Walt and Lois Reiner

 "Show up.  Make change.  Have fun.” Lois Reiner motto

As a freshman at Valparaiso University in 1948, Lois Bertram Dau had little connection with the town other than Saturday movies at the Premier Theater. Soon after graduating four years later, Lois married VU football coach Walt Reiner, a World War II and Korean navy vet.  In 1962 VU’s president asked Reiner to start a Youth Leadership Training Program, and three years later, when Walt became director of the Prince of Peace Volunteers, the Reiner family moved to Chicago’s Near North Side to minister to the needs of Cabrini Green Homes residents.  An outspoken advocate for civil rights and opponent of the Vietnam War, Walt survived 1967 heresy charges levied against him by conservative Lutheran-Missouri Synod officials to which VU was affiliated. As the Reiners prepared to return to Valparaiso, Cabrini Green housing project resident Barbara Cotton lamented that her family was denied the same opportunity.  That plea became the motivation for the Reiners and other Lutheran activists affiliated with the university founding the Valparaiso Builders Association, whose stated mission was “to strengthen the community by addressing issues of race, class and poverty, and to build healthy families and neighborhoods whose diversity is welcomed and cherished.”  The initial agenda: construction of a home for the Cotton family in what at the time was considered a lily-white “Sundown” town, a prospect not necessarily welcomed by a majority of Valpo residents. Braving death threats and other forms of harassment, this goal ultimately became a reality.  Rob Cotton, just ten at the time, is now a city council member and one of approximately a thousand African-American residents in a city of 33,000.

volunteer (now exec. dir.) Paul Schreiner in 1987

Still going strong in its 51^st year, the volunteer organization now called Project Neighbors has provided homes for over 300 residents.  Walt Reiner led by example and often told others, “Don’t sweat the small stuff, caulk it.”  Viewing his mission as liberating, he once stated, “When you give up the need for power, reputation, and money, you have the whole world open to you.” In 1995 the Reiners led efforts to found Hilltop Neighborhood House, which offered health, child care, pre-school, and adult educational services to area residents.  When Walt died in 2006 at age 83, the city renamed a street in the Hilltop neighborhood in his honor.  Loie Reiner, now in her nineties, remains active in Project Neighbors and serves as secretary of the organization.  Currently, there are two Project Neighborhoods-sponsored facilities in operation that provide homes for 33 women and their children. Recently, the zoning board approved a 14-unit facility for men (with preference for veterans) but held up a second rental unit by labeling it a “homeless shelter” despite its opposite intent, to offer an affordable alternative becoming homeless.  After the tie vote Loie posted: “DREAM DASHED….NOT ERASED.  STAY TUNED.”

Liz Wuerffel at zoning board meeting

Through our friendship with Ron and Liz Cohen, Toni and I were supportive of the Reiners’ efforts a half-century ago to desegregate Valparaiso. I met Loie a few years ago at a house party Health and Thais Carter hosted for VU students that had taken Heath’s course on civil rights in Northwest Indiana.  She and I had both participated in the course as speakers and resource persons.  Not surprisingly, Loie was engaging and looking forward more than to the past; I’m honored to have become her friends.  On the eve of her 91^st birthday she wrote:

    My children and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren and all young people of every race, gender, religion, economic level are on my mind. I pray for their courage to fight evil and build their lives on caring and generosity and creativity. I pray that they have faith in a Greater Power; and if that gives them what mine does, they will celebrate each God-given day as opportunity to love their neighbor....someone very different from them but in need of them. I pray that they - that all of us - refuse to be dragged into the hate and despair streaming through our present situation. And I pray that they - we - are listening to those too long unheard for the salvation of our endangered moral fabric.

Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke, 2000

RIP: Funny man Carl Reiner, born in the Bronx in 1922, a year before Walt Reiner (no relation) and integral part of the classic Sid Caesar TV comedy shows of the 1950s.  He was the creator of the 1960s “Dick Van Dyke Show” and longtime film collaborator (and sometimes actor) with Mel Brooks and Steve Martin. Son Rob Reiner (“Meathead” to Archie Bunker in the “All in the Family” series), Carl brought lots of laughs to this fan over a 70-year career.

Roundabout

 "I’ll be the roundabout

The words will make you go out ‘n’ out”

 YES from 1971 “Fragile” album

A British progressive rock group known to be a drug band, members of YES, including frontman Jon Anderson, may well have been high on LSD when recording “Roundabout,” whose lyrics make no sense unless high.  I wasn’t much into progressive rock bands other than Steely Dan until Terry Jenkins turned me on to YES.  At a fantastic Holiday Star concert YES played for almost three hours without a break except for individual musicians exiting the stage during drum, guitar and keyboard solos.  They kicked ass on “Roundabout.”  Both George Sladic and Fred McColly recalled memorable YES concerts they attended, Freddy at Hawthorne Raceway with Peter Frampton and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Roundabouts are proliferating in Valparaiso and other region suburbs.  When first introduced the Post-Tribune’s Quickly column was filled with criticisms.  Once experienced a few times, however, I found they are easy to maneuver and highly efficient. East Coast roundabouts, called traffic circles, have been around for at least three generations. On the way to the Jersey shore vacationers encountered at least a half-dozen.  When Toni and I visited New Zealand 30 years ago, we drove on counter-clockwise roundabouts, as New Zealanders, like Brits, drive on the left (in common parlance, “wrong”) side of the road.

In “A Fist Full of Fig Newtons” Region Rat Jean Shepherd wrote about first encountering a New Jersey roundabout:

    After a lifetime of driving in other parts of the country with conventional staid overpasses, viaducts, crossroads, stop-lights, etc., etc., suddenly I found myself going round and round, surrounded by hordes of blue-haired ladies piloting violet-colored Gremlins.  In and out they wove.  I passed my turnoff four times before I got control of my mind and was hurled out of the traffic circle by centrifugal force, back in the direction I had come.  Good grief!

Liz Wuerffel, who ran for Valpo city council, noted that so many people complained about roundabouts that she probably would have won the election had she gone on record against them.

George Van Til, surprised to read of my long softball career, wrote that he played for a team in the Bethlehem Steel Chesterton league and that teammates often gathered afterwards in a Chesterton watering hole across from the gazebo.  He was so impressed that when on the Highland Town Board, he pressed for the park department to construct one on land that came under its control when Main School was torn down.  The gazebo has been a popular success, site of concerts, weddings, and theatrical productions such as “Music Man” starring longtime clerk/treasurer Michael Griffin, an IUN grad.  I told George that son Dave was in a production of “Music through the Ages.”  One performance was curtailed shortly after one of Dave’s solos by a severe thunder and lightning storm. On Facebook yesterday Dave performed Simon and Garfunkel’s “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard” and “The Boxer.”

I got a call from Gary native Jim Muldoon (Lew Wallace, Class of 1956), like me a Maryland grad and CEO of METCOR.  A subscriber, he praised my latest Steel Shavings and mentioned how his school raised $2,000 in a single day selling peanuts in a campaign to fight polio, a postwar scourge.  We reminisced about the day we spend together at the Archives and touring Gary, and he invited Toni and me to his estate on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Philip Potempa’s Post-Tribune column dealt with the history of Valparaiso, mentioning a virtual audio tour Porter County Museum director Kevin Pazour put together from a 1987 architectural guide developed by members of VU’s Art department. Sites include the courthouse, jail, opera house, two banks, and Lowenstine’s Department Store, in existence between 1916 and 1988, which included a vacuum tube system. Since World War II Valpo’s downtown flourished for 30 years, then suffered downturns during the 1980s and twenty years later followed by resurgences, primarily due to restaurants.  In addition to Lowenstine’s, Potempa lamented other retail casualties such as Linkimer’s Shoes, shuttered in 1994 after 45 years, David’s Men’s haberdashery, closed in 2014 after three decades, and Piper’s Children’s Boutique, which recently went out of business after 37 years.

An obit for Fae Elaine Wewe, 92, who lived in Gary’s Miller Beach neighborhood most her life, noted her culinary skills and that she donated baked goods and homemade jellies and jams to Lutheran church fundraisers.  She and husband Dick, a steelworker, adopted daughter Jeanette in 1959. Fae Wewe’s obit concluded: “Though she grew up in a time that relegated women and others to second-class status, Fae understood that all people deserved equal treatment, no matter their gender, race, ethnicity or ability. Those values formed the core of her life. Though she lacked much formal education, she taught her daughter to read before she started kindergarten.” Jeanette McVicker is presently a professor of English and Women’s Studies at SUNY Fredonia and an expert on Virginia Woolf. 

Night Watchman

 "If you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.”  Louise Erdrich, "The Night Watchman"

Liz Wuerffel participated in a YouTube initiative called “Q Read” in which Valpo residents shared information on books that they were reading.  Liz said she normally reads just one book at a time, but being at home during the pandemic, she’s reading one during the day and another at night. She just finished a new novel, “The Night Watchman,” by Louise Erdrich, whose mother was from a Chippewa tribe.  Its about the Turtle Mountain People who during the 1950s fought against government attempts to terminate their tribal lands, a practice the Trump administration is currently pursuing against the Mashpee Wampanoag People whose plans for a casino evidently irked some of the President’s wealthy donors. Erdrich wrote: “The government acted like Indians owed them something, but wasn’t it the other way around?”

Wuerffel also recommended “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor” by David Ranney, an Urban Planning professor who spent seven years (1976-1982) working in industrial factories in Northwest Indiana and the South Side of Chicago.  A union electrician friend turned Liz on to the book.  During the 1970s Ranney left his tenured position at the University of Iowa because he was a committed socialist who believed, in his words, that “a new society could be built from the initiatives of mass organizations at the workplace.”  Many leftists whose views were similar to Ranney’s moved to Gary at that time and worked to make the steelworkers locals more democratic, inclusive to women and minorities, and environmentally conscious.  Several became close friends.  After watching Liz on YouTube, I expressed a desire to read” Living and Dying on the Factory Floor.”  It arrived in the mail the following day, along with a nice note.

During our present crisis when poor people living from paycheck to paycheck have been especially hard hit and the executive branch of government is seemingly unconcerned over the fate of common people, Liz Wuerffel also posted interviews with homeless people in Valpo that appear on the Welcome Project.  In “We Were Them” a victim recalled:

    When we were living out of our vehicle, necessity drove us to have to go here and go there.  We would park in the Walmart parking lot through the night for sleeping, because we knew they had restroom facilities we could use. And when you live like that, you start meeting other people in a similar circumstance. And I was astounded at the number of people; typically, if you saw them, you wouldn’t even know that they’re suffering in this way. And they’re all around us. We were them, you know, and I never understood any of this. But I got a pretty good grasp of it now.

    What I’ve learned is that life is not a straight line. There’s curves, turns, and you even go back upon yourself many times. And it’s easy to get lost, to take one misstep, to take one wrong turn: left, when you should’ve gone right. And, so, to stereotype all these people, and say they’re this, this, or this — I can’t tell you how wrong that is. Bad things happen to good people, and it ain’t through no fault of their own. It’s life. And I’ll never hesitate to help somebody up after this.

ESPN moved up the date of the first two parts of its 10-hour documentary on Michael Jordan to Sunday due to popular demand during a sports-starved time. I watched a four-hour “30 on 30” show about Michael Vick, who revolutionized the NFL quarterback position by rushing for a thousand yards starring for the Atlanta Falcons for six years after being drafted in 2001 but then was imprisoned for having a dog-fighting ring on his property.  Coming from the Newport News, Virginia projects (like NBA star Alan Iverson), Vick was unwilling to break from childhood friends who took advantage of his generosity and did not have his best interests at heart. The documentary explains that betting on dog fights was common in his old neighborhood tolerated by the police and comparable to cockfighting among Latinos and horse racing for the elite (at least in the eyes of some African Americans).  When police caught one of Vick’s “posse” with marijuana who gave his address as Vick’s estate, law enforcement authorities used that as an excuse to search the entire property.  After serving most of his 23-month sentence, Vick hired crisis manager Judy A. Smith (role model for the main character in the TV show “Scandal”) to help convince society that he was truly contrite.  Ever since he has worked diligently with the Humane Society and community groups. With the help of coach Tony Dungy and Philadelphia quarterback Donavan McNabb, he returned to the NFL and was Comeback Player of the Year with the Eagles.

I’ve been enjoying Acquire games on line and with Charlie Halberstadt’s patient help trying to master playing bridge.  I watched “Bull Durham” (1988) for the first time in 30 years.  Sexy Susan Sarandon plays Annie, a minor league baseball groupie who loves season-long romantic flings and quotes Walt Whitman and William Blake (she teaches English at a local college). The film opens with shots of photos in Annie’s home of slum kids playing stickball, Jackie Robinson stealing home and Pete Rose sliding head first, Babe Ruth at the twilight of his career, Fernando Valenzuela’s eyes almost disappearing upward as he winds up, and 3 foot, 7-inch Eddie Gaebel at the plate in his only major league appearance (he walked on four pitches for Bill Veeck’s St. Louis Browns).

In the wake of Trump refusing to keep funding the World Health Organization all three major networks aired a show featuring big name musicians to raise money and awareness of the need for cooperation during the Covid-19 pandemic.  On piano Lady Gaga led off with the classic ballad “Smile.” Other inspirational numbers included “Lean on Me” by Stevie Wonder” and “Stand By Me” by John Legend. Elton John ("I'm Still Standing"), Jennifer Lopez ("People"), and the Rolling Stones (connected by Zoom) did "You Can't Always Get What You Want"); my favorite performance was Shawn Mendez and Camila Cabello doing “What a Wonderful World.” Paul McCartney chose to do “Lady Madonna, appropriate in view of poor people hurt particularly hard by the economy grinding to almost a halt:

    Lady Madonna, children at your feet
    Wonder how you manage to make ends meet
    Who finds the money when you pay the rent?
    Did you think that money was heaven sent?

    Friday night arrives without a suitcase
    Sunday morning creeping like a nun
    Monday's child has learned to tie his bootlace
    See how they run

    Lady Madonna, baby at your breast
    Wonders how you manage to feed the rest

Visionaries

“Once meek, and in a perilous path

The just man kept his course along

The vale of death.”

    William Blake, quoted in “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead”

Olga Takarczuk

There could only be one reason why I’d be reading an English translation of Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk’s depressing-sounding detective story “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead” – on the recommendation of good friend Gaard Logan, whose judgment has never led me astray.  Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tokarczuk tells the story through the eyes of an eccentric elderly woman.  Following an introductory quotation by William Blake (above), this is how “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead” begins:

    I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.

Romantic poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) was a true original who many contemporaries thought mad.  A Christian who despised organized religion, a devout husband who believed in free love, a visionary anarchist, as biographer Peter Marshall called him, who claimed to have experienced visions, Blake left posterity many provocative proclamations, such as “The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom” and “Each man must create his own system or else he is a slave to another man.”  One found I in “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead” is “Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with the bricks of religion.”

Dave, James, and I watched my grandson’s former team bowl at Inman’s.  On the way I dropped off the new Steel Shavings at Fred and Diane Chary’s.  We talked about recent developments at IU Northwest, including both archivist Steve McShane and Chancellor Bill Lowe retiring at the end of June.  I told Fred that Lowe was teaching a seminar on Irish history and plans to join the History department after a year’s leave of absence.  At Inman’s Kaiden Horn rolled a 267, just one frame from a perfect game, leaving a ten-pin in the fifth.  His Uncle Tom asked me to pull the winning raffle ticket from a bowl.  Sharon Fisher, who used to bowl in my Hobart Lanes league, greeted me warmly.  Her grandkids Otto and Kaylee were competing against James’s old team.  They both wrestle in middle school.  Kaylee recently defeated a favored Crown Point grappler, and the guy refused to shake her hand as customary and tossed his protective gear across the room.  His coach should have publicly chastised him.  For lunch we stopped at Culver’s, like old times.

 SpongeBob SquarePants

Sunday, Maryland defeated Michigan for a share of the Big Ten title, and seventh seed Valpo bowed to Bradley in the Missouri Valley conference final - the Crusaders’ fourth game and four days; they held their own until the final minutes.  Toni served scallops, pan fried noodles, asparagus, and salad to six of us, including Dave’s family.  Afterwards, we played Telestrations.  Angie guessed that my drawing of SpongeBob SquarePants was a hunk of swiss cheese. My flamingo and snail were equally dismal.  I did nail big toe though, and Russia.  Mercifully, there are no winners nor losers, as the game is played for laughs, of which I provided plenty. James isin the midst of a two-week semester break – that’s why Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette are still galivanted through the Southwest.

Al and Liz at Plaza Blanca north of Santa Fe; on the climb Liz said she was only really scared once

Despite the Coronavirus scare, my Art in Focus talk in Munster on Rock and Roll Music, 1960 drew an overflow crowd, including bridge buddy Mary Kocevar and old friends Gloria Biondi, Vickie Voller, Patricia Gonzales, and Jan Trusty. Director Micah Bornstein always begins with a personal anecdote, this time regarding home repair. When he was a kid, he said, his father was fixing an electric socket and told him to stand nearby with a broom and hit with it to disconnect him with what he was holding in case he got an electric shock. Vic fancied himself a handyman and often would send down to his basement work bench for a tool. Without fail, I’d bring the wrong one.

The crowd got into it as I played two dozen songs mingled with commentary.  I saw folks mouthing the words to numerous songs.  I never used to notice audience reaction but got several big laughs, including the reply by Gary U.S. Bonds to rumors that lascivious words could be heard on the recording “Quarter to Three”: “My mother was at that session!”  Maybe she was the culprit, I suggested. Director Micah Bornstein had the 24 songs all cued on YouTube up in advance without the normal 5-10-second ads.  Positioned near me, he cut them off when I gave the signal.  Some I played all the way through, such as “Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go” by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Walkin’ to New Orleans” by Fats Domino, “Running Scared” by Roy Orbison, and “Stay” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.  

This paragraph got a big reaction:

    Appearing atop the hit parade in the winter of 1959-1960 were such vapid songs as “Venus” by Frankie Avalon, “Lonely Boy” by Paul Anka, “Come Softly to Me” by The Fleetwoods, theme from “A Summer Place” by the Percy Faith Orchestra, “Tall Paul” by Annette Funicello, a “Mickey Mouse Club” graduate, and “Cherry Pie,” the one big hit for Skip and Flip, which was catchy but more pop than Rock and Roll.  Many thought the innocent-sounding “Cherry Pie” lyrics had double meanings of a sexual nature (i.e., “singing in the living room, swinging in the kitchen, Swingin’ in there because she wanted to feed me, so I mixed up the batter and she licked the beater, she’s my cherry pie, tastes so good, makes a grown man cry”). 

Born in New Orleans in 1928, Rock and Roll pioneer Antoine “Fats” Domino began to play the piano and sing in Bourbon Street bars while still unable to buy a drink legally.  He had several Rhythm and Blues hits, including “The Fat Man” (1950)  before soaring to the top of the Billboard Pop charts with “Ain’t That a Shame” in 1956.  He followed with soulful versions of the old standards “My Blue Heaven” and “Blueberry Hill.” In 1960 “Walking to New Orleans” and “My Girl Josephine” were huge hits. I noted:

     In high school I had all his records I could get my hands onto and came across some rare Oldies at a Montgomeryville PA flea market. When Fats Domino performed on the road, he’d take his band with him unlike many Rock and Roll stars.  It featured Dave Bartholomew who co-wrote many of his songs and several saxophonists, a drummer, and a bassist.  Region promoter Henry Farag, who booked them into the Star Plaza in Merrillville, told me that Fats would also take soul food in and cook meals for the band (and Henry). 

At Merrillville’s Star Plaza a quarter-century ago, Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon was urging without much luck his audience of mostly seniors to get up and dance. From Revere, Massachusetts, Cannon (real name Frederick Picariello) grew up idolizing Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard.  His first hit was “Tallahassee Lassie” followed in 1960 by “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” Recording on Swan Records , a label Dick Clark had a financial interest in, he appeared on American Bandstand a record 110 times.  One admirer wrote: “Freddy ‘Boom Boom’ Cannon was a true believer, a rocker to the bone.  Freddy Cannon made great noisy rock and roll records infused with a giant drum beat that was an automatic invitation to shake it on down anyplace there was a spot to dance.”  His biggest hit was “Palisades Park” (1962). Lesser known Freddy Cannon songs include “Transister Sister” and “Abigail Beecher (She’s Our History teacher)”. Lyrics went:

All the kids are just crazy about her
Central High would be a drag without her
She knows her history from A to Z
She'd teach a monkey the WatusiWhoa, it's Abigail Beecher Our history teacher, Whoa

“Prince of Soul” Sam Cooke started out as a child with a Chicago gospel group, the Highway QCs, and at age 20 joined the Soul Stirrers.  At live concerts young Sam Cooke stirred young female admirers in ways that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with his sex appeal.  As a solo artist, between 1957 and 1964 Sam Cooke had a 30 U.S. top 40 hits that included “You Send Me,” “Cupid,” “Wonderful World,” “Chain Gang” (in 1960), and many more.  After playing “Chain gang” I noted that after Reconstruction many Southern states forced black men arrested on false or trivial charges to labor on chain gangs where life expectancy was less than two years. The hits kept coming for Cooke until he was fatally shot at age 33 under suspicious circumstances by the manager of a motel where he had taken a young woman with a shady past whom the hotel manager may have been in cahoots with.  Cooke’s song “A Change Is Gonna Come” would become one of the anthems of the civil rights movement.

The 1960 Billboard Top 40 charts also included crooners such as Johnny Mathis, folk singers such as Harry Belafonte, the Highwaymen, and the Kingston Trio, and instrumentals by the Ventures, Duane Eddy, and Floyd Kramer (“Raunchy” by Sun Records saxophonist Bill Justis, was banned from some radio stations even though it contained no words).  Country artists who crossed over into Rock and Roll, included Brenda Lee, Charlie Rich, and the Everly Brothers (“Bird Dog,” “Wake Up Little Susie”), whose 1960 hits included “Cathy’s Clown” and “When Will I Be Loved?”   At Ravinia we and the Hagelbergs saw the Everly Brothers open for the Beach Boys, whom they very much influenced.  Although rumor was that Don and Phil Everly couldn’t stand one another, they made beautiful harmonies and sang songs that spoke to teenagers. 1960 pop music, unlike today, embodied many different genres.  Young people were exposed to all types of music, including novelty songs like “Along Came Jones” by the Coasters and “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles, whose lyrics are still in the head of many aging rockers: “He got a chauffeur that’s a genuine dinosaur, And he can knuckle your head before you count to four.”  After playing “Alley Oop” but cutting it short to a few groans, I mentioned that after playing rock and roll hits in the Fifties college class, the only similar reaction I got cutting them short was “The Chipmunk Song” by Alvin and the Chipmunks.  Go figure.

Ending with “The Twist, to which I danced with Gloria, Vickie, her husband Dan, and a woman named Isabel (“Izzie,” she confided), I noted:

    Although Hank Ballard’s version of “The Twist” failed to become a hit, young people began dancing versions of the twist, often solo rather than connected to a partner.  Quick to notice the new trend, Dick Clark convinced Cameo Records to record “The Twist” by an ex-chicken plucker named Ernest Evans, whom Clark renamed Chubby Checker (a takeoff on the name Fats Domino).  It sounded so like the original that when Hank Ballard first heard it, he thought it was his.  

    In “Soul on Ice” black militant Eldridge Cleaver wrote: “It was Chubby Checker’s mission, bearing “The Twist” as good news. To teach the whites, whom history had taught to forget, how to shake their asses again.”

    “The Twist” became the most influential song of 1960, shaking rock and roll from its doldrums. During the next few years, one critic wrote, “the music would revitalize itself with dance crazes, surf and girl-group records, the British invasion, and soul music.  The old sounds were changing, but Rock and Roll appeared stronger than ever.”

At Bucknell when  bussing dishes at Women’s Cafeteria after meals, the women would put on a Bob Dylan album and guys would replace it with Chubby Checker.  The record player battle was played out on many occasions. 

 

I received a hearty round of applause, and Art in Focus director Micah Bornstein invited me to return next year.  Afterwards, East Chicago Washington Class of 1960 graduate Barbara Whittaker, a cheerleader for the state champion basketball team, asked if I could speak at her sixtieth reunion and Vickie wants me to reprise the talk to her Tri Kappa group. We’ll see. John Cain, one of more than a half-dozen men in the audience (a rarity) invited me to lunch.

Super Tuesday

“It’s a good night.  I’m here to report that we are very much alive.  It may be over for the other guy,” Joe Biden

Like the much-hyped Super Bowl, Super Tuesday does not always produce dramatic results; but in 2020, as CNBC reported, “Joe Biden is the front-runner again after he shocked the world.”  The tide began to turn three days before, in South Carolina.  After U.S. House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn endorsed him, Biden cruised to a landslide primary victory over Bernie Sanders thanks to overwhelming support from African Americans. Pundits doubted this would have a major impact on Super Tuesday since many voters had cast their ballots early, Biden was almost out of money, and his campaign had almost no foot soldiers on the ground in key states such as California, Texas, and Minnesota.  Then, in short order, billionaire Tom Strider, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Senator Amy Klobuchar, seeing the handwriting on the wall, dropped out of the race and endorsed Obama’s former vice-president.  On election eve, Texan Beto O’Rourke embraced him at a rally where both Buttigieg and Klobuchar made eloquent speeches on his behalf. Biden won 9 of the 13 contests, including Texas and Minnesota, and picked up almost as many delegates in California as Sanders.  Next day, Mike Bloomberg dropped out and threw his support to Biden.  Elizabeth Warren has suspended her campaign, so it appears to be down to a two-candidate contest.

For the first time in weeks, I am cautiously optimistic about Trump being a one-term president. That’s the most pressing issue for most Democrats, and Bernie heading the ticket would be a disaster.  At bridge Terry Brendel was similarly buoyed by the outcome.  When someone, probably a Republican, said she wasn’t for Sanders but thought others were unfairly ganging up on him, I replied that other Democrats should gang up on him, he’s not even a Democrat but rather an Independent and socialist.  Had Republicans ganged up on Trump in 2016, I added, maybe the country would have been spared the scourge of his unprincipled presidency. 

Here’s Ray Smock’s take on the sudden shift in momentum:

     It appears that Democratic Party primary voters had an epiphany when Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, and a powerful voice in South Carolina politics, endorsed Joe Biden for president. Congressman Clyburn cut through all the campaign hype and talked from his heart about how fearful he was about the situation in our politics right now. He said we were at an “inflection point," a time to change the arch of our political trajectory because we cannot sustain the current situation. While Clyburn mentioned issues such as affordable and accessible healthcare, education, and housing, he talked mostly about Joe Biden’s integrity and his commitment to the cause of good government. He said it was an inflection point because we needed “to restore the country’s dignity; the country’s respect….”He said “I know Joe. We know Joe. Most importantly, Joe knows us.”

    Jim Clyburn’s emotional call for decency and integrity in our nation and in the person we send to the White House struck that deep chord in many voters. It cut through the fog of the campaign and its myriad issues. We want normalcy to include dignity and respect. If our leaders do not have integrity, if they cannot speak honestly to us; if they do not have strong character, a character not measured in TV debates but in what we see in their hearts, then we will continue to be fearful of our future. It’s not that the other Democratic candidates lack honesty and integrity, or any appearance of normalcy, so much as the strong perception that Joe Biden stood for these things above any other issue. He conveyed a presidential gravitas the others could not match.

    We want desperately to believe that normalcy includes goodness. We want a person that can unify the nation and begin to heal the wounds of vicious partisanship that have too long dominated our politics. The Super Tuesday elections confirmed what Jim Clyburn set in motion. We will see if the upcoming primaries will sustain the amazing momentum, a leap toward normalcy, that Democrats see in Joe Biden, as if for the first time.  Democratic Party primary voters across the board said Joe Biden best exemplified the qualities that make him the standard bearer who can do battle against a president who does not appeal to our better angels and is not normal.

Lois Turco responded to Ray’s post and photo of Biden: “I like a President who eats ice cream in a cone. Normalcy is comforting.”

After a historian labels our sixteenth president a self-serving, racist politician who hated abolitionists, as Fred Kaplan does in “Abraham Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War” (2017), one might expect a cool reception in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.  Reviewer Daniel Feller, University of Tennessee Knoxville historian and editor of the  Andrew Jackson papers, didn't disappoint; he skewers Kaplan as incompetent and his book as incoherent, then lists several dozen factual inaccuracies, including Lincoln leaning toward Jackson’s Democratic Party before that party came into existence. Feller concluded: “Kaplan’s sanctimonious prating about what Lincoln should have known and should have done is at first grating and in the end insufferable. . . There are many fine books out there worth buying and reading.  Don’t waste your time on this one.”

Lincoln funeral train

Faring much better was “Mourning Lincoln” (2015) by Martha Hodes, reviewed by John McKee Barr, who praised its “thorough research, stirring prose, and aptly placed quotations.” Here’s how Barr summarized the reaction of most Northerners to Lincoln’s assassination : “Astonished.  Astounded. Startled. Stupefied.  Thunderstruck.  A calamity.  A catastrophe.  A dagger to the heart.  A thunderbolt from a clear blue sky.  The feelings that had engulfed the confederates less than a week earlier now overtook their conquerors.”  Barr acknowledges that most Southerners were overjoyed, Copperheads not unhappy, Radical Republicans apprehensive but hopeful that Andrew Johnson would be more malleable, and freedmen devastated and in intense mourning. Nearly a million people witnessed the Lincoln funeral train as it meandered on a 1,654-mile journey from Washington, DC, to a tomb in Springfield, Illinois, lying in state at a dozen locations, including Indianapolis and Michigan City, Indiana.

Driving to Miller, I dropped off my new Steel Shavings to Ron and Nancy Cohen and Celeste and Michael Chirich.  Ron gave me a New York Review of Books issue with a Kara Walker drawing on the cover. Accompanying the article by Zadie Smith, “What Do We Want History to Do for Us?” was a 1994 illustration showing two grotesque woman, slave and mistress presumably, bound by a rope, whose identities were forced on them rather than chosen.  Mike and Celeste had just returned from Puerto Rico, where they had stayed at a condo a block from the Caribbean.  One night they heard police cars and helicopters hovering overhead, attempting to capture, they learned later, a boatload of immigrants who’d arrived illegally from the Dominican Republic. I had intended to drop off a magazine at Ayers Realtors for Judy and Gene Ayers, but police cars were blocking traffic – apparently a traffic accident.

In Breakfast of Champions author Kurt Vonnegut’s alter ago Kilgore Trout, an unappreciated science fiction writer whose only outlet for his work was in porno magazines, found this message in the men's room of a seedy New York City movie house: “What is the Purpose of Life?”  Trout’s answer: “To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe.”  In “Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style” (2019) Suzanne McConnell noted that the implication, as a Vonnegut character put it, was that the creator was “the laziest man in town.”  Thus, it was up to writers to be that conscience.

Vonnegut poked fun at pretentious critics. Midland City English teachers, he wrote, constantly berated students for grammatical mistakes, incorrect pronunciation, and poor choice of words:

  They would wince and cover their ears and give out flunking grades and so on whenever students failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War.  Also: students were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn’t love or understand incomprehensible novels and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.

    The black people would not put up with this.  They refused to read books they couldn’t understand – on the grounds they couldn’t understand them.  They would ask such impudent questions as, “Whuffo I want to read no 'Tale of Two Cities?' Whuffo?”

    Patty Keene (a white waitress who had dropped out of high school and had programmed herself in the interest of survival to be stupid on purpose) flunked English when she had to read and appreciate Ivanhoe, which was about men in iron suits and the women who loved them. And she was put in a remedial reading class, where they made her read The Good Earth, which was about Chinamen.

Vonnegut claimed to be in the business of making jokes and compared his method to setting a mousetrap: “You build the trap, you cock it, you trip it, and then bang!”  Here is an example from “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” about quixotic philanthropist Eliot Rosewater, son of a conservative Indiana senator, who believed Kilgore Trout to be a genius:

    “You know,” Eliot said to the Senator, “Kilgore Trout wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors.  That was the national purpose.  There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.”

    “This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors.  But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more.  He went right to the root of the problem.”

  “Uh huh,” said the Senator.  He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarrassed by his son.  “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?” he suggested to hasten the tale to a conclusion  

   “No.  As I say, the hero was a dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.”

In a Bridge Bulletin letter titled “Worst Hand Ever?” Ken Parker claimed that, sitting West at a game in Leland, North Carolina, he was dealt a hand containing four 2s, four 3s, three 4s, a 5, and a 6. After North bid a Diamond, his partner doubled, a force bid once South passed.  Parker bid a Spade, his only 4-card suit, and his partner raised to 4 Spades.  Parker actually made the bid after getting a favorable opening lead.  I scratched (that’s a good thing, meaning I earned master points) at Chesterton Y on Tuesday with Joel Charpentier and  at Banta Center on Wednesday with Dottie Hart.  On the final hand Dottie made 3 Spades doubled for high board.

Liz at El Camino Real, by Al Schuette

Liz Wueffel emailed: “Allison and I are in Santa Fe on spring break and enjoying the full sun. It’s cold at night, being 7000 ft above sea and the start of the Rockies, but beautiful during the day. Today we’re off to the Georgia O’Keefe museum and then we’ll hike a bit!”  I replied: When the OHA was in Albuquerque, I was in Santa Fe with Toni and granddaughter Alissa when she was a pre-schooler.  We toured a Native American museum.   It happened to be near Halloween and merchants were welcoming trick-or-treaters.  Alissa didn’t have a costume, so Toni put a camera around her neck and she went as a tourist.  Making out like a bandit, on the bus ride back to Albuquerque Alissa handed out treats to fellow OHA passengers.  An unforgettable memory.

Bowling against Just Friends, the Engineers won the first two games but in the third were down 13 pins going into the final frame.  Our leadoff man Joe Piunti doubled to get us close.  I threw a strike and then buried my next ball only to leave the ten-pin.  Frank had an impossible split but picked up 2 of the 3 pins, keeping us close. Our clean-up man, Don Geidemann doubled but so did theirs, Denny Cavanaugh, so we lost by 3 pins. We made them earn it though.  Mikey Wardell seemed delighted to receive Steel Shavings, which mentions the delicious fudge he often brings to share.  In fact, I enjoyed a caramel treat he offered me.  George Leach, to whom I’d given a copy the week before, enjoyed the remembrances of retired Gary cop Al Shanahan, passed on to me by Jesse Salomon.  George recalled such Glen Park joints where Gary veteran cops hung out as Pete and Snooks and Junedale Tap, which on Friday nights served delicious fried lake perch dinners.  

March has been designated National Reading Month in honor of Dr. Seuss’s birthday.  Miranda read “Wonder” by R.J. Palacio to her students, the story of a kid born with facial bone abnormality who enters public school in fifth grade after having previously been homeschooled.  A reviewer for The Guardian concluded that it has “such charm and heart, even in the sad parts,” and called it a “great emotional journey that . . . will leave any reader feeling better.”

James is on a two-week semester break from Valpo U. At dinner we had leftover Chinese fortune cookies for desert. Mine read: “You are the master of every situation.”  If only that were true.