Pet Sounds

“Wouldn't it be nice if we were older
Then we wouldn't have to wait so long?
And wouldn't it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong?”

    Beach Boys, “Wouldn’t it Be Nice?”

The 1966 album Pet Sounds, the brainchild of the Beach Boys’ troubled genius Brian Wilson, is considered a classic progressive pop concept album, but initially it received a lukewarm reception in the United States by those who foolishly dismissed the group as past its prime.  It opens with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” – also the title of Brian Wilson’s 1991 autobiography – and most songs deal with various issues of teen angst.  Its sophisticated production resembled Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound and Beatle album “Rubber Soul,” which Wilson admired and hoped to surpass in sheer brilliance.  The track “Pet Sounds” is an instrumental, and one band mate joked that the obscure title came from Wilson being able to hear animal sounds that others couldn’t, while another claimed it referenced the sounds couples made when they were making out below the neck - petting.

    Isobel Crawley: Oh, just one more thing.  The dog.  What should we do to stop Isis getting into the patients’ room?”

    Robert Crawley: I can answer that.  Absolutely nothing.”

    Scene in Downton Abbey TV series referring to a convalescent ward the Earl of Grantham was funding

Several dogs appeared in the series “Downton Abbey” over the years as the Earl of Grantham’s constant companion, including yellow labs Isis and Pharaoh and then Teo, a present from the Dowager Countess played by the magnificent Maggie Smith. In the recently released movie, which Toni and I saw over the weekend, Teo is back by his master’s side to greet King George V and Queen Mary when they pay a visit.  The film tied up several loose ends, was utterly charming, and drew a large audience, which applauded when the credits came on.

 portrait of Great Britain's Queen Anne

 “The Favourite” (2018), now on HBO, stars Rachel Weisz as Lady Sarah Churchill and Emma Stone as Abigail Masham vying for the affection of England’s Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), who reigned for 12 years beginning in 1702 at age 37.  The last Stuart monarch, the daughter of James II, she endured 17 pregnancies that ended with miscarriages, stillborn births or the baby dying in infancy except for one who succumbed at age 11.  By that time she was overweight, suffering from gout and poor eyesight, and barely able to walk.  The rivalry between Sara and Abigail was based in fact.  Jealous over being replaced, Sara did accuse Queen Anne of having a lesbian relationship with her successor as head of the royal bedchamber.  In “The Favourite” the Queen has a menagerie of 17 bunnies representing the children denied to her, evidently a flight of fancy on the part of the director since rabbits were then considered garden pests sometimes eaten but not fit to be pets.  

Our friends Dean and Joanell Bottorff raised dairy goats when they lived in rural Valparaiso and distinguished between pets, livestock, and wild animals.  Never name goats you might later slaughter for food, they advised from experience, as we prepared homemade pizza topped with sausage made from a goat we once knew as Buttercup. 

Listening to a CD by Carly Rae Jepsen and reading Hanif Abdurrzqib’s  essay titled “The Weekend and the Future of Loveless Sex” in “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us,” suddenly I heard a dog barking upstairs.  It was Maggie May, arriving with Dave, Angie, Becca, James, and two new friends, Asher and Kaitlyn, from Valparaiso University.  After pizza and ice cream we played Telestrations, where you alternatively draw and guess pictures passed around the table and see how far the final drawing has changed from the original.  For example, three Little Pigs morphed into Three Blind Mice and ended up resembling billy goats, the eighth person thought.  I’m pretty bad at it and often was a source of confusion, but it’s mainly for laughs , with no winners or losers.  It was great seeing James and meeting Asher and Kaitlyn, roommates who graduated from Indianapolis Ben Davis, named for a railroad executive who in the 1880s obtained a railway stop for his Marion County community. 

Over the years I’ve had many pets, beginning with the family dog Smokey, which I remember mostly from old photos. When Hurricane Hazel flooded the street in front of our home in the Philadelphia suburb of Fort Washington, Smokey got caught in the current and finally escaped two blocks away.  I was in college when the news reached me that he had passed away of old age.  During Phil and Dave ‘s childhood we had a dog Slaughter that an asshole neighbor shot and killed when he wandered onto his property and a cat that I ran over when he was under our parked car.  Lasting longer were a dog Ubu that was scared of its shadow and a fearless outdoor cat Marvin that knew to be wary of racoons but fought any stray cat that invaded his territory, often necessitating trips to the vet.  Pets belonging to various family members are frequent guests, but Toni and I have resisted all efforts to take on the responsibility of another pet.   

The grand 16-hour Ken Burns documentary Country Music opens with a shot of Thomas Hart Benton’s mural depicting musicians playing the fiddle, banjo, mountain dulcimer, and guitar as well as dancers, gospel singers and in the background a riverboat and train.   The banjo player is African American is playing a version of an instrument brought to America by slaves, and beyond the railroad tracks a group of black women can be seen dancing by the riverbank.  Benton painted the mural at age 84 for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville and meant for it to be enjoyed  by those who do not normally visit art museums. Burns discusses the influence of legendary black blues performer DeFord Bailey.  Born in Smith County, Tennessee, Bailey learned to play the harmonica at age three, and developed a distinctive style while bedridden for a year with polio.  Listening to stray animals and trains passing by, he developed an uncanny ability to imitate their sounds. During the 1920s Bailey became the first black musician to appear on the WSM radio program Barn Dance, which morphed into the Grand Old Opry.  He performed “Pan American Blues,” named for a train that ran between Cincinnati and New Orleans in 24 hours.  In 1928 Bailey recorded “John Henry” for Victor Records, which was released both in its “hillbilly” and “race” series. 

ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” paid tribute to the incomparable Cokie Roberts, who appeared on the program for many years with David Brinkley, Sam Donaldson, and George Will.  As Cokie once quipped, “They were looking for a skirt” and got much more than they bargained for.  Cokie more than held her own, as Donaldson’s anecdotes made clear.  Once when questioned about rumors of his womanizing, Texas Senator John Tower asked Donaldson to define womanizing.  As he was having trouble answering, Roberts simply said, “You know it when you see it.”  An attorney for President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal was trying to explain Clinton’s argument that oral sex wasn’t really sex, and Cokie interjected, “Would your wife buy that?”  The guest was speechless as the blood drained from his face. Donaldson recalled that when Clinton asked Cokie’s mother Lindy Boggs, retired from Congress and in her 80s, to serve as Ambassador to the Vatican, she was cool to the idea until Cokie said, “Take it, you can do two things you love, go to Mass and attend parties.”  Lindy accepted the assignment.

Ethyl Ruethman with Jordan Ramos; NWI Times photo by Steve Euvino; below, Greta Thunberg

A hundred supporters attended a Youth Climate Strike rally at the open-air pavilion in Portage, the NWI Times reported.  Organized by IUN student Ethyl Ruethman, it was part of a worldwide demonstration in advance of the United Nations Summit on Climate Change inspired by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.  Ruethman indicted the industrial plants, killing Lake fish, and  polluting the Calumet Region’s air, land, and water resources.  As her sign declared, “Time is running out.”  When Thunberg spoke in front of world leaders at the UN, she told them, “You have stolen my childhood with your empty words. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth – how dare you!”

In Nicole Anslover’s class on Fifties Baby Boomers I discussed coming of age during the birth of rock and roll.  Like most of my peers I preferred the rhythm and blues originals of such songs as “Goodnight Sweetheart” by Gary’s Spaniels to lame cover versions by the Maguire Sisters and, worse, Pat Boone (shudder) butchering Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruitti.”  I told of seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show from only the waist up singing “Hound Dog,” originally Big Mama Thornton tale and about a cheatin’ husband, not a lazy hunting dog.  Presley’s version of the 1957 hit “One Night” was first recorded by Smiley Lewis with the line “One night of sin is what I’m paying for” changed to “One night with you is what I’m praying for.”  To his credit, Elvis sang the original lyrics at live appearances and acknowledged his debt to black blues and gospel forebears.  According to writer Peter Page, Elvis was devoted to pets over the years, “including a turkey named Bowtie, a mynah bird that repeated the excuses he heard for Presley being unavailable (‘Elvis is asleep,’ ‘Elvis isn't available,’ ‘Elvis isn't here.’), two wallabies from Australian fans (he donated both to the Memphis zoo), various farm animals and many dogs - Sherlock, Brutus, Snoopy, Edmund, and Get Lo, a Chow he once had flown back and forth to Boston on his private plane for kidney treatment. He often gave dogs as gifts, such as the poodle, Honey, to his wife, Priscilla, for Christmas 1962.”

Cousin Tommi Adelizzi, 83, sent me a jpeg of a Lane Christmas card from when I was a teenager.  Tommi (Thomasine) would have been named James Buchanan Lane IV had she been a boy.  Instead, I carried on the name, of my great, great, great uncle, the country’s fifteenth President.   My grandson insists on being called James rather than some nickname. I haven’t seen Cousin Tommi since I was a kid and she a sophisticated teenager when her family came east from San Diego, California, where Uncle Jim had was a co-founder of Chicken of the Sea Tuna Company.  She planned the family reunion in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the home of Wheatland, President Buchanan’s estate, then was unable to  attend.  It was nice to see Smokey in the picture, one I  had forgotten about.

America's Best Idea?

Ken Burns’ six-part, 12-hour series, entitled “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” began to air on PBS. The subtitle is from a quote by Wallace Stegner. I’ve enjoyed Burns’ previous efforts on the West, Baseball, Jazz, the Civil War, Baseball, and World War II; but the fiddle and banjo music can get to be a little too much. A reviewer for the L.A. Times wrote that unlike many documentaries that dumb-down the study of the past, Burns teaches us that “history is a gorgeously complicated thing.” Burns refers to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, where Toni and I reside until our leaseback runs out in September 2010. As neighbor John Laue points out in a proposal to save some of the few remaining houses from “the wrecking ball,” the West Beach Unit where I live in the once tight knit community of Edgewater was added in a 1976 Expansion Bill that more than doubled the size of the park. Also the government negotiated more than twice as many leasebacks as any other park and for the first time did not issue lifetime leasebacks. We negotiated a 20-year leaseback that was subsequently extended another nine years. When that ran out in 2007, the government allowed us to extend it till September 2010, at which time all remaining homes will be torn down, if the Park Service gets its way.

In a 1991 volume of “Steel Shavings dealing with the history of Portage, Indiana, I included a poem called “The Oaks” by John’s father Gilbert Laue about the cost to nature of “progress.” He wrote:

Men in hardhats
chainsaws snarling
earthmovers roaring
exult in their power
as the old oaks crash to the ground
and every vine and violet
blade of grass and fallen leaf
in buried under raw sand
contoured
for the Interstate cloverleaf

entrance to the steelmills-in-the-dunes
and a new motel to be called
no doubt
The Oaks

In 1998 John Laue and I co-edited an oral history of Edgewater that included many wonderful sketch drawings by area artist Dale Fleming and appeared in volume 28 of Steel Shavings, entitled “Tales of Lake Michigan and the Northwest Indiana Dunelands. In the Editor’s Note I wrote that a violent thunder and lightning storm greeted us our first night at 9649 Maple Place, which was located high atop a sand dune in a wooded area not far from the lake. In time we got used to shoveling lake effect snow and having cold air permeate our double-paneled fireplace room north window when the wind chill factor dropped below zero. With mixed feelings we watched deer munch on our shrubs, cleaned up after raccoons raided our garbage cans, lost electricity several times a year, and experienced sensations similar to an earthquake after shock when vibrations from passing trains disturbed the sand under our home. Compensating for these minor inconveniences were the pleasures of hearing the surf on stormy days (“pounding the shore with the throb of an engine,” to quote French novelist Simone de Beauvoir), rummaging for firewood in a nearby ravine, tending our plants and garden vegetables, catching sight of toads, possums and even an occasional snake, and observing hummingbirds, woodpeckers, hawks, and dozens of other kinds of ornithological specimens, including migratory ducks and geese flying overhead in formation and seemingly honking at us.”

This Gilbert Laue poem appears in “Tales of Lake Michigan””

He wasn’t much for nature
Walks in the woods
Bird watching
Spring’s first hepatica
Home craftsman
Semi-pro
Was his line

Remodeling, rebuilding
Repairing
Fixing
Making and designing
Planning how to do it

Poor Dot was doomed
To never live
In a finished house
Her kitchen was torn up
He was building new cabinets
The rec room
New ceiling
Bathroom
Showerstall
And on and on

Once he even figured out
How to raise the roof
To add a whole new floor

He needed the attached garage for his tools and materials
So to it he attached a two-car garage, with a sun-deck roof
Neither car has ever been in it
There isn’t room.

Heard from Paul Kern about volume 40. He wrote: “I've read it cover-to-cover and found it very interesting. Of course, some might quibble that you cannot write a "retirement journal" when you are so obviously not retired. Somewhat startled to find my emails in your journal, I was relieved to not find anything in them that made me cringe. It's true that it was my dream in graduate school to teach at a liberal arts college, but after several years I concluded that IUN was a good place for me. I liked the students and enjoyed the freedom I had to do things like develop ancient history as one of my fields. The atmosphere at a small college might have seemed a little claustrophobic. Also I thought the Region was an interesting area and always admired and enjoyed your efforts to preserve its history and bring it to life. Writing the history of IUN with you was an honor. I had forgotten that you holed up in my apartment one Christmas to finish up City of the Century. I guess that's when I was spending the holidays with my sister and our parents. I liked the way you weaved background info and reminiscences into your journal. That brought back many good memories.”

Salem Press released my review of “1960: LBJ VS. JFK VS. NIXON: The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies by David Pietrusza. I mentioned that it captures the essence of a pivotal Presidential election that featured party primaries and television “debates” assuming immense and lasting importance and wrote: “Since the publication in 1961 of Theodore H. White’s classic The Making of the President, 1960, journalists and historians alike have swept aside the code of silence regarding the peccadilloes of politicians. Without verifying its veracity Pietrusza repeats an anecdote about John F. Kennedy having sex with a call girl at Chicago’s Palmer House 90 minutes before his first TV encounter with Richard M. Nixon, who looked, to quote Ben Bradlee, like an “awkward cadaver.” Afterwards, the story goes, the charismatic candidate was so pleased with how things went that, according to longtime confidant Langdon P. Marvin, Jr., “he insisted we line up a girl for him before each of the debates.” Concerning Lyndon Baines Johnson, also a notorious philanderer, the author quotes wife Lady Bird’s rationalization that since her husband loved everyone, ‘it would be unnatural for him to withhold love from half the people.’”

The review continued: “In recent years revelations have surfaced about the role Mobster money played in securing West Virginia for Kennedy in the Democratic primary, the amphetamine injections from “Miracle Max” Jacobson, nicknamed Dr. Feelgood, and how Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley provided the necessary “ghost votes” to secure Illinois in November. Had Nixon chosen the Prairie State’s Senator Everett Dirksen or Governor William “Wild Bill” Stratton as his running mate, he might have won. JFK’s choice of LBJ was shrewder. In the capable hands of prolific sports/social historian David Pietrusza (i.e, Teddy Ballgame: My Life in Pictures (with Ted Williams), the behind-the-scenes maneuvering and character flaws of these contenders in the bare-knuckles blood sport of politics come alive and serve as cautionary tales to a new generation of readers.”

Last Friday IU Northwest’s History and Philosophy department was to take Anja Matwijkiw out to Aladdin’s Restaurant in Merrillville to celebrate her getting tenure and promoted to associate professor only she was sick and couldn’t come. Ten of us had lunch anyway including fellow emeriti Ron Cohen and Fred Chary. Gave “Freddy,” as I sometimes call him, a copy of the Retirement Journal. Ron, whose wife Nancy Del Castillo, has been reading volume 40 and contributed a journal herself to my “Ides of March 2003” issue, asked about my method of journal keeping. Told him I’d scribble down notes in the late afternoon and type daily entries the next morning but then make additions and revisions later. I often call Ron “Sparky,” a nickname he dubbed himself when he was a deejay on a radio program. They both call me Jimbo, as does Chancellor Bruce Bergland and many others. As Ray Saluga of the Ace Trucking Company liked to say, “You can call me Ray, Or you can call me J., Or you can call me Ray J., Or you can call me Ray, J. J., Or you can call me R. J. J., Jr., but you doesn’t have to call me Johnson.” The grandkids love it when I do that routine.

On Saturday Toni and I went to a quilt show at Timothy Ball Elementary School in Crown Point, named in honor of the Calumet Region’s first teacher, minister, and historian. There is also a Solon Robinson School, named for Crown Point's first resident. A bowling teammate, Frank Shufran had a quilt in the show, as did his wife Joan. Her entry, entitled “The ABCs of Life,” had such words to live by from A to Z as “Accept differences,” “Be kind,” “Yearn for peace,” and “Zealously support a worthy cause.” The worthy cause that we support most zealously is the Southern Poverty Law Center, which helps victims of bigotry. Frank at age 78 plays golf whenever the weather permits and averages in the high 180s on my bowling team, the Electrical Engineers. Over the years, I have come to admire people ten years or so older than me who are still vibrant. Neighbor Chuck Bernstin, who was still repairing TVs and VCRs a couple years ago, was one. Local radio and TV personality and historian Tom Higgins is another.