Turkey Season

“What do you call a cluster of featherless turkeys?  A cluster pluck.”

             (First Thanksgiving by Jennie A. Brownscombe)

Renditions of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 are based on based largely on speculation and myth.  The separatists (later designated Pilgrims) who arrived  on the Mayflower the year before were indeed aided in the cultivation of corn, beans and squash by the Wampanoag Tisquantum (Squanto).  In 1614 he had been captured and sold into slavery before returning to America as a translator and finding his Patuxet band virtually wiped out by a smallpox epidemic.  There is no evidence that turkey was served at the three-day harvest celebration and certainly no pies, but fowl were plentiful in the area, so wild duck or turkey may have been available, and the Wampanoag (“People of the Dawn”) visitors probably provided venison.  Some might have perished in the 1637 Pequot massacre, others (or their descendants) in King Philip’s War during the mid-1670s.

At bridge Terry Bauer mentioned that a daughter was visiting her sister in Hong Kong and found it easy to get around and shop because there were virtually no tourists due to the continuing anti-government protests.  She was surprised to find mountains and hills with plentiful hiking trails.  On one such excursion 25 years ago, I recall encountering a beautiful waterfall and a troop of monkeys that, Dean Bottorff warned, loved to steal cameras from careless tourists.  Don Geidemann and Judy Selund had a final round sit-out.  As they left, Don said, “Happy Thanksgiving, turkeys” – as in jive turkeys. They were amazed to find out later that they scored a 73.61 percent, earning an acknowledgement in Barbara Walczak’s Newsletter.  Geidemann told her: 

  The super game was overdue.  Some may apply the idioms, “Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometime” or “Every dog has its day” but we believe that we have graduated from “The school of Hard Knocks” both in our personal lives and at the bridge tables. Judy and I initiated our partnership 13 months ago.  Our agreement includes tolerance for missed bids and missed plays.  We are still learning as we go.

Judy added: “Our objective is to minimize the bonehead mistakes.”

 Don Geidemann and Judy Selund, photo by Charlie Halberstadt

We had a great time at Evelyn and Herb Passos’ for Thanksgiving as did Don and Judy, a former gym teacher and longtime friend of Evelyn’s.  I enjoyed chatting with sons Max Passo, who started medical school in August, and Alex, a former student and now an attorney.  Next day, we had 23 family members and guests at the condo for our belated Thanksgiving, almost half of whom spent the night.  Toni served turkey, ham, and a tofu turkey roll that I did not sample, saving room for daughter-in-law Beth’s cherry and blueberry pie.  During the course of the day I played Lost Cities, Acquire, Perudo, and Werewolf.  I was about to turn in when Phil, Alissa, and Beth persuaded me to watch Super Troopers 2, the sequel to the 2002 campy cult classic.  After a hilarious dream sequence, it went downhill but was good for cheap laughs and groan-worthy puns.  Obnoxious Rodney Farva (Kevin Hefferman) tells fellow troopers, “You know they have Eskimo hookers up here [in Canada]?  When they have sex, they really get ‘Inuit.’”  It was fun spotting cameos by Rob Lowe (as minor league hockey legend Guy LeFranc), Lynda “Wonder Woman” Carter, grown up “Wonder Years” star Fred Savage, and black comedian Damon Wayans Jr.

The Memorial Opera House Holiday production, Meredith Wilson’s “Miracle on 34th Street,” was originally a 1947 movie.  In eighth grade at Barnum Junior High in Birmingham, Michigan, I saw the film 30 minutes at a time during a week of lunch hour.  The musical, first titled “Here’s Love,” opened on Broadway in 1963.  Set at Macy’s in New York City, the play references Macy’s competitor Gimbel’s. In the early 1960s when I worked in a law firm mailroom in Philadelphia’s center city, department stores appeared to be in their prime. There was no Macy’s but Gimbel’s, Wanamaker’s, and Strawbridge and Clothier were three of the grandest, with holiday window displays to attract shoppers.

"Miracle on 34th Street" photos by Ray Gapinski

The strong cast included charismatic Thomas Olsen as Kris Kringle (who co-starred in “La Cage Aux Folles”), Frank Allen as a drunk Santa and a fictitious R.H. Macy (the family sold the business in 1895 shortly after founder Rowland Hussey Macy died), and several talented youngsters, including preteen Goldie Samardzija in a prominent role as the store manager’s daughter.  Portage attorney Dan Whitten played several characters, including the Governor and the D.A. While the dialogue was dated (for example, the romantic lead referred to his love interest as a dame), the music and dance numbers were  great.  During intermission I spoke with bowling buddies Dorothy Peterson and Gene Clifford.  During turkey hunting season Gene, 82, arrived at Hobart Lanes sporting a black eye.  When a wild turkey surprised him, he fired his weapon and it recoiled while it was too close to his face. At the curtain call Kris Kringle (Olsen) asked the audience to join in an encore of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.”
                  Dan Whitten, fourth from left

Chancellor Lowe and F C Richardson

At Pesko’s I ordered a Yuengling on draft and steak salad, enhanced by onions Dick Hagelberg discarded and several slices of delicious bread. Brian Barnes noted that he’d attended the annual IUN Chancellor’s Medallion banquet as guest of former dean F.C. Richardson and wife Bernice who were honored for their many years of service to the university.  After serving as Chancellor of IU Southwest, Richardson returned to Northwest Indiana and became an advisor to Chancellor Lowe, whom Brian briefly met. The citation stated:

    Only the second African-American to join IU Northwest’s faculty, F C is celebrated for his advocacy for Black rights during the Civil Rights movement. One of F C’s most important career contributions was his role as advisor for IU Northwest’s Black Caucus, now known as the Black Student Union. 

    F C’s wife, Bernice, earned degrees in elementary education from IU Bloomington in 1968 and IU Northwest in 1973 and spent most of her career in Gary schools, primarily in the roles of assistant principal and principal.  Bernice also served as an IU Northwest Alumni Association board member for several years.

 muddied up Andrew Weil with rosemary and mint plants

In “Food for Dissent” (2019).  Maria McGrath seemed conflicted about self-health guru Andrew Weil, a onetime hippie who kept alive counterculture precepts (i.e., the revolution must begin inside each person’s head) but profited by hawking of all sorts of products purportedly leading to physical well-being. I came across the name of Mike McGrath, editor of Organic Gardening during the 1990s and wondered if he was related to Maria.  The final chapter discussed Ron Dreher, author of “Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counter-Culture and Its Return to Roots” (2006).  McGrath concluded:

  Conservatives’ presence in the hippie-left movement surprised and disturbed natural foods proponents with countercultural biographies and affinities. It should not have. Cultural preservation, pastoral sentimentality, and moralistic consumerism – the movement’s fundamentals – were always there, ready for conservative adaptation.

I came across Rodger McDaniel’s “Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt” (2013).  Hunt, a former Democratic governor elected to the Senate in 1948, was an outspoken opponent of the Wisconsin demagogue Joseph McCarthy.  Rightwing Republicans Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Herman Welker of Idaho attempted to blackmail him into not seeking re-election after Hunt’s son Buddy was arrested for soliciting sex from a male undercover cop in Washington’s Lafayette Park.  Normally, first offenders got off with a warning and notification to the family, but Bridges and Welker pressured District of Columbia law enforcement authorities into prosecuting Buddy and warned Hunt that they’d publicize the case unless Hunt retired from politics.  Hunt subsequently shot himself at his Senate desk.  The day before, McCarthy hinted that he’d make the sex offense public.  Senate reporter Allen Drury used a fictionalized version of the incident in the 1959 novel “Advise and Consent.”

Hammer Down

“I was born to rock 'n' roll, everything I need
I was born with the hammer down
I was built for speed.”

         “Built for Speed,” Motörhead

 Lemmy Kilmister ofMotörhead

British thrash metal band Motörhead formed in 1975, the same year C.W. McCall had a smash hit with the novelty song “Convoy,” a trucker fantasy, which gave rise to the CB craze (“Pig Pen, this here's the Rubber Duck, and I'm about to put the hammer down”), about teaming up with a thousand other rigs and defying the law by crashing through toll gates.  Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister considered himself a punker and was an admirer of the Ramones and not only wrote “R.A.M.O.N.E.S.” but performed it with the band in 1996 at their final show.  Joey Ramone remarked: “It was the ultimate honor – like John Lennon writing a song for you.”  The final verse contains these lines:

Bad boys then, bad boys now,
Good buddies, mau mau mau,
Keep it up, rock n roll,
Let the music save your soul

In Finn Murphy’s “The Long Haul,” I learned in the chapter “Hammer Down” that the three most popular CB handles are Gator, Coyote, and Lone Ranger.  Gator is also slang for a large piece of tire tread.  A tractor without a trailer is nicknamed a bobtailer.  Fayette, North Carolina, home of Fort Bragg, is Fayettenam because so many soldiers get sent overseas from there.  Murphy asserts, “The work is so hard and held in such low esteem that there’s not a lot of time left over for bigotry.”  Still, there’s a pecking order, and the teasing from grizzled veterans is incessant, often based on one’s looks or ethnic origin. In the chapter “Hammer Down,” Murphy described driving through South Carolina as part of a ten-truck convoy:

  The front door of the convoy was a Bowman freighthauler followed by three Armellini reefers hauling fresh flowers, then me, then a skateboard steel hauler, an Atlas bedbugger, another skateboarder hauling hot tubs, and the back door was a Schneider freight box called a “Pumpkin” because of its orange color.  We flew together for 135 miles doing 65 the whole way.  We all fell into a groove.  Everyone was driving well, everybody was professional, everybody was going fast but not crazy, and there was a plane of consciousness that we had together. It’s the closest thing to a Zen experience I know, except when I’m in my loading trance. Both of those things are what keeps me out there.  The rest of it is just hassle.

At bowling the Engineers spotted Pin Spinners 91 pins, an unusual development – normally we get pins.  I rolled a 447 series, a pin over average, as we took 5 of 7 points.  We’d have won all three games except that Frank Shufran left a ten-pin in the tenth on a pocket hit whereas a strike would have given him a double.  As I was leaving Hobart Lanes, George Villareal, who’d been at the Steel Pen Conference last weekend to pick up wife Betty, gave me Nancy Nau Sullivan’s business card. The author of the highly acclaimed memoir “The Last Cadillac,” Sullivan was disappointed to have missed me. She’s writing a book about Gary pioneers Tom and A.F. Knotts and wants to have lunch.  Part of the so-called “sandwich generation” responsible for both children and parents, Sullivan dealt with compassion about caring for an ailing father. She wrote: “His senility was like water rushing through my fingers; I couldn’t grab hold of it, understand it, manage it at all.  The dementia came and went without an itinerary. We just had to follow along and do the best we could.”

 

During Melissa Fraterrigo’s conference workshop, Betty Villareal told me she had been a frequent contributor to IUN’s award-winning literary magazine Spirits.  In the Spring 2013 issue appeared “Pencil Me In”:

The imprint that they make is permanent,

black, blue, red can change your mind,

but not your view of what you see or believe.

Held tightly in the hand of time,

the point would be explained or drawn,

erased and perceived on the parchment.

Only those with gifts of sight will follow,

Only the gifted can write what takes place - - -

Can you see between the lines?

The wooden tool can wound,

Like the bloody knife has teeth

Or the spice that salts the open cut.

Beware!  This instrument has malice,

It can change a life or lift an impression.

W.K. Buckley in 2003

In the Winter 2003 issue of Spirits was William K. Buckley’s poem “This Mechanic,” about working at Steel City Truck Stop, located a couple miles from IUN at 3001 Grant St. in Gary and now a Petro.  After explaining his routine, Buckley wrote:

I work with cooks and tough waitresses,

Down-and-outers and crazies, who bum cigarettes,

With drifters and lot-lizards, hicks and fat drivers,

And bored country kids - - -

So don’t jive me about making it big,

I’ll give ya’ a five if you need it,

But don’t hand me that crap about

The American Dream.

Maintenance that’s our old truth

It gives us meaning

In this industrial soup.

In that same Sprits issue is Joe Gutierrez’s “Memories of Grandpa,” about Colonel Ulysses Lee Grant Comptin, a great storyteller of tall tales who died in 1940 when Joe was seven.  Gutierrez, who grew up in an Indiana Harbor neighborhood eradicated by urban renewal, wrote:

  His trigger finger in his right hand was gone, and, depending on the time of year, he told a different story of how he lost it.  If it was winter, he would wrap his long arms around himself like he was freezing, then shake his hands like he was trying to warm them up.  Said his finger froze off when he and three other soldiers crossed the Bering Strait.  It was the middle of February, and they were in a wooden flat-boat that sprung a leak. His fingers were long with big knuckles, so he volunteered to plug the hole with his finger.  He said he closed his eyes and stuck his finger in the bottom of that boat and saved their lives.  By the time they got to shore, his finger had turned blue. When he went to touch it, it just fell off.

  If it was summer and he was in a hunting mood, his finger was bitten off by a wolverine he killed with a bow and arrow handed down to him by his great-grandfather.  Grandpa said his great-grandfather was raised by the Iroquois, who kidnapped him when he was three years old.  Grandpa said when he let his arrow fly, it hit that wolverine right in the shoulder blades.  Said that devil lay there like he was dead, until he got up close.  When he reached down to pull out his arrow, that sucker screamed like a banshee, grabbed hold off his finger, and bit it off at the knuckle.  He got so mad, he bit down on that wolverine’s nose and tore it right off.  Grandpa said that monster started crying like a baby, then laid down and died.

  If he was really in a story-telling mood, a shark bit his finger off in Lake Michigan.  Said he built a raft out of railroad ties and rolled out a few miles to do some fishing.  Said he was so far out, he could barely see the shoreline over the waves.  Fished from morning till night and caught nothing.  When he was just about to head back, he finally got a bite, a big one over four feet long.  Grandpa said he fought that sucker for hours and almost had him, when a shark jumped up and snatched that four-footer clear out of his hands.  Grandpa said he was so mad, he jumped in, caught that shark by the tail and swung it around. Said he grabbed the top of its mouth with his left hand and pushed its jaw down with his foot.  He struck his right hand in past those razor-sharp teeth and down its mouth when that damn shark decided to dive. Grandpa said he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.  The next thing he knew that shark bit down. The Colonel had just enough time to pull his arm out.  At that last second, his finger was off and that shark was gone.

Barb Walczak’s bridge Newsletter reported that Sharon Massey and Judy Selund scored 73.75% at the Fort Wayne sectional.  It was the first time they had played together.  Judy said that they just seemed to mesh, while Sharon told Walczak: “Judy is an easy partner to play with and is rock steady.”  Years ago, Judy and Bob Selund were in our bridge group. Sharon’s son was one of my first students.