End of the World As We Know It

“A government for hire and a combat site

Left her, was coming in a hurry

With the Furies breathing down your neck”

    “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” R.E. M.

 

At Kirsten Bayer-Petras’s request Dave performed “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E. M. with James joining in, providing harmony for the final chorus, ending with “I feel fine.”  If only that were true. The lyrics are sung at breakneck speed and at times seem nonsensical.  Here's an example: "Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs/ Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybean, boom." 

 

Here are excerpts from Chesterton Tribune reporter Kevin Nevers from the April Chesterton Town Council meeting:

    “I am not going to request, I’m going to plead for citizens to support the businesses offering curbside service,” urged Jim Tom, R-1^st.  “There are a lot of them out there.  They’re listed in the Chamber’s website. We want these businesses to still be there when this is over.”

    Member Jennifer Fisher, I-5^th, expressed her gratitude to staff for its implementation of the Chesterton Covid-19 Resident Assistance Plan: the green thumbs-up and red thumbs-down window placard program.  “Good job,” she said.  “It reflects the great heart we have in this community.”

    Sharon Darnell, D-4^th, encouraged folks to call and text and email family and friends during the lockdown.  “Please keep those people around you in your thoughts,” she said. “Reach out to them.  Personal contact is so important in these times.”

 

In the “Echoes of the Past” column Nevers does with Betty Canright was this reprint of a story from 1945, when WW II was still taking the lives of Chesterton residents:

   Lt. Magdalene Kubeck, U.S. Navy Nurses Corps, died in an auto accident in the South Pacific area.  It had been raining very heavily in the preceding days and the roads were extremely slippery, and the car in which she was riding was sideswiped by an oncoming vehicle.

 

The Abraham Lincoln Newsletter reprinted an interview Richard J. Hinton conducted in December 5, 1860 with President-elect Lincoln in the hope that he would endorse recognition of the government of Haiti, a republic controlled by former slaves.  Lincoln expressed sympathy for recognition but admitted he would proceed cautiously, given the “alarming” state of affairs with Southern states. Lincoln eventually recognized Haiti in July of 1863 as the Civil War raged.  More enlightening than the interview itself was this biographical profile of 30-year old English native Hinton provided by historian Bob Willard:

    Richard J. Hinton came to America in 1851 and took up residence in New York City.  As a reporter, he opposed the Fugitive Slave Law, became an anti-slavery advocate, and assisted in the organization of the Republican Party.  He was an ally of John Brown and an assistant of abolitionist James Redpath, who headed an effort to encourage free blacks to emigrate to Haiti.

    In 1856 Hinton took up residency in Lawrence, Kansas and joined John Brown.  In fact, but for an accident, he would have been with Brown at Harpers Ferry.  A man mistaken for Brown was hanged.  Together with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Hinton also planned the jailbreak of Brown’s accomplices who assisted slaves through the Underground Railroad. 

    Hinton helped recruit volunteers for the first Kansas Colored Infantry regiment early in 1862 and was appointed its adjutant with the rank of first lieutenant.  Hinton mustered out of military service in November 1865, having received the brevet rank of colonel.  He finished the war as acting inspector general of the Freedman’s Bureau as well as being sent South from Washington for a time on secret service work ordered by President Lincoln.

 

Haiti’s history has been marked by foreign interference and political instability.  After Christopher Columbus discovered the island of Hispaniola in December 1492, the native Taino population rapidly succumbed to smallpox epidemics and harsh forced labor policies in Spanish gold mines and plantations. Under French rule that began in the seventeenth century black slaves eventually outnumbered white Europeans 10 to 1. During the French Revolution a slave revolt led by Toussant Louverture eventually led to independence in 1804, by which time Louverture had died in a French prison.  In 1915 American business investments seemed threatened by civil unrest.  President Woodrow Wilson sent marines to restore order to Haiti, an occupation that lasted 20 years and involved using Haitians as virtual slave labor to build bridges, roads, and other infrastructure. Following two decades of unstable presidencies, dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier and son “Baby Doc” instituted a 30-year reign of terror, ending in 1986.  Haiti’s first democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was twice ousted in coups, including in 2004 aided surreptitiously by the Bush administration.  Aristide returned to Haiti in 2011 after seven years in exile but has not run for office since.

 

Bridge buddy and former student Vickie Voller emailed to report that she’d been reading my 2015 Steel Shavings and was pleased that I had written about IUN professor Bob Lovely and Post-Tribune columnist Carol Vertrees.  Vickie was writing for the Post-Tribune in the mid-70s at the time I was submitting weekly columns on the history of Gary.  I’m always flattered when I learn that someone is reading one of my publications.  Douglas Dixon informed me that his manuscript “Beyond Truman: Robert H. Ferrell and Crafting the Past” has been published. He had asked me to review an early draft, but I begged off, saying I did not hold the late IU diplomatic historian in high esteem, mainly due to his disparagement of New Left historians. Ferrell mentored many historians at IU, including Dixon, and was an expert on Harry S Truman. In “The Question of MacArthur’s reputation” (2008), Ferrell concluded that the future general embellished his role in the WW I Meuse-Argonne offensive, taking undeserved credit for the success of troops in combat.

Tree of Life

“You can run all your life

And not go anywhere.”

   (Take Away This) Ball and Chain,” Social Distortion

 

Prior to playing “Ball and Chain” for his daily Facebook performance, son Dave wrote that he was feeling a little socially distorted, given the enduring self-isolation caused by the pandemic. In the background was a poster of his high school band LINT. Dave’s previous selection was “Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne in honor of co-founder Adam Schlesinger, who passed away from COVID-19.  Also R.I.P., Bill Withers.  “Ain’t No Sunshine” with them gone.

 

Knowing what an acclaimed director Terrence Malick is, I watched “The Tree of Life” (2011), which I found rather pretentious and boring despite stellar performances by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as the postwar parents of three boys.  Scenes depicting the formation of the earth reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  Critic Roger Ebert loved tit and summed up the theme of all Malick movies in this way: “Human lives diminish beneath the overwhelming majesty of the world.” Maybe, but the flick could have used more action and some resolution.

My favorite reporter, Chesterton Tribune's Kevin Nevers, has been self-isolating with wife Meredith, Kate and Andie, and their cats for the past two weeks.  In “Thoughts on a Pandemic” he describes himself as “a tired hack who after 23 years at the Tribune has very nearly run out of words, so the slower pace of teleworking suits me just fine.” Erudite without being pedantic, Nevers incorporated the words paradigm and apparatchik, made reference to second mate Stubb on the deck of the “Pequod,” the whaling ship in “Moby Dick,” and wrote: “I’ve always been a homebody, so living in my pajamas and shaving once every five days come naturally to me.”  He described having beers with his best friend in his garage 12 feet from him with hand sanitizer between them.  He predicted that the pandemic will “mutate the DNA of our way of life [and] distort notions of personal space, norms of etiquette, forms of consumption, seismically shift the terms and structures of politics, and transform how we celebrate and grieve, woo and worship.”

 

In “Rabbit Is Rich” John Updike referred to America in 1979 “littered with pull-tabs and bottlecaps and pieces of broken mufflers.” Forty years later, it’s much worse – millions of plastic bags that will scar the earth’s land and seas for centuries.

 

In my current Steel Shavings magazine I wax nostalgic about playing Spin the Bottle at a party Ray Bates held, searching for used Fats Domino records at Montgomeryville flea market, giving girls back rubs (and sometimes having them be reciprocated) in home ec teacher Mrs. Davis’s homeroom, and being interrupted while parking in the Van Sant farm long dirt road by Chief of Police Ottinger. With plans for my 60^th high school reunion in possible jeopardy, this paragraph seems bittersweet:

    In 1980 I shared a smoke with Gaard Murphy and husband Chuck; in 1990 Sue Floyd asked me to dance to “Proud Mary” and I mistook Carolyn Aubel for Carolyn Ott and blurted out that I’d had a rush on her.  In 1995 I got Wayne Wylie (who never dances, wife Fran warned) to boogie with me to “I Wanna Be Sedated”.  Favorite math teacher Mr. Taddei came to the 40^th, Mrs. Polsky and Mr. Bek to the 45^th, and several first-timers to the 50^th, including Jay Bumm and Wendy Henry wearing, unbelievably, her Homecoming Queen tiara. In 2015 I trading senior Little League memories with Eddie Piszek, and deejay Fred Scott played hits from 1960, including The Twist” and “Go, Jimmy, Go.”

Exceedances

“Another sad day for Lake Michigan.  Industry still using the lake as its own dumping grounds!” Jim Brown

 IDEM officials checkoff dead fish near Portage marina, NWI Times photo by John Luke

A malfunction at ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor plant has resulted in thousands of fish dying in the East Branch of the Little Calumet River and in nearby Lake Michigan. Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) officials have used the euphemism “exceedances” to characterize the chemical spill of cyanide and ammonia-nitrogen.  Indiana Dunes National Park superintendent Paul Labovitz closed the Portage beach area and told Kevin Nevers of the Chesterton Tribune, “It was a broad-spectrum kill.  It was not species-specific.  Anything close to the source was killed.  It even killed catfish, and catfish are pretty hard to kill.”  Labovitz was rather cavalier in concluding, “I put this in the category of ‘Shit Happens in an industrial community.’”  He praised Arcelor-Mittal for accepting blame for the environmental disaster and communicating results of their ongoing investigation far faster than was the case with U.S. Steel when a deadly carcinogen spilled into Burns Ditch from its Portage facility 30 months ago with dire consequences. Republicans being in control of state and federal regulatory commissions, it is doubtful that Arcelor-Mittal will receive more than a slap on the wrist.

Post-Tribune photo byZbigniew Bzdak

Cha Meyer reacted to Portage Beach being closed until further notice: “We are canaries in the coal mine of the world that our society has polluted and squandered away.”

Portage officials contradicted Superintendent Labovitz’s charitable assessment.  A spokesman noted: “While reports show many, including IDEM, knew of the concerns as early as August 12th, the City of Portage was not informed of this concern until August 15th.” Commenting on the Portage Indiana Municipal Facebook site, Diana Dempsey Bartkus wrote: “It’s cheaper for them to pay the fine than dispose of properly, I’m sure. Throw down! Make an example out of them! There should be zero tolerance! Beach goers were not turned away from any of these beaches on Thursday! They already knew of the situation for more than 24 hours! This is awful and infuriating!!!” Tammie Klym added:“How is any level of these deadly chemicals allowed to be near our water supply? How are these companies allowed to have any vessel that allows anything to be dumped into water? I can see intake. This is why our ecosystem is failing. This company makes millions if not billions of dollars. Put in a filtration system and make sure it works.” This from Jonathan Fronczak: “Forget a fine, some people need to be locked up. You can get a felony and jail for hunting and fishing unlawfully. The only way to stop future events is criminal prosecution. Make an example!!!”

George Takei at Rowher and at present

Rohwer Internment Camp

Veteran actor George Takei, best known as Hikaru Sulu in the “Star Trek” series, is in AMC’s “The Terror: Infamy,” which takes place in an internment camp where Japanese-Americans were consigned during World War II. In a Timeinterview Takei tells of his family being interned when he was just five. Soldiers showed up at their home in Los Angeles and took them to Santa Anita racetrack, where a chain-link fence surrounded the entire facility.  Takei recalled:

  We were unloaded and herded over to the stable area. Each family was assigned to a horse stall.  For my parents, it was a degrading, humiliating, enraging experience to take their three kids to sleep in a smelly horse stall.  But to me, it was fun to sleep where the horses slept.

One stall had been home to the famous racehorse Seabiscuit, winner of the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap less than two years before. From Santa Anita the Takei family was sent to Rohwer internment camp in Desha County, Arkansas.  Takei recalled: 

  We were plunked down in the swamps of southeastern Arkansas.  To me, it was an exotic, alien planet.  Trees grew out of the water of the bayou that was right next to the barbed-wire fence. I remember catching pollywogs and putting them in a jar. Dragonflies, which I’ve never seen before.  The first winter, it snowed. I was a Southern California kid.  To wake up one morning and see everything covered in white, it was a magical place.

  For my parents, it was a series of goading terrors, one after the other.  But children are amazingly adaptable.  We adjusted, and we got used to what would have been a grotesque thing – lining up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall, or going with my father to bathe in a mass shower.  When I made the night runs to the latrine, searchlights followed me.  I thought it was nice that they lit the way for me to pee. It wasn’t until later that I learned about the reality, the horror, the terror, and the injustice of the incarceration.

Toni and I attended a RailCats baseball contest against the Milwaukee Milkmen.  While the game itself was rather boring, afterwards there was a spectacular fireworks display, like a grand finale that lasted a good 10-15 minutes.  In“They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” essayist Hanif Abdurraqib admitted to being a fan of his hometown Triple-A Columbus (Ohio) Clippers, and watching a Fourth of July fireworks display at Huntington Park:Over the weekend:

  You’ll roll your eyes when “Born in the U.S.A.” plays while the fireworks fly screaming into the sky, tucking all its darkness into their pockets.  I still go to watch the brief burst of brightness glow on the faces of black children, some of them have made it downtown, miles away from the forgotten corners of the city they’ve been pushed to. Some of them smiling and pointing upwards, still too young to know of America’s hunt for their flesh.  How it wears the blood of their ancestors on its teeth.

Music critic Abdurraqib, it turns out, is a big Bruce Springsteen fan.  He has attended several of The Boss’s concerts and is particularly fond of “The River” album, which celebrates the small pleasures of blue-collar culture and, as Abdurraqib put it, “the ability to make the most of your life, because it’s the only life you have.”  Catching Bruce and the E Street Band at a sold-out show in Newark, New Jersey’s Prudential Center, Abdurraqib observed:

  As I looked around the swelling arena, the only other black people I saw were performing labor in some capacity.  As the band launched into a killer extended version of “Cadillac Ranch,” I looked over to the steps and saw a young black man who had been vending popcorn and candy.  He was sitting on a step covered in sweat and rubbing his right ankle.  A man, presumably attempting to get back to his seat, yelled at him to move.

  In Bruce Springsteen’s music, I think about the romanticization of work and how that is reflected in America.  Rather, for whom work is romantic, and for whom work is a necessary and sometimes painful burden of survival. In my decade-plus of loving Bruce Springsteen’s music, I have always known and accepted that the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal will come from.

I woke up disoriented, then realized; no electricity.  Most of Chesterton suffered the same fate.  Dave took us to breakfast.  After encountering long waits at Round the Clock and Bob Evans, we were about to settle for Culver’s when Dave noticed that, it being 11 o’clock, AJ’s Pizza Company was just opening.  They served great coffee, and the lunch menu included a tasty steak sandwich and homemade chips. I called Ron Cohen on Dave’s cellphone, and, back at the condo, he and Nancy picked me up for Fred Chary’s 80th birthday celebration just as our power returned.   

EllaRose

As always, Diane Chary prepared a bountiful buffet.  Having recently eaten, I was pleased to discover a vegetable plate and chunks of mangoes in a salad.  Later I went back for other delicacies.  Fred’s daughter EllaRose, a playwright, came from New York City.  Missing were regulars Karen Rake and Milan Andrejevich, as well as recently retired English professors Alan Barr and George Bodmer. Both attended ten years ago but not for Fred’s 75th, by which time they were shunning me – a case of letting academic differences take priority over friendship.  Not surprisingly, right-winger Jean Poulard and lefty Jack Bloom, both still teaching despite being well past retirement age, argued over Trump separating immigrant families.  Bloom is teaching a Fall course on the Vietnam War and is eager to see my old syllabus.  Its reading list included Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Ronald J. Glasser’s 365 Days,Michael Herr’s Dispatches,and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk. I talked with Fred about the Phillies’ recent sweep of the Cubs and told him that the Steel ShavingsI gave him contained descriptions of the Eagles’ Superbowl victory and the raucous celebrations afterwards. EllaRose opened a bottle of champagne Poulard had brought from his home village in France, and we toasted the guest of honor and vowed to gather again five years hence.  Diane insisted I take food home for Toni, so I opted for slices of vegetarian lasagna and chocolate cake.  On the birthday cake were figurines depicting a Phillies pitcher and catcher and a Cubs batter striking out.

Like Fred, I am a loyal Philadelphia sports fan with a couple all-time favorite players in each major sport – Richie Ashburn and Dick Allen in baseball, Eagles Chuck Bednarick and Sonny Jorgensen, Flyers Bobby Clarke and Bernie “Kid” Parent, and 76ers Julius “Dr. J” Irving and Allen “AI” Iverson.  Iverson is also a favorite of Hanif Abdurraqib, who wrote an essay titled “It Rained on Ohio On the Night when Allen Iverson Hit Michael Jordan with a Crossover.” The memorable event took place in 1996, AI’s rookie season, when “he hadn’t yet grown out his soon-to-be signature cornrows and was several tattoos short of where he would end his career.”  At the top of the key facing his idol, AI pulled off a double crossover, then nailed an easy jump shot.  While in high school, Iverson had been incarcerated in the aftermath of an interracial bowling alley brawl in Hampton, Virginia (only black kids were arrested). Accused of throwing a chair, Iverson told the judge, “What kind of man would I be to hit a woman in the head with a damn chair?”  Sent to a correctional farm, Iverson couldn’t play basketball his senior year and scholarship offers dried up.  Only Georgetown’s coach John Thompson took a chance on him.

Beloved by 76er fans and self-described “punk kids” like Abdurraqib, Iverson gave his all on the court, “throwing his body all over the place for the city of Philadelphia and dragging lackluster teams to the playoffs and then [in 2002] to the finals.”  The day after watching AI fake out Jordan, Abdurraqib was on a still-slick playground in Columbus “in baggy jeans that dragged the ground until the bottoms of them split into small white flags of surrender”dreaming “of having enough money to buy my way into the kind of infamy that came with surviving any kind of proximity to poverty.”  Of Iverson Abdurraqib concluded:

  He was a 6-foot wrecking ball, who wouldn’t practice hurt, but who would play hurt for what felt like half of the season.  The era of witnessing Allen Iverson was the era of learning a language for your limits and how to push beyond them.

 Ray Smock in Nebraska

I heard from old friend Ray Smock from Maryland days, traveling through the Great Plains states, and Paul Turk, whom I met when my family moved to the Detroit area in the mid-50s.  He’s a Cleveland Indians fan and, to a lesser degree, the Washington Nationals, now that he’s living in the DC area.  Daughter Kat, a grad student in archeology at Vanderbilt, “spent much of the summer in the Fish River Canyon in Namibia, scratching for the fossil record of the very earliest animals in the Ediacaran Period, 450+ million years ago.  Dinosaurs are SO nouveau and come-lately.” According to the online Encyclopedia Britannicathis was the latest of three periods of the Neoproterozoic Era marked by considerable tectonic activity and the rapid retreat of ice sheets associated with the Marinoan glaciation.

                            Kat Turk; fossil from Ediacaran period found in Australia                                                                           

In the City

I was born here in the city
With my back against the wall
Nothing grows, and life ain't very pretty
No one's there to catch you when you fall

“In the City,” Eagles

Canned Heat at Woodstock; below, Hanif Abdurraqib

When the Eagles formed in 1971 in Los Angeles, the counter-culture back-to-the-land fantasy of independent rural communes still was potent. At Woodstock two years before Canned Heat performed their iconic “Going Up the County,” which contains these lines:

I'm gonna leave this city, got to get away
All this fussin' and fightin' man, you know I sure can't stay
So baby pack your leavin' trunk
You know we've got to leave today
Just exactly where we're goin' I cannot say
But we might even leave the U.S.A.

“In the City” by the Eagles follows in a long antiurban American tradition, glorifying rural life and, more recently, what historian Kenneth T. Jackson called the “Crabgrass Frontier” of suburbia, whose allure was the promise of home ownership with garage and ample yards in a safe community with good schools.  Ibn “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” Black essayist Hanif Abdurraqib captured the misleading image as seen by a teenage interloper:

  The sidewalks were more even underneath our bike tires, and the silence was a gift to a group of reckless and noisy boys, spilling in from a place where everything rattled with the bass kicking out of some car’s trunk.  We would ride our bikes with our dirty and torn jeans and look at the manicured lawns and grand entrances and the playgrounds with no broken glass stretched across the landscape. . . . It allowed me to fantasize, imagine a world where everyone was happy and no one ever hurt.

Thomas Hart Benton, "America Today" city and steelmaking panels

Anti-urbanism, in part was a reaction to rapid industrialization and the subsequent influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants to our shores, demonized cities as centers of sin and crime, corruption and radicalism, poverty and wage slavery.  Thomas Hart Benton’s century-old 10-panel mural “America Today,” for example, depicts burlesque dancers, subway muggers, and bloodthirsty fans at a prizefight as well as muscular, overworked steelworkers tending ladles of molten steel and guiding red hot ingots along an assembly line.   

Allison Schuette wrote this poem based on 1907 stereographs depicting the construction of Gary Works and found in “Gary: A Pictorial History”:

    The scale of the enterprise is immense. 

I fear it cannot be communicated; it must be experienced. 

The historians’ illustrated history introduces the scope: 

the ragged landscape of dunes and the marshy swamps not yet dredged;

the size of the labor force, the conditions under which they labored 

(snakes, yellow jackets, hornets and dune fleas); 

the clearing of the land, grading of the land, 

digging of the land, constructing upon the land; 

the relocation of the Grand Calumet River 1000 miles south of its original bed; 

the immensity of the machines and the scaffolding, 

dwarfing the size of any labor force, exposing us for the ants we are. 

But scope is to scale as smell is to taste, 

a whiff of what is to come if you are allowed to eat at the table. 

Which makes the stereographs all the more tantalizing. 

Printed on the historians’ page, they tease but refuse to do their job. 

The unified, three-dimensional world split, duplicated, flattened. 

Not one set of foundations for the traveling cranes, but two. 

Not one array of the great blast furnaces, but two.

Not one crew of workers unloading the long steel beams for the open hearth mill, but two. 

Not one length of the machine shop interior under construction, but two. 

Duplication draws the mind to the surface, to comparison and contrast, right and left. 

The stereographs confirm the eagerness of the industrial age, 

the enthusiastic ego, multiplying the moment to drive the point home. 

Look, look. Look at what we’ve done. But all I can do is look.

I cannot see, as Oliver Wendell Holmes did, the “scraggy branches of a tree”

running out at me “as if they would scratch our eyes out.”

The present refuses me complete access to the past. 

When I ask, it says, the stereoscope has been packed away

     and no one remembers where to find it. 

Nobel laureate in literature Toni Morrison died at age 88.  She once said, “If there is a book that you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.”  She was born in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio. At the age of two she was inside a house that the landlord set on fire because her family could not afford to pay the rent.  Her parents laughed at the fool and moved on. Thus, Morrison learned early that, in her words, “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”  Morrison was a 2016 recipient of Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her novel “Jazz” (1992), set in Harlem during the 1920s, deals with a married salesman, Joe Trace, murdering Dorcas, his young lover whose corpse Joe’s wife Violet (“Violent”) assaults with a knife at the funeral. Danger and excitement stimulation all the senses: that was Harlem during its Renaissance.

The topic in Steve McShane’s Senior College class on the history of the Calumet Region was “Steelmakers and Steeltowns.” It covered the founding and industrial growth of Gary and East Chicago with emphasis on the steel mills that dominated almost every aspect of life.  I distributedSteel Shavings, volume 46, with Vivian Carter on the cover and promised to be back in 10 days to talk about her launching Vee-Jay Records and to play doo wop and rock and roll hits produced and released by the record label.  In class was Beatrice Petties, whom Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette interviewed for the VU Flight Paths project. Here are some of Beatrice’s recollections about her Gary work experiences:  

   My mother said, “Always leave a job to where maybe you could go back to it.”And that was how I tried to leave. Any job I left I tried to leave that way. Gave them notice and let them know I was leaving. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do that.

   I went to the Gary National Bank, worked in there for about five years.  Mr. Horn, my supervisor, promised that once I learned the job they would promote me.  I went through the training and did the job for a year but never got the promotion. So I walked in the office and I said, “Mr. Horn, it’s been a year since I finished my training. When am I going to get a promotion?”He said, “Let me get back to you.”I said, okay. About a week later, I stood there in the door and said, “Mr. Horn, what did you promise me?”He said, “Well, we can’t do this right now.” I said, “Why?”And he gave me some long reason. I said, “Okay.”I never argue with anybody about a job. I went around the corner, and put in an application for Gary Housing Authority. About a month later, I went in and I told Mr. Horn, “Mr. Horn, I’m handing in my resignation.”And he said, “Don’t do that. Wait I’ll get back to you.” I said, “Okay.”He came back the next day, and said, “We’re going to promote you.”I said, “No, thank you, Mr. Horn. I’m taking the job, and I can leave today if you would like.”He did not like it at all. They were paying me almost $1,500 more than what I was getting at the bank, so I naturally was not going to turn that job down.

   I worked in the purchasing department at Gary Housing Authority, and the lady that was over the purchasing department left. When they put the job up on the board, I asked for it, but because I hadn’t been there very long, they put someone else in the position. Mr. Bosak, he said the wrong thing to me. He said, “Will you show her how to do the job?” And I said, “Okay. Fine.” I did not make it any better or any worse. I went and applied at Methodist Hospital. And I left not just because he didn’t give me that promotion, I left because there was some political shenanigans going on. They had a fund going, “Flower Fund,” for people who worked there, but I found out through talking to some other people that it was really a political fund for whomever was in office at the time. I said, “Don’t take any money out of my salary for that.” That’s when I said, “Thank you,” left, and  got to Methodist Hospital. I worked in the engineering department for almost 18 years. I was the only lady in the department, and the guys were great. I had a good time. We even see each other and talk to each other now. But that was a good time. A very good time.

Miller mainstay and retired Purdue Calumet professor of Electrical Engineering Rich Gonzales passed away.  I’d see him at Joe Petras’s annual Marquette Park playground fundraiser and other local functions, such as Ed Asner’s one-man show as FDR.  We both were guests at a dinner party Tom Eaton threw and a house party for Indiana gubernatorial candidate John Gregg. Rich was a good guy.

Commission for Higher Education member Jon Costas

The Commission for Higher Education met at IUN, first time in eight years.  Since its creation in 1971, the state-mandated policy-making group, much ridiculed by a long line of administrators, has issued welcome, albeit sometimes ignored, mission statements stressing the need for Regional campuses to serve its local constituencies in terms of research, community service, and teaching goals and practices. When I arrived at the Arts and Sciences Building, the adjacent parking lots were blocked off for use by the university’s guests.  Inside I spotted a bunch of white men in suits (actually, I discovered later, 3 of the 14 members are women and one African American).  The only person I knew was Valparaiso mayor Jon Costas, who grew up in Gary’s Horace Mann district during the 1960s.  I told Chancellor Lowe’s administrative assistant Kathy Malone that I was under-dressed, then thought better of it since I was wearing an IU polo shirt.  One is never under-dressed wearing IU apparel.

The Chesterton Tribune often has more (and better) news coverage than the two major Region papers.  For instance, a recent issue contained a lengthy analysis of Trump freezing all Venezuelan assets, which the Russians (correctly in my opinion) labeled economically motivated “international banditry.” The Tribuneis owned and edited by David Canright, who graduated from IU and was active in anti-Vietnam War protests and the antinuke Bailly Alliance.  The daily has a long tradition of support for the working man and ecology.  In fact, it was founded in 1882 as a Greenback Party weekly.  During the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan was a force to be feared in Indiana small towns, the Tribune refused to print any articles about Klan activities.  It remains a vital source of community doings. 

 Kevin Nevers and Jeff Trout

I’ve long admired the work of Tribunereporter Kevin Nevers, who with Betty Canright also puts together “Echoes of the Past,” scouring files from 10, 15, 25, 50, and 75 years ago.  In August of 1944, for example, “two rattlesnakes were killed in Henry Grieger’s garden at Furnessville (an unincorporated community in Porter County along Route 20 near Beverly Shores).  One had four rattles and the other five and a half.” For the first time civilians were permitted to tour a few areas of the the Kingsbury Ordinance Plant. Also the Chesterton Merchants Association promised to build a band shell in the town park because passing New York Central trains made so much noise during concerts.  Presented with the Chamber of Commerce Community Service Award, Nevers credited David Canright with emphasizing that the Tribunewas a “newspaper of record.”  He said: “My editor doesn’t ask me what my lead is, he asks me how many stories I have and how much space I need. He winds me up and points me in the right direction."

On this date in 1974 Nixon resigned and in 1988 the Chicago Cubs turned on recently installed lights for the first ever Wrigley Field night game.  Exactly four year later, Metallica band member James Hetfield was badly burned due to a pyrotechnics explosion on stage at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium.  In 1995 Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead breathed his last.

At Banta Center my bridge partner was feisty Dottie Hart.  Ten years my senior, she is moving in with her daughter, who joked that Dottie could have men over so long as they were gone when she got home for work. I quipped, “What time does she get home for work?”  Among the treats: Don Giedemann’s delicious cherry cobbler, resembling what once was my Thanksgiving specialty.  Norm and Mary Ann Filipiak offered blue bearded iris bulbs to any takers. I took several that Toni appreciated in view of the fact that I never followed through on promises to dig up iris bulbs from our Maple Place residence when our National Lakeshore leaseback expired.  Pam Missman, whose husband was playing ping pong nearby, has an endearing smile that reminds me of seventh grade girlfriend Pam Tucker, a great kisser who, years later, told me that when my family moved to Michigan, it nearly broke her heart.  Sigh! Puppy love.

Regal Beloit workers in Valpo 130 strong are in the sixth week of their strike.  I pass the pickets to and from bridge.  Journeyman carpenter Ryan Higgins toldTimescorrespondent Joseph Pete that medical insurance eats up a huge chunk of workers’ salaries and asserted:

  My dad has worked here for 42 years. Raised my sister and I on fair wages and benefits. I remember when I was a kid and McGills (the original owner) would have company picnics and would personally man the grill and drink beer with his employees! Those days are long gone! My dad makes less than he did 25 years ago. How is that fair? Stand up for what is right people!

Ryan Higgins

photo by Liz Wuerffel