No Walls

“Strangers are exciting, their mystery never ends.  But there’s nothing like looking at your own history in the faces of your friends.” Ani DiFranco

 Ani DiFranco

Grammy-winning folk singer Ani Di Franco’s memoir, “No Walls and the Recurring Dream” has received rave reviews.  The title refers not only to the outspoken feminist’s candor about intimate thoughts and recurring dreams but to a Buffalo, New York, carriage house where she grew up with a suicidal brother and distant parents. Other than the bathroom, it literally had no walls, just single rooms on the first and second floors. At age 18 an angry, “anti-everything” punker craving human connection, Ani shaved her head, explaining in an NPR interview: “I didn't want to be a sex object and there I was playing in bars you know mostly surrounded by men with drinks in their hands. And I was getting attention for not the right reasons. I wanted a different kind of power, I think.”  Now married with two children, she wrote of being a nude model when a struggling artist in Manhattan and while hitchhiking with a female lover escaping from a driver intent on raping them.

Michael Jordan’s number 23, Walter Payton’s 34, and Bobby Hull’s number 9 were more famous, but my favorite Chicago ball player wore jersey number 22.  Bill Buckner, who died at age 69 after a struggle with dementia, unfortunately, will always be remembered for a grounder that went through his legs at first base in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series between the Red Sox and the Mets.  Previously, during eight seasons with the Cubs, Buckner was a pro’s pro, winning the batting title in 1980 with a .324 average and leading the league in doubles during his 1981 All-Star season. He never struck out more than two times in a game or as many as 40 in an entire season. In contrast, Cubs All-Star Javier Baez fanned five times against Houston on Memorial Day and sluggers commonly strike out 150 times in a season.  “Billy Buck” hammered out over 2,700 hits during a 22-year career.  During that time only Pete Rose had more.  Appearing in a 2012 episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Buckner endures pedestrians mocking him; nobody seesg his autograph while sitting next to popular Met Mookie Wilson. He muffs a ball Larry unexpectedly tossed at him but nobody but emerges the hero, catching a baby falling from a building that’s on fire.  Buckner’s successor on the Cubs, first baseman Leon Durham, misplayed a grounder in the final game of the 1984 National League playoffs against San Diego that cost them a chance to play in the World Series for the first time since 1945.

On Memorial Day 96-year-old Pete DuPré, rising from a wheelchair, played the National Anthem on harmonica at a women’s soccer exhibition between the United States and Mexico.  Very moving. The veteran had taken part in the D-Day landing at Normandy.  At Applebee’s with Dave’s family I paid tribute to Angie’s grandfather Tom, and Toni did the same for her dad Tony, both World War II veterans. In Japan Trump ridiculed potential Democratic rival Joe Biden and praised North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, He is considering pardoning a Navy SEAL accused of killing a young girl and an old man in Iraq, as well as an unarmed captive.  Shameful, as many decorated veterans have emphasized. My childhood friend Paul Curry, who died in Vietnam, would have liked Justin Moore’s “The Ones That Didn’t Make It Home.”  It begins:

Tour was up middle of June
She was plannin' a welcome home barbecue
Green bean casserole, grandma's recipe

There was a knock on the door around two o’clock

Two uniforms and her heart stopped
Yellow ribbon 'round an oak tree, blowin' in the breeze

Dean Bottorff vented his anger at Trump’s perversion of Memorial Day by posting comments by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez explaining that Trump is a symptom of a system desperately in need of repair and a New Yorkercover entitled “The Shining.” The latter depicts Republican toadies Mitch McConnell, William Barr, and Lindsey Graham shining their leader’s shoes.  On a happier note the dedication of Indiana Dunes National Park, Indiana’s first and only such place designated place took place at the Paul Douglas Center in Gary.

dedication photo by Steve Spicer

Curtis and Phil Reid

Haverford graduate Phil Reid, a student of Anne Balay’s whom I met at an oral history conference last October in Montreal, stopped by with his brother Curtis on their way home to Colorado.  At Craft House we discussed Phil’s plans to enter AmeriCorp s and teach inner city kids in Baton Rouge. I gave him a copy of Steel Shavingsthat describes our hanging out in Montreal at a Chinese joint for lunch and McKibben’s Irish Pub that evening. At our session, organized by Balay, moderated by Donald Ritchie, and titled “Teaching Ethical Oral History Methods to Undergraduates” Phil talked about interviewing Philadelphia neighborhood residents about graffiti works of art.  I wrote: “Phil announced he’d be reading his remarks since he was nervous and delivered them with breakneck speed but got a hearty round of applause.”

Though warned by Gaard Logan that Rohinton Mistry’s 599-page historical novel A Fine Balance” was incredibly heartbreaking, the characters were so compelling, I stuck with it till the very end.  Horrible things happen to the main characters as they live through the nightmare of India during the “Emergency” of the mid-1970s, when corrupt officials razed slums and forcibly sterilized innocent victims in the name of progress and efficiency. Student Maneck Kohlah briefly found contentment boarding with 42-year-old Dina Aunty, tailors Ishvar and Om, and a litter of kittens.  After spending eight years in Dubai, where his social life was as barren as the desert landscape and young female immigrants were often enslaved.  Maneck returns to Mumbai to find that Dina Aunty has lost her flat and aged beyond her years.  Living with her brother, she tells Maneck he should shave off his beard because “it makes you look like a toilet brush.”  It’s the closest she comes to exhibiting any emotion.  Ishvar has lost his legs and Om has been castrated; both have been reduced to beggary.  Ironically, just before Maneck decides to step in front of a speeding train, he is splattered with crow droppings, which his mother claimed was a sign of impending good fortune.

Alissa called from Ireland.  After Anthony enrolled in a Grand Valley State overseas course through her office of overseas programs, a chaperone couldn’t go, so Alissa took her place. What a great experience for both, Alissa the seasoned world traveler, Anthony on his first such adventure.

The Spring 2019 issue of Traces magazine arrived with boxer Joe Louis on the cover to go with my article “The Champ: Joe Louis and Race-Relations in Gary.” The only other time I made the cover, for Gary pugilist Tony Zale, it was also a bare-chested shot.  Describing the front cover photo editor Ray Boomhower used this quote by Langston Hughes asserting that after each Joe Louis victory, “thousands of black Americans would throng out into the streets across the land to march and cheer and yell and cry because of Joe’s one-man triumphs.”John C. Shively’s “Battle Stations: John Wooden, Fred Stalcup, Jr. and the Attack on the USS Franklin” dealt with a Hoosier Purdue grad who died aboard an aircraft carrier crippled by a Japanese air strike during World War II. A fellow Boilermaker, legendary basketball player and coach John Wooden, would have been aboard instead of Stalcup had he not come down with appendicitis right before it sailed for the Far East.

attack on U.S.S. Franklin, March 1945

At bridge I gave Sharon Snyder a copy of Traces and told her I mentioned her father-in-law, Post-Tribunepublisher H.B. Snyder’s role 70 years ago in making sure African Americans were not excluded from the newspaper’s annual tournament at previously segregated South Gleason Golf Course.  Alan Yngve said that when he lived in Dune Acres he used to compete in sailboat races with B.G. Snyder, whom Sharon married.  When I brought up bowling, I learned that Judy Selund’s 81-year-old partner Don Geidemann had a 210 average.  I asked if they had any interest in subbing on Thursday afternoons.  I told Judy that Bob Selund’s photo was in Barbara Walczak’s newsletter citing the bridge players who had passed away during the past ten years.

Bob Selund

History chair Jonathyne Briggs asked me to attend senior David Hill’s thesis defense about the legacy of U.S. expansionist policies in Central America. He broke his presentation down to the pre-Cold War, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods.  While our rationale for meddling in these countries’ affairs shifted over time, the end result remained the same, to the detriment of the people, many of whom are presently seeking asylum in America. Once companies such as United Fruit had a stranglehold on these countries’ economies; now it’s international banks.  Hill was impressive even though his thesis seemed overly broad.  I questioned him about the role of the Catholic Church in these countries and our training Central American police and military officers serving repressive regimes.  Chris Young recommended that Hill not concentrate exclusively on external factors, citing a legacy of corruption and gangsterism, and the absence of a large educated middle class as partly responsible for the current situation.

Cat's Cradle

“Cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little girl blue and the man on the moon
So when you're coming home?
Hey yo, I don't know when
We'll get together then.”

         Harry Chapin, “Cat’s in the Cradle

Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” being one of my favorite songs, whenever Dave gets out the acoustic guitar, I press him to sing it.  Chapin’s point is that parents can become so busy that they don’t have time for their children.  Fortunately, that cautionary tale didn’t apply to me.  Born in 1942 (same year as me), Chapin died at age 39 after his Volkswagen collided with a truck, setting it aflame; five years later he was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his work combatting world hunger.  Chapin also recorded “Taxi,” “Mail Order Annie,” and “Sunday Morning Sunshine.”

James is reading Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” for an English class assignment. I recall Toni’s father, Anthony Trojecki, demonstrating how to take string and form a pattern known as Cat’s Cradle.  Editor Sidney Offit called “Cat’s cradle” “an icy black comedy”and Vonnegut “an acidly funny Midwestern fabulist whose anger and sorrow at the way things are is equaled only by his love for the best we can be.” In Vonnegut’s novel, Felix Hoenikker, one of the scientists who worked on developing the atom bomb, was playing with a loop of string and creating that formation while Hiroshima was being bombed, incinerating close to 100,000 Japanese.  His son Newt recalled:

  He went down on his knees on the carpet next to me, and he showed me his teeth, and he waved that tangle of string in my face.  “See?  See?” he asked.  “Cat’s cradle.  See the cat’s cradle.  See where the nice pussycat sleeps?  Meow.  Meow.”  And then he sang, “Rockabye catsy, in the tree top, when the wind blows, the cray-dull will fall.  Down will come cray-dull, catsy and all.”

Like in the Harry Chapin song, Hoenikker’s three children are badly neglected, and their attempts to gain his attention have tragic consequences. Elsewhere in “Cat’s Cradle” Vonnegut wrote this dialogue:

  “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . .”
  “And?”
  “No damn cat, and no damn cradle.” 

When I went to check out “Cat’s Cradle,” a Chesterton library staff member informed me that they were holding Bob Woodward’s “Fear: Trump in the White House” for me.  When I first requested it months ago, I was eighth on the list.  It opens with this quote from The Donald: “Real power is – I don’t even want to use the word – fear.” Spineless Republican legislators certainly fear crossing him and possible losing the 30% or so of the electorate who apparently believe he can do no wrong. In the opening scene of “Fear” presidential adviser Gary Cohn removes a letter from Trump’s Oval Office desk that would have set in motion U.S. withdrawal from a trade agreement with South Korea that would have risked interrupting sensitive spy operations on North Korean missile capabilities and thus jeopardized national security. Woodward wrote: “In the anarchy and disorder in the White House and Trump’s mind, the president never noticed the missing letter.”   

Mike Olszanski was a guest speaker in Philosophy professor Anja Matwijkix’s Business Ethics class.  At lunch Oz told me he enjoys the opportunity to get on his soap box and represent the perspective of organized labor’s rank-and-file.  I know the feeling and in two weeks will be talking about the Gary Homefront in Nicole Anslover’s World War II course.  She’s currently discussing wartime propaganda.  I told her how the government made use of African Americans, including heavyweight champ Joe Louis and naval hero Dorrie Miller, for propaganda purposes – ironic in view of their treatment in the segregated military.  Despite Louis raising millions in war bonds, the IRS unfairly claimed he owed more back taxes than he could ever hope to pay.  Dorrie Miller was a mess attendant working in the laundry on board the USS West Virginia anchored in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941.  Miller rushed on deck, shot down two planes with a machine gun, and rescued a wounded officer.  The War Department was reluctant to honor Miller until the black press publicized his actions.  Miller died in 1943 on board the USS Lissome Bay when a Japanese torpedo struck the escort carrier near the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific.  A Gary housing project was named in Miller’s honor.

Since Nicole told me to visit her class whenever I could, I decided to sit in on one on propaganda.  After she showed brief excerpts from the German film “Triumph of the Will” and a Frank Capra produced episode of “Why We Fight,” she led a lively discussion comparing and contrasting them.  The latter included a quote by Vice President Henry Wallace depicting World War II as a battle between the free world and slave world. When she elicited opinion on what affect propaganda had on Americans, I commented that it spurred civil rights leaders to demand an end to racist practices on military bases, at defense plants, in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere and led to the Double V campaign for victory against tyranny both abroad and at home.  One student mentioned Japanese-Americans being put in internment camps, and Nicole pointed out how anti-Japanese propaganda was blatantly racist.  Nicole’s next class will deal with comic books and Disney cartoons.

Larry David and pregnant mother

On an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Larry’s lunch companions are congratulating a women on becoming pregnant with her tenth child.  Larry pipes in, “Isn’t that a little selfish?” Later at her father-in-law’s barbershop, Larry learns she’s had a miscarriage and makes a quip about her already having nine kids, causing the barber to start beating him with a towel.

According to WXRT’s Mary Dixon, February 13 is Galentine’s Day where women celebrate intimate friendships with other women.  The sun finally came out after many days but the wind chill is still around zero. In the past few weeks ice mounds along the lake have expanded rapidly, as demonstrated in a photo by Samuel A. Love, taken during a Douglas Center Sacred Wanderings tour.

The sun finally came out after many days but the wind chill is still around zero. In the past few weeks ice mounds along the lake have expanded rapidly, as demonstrated in photos by Samuel A. Love, taken during a Douglas Center Sacred Wanderings tour.

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.