Deep Freeze

“Don’t knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn’t start a conversation if it didn’t change once in a while.” Kin Hubbard

Hoosier Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard (1868-1930) was a cartoonist and journalist whom Will Rogers called “America’s greatest humorist.”  Kurt Vonnegut often quoted him.  In “Slaughterhouse Five” he referenced the witticism, “It’s no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.”  The same Hubbard quote appeared again in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.”

Chicagoland suffered through several days of record low temperature, as a polar vortex put the entire Midwest into a deep freeze for nearly a week, preceded and followed by snow.  For a week IUN either opened late, closed early, or shut down completely.  Even bowling and bridge got cancelled.  “Deep freeze” can mean a state of suspended animation, which seemed appropriate given so many things coming to a crashing halt.  My get together with Valparaiso University Sociology professor Mary Kate Blake was put off a week.  Conditions brought to mind the brutal winters of the 1970s when I considered looking for a job in warmer climes and 1985 when to my amazement our Maple Place thermometer dipped well into the minus 20s.  In 1994 our driveway had a thick coat of ice that proved virtually impossible to  remove. Every snowstorm left me wondering if I could get up our hill once I left for school.  Fortunately the Portage Street Department didn’t forget about us, thanks to cakes Toni baked for the drivers every Christmas. While teaching an 8:30 a.m. class, as was my routine, I sometimes called ahead and was told classes hadn’t been postponed or cancelled, only to learn otherwise upon arriving to IUN. More than once, I slept overnight on an uncomfortable couch in Tamarack Lounge due to conditions outside.

 above, Paul Kaczocha's house in Miller; below, Grand Rapids, MI

It’s been colder in these parts than in Antarctica, Greenland or Siberia.  The weather was even worse in western Michigan, where lake effect has been relentless.  House pets are rebelling against venturing outside to relieve themselves.  After Miranda posted a photo of her “snow kitten,” her mom asked if she had thrown him outside.  “Nooo, placed him very gently,”cat-lover Miranda responded.  When she was a kid, Miranda loved visiting Ken Applehans and his menagerie of cats and kittens that he’d taken in on various occasions.  Darcey Wade complained that her kitchen smelled like urine.  Predictions are for as much as a, 80-degree temperature change, as Monday’s forecast is high in the mid-50s.

Home bound, I did a final proofread of the forthcoming Steel Shavings,volume 48 with Gary jazz legend Billy Foster on the cover. In the Index were several inconsistencies regarding spelling. For instance, I had three “fs” in Pfeifer and left out the “a” in MacDonald. Moore, Powell was out of order, and Cele Morris appeared in two different spots.  Coincidentally, Maria McGrath emailed that she was currently preparing an Index for “Food for Dissent,” due out in June. Mine is a Region name index.   I replied: “Subject indexes are ten times harder.  They’re also hard to proofread without falling asleep.”

I found a couple decent movies on HBO and watched reruns of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Both Super Dave Osborne (Bob Einstein) and Shelley Berman made their debut during season 4, which centers around a scheme by Mel Brooks to have Larry David star in “The Producers” in order to bring the long-running production to a merciful end.  During rehearsals he drives both Ben Stiller and Dave Schwimmer crazy.  The best episode has Larry taking a hooker to a Dodgers game so he can drive in the fast lane and arrive on time.  Afterwards, she and Larry smoke a joint with his dad (Berman) for his glaucoma, and the Old Man starts talking like a 1950s NYC cool cat.

I finished Kurt Vonnegut’s “God Blass You, Mr. Rosewater” (1965), which I had checked out from Chesterton library (also in the stacks was Vonnegut’s later “God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian”) along with Kurt Vile’s new CD “Bottle It In” and others by Oasis and Paul McCartney.  Neither I nor a library staff person could find McCartney’s “All the Best,” but as I was leaving, she caught up with me to say she’d found it and checked it out for me. Nice.   “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” takes place in Rosewater, Indiana, which Vonnegut claims is 42 miles from Turkey Run State Park. Science fiction writer Kilgore Trout makes an appearance, and in some ways the book is a prequel to my favorite Vonnegut novel, “Breakfast of Champions: Goodbye Blue Monday.” “God Blass You, Mr. Rosewater” has many quirky characters, whom everyone but Eliot Rosewater despises, including town drunk Delbert Peach, who goes around singing, “I’ve got the clap and the blueballs, too/ The clap don’t hurt but the blueballs do.”

In my Fifties Steel Shavings, subtitled “Relationships between the Sexes during the Teen Years of the 1950s,” which I call my R-rated issue, a section called Blue Balls includes this account by Jim Wojehowski of taking a date atop an abandoned grain elevator in Burnham, where one could see for miles and miles and get a scenic view of the Chicago skyline: 

  Joey and I took Peggy and Lisa through a hole in a fence up to the warehouse.  We had been hyping the eerie nature of the building and tossed in a few murder stories. The girls said they weren’t scared, but when a ton  of pigeons flew out as we reached the top of the staircase, the girls clung to us like we had hoped. Before long we settled in to some serious necking and petting.  You could say we had as much fun as two people can have with their clothes still on. The next day I had a classic case of teen “blue balls.”

In her Ayers Realtors Newsletter column cat lover Judy Ayers wrote about her childhood neighbors in Miller, the Moseguards, and a recently deceased pet in an essay titled “Ode to Old Dude”:

  There was an elderly retired couple, the Moseguards, who had an old black Ford sedan that Evelyn drove, and the car had taken quite a beating as Evelyn got older and had trouble negotiating the car and the garage door. Elmer was the passenger and wore suspenders and a funny little hat that he tipped as they drove down the alley.  Evelyn wore housedresses, full frontal aprons, and a hat that matched Elmer’s. She took her driving seriously with both hands gripped on the wheel, eyes focused on the path ahead and enough force on the accelerator to make gravel fly and mothers quickly take inventory of the children when they heard the Moseguard car approaching.

  Elmer and Evelyn loved cats and had a lot of them. There was always a cat or two in various windows of the house, some sat in the sun in their back yard and there was always a cat or two in Elmer’s lap when they went on driving excursions. Gene remembers the time when Elmer pounded on the Ayers’ back door, yelling and screaming about a cat in their tree and wanted Gene to come out right away and retrieve it.  Elmer had a ladder in place, having already attempted to rescue the little rascal, when 11-year-old Gene was recruited.  He could reach the cat, but the cat bit and/or scratched him time and time again as Elmer and Evelyn yelled from the ground and became quite surly themselves.

  Twelve years ago, Gene and I were given a kitten named Dude. Over the years we had cats one at a time and were always mindful of mimicking the Moseguards.  That includes making sure a draft of cat presence was never the first to greet Trick or Treaters  on Halloween, and we make sure neither of us leaves the house adorned in cat hair. Even though it’s been weeks since Dude died, I still expect him to meet me at the door or come running at the sound of the can opener opening a can which in Dude’s mind could only contain tuna. As sad as it is to lose a pet, I still say there is nothing like a nonjudgmental, trusting dependable four-legged companion, and one of these days I hope we find another furry friend.

 Izzy Young in 2014

Ron Cohen is speaking about Bob Dylan at Gary Rotary next week.  He invited me to be his guest, but it clashes with bowling. I recently proofread a chapter about Dylan for Ron that includes several references to our mutual friend Izzy Young, who in 1957 opened the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village and produced Dylan’s 1961 Carnegie Hall concert.  Izzy is mentioned in Dylan’s song “Talkin’ Folklore Center.”  Ron is also upset at attempts, by Gary school officials to auction off the original model for the Picasso sculpture in Chicago used by American Bridge and subsequently given to the school corporation.

Loading Zones

“I park for free

One stop shop life for the quick fix

Before you get a ticket

That’s the way I live my life

I park for free.”

Kurt Vile

 Kurt Vile

Kurt Vile, 38, was born in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, and like members of the War on Drugs, my favorite band,  has spent most of his career in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia near where Toni grew up.  In fact, along with Adam Granduciel, he was a founder of the War on Drugs but parted ways after the release of their first album, “Wagonwheel Blues” (2008). The two remained friends, however, and Granduciel continued to play with Vile’s backing band, the Violators, for another five years. “Loading Zones,” my current favorite song, is on the album “Bottle It In.”  Vile explained: “The original inspiration to this song was me literally driving around my own town of Philadelphia, thinking about how, in your mind, or in real life, you own your town once you’ve lived there long enough.”  After complaining how difficult it is to park legally in the “City of Brotherly Love,” he added: “[But] there’s all kinds of loading zones you can creep around in. And it’s also sort of just a way of life. It’s sort of like a ‘Sopranos,’ gettin by on the back streets–except no murder.”  Vile’s previous hit, “Pretty Pimpin’,” begins:“I woke up this morning and didn’t recognize the man in the mirror.”  

At my emeritus office in the new Arts and Sciences building I picked up a week’s accumulation of mail, something I do infrequently.  There is no elevator in the south end of the two-block long building, where my room is, and the 30 steps to the second floor are tough on the knee.  In addition, there is no parking anywhere near the north entrance except for a loading zone. I do occasionally park there on quick stops, popping the trunk of the Corolla as if I’ll be loading something into it when I return.   Awaiting for me in my office were four pieces of mail: a permission slip from former trustee James Dye that allows access to our recent interview; two copies from John Cain of South Shore Arts of the “Gary Haunts” exhibit booklet that contains my historical essay; an announcement and thank you note from Scott Bocock of the Cedar Lake Historical Society (I evidently became a member automatically when I spoke to the group); and a package containing Steel Shavings, volume 47, that I had sent to Steven High at Concordia University in Montreal.  The post office returned it because it didn’t contain a required customs form.  WTF?

above, Joe Petras; below, Dick Hagelberg, Jimbo, Steve Spicer (photo by Jim Spicer) 

On Saturday I took James bowling and to Culver’s.  His English class is reading “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens, not a book I’d recommend for teenagers.  At noon I attended Big Joe Petras’ Marquette Park Playground fundraiser at Miller Bakery Café, an event that has previously been held at Arman’s and Miller Pizza.  Over the years Big Joe has raised thousands of dollars.  I ran into many old Miller friends, including Jim and Steve Spicer, Jack Tonk, Dan Simon, Ron Cohen, Rich Gonzalez, and Dick Hagelberg, who treated me to a pint draft from Eighteenth Street Brewery, first located in Miller but now in Hammond. I was home in time for the IU victory over Butler, 71 to 68, in the Crossroads Classic on a last-second 30-foot miracle shot by freshman Rob Phinisee (below).  The Hoosiers trailed until the final two minutes, but Juwan Morgan kept them in the game with 35 points, a career high.

Sunday I made French toast and bacon, watched the morning news shows, addressed about 70 Christmas cards, and watched my two favorite NFL teams the Chicago and the Philadelphia, win important games from Green Bay and the L.A. Rams respectively, the Bears to clinch the NFC Central and the Eagles to keep their playoff hopes alive.  The only fly in the ointment: I got eliminated in the Fantasy semi-finals as Houston running back Lamar Miller was injured early in his game with the Jets, my starting QB Carson Wentz didn’t play, and backup Nick Foles hardly ever threw to my tight end Zach Ertz.  Had I played either Dalvin Cook of Minnesota or Chris Carson of Seattle in place of Miller, I’d have won.  As it was, I’d have beaten any of the other semi-finalists.

At the Archives two Ball State grad students, Carrie Vachon and Nick Miller, were working on a grant project to create a virtual museum on the history of civil rights in Indiana.  They were very interested in my publications, especially the Gary pictorial history and my Tracesarticle on Reverend L.K. Jackson.  I suggested several sources on Mexican Americans and referred them to these documentaries: an “Eyes on the Prize II” episode highlighting the 1972 National Civil Rights Convention at Gary West Side High School; “Hoosiers: The Story of Indiana,” based on Jim Madison’s book; John Hmurovich’s “History of Gary”; and an episode of the WFYI series “Across Indiana” on Mexican Repatriation.

 left, Alex Karras; below, Dick the Bruiser

I ran into Mike Chirich, a Lew Wallace grad, and we talked about Gary sports history. He played junior varsity football and recalled legendary Coach Eddie Herbert.  We traded stories about Alex Karras, whom I wrote about for a Traces article and whom I interviewed by telephone shortly before he died.  Suffering from Alzheimer’s, he joked that I could call him the next day and we could have the same conversation since he wouldn’t remember the one we just had. Chirich knew about the Detroit sports bar that Karras had a financial interest in, where he evidently placed bets on games, causing the NFL commissioner in 1963 to suspend him from playing for a year.  During that time he became a professional wrestler and supposedly got into a bar fight with Dick the Bruiser (William Afflis, a former Green Bay Packers lineman) shortly before their scheduled match. According to Chirich, Dick the Bruiser was taken to jail supposedly bleeding from the head due to being struck by a pool stick.  Karras visited him, and “The Bruiser” bragged that the publicity should bring about a full house for the match.

 Janet Jackson, Robert Smith of The Cure, Stevie Nicks

2019 inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame include Gary’s own Janet Jackson as well as The Cure and Radiohead, all deserving.  Others include Def Leppard, Roxy Music, Stevie Nicks, and the Zombies, a Sixties British band whose hits include “She’s Not There” and “Time of the Season.”