I had countless dances and celebrations sickens me. I was a paper boy on that corner, grew up there, walked by there a thousand times. Even in our darkest hour, I remember that love is a basic human instinct that will prevail.

Prior to bridge, eight of us dined at Wagner’s, known for having the best ribs in Northwest Indiana.  In 1988, David Wagner purchased a boarded up tavern off the beaten track in Porter and opened the restaurant, which now does a booming business.  Mike and Janet Bayer introduced us to Wagner’s shortly before they moved to Vermont; Alice Bush and Ken Applehans took us there while we were living with them after the 2000 home invasion, where I had my first beer in over a month.  Saturday, for 20 bucks, I ordered a meal with two entries, a half-rack of ribs and steak shish kabob (the latter became Sunday dinner).  Toni and I had the best round of the night, making three game bids in four hands, and she won the 4-dollar first prize.  Eating delicious chocolate cake afterwards, Dick Hagelberg, knowing it came from Jewel, repeated his standard quip that Toni must have spent most of the day baking it.

The reigning Superbowl champion Philadelphia Eagles evened their record at 4-4 with an exciting victory over the Jaguars in England.  The game aired at 8:30 a.m. Chicago time.   Hours earlier, four Jacksonville players were detained by police after refusing to pay a $64,000 bar tab at London Reign nightclub. It’s hard to imagine how they could have incurred such a large bill short of treating the entire house to free drinks or having exotic dancers pleasure them.  Perhaps management was simply stiffing four naïve African-American jocks in a strange environment.  All told, it was a good NFL day, with the Skins, Bears, and Eagles all triumphant. The only sour note  was my Fantasy team, again garnering the second most points but losing to Pittsburgh Dave when Todd Gurley, after a 25-yard run, took a knee rather than cross the goal line, knowing time would expire, giving the Rams the victory, while a TD might conceivably have allowed Green Bay to tie the score in the final minute. What he did crushed many bigtime NFL high-rollers, the Rams being 71/2-point favorites.

Anne Weiss, photos by Jerry Davich

Post-Trib columnist Jerry Davich profiled high school history teacher Anne Weiss, 73, whose Andrean career spans 50 years. Several former students claimed she was their best teacher ever.  Joking about her bossy personality, Weiss remarked: “Some boys find it difficult to deal with a loud woman. Some girls, too.”  Lamenting that there were only two remaining blackboards at Andrean, Weiss joked: “Take me away before you take my beloved blackboard.”  While chair of IUN’s History Department, I observed Anne in the classroom to assess whether the course was worthy of AP (Advanced Placement) status, earning students college credit.  She was very knowledgeable, interacted well with students, but forced them to think, reason, and participate.

 "Merciless" Mary McGee

Brad Miller from Indiana Landmarks requested information on North Gleason Park clubhouse, a 1941 WPA project.  It served a nine-hole golf course that frequently flooded in the spring and was inferior to the whites-only 18-hole course across the Little Calumet River in South Gleason Park. The site became Police Athletic League training quarters for local boxers, and Miller found walls lined with fight posters.  One touted Gary’s own “Merciless” Mary McGee, who began competing professionally in 2005.  Presently unused and suffering from considerable roof damage, the building once contained a restaurant and was, Archives volunteer Maurice Yancy recalled, the site of dances  In “Gary: A Pictorial History” is a photo (below) of visiting celebrity Joe Louis, the heavyweight champ, at a 1948 Par-Makers golf tournament.  

Louis-Schmeling, 1938; two minutes later the German was on the canvas

The most popular black celebrity of his time, Joe Louis Barrow was born in 1914 in east-central Alabama, the seventh child of sharecroppers Monroe and Lillie Barrow.  The family moved to Detroit at age 12 where Joe, a shy kid with a stammer, first observed streetcars, electric lights, and indoor toilets.  One story, probably apocryphal, claims he went by his middle name to avoid his mother discovering that he was using money for violin lessons to learn boxing.  His pugilistic career took off during the Depression under the tutelage of John Roxborough, Detroit’s black rackets   boss.  To drum up fan interest, urban newspapers, including both the Chicago Tribuneand the Chicago Defender, billed the “Brown Bomber” as wholesome and nonthreatening, in contrast tothe previous generation's controversial black champion Jack Johnson.  Under strict orders from handlers to, unlike Johnson, avoid white women, Louis wed comely Marva Trotter in 1935.  Throughout his career, however, he reveled in Gary’s nightclub scene, visiting such Midtown establishments as Mona’s Lounge, Mae’s Louisiana Kitchen, the Wonder Room, and the Playboy Club, whose owners treated him like royalty.

In 1938, when Louis knocked out German Max Schmeling in just 124 seconds to avenge his only previous loss before 70,000 fans in Yankee Stadium and millions more radio listeners, celebrations erupted in African-American neighborhoods across the nation.  In Gary a tragic confrontation erupted when Black celebrants ventured into segregated Glen Park and found themselves engulfed by an angry mob, resulting in the accidental death of a white woman and the murder conviction of civil rights leader Joseph Pitts.  I wrote about Pitts and palpably unfair trial in “Gary’s First Hundred Years.” Here’s David Margolick’s account in “Beyond Glory”:

  Two Gary residents a white woman named Florence Nehring and Joseph Pitts, a black barber, had listened to the fight – she at her home, he at his barbershop.  Each then went out to reconnoiter.  Whites near one commercial strip began pelting the car carrying Pitts and two of his friends with tomatoes and eggs.  Pitts got frightened, opened the door, and brandished a revolver, which went off accidentally.  After ricocheting off a wall, the bullet hit Nehring in the abdomen.  Hundreds of angry whites swarmed around Pitts’s car; cries of “Lynch the nigger!” filled the air.  A policeman pulled him to safety, but whites turned the car over with the other men still inside; one rioter tried puncturing the gas tank with an ice pick and setting the car on fire.  Fearing he’d be lynched – the crowd had swollen to more than two thousand people - authorities took Pitts to a remote jail. 

In 1951, the Par-Makers joined the United Golf Association, a black organization (at the time the PGA restricted its membership to whites only), and sponsored a tournament that Joe Louis agreed to participate in.  Due to the Champ’s promised appearance, parks department administrators were shamed into agreeing to make South Gleason’s course available. That year, a dozen Par-Makers members signed up to play in the annual Post-Tribunecity tournament.  Publisher H.B. Snyder, President of Gary’s Urban League Board, made sure they weren’t turned away.  Even so, the match play flights were rigged against the black entrants.  By the quarterfinals Nolan “Jelly” Jones was the only remaining black golfer.  His semi-final opponent was the tournament favorite.  On one hole Jones witnessed his opponent hit a ball under a tree only to have a spectator kick it back onto the fairway.  Jones won the match anyway.  The following week, black fans parked adjacent to the course to watch Jones compete for the championship.  When he clinched the victory on the sixteenth hole, the tournament director left rather than to acknowledge the new champion.  A week later, according to Par-Makers president Thomas Moxley, a “puny” little trophy arrived at North Gleason clubhouse for Jones, who continued to play the South Gleason course.  As club champ, officials didn’t dare turn him away.  Most Par-Makers, on the other hand, continued to use North Gleason. In 1991, Moxley explained why: “You knew that you were not welcome.”  In 1952 Louis participated in a PGA event, the San Diego Open, as an amateur, paving the way for black professionals to follow in his footsteps.

The Champ’s final years were not happy ones.  Following his retirement and an unsuccessful comeback that ended with a humiliating loss to Rocky Marciano, the IRS continued to hound him for back taxes, He had a short career as a professional wrestler and became a fixture at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, greeting tourists. Many a Gary resident posed for a shot of them with Louis.  Plagued by dependence on drugs and a paranoid fear of plots to kill him, he died of heart failure in 1981.  At President Ronald Reagan’s insistence he was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors; Max Schmeling, who had befriended old rival, served as a pallbearer.  Responding to frequent eulogies that Louis was a credit to his race, New York Postcolumnist Jimmy Cannon wrote: “Yes, Joe Louis was a credit to his race – the human race.”

On a lighter note, this from Jim Spicer:

   Last week a passenger in a taxi heading for Midway airport leaned over to ask the driver a question and gently tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention. The driver screamed, lost control of the cab, nearly hit a bus, drove up over the curb, and stopped just inches from a large plate glass window. For a few moments everything was silent in the cab. Then, the shaking driver said, “Are you OK? I’m sorry but you scared the daylights out of me.”
    The badly shaken passenger apologized to the driver and said, “I didn’t realize that a mere tap on the shoulder would startle someone so badly.”

    The driver replied, “No, no, I’m the one who is sorry, it’s entirely my fault. Today is my very first day driving a cab. For the past 25 years I’ve been driving a hearse.”

Got my overgrown toenails clipped at L.A. Nails.  A year ago, the cost was seven dollars, and I’d tip the person three.  Last time, the price went to $10, and I left a two-dollar tip. This time the manager wanted $20.  I didn’t leave any tip.  Petty? Perhaps. As I entered our condo, the pungent aroma of Polish golumpkis greeted me.  Toni was watching acid-tongued “Judge Judy,” the best of the many imitators benefitting from the popularity of Judge Joseph Wapner’s “The People’s Court,”  that ran for 12 seasons beginning in 1981.  “Wapner”was a famous Dustin Huffman line in “Rain Man” (1988).  Wapner had been a municipal court judge in Los Angeles, and Judge Judy Sheindlin, 76, whose show debuted in 1996, once was a family court magistrate in Manhattan.  

There were 6 full bridge tables at Chesterton Y due to a sanctioned bridge tournament. We played pre-arranged hands simultaneously used at other Unit 154 sites.  Charlie Halberstadt and I held our own against some of the best Region pairs.  Director Alan Yngve and Joel Charpentier won, with the Carsons and the Tomes tying for second.  I invited Chuck Tomes to IUN’s Homecoming basketball games, and he noted with sadness the death of IUN assistant women’s coach Ken Markfull, 64, five-time Post-Tribunehigh school coach of the year during a 30-year career at Hobart and Andrean, with both Sectional and regional championships on his resumé.  Terry Bauer, reading a Wendell Wilkie biography, couldn’t get over Republicans nominating a longtime Democrat as their 1940 presidential candidate.  Henry Luce of Timemagazine had a big hand in that, I noted.

My best hand  came against stellar opponents Barb Walczak and Trudi McKamey. Holding 17 points and 5 Hearts, I opened a Heart.  When Charlie bid 2 Hearts, indicating a weak hand with 6-8 points but at least 3 Hearts, I jumped to game.  With a 4-I trump split against me and only one clear entry to the board, I was not able to finesse the Heart King twice, which Barb held, along with another trump. With four cards left, three of them trump, including the Ace, I deliberately trumped a good trick on the board and led what Barb assumed was a good Diamond.  When she trumped, I played a higher Heart and then led out my Ace, making the contract for a high board, as nobody else bid and made game.  As we were leaving, Trudi said to me, “I’ll remember that 4-Heart bid.” Like me, she probably broods over hands she scored poorly on rather than the good ones. My biggest regret: against Judy Selund and Don Giedemann, with 4 Hearts out, including the Queen, I had to choose between a finesse and leading  my King and hoping the Queen dropped.  I finessed, and Don took the trick with a bare Queen.

life masters Anna Urick, Charlotte Abernathy, and Trudi McKamey; photo by Barbara Walczak

Ida Sain at her home; Huffington Post photo by Doug McSchooler

An article on Gary’s “hyper-vacancy” crisis (25,000 lots, 6,500 abandoned buildings) appeared in today’s Huffington Post by David Uberti, who interviewed me a couple weeks ago.  Glen Park resident Ida Sain, 75, told him that her parents moved to Gary around 1940 and her father quickly found work at U.S. Steel.  At the time African Americans were restricted to the Midtown area, and most suburban communities were off limits.  “When I was a kid,”Ida recalled, “they didn’t even want to serve you out there.”Uberti wrote:

    Following in her father’s footsteps, Sain landed a job driving trucks at the mill before eventually settling into office work. As a single mother in 1972, she bought her three-bedroom home in the mostly white Glen Park area, where she still lives today. It was an ideal neighborhood to raise her daughter, Marviyann Brown, but the signs of economic collapse had already begun.

    It started as a trickle of upper- and middle-class whites leaving. They took advantage of federally backed home mortgages to buy newer, larger houses in the suburbs connected to downtown by a burgeoning highway system. Many black families were denied such federal aid and were explicitly not welcomed in the suburbs by real estate firms and community groups. After Gary came under black political leadership in the late 1960s, this out-migration exploded into full-on white flight, with major stores and businesses also moving outside city limits.

    To Brown, it was clear that certain kids in the neighborhood were moving away while others weren’t ― or, to be more precise, couldn’t. Brown’s family stayed while her best friend, Julie, a white girl who lived nearby, left with her family. “I always wondered what happened to her,”Brown said.

I had talked with Huffington Postwriter Uberti about the devastating effects to Gary of middle-class black flight to previously all-white suburbs in the past40 years, but he chose not to bring that up.