Wobblies

"The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.” Helen Keller, IWW member, 1911

Wobblies was a nickname for members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical union founded in Chicago in 1905 whose leaders included Eugene Victor Debs and Big Bill Haywood.  Believing in “One Big Union” and organizing industry-wide rather than by trades or crafts, the IWW had considerable success in western states, signing up farmworkers, lumberjacks, miners, and unskilled workers ignored, for the most part, by the cautious American Federation of Labor. The Wobblies used songs (“Solidarity Forever”) and colorful slogans (“Get the Bosses Off Your Backs”) to spread their mass appeal.  It had an estimated 150,000 members in 1917 before its members were persecuted and its leaders jailed, deported or murdered during World War I and the Red Scare. Its spirit lived on, inspiring many New Leftists during the 1970s including David Ranney, who belonged to the socialist groups New American Movement and the Sojourner Truth Organization.

In 1976 David Ranney hired in at FAROC, a small job shop in East Chicago, Indiana, that rebuilt centrifuge machines, used in rendering plants processing carcasses of pigs, cows, and horses into solids and liquids converted to other uses. Ranney found the listing in the Daily Calumet and drove to the plant from South Chicago via the Chicago Skyway.  In “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor” Ranney recorded his first impressions:

    From the Skyway I can see miles of bungalow homes, smaller and larger factories, and two steel mills, all going full tilt. As I get near East Chicago the acrid smell of steel production gets even stronger than it is in South Chicago.  Smoke fills the air and visibility is limited.  Massive integrated steel mills, including Inland Steel and U.S. Steel Gary Works, run around the clock. One of the operations in these mills is burning coal to make a product called coke that burns hot enough to combine limestone and iron into steel.  There are also huge mills that use the raw steel to produce sheets, beams, tubes, and rails. Other factories nearby use steel to make blast furnaces and giant ladles that are needed for the steelmaking process. At one point, five steel mills in the area employed over one hundred thousand workers.

At FAROC, which employed between 15 and 20 workers, there were many hazards, caused in part by the fact that there never seemed to be adequate time to clean up after a job was finished. Ranney wrote: “There are pallets of parts and motors lying in the aisleways.  Tools are sitting around everywhere, and the place is filthy.”  Ranney is injured twice in five months, once in the hand while using a drill bit and then when he tripped over a small ball bearing on the slippery floor, opening a large gash in his head when he fell into a piece of metal on a pallet and necessitating a trip to the ER.  The following Monday the boss fired him. Ranney objected saying, “That’s illegal, you know – to fire a guy because he is hurt on the job?”  The boss responded, “I’m firing you because you are not worth a shit.  Sue me!”

Seeking work, Ranney learned that Inland Steel was hiring. Arriving at the plant, he joined a line estimated to be a mile long only to be told that the positions had been filled. Over the next six years he worked at another half-dozen small plants, sometimes terminated when companies learned of his leftist background, other times penalized for trying to bring together white, Latino, and black workers.  He discovered that in most cases the unions supposedly representing the labor force seemed in cahoots with management and a common theme at all the plants was, in his words, “exploitation of backbreaking and dangerous labor and the often unhealthy and unsafe working conditions.” In a concluding chapter Ranney reflected on lessons learned and beliefs reinforced by his years working as an industrial worker. Labor in a capitalist society, he believed, is reduced to a commodity, and progress for workers is the result of militant labor struggle.  The precipitous decline in American manufacturing job was the result of a corporate strategy to relocate overseas and to replace its work force with robots and computers who don’t demand decent wages or complain about health and safety concerns.

While at the University of Maryland, I played on a softball team composed of History grad students; we called ourselves the Wobblies in honor of our kindred labor activists.

During my three-year career as pitcher (it wasn’t slow pitch but no windmill deliveries were permitted) we were one of the best teams, the others being Physical Plant and Upward Bound, the latter composed of incoming African-American students.  One year I took teammates to Boys Village of Maryland, where I worked teaching kids ages 13-15 who were either delinquents or foster children who had run away from where they’d been sent.  Most weren’t bad kids, and they were impressed that my teammates had come to play ball with them and quite good at hitting up my friends for money and in one case his glove.

Soon after I started teaching at IUN, several students (Ivan Jasper, Dave Serynek, Tom Orr) asked me to pitch for their softball team, Porter Acres, named for a former motel where many of them lived, enjoying a counter-culture lifestyle that my family became part of, at least on weekends and after games. We weren’t very good at first but enjoyed one glorious championship season where we even won a tournament against more highly ranked A and B division squads.  The team disbanded after Ivan Jasper and Tom Wade moved to the Bahamas, but I still get together a least once a year with several old teammates and reminisce.  Phil and Dave were bat boys for Porter Acres, and a decade later while they were IU students Dave and his friend Kevin Horn started a team (it had various names depending on who’d sponsor us and pay for our shirts) and needed a reliable pitcher. In slow pitch softball control is the chief requisite and I hardly ever issued walks. One game I hit a line drive down the first base line.  The rightfielder dove for the ball but missed and it kept rolling and rolling.  I was chugging into third base intending to stop, but Dave, coaching third, waved me in.  A good throw would have nailed me, but the surprised second baseman who took the cutoff, heaved the ball over the catcher’s head. Voila, my lone career home run.

Our team often finished first during the regular season but faltered in post-season tournaments when rival teams often brought in ringers. In 1996, however, we won it all. In the semi-final we were clinging to a one-run lead in the bottom of the seventh when a batter hit a little nubber in front of the plate.  I was known for making throws to first underhand because I had a sore shoulder and better control than if I threw overhand.  Knowing that I’d have no chance to beat the runner underhand, I whipped the ball overhand and nailed the guy by a half-step.  My teammates couldn’t believe what I’d done.  In the final game we had a five-run lead after our final at-bats, but our opponents got four runs and had men on first and second with two out and a feared home run hitter, Jim Wilkie, at the plate (a ringer whom I knew from coaching Little League). Pitching him inside, I gave up two colossal foul balls, then pitched one with at least a 12-inch arc. Had he hot swung, it would have been called an illegal pitch, but Wilkie, fearful of taking strike 3, hit the highest fly ball I’d ever seen to short leftfield.  Kevin Horn camped under it, squeezed his glove around it, and we were champs.  I still have the t-shirt from Portage Park Department, inscribed in letters now fading, 1996 Imagination Glen Men’s Champions.

During this time former student and Porter Acres teammate Terry Hunt, a Vietnam vet, asked me and son Dave to play for a Glen Park Eagles team. Terry and I shared pitching duties and normally one of us would play second base when the other pitched.  One evening in the last inning Terry asked me to play first base, which I’d never done before.  I objected, and he insisted, claiming it was as easy as sitting in a rocking chair. With darkness fast approaching and two outs he fielded a grounder and threw to me.  I muffed the throw, putting the winning run on.  The next batter hit a grounder to our shortstop, who had a rifle of an arm.  His throw to me seemed like a speeding bullet, but miraculously it landed in my glove; otherwise it could have done serious harm to me.  Game over.  I told Terry never to ask me to play that position again. My teammates loved to party, but I rarely visited their clubhouse (“Aerie”) because so members smoked and it had a low roof. I occasionally still wear my “uniform,” a shirt with my nickname “Doc” on the back and the number 55, my age at the time.  Two years later, I retired after getting hit by two balls, a line drive at my ankle and a grounder that took a bad hop and got me in the face. With the mound just 15 yards from home plate and realizing my reaction time may have slowed down, I reluctantly gave up the sport that had given me so many cherished memories.

Hot Hot Hot

“Me mind is on fire

Me soul is on fire

Feelin hot hot hot”

   “Hot Hot Hot,” Buster Poindexter 

David Johansen in middle

Written and first recorded in 1982 by Arrow (Alphonsus Celestine Edmund Cassell) from the Caribbean island of Monserrat as an upbeat calypso, “Hot Hot Hot” became a hit five years later for David Johansen, formerly with the New York Dolls, under the pseudonym Buster Poindexter. The music video caught on, and “Hot Hot Hot” became a karaoke favorite, with the word hot repeated a total of 137 times.  Toyota commercialized the tune (Toyota’s Hot Hot Hot”),and The Cure recorded a version with lyrics about being struck by lightning.  Jimmy Buffet opens most shows with “Hot Hot Hot,” which has been used in many TV and movie soundtracks, including “The Office” and “The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea” (2000).

I wrote my University of Hawaii master’s thesis on somebody named Poindexter, territorial governor Joseph Boyd Poindexter.  Appointed by FDR, Poindexter helped implement the New Deal in the Hawaiian islands and brought Asian-Americans into leadership roles in Hawaii’s Democratic Party.  Sadly, he is most remembered (and not fondly) for authorizing martial law during World War II, which lasted much longer than islanders thought necessary, even though the governor was ordered to do so by Franklin Roosevelt, leaving him no choice.  Had he refused the President’s direct order, Hawaii faced the prospect of a military takeover and loss of home rule. Nicknamed “Mahope Joe” for his rather plodding, uncharismatic personality, he nonetheless was notorious within Iolani Palace, I found out, for pinching women unfortunate to be behind him in the elevator.

A record heat wave is affecting most of the nation, including Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana.  At 8:30 the temperature was already 86 degrees with high humidity.  Yesterday was even hotter.  Numerous weekend outdoor events got cancelled but not the Porter County Fair. I used to work the IUN booth there in a building that at least had air conditioning.  A friend worked in a fried veggie truck that if still in operation must be insufferable in such weather. Midway through the Cibs game an huge cheer erupted even though nothing had transpired on the field.  The wind had shifted to the north, suddenly dropping the temperature ten to twenty degrees. With the wind blowing out the score had reached 6-5, Cubs, in the fifth.  No runs scored after that.

I’ve received several notices about my sixtieth high school reunion, scheduled for October 2020. Those less sentimental or still harboring traumatic memories from their teen years generally don’t come.  I’ve attended every one since my twentieth, enjoy the surprises they always provide, and retain vivid memories from each.  In 1980 I shared a smoke in the parking lot with Gaard and Chuck Logan and was surprised some people hardly recognized me because I’d grown a good six inches since high school; in 1990 Susan McGrath asked me to dance to “Proud Mary” by Ike and Tina Turner; in 1995 I got Wayne Wylie (who never dances, wife Fran warned) to boogie with me to the Ramones’ “I Wanna be Sedated.” Favorite math teacher Ed Taddei came to the fortieth, sexy Miss Polsky and Mr. Beck to the 45^th, and several first-timers to the fiftieth, including childhood pal Jay Bumm and Homecoming Queen Wendy Henry wearing, unbelievably, a tiara.  In 2015 traded baseball memories with old pal Eddie Piszak; classmate Fred Scott played hits from 1960, including “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, “Go Jimmy Go” by Jimmy Clanton, and “Save the Last Dance For Me” by the Drifters. Although I need the help of name tags for a few classmates, most I recognize almost immediately. One year, however I mistook Carolyn Aubel, who only attended Upper Dublin (U.D.) her senior year, for Carolyn Ott and blurted out that I’d had a crush on her in junior high.  Now I’m more careful.

In John Updike’s “Lunch Hour” first published in the New Yorker, David Kern attends his forty-fifth reunion in a small Pennsylvania community not unlike my home town of Fort Washington, PA, whose “underpopulated terrain,”Updike wrote, was now “filled with shopping centers, car lots, aluminum diners, and fast-food franchises.”The only such franchise I recall near us was a Dairy Queen (we called it a frozen custard stand) where Judy Jenkins and Alice Ottinger worked one summer.  Updike describes reunion attendees being greeted by displays of “photos from the happy days – duck tails, bobby sox, the smoke-filled luncheonette.”David observes that youthful personality traits were poor predictors of adult achievement:

 It was the comically tongue-tied yokel, invisible in class, who moved to Maryland and founded an empire of plant nurseries and parked a silver Jaguar in the lot of the reunion restaurant.  It was the forlorn, scorned daughter of a divorced mother – a monstrous thing in those days – who had become a glamorous merchandising executive out in Chicago.  The class cut-ups had become schoolteachers and policemen, solemn and ponderous with the responsibility of maintaining local order.   The prize for newest father – his bouncy fourth wife in a low-cut satin minidress, indistinguishable from his third, five years ago – went to a boy who had never, as far as anyone could recall, attended a dance or gone out on a date. The class wallflowers, an almost invisible backdrop of colorless femininity against which the star females had done their cheers and flaunted their charms, had acquired graceful manners and a pert suburban poise, while the queens of the class had succumbed to a lopsided overdevelopment of the qualities – bustiness, peppiness, recklessness, a cunning chiseled hardness – that had made them spectacular.

Updike’s last line is not true of U.D. stars Suzi Hummel, Susan Floyd, Judy Gradin, and Marianne Tambourino, all of whom aged gracefully.  Like David, I had grown up in a rural suburb where I was quite popular, moved away for a time, then returned to Upper Dublin school with former classmates.  We both felt insecure and initially didn’t fit into any one group until befriended by a girl, in David’s case Julia, in mine Mary Delp.  Mary taking a liking to me did wonders for my self-image. We first bonded her a school bus one afternoon when I was visiting Eddie Piszak; in David and Julia’s case, it was during their 55-minute lunch breaks when they jumped in a car with two others, drove around, and ended up at a burger joint. It was a time in our lives when, to paraphrase Updike, we were on the edge of those possibilities approaching to shape and limit our lives.

 Mary in 2015

Like Upper Dublin, David’s old school, “with its waxed oak hallways and wealth of hidden asbestos, had been razed” and at his next reunion “the door prizes had been yellow bricks salvaged from the rubble.”  In my case, it was an offer to tour the new facility, which I declined.  I preferred to remember the old junior-senior high building.  Shortly after graduating, Chuck Bahmueller, Vince Curll, and I, after consuming a few beers, paid a visit to “Old U.D.”  Stopping to see guidance counselor Mr. Dulfer, always good for a hall pass or excuse slip in a pinch, tactfully passed out mints after getting a whiff of us.  Dulfer’s advice to college-bound seniors never wavered: consider Muhlenberg College, his alma mater.  “Hot Hot Hot” French teacher Renee Polsky greeted us warmly and called me Jacques, which always got a rise out of me. Favorite teacher H.M. Jones was gone, however, summarily dismissed for indecent behavior toward a male student.

Jeanette Strong at Fair Housing rally

Archivist Steve McShane sent a researcher some photos of a Gary civil rights march that took place on September 9, 1963 organized by the Combined Citizens Committee on Open Occupancy (CCCOOO) to protest ghettoized housing conditions and rally support for an open housing ordinance. Thousands assembled at 25th and Broadway behind a coffin emblazoned with the words “Segregated Housing.”  Carrying banners and singing “We Shall Overcome,” the crowd paraded down Broadway to City Hall for a rousing rally.  

above, Gary Works in 1908; below, Allison Schuette

Allison Schuette has written numerous poems inspired by photos from Ron Cohen and my “Gary: A Pictorial History.” Accompanying “The Lakefront Changed from Sand to Steel” is a panoramic view of Gary Works, circa 1908, from the Calumet Regional Archives US Steel digital collection that one can access online.  Schuette wrote: 

Paul says as a younger man he believed racism would hold Gary 

back only a short while: close to Chicago, lots of infrastructure, 

national lakeshore. Liz and I drive up Indiana 49, 

exit on US 12, and drive west to Beverly Shores to avoid 

parking fees. At Kemil Beach, the shoreline sprawls northeast to Michigan, 

southwest to Burns Harbor then Gary: sand to steel. Industrialists

that first decade of the 20^thcentury hired men to dig 

into the dunes and drain the swamps. What did it feel like to jump in the 

lake at the end of a grimy day? How large did the labor leave one? 

What stature did one single worker inherit from the scope of the 

industrial imagination? Or did the lake have the power 

to minimize the enterprise, goading the entrepreneur to put in place

a black and white (and brown) world that Paul would have to witness far 

longer than he ever thought possible?

Al explained the concluding lines in this manner: “I was intending it to mean that the owners and management were creating and relying on segregation to keep workers opposed to seeing common cause. I also wanted to play on the concept of ‘black and white thinking’ and oversimplification in order to control outsized forces.”

 Kevin and Tina Horn

Juanita Mitchell

Tina Horn successfully pulled off a surprise fiftieth birthday party for hubby Kevin at AJ’s Pizza by pretending it was somebody else’s celebration.  “You got me,” Kevin admitted.  He’s a huge White Sox fan and a couple weeks earlier g Sox as his present.  As we were singing “Happy Birthday,” a Sox player hit a home run that was on the screen behind him, which Kevin didn’t fail to notice.  I talked Region politics with former newsman Robert Blaszkiewicz, who worked for the NWI Times and Chicago Tribune before landing a public-relation position with Franciscan Health.  He turned me on to an article in the Tribune about 107-year-old Juanita Mitchell, who remembered the 1919 Chicago Race Riot, which started when a black kid on a raft drifted close to the white beach, was struck by a rock, and drowned.  Juanita told the Tribune: “My uncle pulled out the biggest gun I’ve ever seen and stood at the window, and I heard him say ‘Here they come,’”Mitchell explained, “It meant the white folks was coming up 35th Street and that the riot was going to begin.”We both lamented the decline in quality of the Times’Sunday Forumsection since editor Doug Ross was bought out.  We agreed thatTimes reporter Joseph Pete is top notch.  Whenever he calls for information about a story, he calls me sir.  He’s that way with everyone, even me, Robert told me, a carryover from the military.Pete’s wife Meredith is an ace reporter for the Post-Tribune.

Meredith and Joseph Pete

 photos by Joseph Pete

For the past three weeks on the way to and from Banta Center for bridge I’ve passed striking machinists picketing the Regal Beloit plant in Valpo.  When I first waved, someone held up a sign asking me to honk if supportive, so that’s what I’ve been doing.  International Association of Machinists Local 2016 Business Representative David Gault, representing the 130 striking employees, told Joseph Pete that health insurance increases over the life of the past two contracts have eaten up workers’ wages.  Regal, which produces aerospace bearings, including parts for military helicopters, has been stonewalling rather than bargaining in good faith. 

It's Happening

“Go and dance yourself clean
You're blowing Marxism to pieces
Maybe they're arguments, the pieces.”

         LCD Soundsystem, “Dance Yourself Clean”

The LCD Soundsystem CD “It’s Happening” (2010) opens with “Dance Yourself Clean,” which concludes:

We should try a little harder
In the tedious march of the few
Every day's a different warning
There's a part of me hoping it's true

Calling themselves a dance-punk band from Brooklyn, James Murphy and company’s final track on “It’s Happening,” “Hope,” advises: “Grab your things and stumble into the night so we can shut the door on terrible times.”  LCD Soundsystem is about to release its first CD in seven years and has previewed two tracks from it, “Call the Police” and “American Dream.”  The latter is about faded dreams:

Oh, the revolution was here
That would set you free from those bourgeoisie
In the morning everything's clearer
When the sunlight exposes your age
But that's okay

WXRT has been giving “Call the Police” heavy air play because LCD Soundsystem is playing three dates in early November at the Aragon Ballroom.

 Kathy and Miranda in Chicago; photo by Sean Michael

Toni picked up Miranda, Sean, and Kathy Sichaleun (the Americanizing of her Thai name) at the South Shore station. They were exhausted but pumped from their Lollapalooza experience.  Sean recommended I check out ALT-J.  Shortly after they took off for Grand Rapids, Tom and Darcy Wade drove us to Hacienda Restaurant in Long Beach to celebrate Dave’s birthday, along with 17 others, including the Kevin Horn, Robert Blaszkiewicz, and John English families.  We had met at Shoreline Brewery in Michigan City, but there was a two-hour wait. The Hacienda looked familiar.  Spotting someone with an orange creamsicle cocktail, I remembered that Kim and Terry Hunt had taken us there.  I ordered an APA from Three Floyd’s in Munster plus the steak fajita salad, which was so enormous half was left over for lunch the next two days.

At Hacienda for Dave's birthday

Chicago lost to Washington despite two home runs (numbers 20 and 21) from Willson Contreras.  Gabby Hartnett holds the record for Cubs catchers with 37 round trippers in 1930. The following season, Hartnett shook Al “Scarface” Capone’s hand while the gangster was sitting in a first-row box seat.  Within a year, Capone would be a federal prisoner.

Gabby Hartnett and Al Capone

I avoided the Tri-State (80-94) on the drive to IUN but going home took it to the Porter exit.  A quarter-mile after the Broadway entrance ramp, a sign informs whether there is slow or stopped traffic ahead and in how many miles.  Normally I get off at Central, but the sign read “construction in four miles” but nothing about heavy traffic so I chanced it.

Hall of Fame manager (for the Yankees and Mets) Casey Stengel cultivated a persona as a clown early in his playing career for the Brooklyn Dodgers.  At Ebbets Field during pre-game fielding practice he’d station himself in the infield and pretend to snag grounders and throw to first.

Archivist Steve McShane is on vacation, so reserves unit librarian Betty Wilson called to tell me that IUN Nursing secretary Brenda Jenkins wanted to peruse the Calumet Regional Archives collection on the Steel City Chicks, a local softball team active in the 1940s and 1950s.  I let her have access to the two boxes in the Archives and gave her Steel Shavings, volume 45, which has information about the colorful Chicks.  In Steel Shavings, volume 45, I wrote that the Chicks wore blue and gold satin uniforms, including at times short shorts, and rarely lost.  Star pitcher Omega “Big Pitch” Lyons stood five feet nine and weighed over 300 pounds and was a formidable switch hitter.  Coach Fred Price recalled that Omega couldn’t bend over run fast or slide into bases but threw a ball that had a natural drop.  He said: “By the time it reached the plate, it would be about a quarter to a half inch lower than when the batter first saw it.”  The result was that, it batters did hit the ball, it would be an easy ground out.

 Shrine of St. Jude

Mike Chirich’s sister and brother-in-law are visiting Miller for a month, beginning in late August.  He has a doctorate in Religious Studies and is interested in religious myths and superstitions and their role in cultural retention over generations.  I’m planning to give him a copy of “Maria’s Journey” by Ramon (Ray) and Trisha Arredondo.  When Ray was a kid, while playing tag, he had a vision of an old, bearded man in religious robes sitting on a bench and promptly fainted.  Years later, when he took Maria to the Dominican Shrine of St. Jude Thaddeus in Chicago, the statue seemed identical to his childhood vision.  In the Foreword to “Maria’s Journey” I wrote:

Whenever Maria’s children left town, they would solicit Maria’s blessing for a safe trip.  As Ramon recalled: “We’d kneel before my mom and my grandmother when she was alive, and they’d say some prayers and bless us.”

Maria’s husband Miguel was politically radical while she clung to religion to sustain her through difficult times.  She didn’t go to mass, however, and go to confession, once telling a priest when she fell ill, “Do you really think I have time to sin?  I hardly leave the house except to buy groceries.”

In the New York Times Sunday Magazine, I learned the meaning of “Fubu” (for us by us) from Wesley Morris, who wrote about African Americans being “unapologetically black” and cited as an example Beyoncé’s lyrics in “Formation” from the CD “Lemonade”:

You mix that negro with that Creole, make a Texas bama
I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros
I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils

That same issue ended with self-proclaimed feminist Rashida Jones defending pornography – at least nonviolent forms of it.  She mentioned “duck lips" selfies, defined in this manner in Urban Dictionary:

  This is a face used in many teenage Facebook pictures. They stick their lips out in a fashion that resembles a duck's beak. It is meant to be seductive, although why anyone would think ducks are sexy, I don't know. Stay away from these girls; prolonged exposure to them may cause brain cell damage. This is not to be confused with a kissy face, which is a girl making a face as if she were about to kiss someone. This is an okay face under the circumstances that A: She is in a relationship and sending it to her boyfriend because she's traveling far away B: Blowing kisses to her mom or dad through skype C: It's Valentine’s Day. If it is not under these circumstances, then it's just as bad as duck lips.

Michael Jackson with duck lips