Sandy

“And Sandy, the aurora is risin' behind us
This pier lights our carnival life forever
Oh love me tonight for I may never see you again
Hey Sandy girl

My, my baby

. . .
I just got tired of hangin' in them dusty arcades 

bangin' them pleasure machines
Chasin' the factory girls underneath the boardwalk 

where they all promise to unsnap their jeans”

Bruce Springsteen, “4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”

Within the first 30 minutes WXRT’s Saturday flashback show on the year 1973 featured great songs by Bruce Springsteen (“Sandy”), The Who, Patti Smith, Faces, Jackson Browne, and Elton John (“Grey Seal” from the double album “Beyond the Yellow Brick Road”).  I can’t recall ever hearing “Sandy” but the others were familiar.  Four-year-old Dave loved seeing Elton John, a great showma, on TV.  At an IUN History Department meeting Bill Neil referred to “the yellow brick road,”meaning from the movie, and Paul Kern said afterwards, “I was surprised Bill knew the Elton John album.” 1973 was an eventful year, with the Watergate hearings exposing Nixon’s criminality, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigning in disgrace, the Vietnam War ending in ignominy, the CIA overthrowing Chilean President Salvador Allende on behalf of international business interests, and the Supreme Court ruling on the controversial abortion case Roe v. Wade.

With Dorian in the news all week, finally wreaking havoc on the Carolina coast, I heard numerous references to Hurricane Sandy, which in 2012 battered the Jersey shore after first leaving destruction in its wake in the Caribbean. Dorian caused massive flooding in Nag’s Head, NC, not far from Kitty Hawk, where we spent a weekend while I was in grad school at Maryland.  I recall on the way trying to follow Dave Goldfield as he drove at high speeds beyond the capacity of our VW bug. One-year-old Phil ran into the Atlantic Ocean surf, got knocked down, and wanted no part of the beach the rest of the day, so we stayed by the motel swimming pool. In the news back then was an incident still vivid in my mind where a motel manager dumped chlorine in a pool when African Americans attempted to use it.

Hearing Bruce Springsteen’s“4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” reminded me of Sandy Sanders, softball teammate Ivan Jasper’s girlfriend during the 1970s.  She was blond, beautiful, a former high school track star, and warm and friendly. Sandy and Ivan eventually broke up because she wanted kids and he didn’t, having taken care of younger siblings most of his life after his mother deserted the family. In 1979 Ivan and Sandy took one last trip together to the Bahamas (last week devastated by Dorian) along with several other Portage Acres couples, including the four Lanes. Phil and Dave, then 10 and 11, loved Sandy, as did all of us. One afternoon by the pool she was lying on a beach chair when Ivan noticed them looking their way and briefly unsnapped and lifted her bikini top.

Steve Rushin of Sports Illustratedcan make any subject interesting.  Writing about the phasing out of tickets to sports events, as most folks receive them on mobile devices, Rushin admitted the technological advancement has its advantages but also, “like Dylan going electric, its drawbacks and consolations.”  Soon, Rushin quipped, nobody will know the meaning of,“I’ll take a rain check.” Collectors wax nostalgic over such items as tickets shaped like pineapples or catchers’ mitts.  Quite valuable would be one from Sandy Koufax’s last game as a Dodger in the 1966 World Series.  Koufax went 27-9 that season despite suffering from a sore arm that hastened his retirement as age 30.  I got a good laugh reading this paragraph:

  One U.S. Open golf spectator was given a replacement ticket after persuading officials that his dog had really eaten his pass. But the Michigan State season-ticket holder who inadvertently threw his tickets into his fireplace while burning old files was SOL.  His tickets did not rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes.

It took me a few seconds to realize that SOL stood for “shit outta luck.”Toni got it immediately.

Bob and Rhea Laramie

I cheered when Phil’s former soccer coach Bob Laramie, who identified himself as 49-year Portage resident posted this raffle ticket and wrote:“I hope these weapons being raffled off by the FOP do not come back to haunt the department or the citizens of Portage. In the future when they come wanting donation, they will be reminded about this. The Mayor supporting this will also lose my vote in the upcoming election. I have no problem with guns just weapons of war that people use to slaughter others.  Robert Laramie, 49-year resident of Portage

John Fraire, who I’ve known for many years and whose brother Rocky is a good friend, sent me this email:

  Some of my research on the Mexican community in NW Indiana was the collection of oral histories of some of the original Mexican residents in the East Chicago. They were collected under IRB guidelines at Western Michigan University and then were approved for use by the IRB office of Union Institute and University where I completed my doctorate. The narratives have all been transcribed and printed. I would like to donate the following to the Calumet Archives:  print copy of the transcribed narratives, release forms from the individuals interviewed, original transcriptions with handwritten notes, flash drive with all the interviews.

What a treasure trove! I responded: “I’m very excited at your choosing the Calumet Regional Archives as the repository for your valuable collection.  By the way, I see your brother Rocky when our book club meets every two months at Gino’s in Merrillville.” He emailed back: “Thank you Jim. And thanks for all your help over the years. I will let you know when I am headed back to Crown Point with the materials. It will be great to go over them with you.”  Fraire has written extensively about women’s baseball teams in Indiana Harbor and California.

photo by Marty Bohn

At Gardner Center in Miller Marty Bohn’s exhibit “Definitive Moments,” featured striking photos taken in Nepal, India, Morocco, and Cuba.  I’d love to visit Nepal and Cuba, not so much India or Morocco. This from Anne Balay, who misses living in Miller but was denied tenure at IUN due to blatant discrimination on the part of her immediate superior:

  My face is on this truck. The couple who drive it designed the truck to represent trucking as it was and at it is now. They wanted my book and the stories it tells represented. Given the number of closed doors that I have met with, this recognition feels so affirming. The audience I really care about gets it and I am so damn grateful.

Uncivil War

“The GOP is a football team that’ll do anything to win,” Richard Linklater.

I sent a note to Ray Smock stating that the difference between the two (right) wings of the GOP is that the crazies (read Sarah Palin) want to impeach Obama while Speaker John Boehner’s troops want to sue him.  Characterizing Boehner’s “chickenshit” move as an outrageous campaign ploy that should be laughed out of court, Ray wrote:

“What this means is that before the House breaks for the fall campaign season they will spend floor time laying out the case against Obama. Everything they hate about him will be on display. It will be Obamacare, the Keystone Pipeline, Benghazi, foreign policy, Obama’s use of executive orders, the whole ball of wax. Somehow from all this they plan to craft a lawsuit that has enough specific charges for the federal court to consider it without puking first.

So the Republicans have settled on a plan short of impeachment to keep feeding red meat to the base through November. The base has been bombarding House Republicans asking them why they haven’t impeached the President yet. So this is their answer. They are going to sue his black ass. Let it all hang out, the hatred, vitriol, and the big smear.  Will we ever see again a civil government in America, where we focus on our real enemies in the world and quit destroying one another?

Boehner is taking a page from Newt’s playbook from the 1980s by using C-SPAN to spread the case against the president. Every House Republican will get a chance to stand up and condemn the president and pound the table so the home folks will know that their guy or gal hates the president.  The fall campaign theme for Republicans is that whatever is wrong with America it is the President’s fault.”

Working on Dunes Highway

Dick Meister and Ken Martin donated a copy of their recently published pictorial history of Ogden Dunes to the Archives.  In 1923 by Samuel Reck and Colin Mackenzie headed a group that purchased 500 acres from the estate of Francis Ogden.  Samuel and Anne Reck built the first full-time residence on land overlooking Lake Michigan.  Due to the lack of roads, the most practical mode of transportation was horse and wagon.  In 1925 twenty landowners successfully petitioned the Porter County commissioners to incorporate as a town.   Three factors were crucial to the shoreline community’s success. During the 1920s the construction of Burns Ditch waterway drained land suddenly available for development.  Second, business magnate Samuel Insull purchased and improved the Chicago, South Shore and South Bend electric railroad.  Finally, a new Dunes Highway (U.S. 12) linked Porter County to Chicago and Michigan.

Chris Young lent me Jay Winik’s “April 1865: The Month That Saved the Nation.”  It looks well written and deals with the final days of the Civil War, including the Union victory at Petersburg, the capture of Richmond, Southern plots to launch guerrilla warfare, General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the beginnings of Reconstruction.  The author, a former senior staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, witnessed bloody civil wars in Cambodia, Central America, Africa, the Balkans, and elsewhere, and sought to learn, in his words, “how a young and still embryonic America avoided the terrible and tragic fate that has beset so many other countries.”   Nonetheless, more than 700,000 Americans died to preserve the union, and the price of sectional peace was the abandonment by Republicans of former slaves when they became a political liability.

 Winslow Homer's Defiance

In a New York Review of Books essay entitled “Our Monstrous War,” Civil War historian James M. McPherson wrote: “Disease was even more lethal than combat.  Fetid water, poor and insufficient food, bad sanitation, clouds of flies and other insects, extreme weather, and primitive medical knowledge caused dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid fever, pneumonia, malaria, and a host of other maladies that carried away twice as many soldiers as did fighting.  Lice and chiggers were ubiquitous; no soldier escaped the misery they caused.”

Dave Serynek asked me to recommend a biography of little-known president Rutherford B. Hayes.  There were several to choose from, believe it or not, but the one I found most interesting was by Harry Barnard, whose “Eagle Forgotten” on Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, is one of my favorite books.  Like Altgeld, Hayes was pretty much forgotten when Barnard’s volume first appeared in 1954, despite his having been a Civil War officer, three-time Ohio governor, member of Congress during Reconstruction, and dubious winner of the most disputed Presidential election in American history.  As Thomas Wolfe quipped about Hayes and Harrison: “Which had the whiskers. Which the burnsides; which was which?”  Again quoting from Wolfe’s essay “From Death to Morning,” Barnard hoped to portray Hayes as a man “torn, as we have been, by sharp pain and wordless lust, the asp of time, the thorn of spring, the sharp, the tongueless cry,” and who sought “new lands, the promise of the war, and glory, joy and triumph, and a shining city.”  Heady, ambitious stuff – maybe oo ambitious.  It appears that Barnard avoids discussing Ruddy’s sex life.

Despite the horrors of combat, Colonel Rutherford Hayes relished the opportunity to prove his manhood in a just cause.  At South Mountain a musket ball fractured his arm, taking him out of action for two months.  Once he drew his pistol on a soldier about to flee from the battlefield and threatened to kill him if he didn’t fight.  Barnard wrote: “The soldier fought and lost his life, after which Hayes said that he had given the man a hero’s death instead of a coward’s, and what could be better than that?”  I hope Hayes subsequently lost sleep over causing that man’s death.

 Volunteers in Indiana's Ninth Regiment

Will Radell spoke to youngsters participating in a week-long Civil War camp at Westchester Historical Museum, as well as several parents, staff members, and guests, including recently retired Education professor Paul Blohm.  Will wore a woolen Union uniform and had pitched a tent held up by tree limbs.  Speaking as if he were in the Ninth Indiana Infantry Regiment, he mentioned how it was composed mainly of volunteers from Northwest Indiana and their contributions during the bloody battles of Shiloh and Gettysburg.  The kids had many questions, especially about his weapons.  He explained that muskets could only fire, at best, three shots a minute.  Soldiers rarely utilized their bayonets, preferring to use the butt end as a club during hand-to-hand combat.  For one thing, if you stabbed the enemy, the bayonet might get stuck in him.  Describing re-enactments, Will said that some “hard core” participants refused any modern amenities, but he always took bug spray and sunblock with him.

I watched the 1998 update of the Charles Dickens novel “Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, with, as a special bonus, Anne Bancroft and Robert DeNiro.  Like the Dickens story, a young orphan becomes a successful gentleman due to a secret benefactor.  Paltrow as Estella was stunning in scenes where she poses naked for Hawke and later seduces him.

The second reception in three days featuring Corey Hagelberg’s work, this time with wine, beer and food prepared by Cheryl and Kate, was a big success.  Many Millerites attended, including Gene and Judy Ayers, George McGuan, Robin Rich, Marty Bohn, and Bill Carey, whom I hadn’t seen in years and didn’t recognize without a beard.  Corey told Toni that her art was a big influence on him growing up.  We have several of his pieces that he’s given us over the years and decided to buy one of the woodcuts on display.  Samuel A. Love posted great photos showing Corey’s new salvaged art as well as his woodcuts. 

Kay Abraham and Ish Muhammad with Toni and Ann Fritz in background

Shortly after we arrived home, six guests arrived for the weekend, Mike and Janet Bayer, daughters Shannon and Kirsten, and Kirsten’s boys Dane and Nicholas.  It didn’t take the kids long to acclimate themselves.  As Kirsten said, they are like sharks, never still.  Or tornadoes.  I stayed up until one in the morning and eight hours later cooked eggs, sausage and potato latkes for everyone.

John Fraire, whose article on baseball teams in Indiana Harbor appeared in Indiana Magazine of History, invited me to a reception in Crown Point.  The purpose was to introduce his new bride to his Midwest friends and relatives.  During the 1970s I was good friends with his brother Rocky, who recently sent me a novel her wrote about steelworkers.  I was flattered to be asked and took along a copy of Ray and Trish Arredondo’s “Maria’s Journey,” for which I and wrote the Afterword and edited.  Omar Farag and Rocky Fraire greeted me when I arrived, followed shortly by John and new bride Martina.  During a brief ceremony John choked up saying the two times he really wished his mother were alive to be there were when he received his PhD and at his wedding to Martina, whose strength and loyalty to family reminded him of her.  Later he told an anecdote about her at age 78.  A young woman came up to her car window in a mall parking lot cussing her out for allegedly cutting in front of her.  She listened calmly, but when the woman wouldn’t stop, she told her, “Don’t make me get out of the car or I’ll slap you silly.”  The woman quickly made her exit.