On the Basis of Sex

 “I ask no favor for my sex, all I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg, quoting Sarah Grimké during her first oral argument before the Supreme Court

 Sarah Grimké  

Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) and sister Angelina were prominent abolitionists and feminists.  Born into a prominent South Carolina family, Sarah sympathized with slaves she grew up with and resented that her own education was inferior to her brother’s due to social norms of the day.  She moved to Philadelphia, became a Quaker, and lectured about two issues dear to her, the immorality of slavery and discrimination against women. She once wrote: “I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognize.”

 Ruth Bader Ginsburg portrait

 “On the Basis of Sex” follows the early career of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of just nine women in her 1956 Harvard Law School class. At the time, the building lacked a woman’s bathroom. Despite her academic credentials, no New York City law firm would hire her as an associate, so she began teaching at Rutgers and then Columbia Law School.  The film highlights a case Ginsburg successfully argued with her husband, a tax attorney, before the Tenth Circuit of Appeals of a man denied a tax deduction for hiring a nurse to care for his mother so he could continue working.  She wrote the brief in the 1971 Reed v. Reedcase in which the Supreme Court extended the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to women.  In 1972 she became general counsel for the ACLU Women’s Rights Project.  Felicity Jones played Ginsburg as iron-willed, extremely intelligent, and compassionate. I loved Sam Waterston as unctuous Harvard Law School dean Erwin Griswold and Kathy Bates as veteran civil liberties activist Dorothy Kenyon.

A graduate of New York University Law School, Dorothy Kenyon (1888-1972) was an important feminist and New Deal liberal who worked with the ACLU, NAACP, and agencies offering legal services for the poor in New York City.  When Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy falsely accused her of being connected to subversive organizations, Kenyon (above) called him a liar and a coward hiding behind Congressional immunity.

In “I’m Not Taking This Sitting Down” (2000) humorist Dave Barry described donning the lizard costume of the Miami Fusion soccer team mascot P.K. (for penalty kick) and learning to his chagrin the fine line between being an object of affection and ridicule. He discovered that children “love to run directly into mascots at full speed and tend to hit you” right where one would be well-advised to “wear a cup.”  Barry was at a gala where Mick Jagger made an appearance, looking “like Yoda wearing a Mick Jagger wig” and probably the only one in the room his senior.  In high school Barry’s band attempted to play Rolling Stones songs, such as “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Under My Thumb” but could never get the chords right.  Barry wrote:

    He seemed like a pleasant enough person, as near as I could tell from watching a crowd of avant guard people trying to get as close to him as possible while pretending not to.  I considered trying to push my way in there and start up a conversation with Mick, maybe try to find out the correct chords to “Under My Thumb.”

Former student Fred McColly stopped by on the way to the Archives to drop off two new journals about working at South Lake Mall on Macy’s department store’s loading dock.  He enjoys his co-workers but fears that Amazon and other direct mail giants will soon render stores like Macy’s obsolete.  Cosmetics appears to be Macy’s most important big-profit item. For Sears, mail order pioneers who lost their way, in its last days as a department store the main sellers had been paint and kitchen appliances until new competitors undercut them.

To celebrate bridge player Joe Chin becoming an Emerald Life Master, having accumulated 7500 master points, over 70 people gathered in Gary to honor him, including nonagenarian Jennie Alsobrooks, who, in Chin’s words, “started a lunch-hour foursome at Gary West Side High and taught me bridge basics.”  Barbara Walczak, who planned the event, presented him with a 50-page illustrated book citing some of his accomplishments and tributes from former partners and opponents.  Walczak’s Newsletter reported on the death of Claire Murvihill, noting that at Claire’s request the last hour of her funeral celebration was devoted to bridge; seven full tables participated. Back playing after a two-week hiatus,  Dee Browne and I finished third out of ten couples with 58%.

Terry Brendel, in charge of the Valpo game with Charlie Halberstadt in Arizona, complimented my letter to the NWI Times complaining about Gary and its political leadership.  The editor had left out some of my supporting material, but Terry reminded me of the policy limiting letters to 250 words or less.  I did like the headline: “Positive solutions needed to Gary’s problems.”  It fit with my final sentence: “What is needed in the face of Gary’s present travail is regional cooperation and positive solutions, not ugly stereotyping by those who, in my opinion, long ago ceased wishing the city well.”

In the Banta center library was “Baseball Forever” by Ralph Kiner, my first sports hero growing up in Easton, PA.  Kiner’s father, Ralph, Sr.,  had been a steam-shovel operator in the New Mexico copper-mining town of Santa Rita who died when Ralph was just four.  Mother Beatrice moved the family to Alhambra, CA, worked as an insurance company nurse for $125 a month, and, in Kiner’s words, kept a clean house and close eye on her son, sending him to military school for a semester when he lied about his after-school activities.  Kiner played for Pittsburgh, my dad’s hometown, and led the National league in home runs a record six years in a row, twice hitting over 50.  He briefly played for the Cubs and Cleveland Indians before a bad back ended his playing career.  Chicago oldtimers fondly recall Kiner in rightfield, slow-footed HR hitter Hank Sauer in left, and Frank Baumholtz in center, expected to cover most of the outfield. Beginning in 1961, Kiner became a New York Mets announcer until his death in 2014.  

At bowling, after overhearing Jim Daubenhower and I discussing Gary, George Yetsko mentioned that he was a 1951 Lew Wallace grad (he recalled French teacher Mary Cheever’s murder, which led to women protesting crime and corruption tolerated by the Democratic machine).  Wife Marge was a Horace Mann grad.  Her grandfather, a dentist, lived in a large house with a spiral staircase that was later torn down to make way for RailCats Stadium. 

 Tim Vassar

Daubenhower brought me Timothy Vassar’s autobiography “Jeremiah Wasn’t Just a Bullfrog: A Story of Passion, Pursuit, Perseverance . . . and Polliwogs.”  Vassar, a Butler University grad, taught special education, coached track and field at Lake Central High School, and is presently Director of Student Teaching at IUN. A Highland native, Vassar attended Mildred Merkley Elementary School, a name Region humorist Jean Shepherd (whose style Vassar’s resembles) would have appreciated.  Tim father worked at the mill plus two weekend jobs to provide for his family of six.  Vassar wrote: “My Dad used to say that Northwest Indiana was one of the only places on earth where you could run your furnace and central air on the same day.  Since we didn’t have central or any other type of air conditioner, I had to take his word for it.”  

Tim Vassar played centerfield on a Highland team coached by Andy Domsic that competed in the 1970 Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA after winning state and regional tournaments.  In Williamsport Vassar noticed Taiwanese players eating with chop sticks and met Pirate great Pie Traynor and 1968 Olympic medalist Chi Chang, the first woman to run 100 yards in ten seconds flat.  Tim’s moment of glory came when he fielded a line drive on two hops and threw out a runner jogging from first to second. After defeating a German team consisting mainly of sons of American servicemen, Highland lost in the semi-finals to eventual champ New Jersey.  The town of Highland threw a parade for the returning heroes, and players rode in convertibles.  The following year, 1971, a team from Gary, led by Lloyd McClendon, reached the Little League finals, losing to Taiwan in the longest game, nine innings, in tournament history. After McClendon homered in five consecutive at-bats, opposing coaches intentionally walked him every time he came to the plate.

Princeton professor Imani Perry was the featured speaker at VU’s Martin Luther King Day celebration.  Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1972, she is the author of six books, including “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry” and one on the history of the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Perry’s keynote speech lamented the “Disneyification of Dr. Martin Luther King” and urged students, my grandson James, a VU freshman among them, to overcome the rancid present political climate. NWI Times correspondent Doug Ross quoted her as saying, “Hope is not an organic feel for me at this moment.  I don’t just feel it, I create it, and we all have to do that.”

Jim Spicer’s latest senior citizen joke:

  An elderly man in Louisiana had owned a large farm for several years. He had a large pond in the back. It was properly shaped for swimming, so he fixed it up nice with picnic tables, horseshoe courts, and some apple and peach trees.
    One evening the old farmer decided to go down to the pond and look it over, as he hadn't been there for a while. He grabbed a five-gallon bucket to bring back some fruit. As he neared the pond, he heard voices shouting and laughing with glee. As he came closer, he saw it was a bunch of young women skinny-dipping in his pond. He made the women aware of his presence and they all went to the deep end. One of the women shouted to him, “We're not coming out until you leave!” The old man frowned, and proving that some seniors still think fast he said, “I didn't come down here to watch you ladies swim or make you get out of the pond naked. I'm here to feed the alligator.”

Unblinking Eye

“A photograph is a biography of a moment.” Art Shay

 Art Shay by Andrea Bauer

Nelson Algren Museum in Miller was the site of a 96th birthday celebration for photographer Art Shay, whose renderings of Chicago novelist Algren, a summertime Miller resident, adorn its walls.  Beforehand, Ron Cohen invited me to lunch at Captain’s House to meet feature speaker Erik Gellman, a Roosevelt University historian who organized the exhibit “Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles through the Lens of Art Shay” and is writing a book on that subject.  With us were Ron’s wife Nancy and Gary city council member Rebecca Wyatt.  Picking up a carry-out order was McKenya Dilworth, coordinator of an after-school program at Dunes Charter School; she hopes to rally support to keep Wirt-Emerson open for use as a community center.  I barely made a dent in my Cobb salad, although I gobbled up the homemade croutons, bacon, and mango bits.  Before leaving, I used the bathroom.  When I returned to the table, my coat was gone.  A waitress noticed my distress and explained that Chef Angela, assuming I had left without it, had rushed outside hoping to catch up with me.  Nice.

 Art Shay photos: above, "Backyard Olympics"; below Cassius Clay in 1961

Billy Corgan in 2011 by Art Shay

The illustrated talk before a standing-room only crowd concentrated on Shay’s depictions of young African Americans and poor whites often deemed juvenile delinquents, many stripped naked and tortured by corrupt Chicago cops during the 1950s and 1960s, according to Gellman.  Hostess Sue Rutsen provided a summary of the photographer’s distinguished career and pointed out that it would have been Nelson Algren’s birthday number 109.  Art Shay’s son Bill noted that years before, his parents befriended Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, who often came for Sunday dinner, and that Art had been working on a pictorial project with him.  Shay’s assistant Erika repeated life lessons learned from Art about fortitude and stepping up to the plate. Fielding questions about his colorful life, Shay alluded to his Bronx roots, where his Jewish father, a Trotskyite from Latvia, became a tailor.  A pilot’s navigator during World War II who flew 52 missions, Art became a stringer for Look, Life, Sports Illustrated, and other popular magazines.  Studs Terkel called him a treasure, who “has an unblinking eye for Chicago’s underside – and its humor.”

 victims Kristopher and Kailani Gober

Meanwhile, a few blocks away, a fire at Lakeshore Dunes Apartments had started in a fourth floor when kids stuffed a blanket into the oven, killing Kristopher Gober, 5, and two-year-old sister Kailani.  In an adjacent unit, Monty Spencer made his way through black smoke to the window and yelled for help.  Earl Stiff told a Chicago reporter from WBBM, “We grabbed this cover, and we told him to just jump, and they told him 1, 2, 3, 4, and he jumped.  It was like 20 people holding the blanket.”  What a tragedy: in the blink of an eye two young lives wiped out.

above, Wendell Carter charged into; below, Stormy Daniels on "60 Minutes"

I was home for the exciting Kansas-Duke Elite Eight conclusion.  I had Duke advancing to the Final Four; two of my picks, Villanova and Michigan, were already in.  The Blue Devils could have won in the final second had a ten-footer by guard Grayson Allen gone in. In overtime, a crucial call went against Duke’s Wendell Carter on a clear charge, and Kansas never looked back.  On “60 Minutes” Stormy Daniels seemed totally credible describing her one-night stand with Trump.  At one point Anderson Cooper quoted porn star Jenna Jameson, who said about Daniels, “The left looks at her as a whore and just uses her to try to discredit the president. The right looks at her like a treacherous rat. It's a lose-lose. Should've kept her trap shut.”  I disagree with the whore/rat analysis, but Daniels’ reaction was: “I think that she has a lot of wisdom in those words.”  Asked why the story is significant, Stormy Daniels’ bulldog attorney Michael Avenatti mentioned the White House cover-up and thuggish efforts to sully the adult film star’s reputation and browbeat her. In other words, obstruction of justice.

 Phil's family

Becca and Alyssa Jones in Nashville

Over the weekend Phil celebrated a fiftieth birthday and scored a soccer hat trick.  Becca traveled through a snowstorm to Nashville with Chesterton’s Sandpiper choir, where the group performed at the Grand Old Opry.  Next stop: Orlando, Florida. Angie is a chaperone.

David Parnell’s Roman History students participated in a war game that he described as a cross between Risk and Diplomacy.  I enjoyed David’s Crusades class so much, I had been tempted to audit it.  I told Nicole’s Diplomatic History students that soldiers’ experiences in Vietnam differed depending on when they were there, where they were located, and their function.  Whereas morale was initially high among the troops, when it became apparent that the war was not winnable, drug use, desertions, fragging and other evidence of poor morale escalated.  As Omar Farag stated, the goal of patrol missions became not to search and destroy but search and avoid.  When a student who had taken several courses with Raoul Contreras brought up the CIA’s role in overthrowing Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, I noted that the apparent success of CIA operations in Central America and Iran emboldened Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA director Allen Dulles to attempt nation-building in South Vietnam.  What folly!

 In “Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War” by Karl Marlantes, a former marine combat officer in Vietnam, Waino Mellas has been put in charge of a rifle platoon consisting of 40 mostly teenage marines on a fire-support base located on an isolated hill between Laos and the DMZ.  This summary appears on the book jacket:

  From the moment his feet hit the mud – the brass have named the hill Matterhorn – his senses are assaulted by a chaotic swirl of monsoon rain and fog, screeching radios and bulldozers, and the stench of almost 200 men who are some combination of sick, exhausted, filthy, sodden, and scared out of their minds.  He has no idea if he is up to this.

New York Times reviewer Sebastian Junger concluded: “Matterhorn is a raw, brilliant account of war that may serve as the final exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American history.”

Life master Joe Chin emailed, “Received the precious copy of Steel Shavings.  So proud to be part of the history of the Gary region, my adopted home since 1973.”  At bridge Chin recognized Dottie Hart from her photo in volume 47.  Dottie and Terry Bauer and Jim and Marcia Carson both made slams against Dee Van Bebber and me for high boards.  Typical of our bad luck was a hand where I bid 4 hearts and was the only North player to garner 11 tricks, only to lose high board when another couple on defense foolishly doubled 2 Hearts and the other North player made an overtrick.  On another hand, I executed a cross-rough to make 3 Clubs for 110 points only to find that two other North-South couples got plus 200 for setting 3 Hearts vulnerable down two.

 Bill Lowe and Rufus Redhawk pose with IUPUI chancellor Charles Bantz and Jawz the Jaguar at 2014 Black Expo

IU’s Bicentennial Committee asked Steve McShane to provide a history of IUN’s mascots.  This is what he wrote:

      In its nearly 60-year history, IU Northwest has enjoyed several names for its mascot.  In each case, the campus sought names tied to its service area, the Calumet Region of Northwest Indiana (aka “The Region”).  Mascot names ranged from the area’s human history to its natural historical development.

      In 1971, the campus mascot was the Chiefs, a nod to the rich Native American heritage of the area.  After a few years, the name was changed to the more general Indians, both because Indiana means “Land of the Indians”, and also the baseball team chose to wear hats modeled after the Cleveland Indians’ headgear.  Both of these names appeared to be used interchangeably in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1992, the campus held a contest for a new mascot name.  A number of students submitted suggestions, many of which were tied to the steel industry, such as Steelworkers and Ingots.  A selection committee chose the IUN Blast in 1992, to denote the local steel industry’s most iconic symbol, blast furnaces.  The new mascot also referenced the blast of icy cold winds coming off of Lake Michigan in the Region.

      In 1999, on the eve of the opening of a new student activities building (which included the campus’ first real gymnasium), the campus community felt a new name should be chosen as part of the Savannah Center’s opening festivities.  A call for mascot suggestions tied more closely to the area’s flora and fauna resulted in the Redhawks, named after the local Red Tailed Hawk.  Today, Rufus the Redhawk keeps busy, rallying the spirit of faculty, staff, and students behind all of the athletic teams at IU Northwest.