Margaret Bourke-White

“Work is something you can count on, a trusted, lifelong friend who never deserts you.” Margaret Bourke-White

below, Margaret Bourke-White in Tunis, 1943

A star photographer for Lifemagazine, Margaret Bourke-White did a cover feature for a 1943 issue portraying women defense workers in Gary, which I showed on the screen to Nicole Anslover’s students.  Bourke-White (1904-1971) also followed the troops to Tunisia and other combat zones. With General George S. Patton she toured the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald.  Referring to those in her profession, she once said, “We are in a privileged and sometimes happy position. We see a great deal of the world. Our obligation is to pass it on to others.”During the 1950s she traveled to South Africa and captured the inhumanity of apartheid.

boundary of Moroka Township in Johannesburg by Margaret Bourke-White

Born in the Bronx of Polish and Irish descent and growing up in New Jersey, Margaret Bourke-White attended many colleges, including Purdue, before graduating from Cornell in 1927 after a failed two-year marriage, whereupon she added her mother’s surname, Bourke, to her maiden name.  Her big break came in 1929 when Fortune magazine hired her as an associate editor and photographer.  A year later she became the first foreigner permitted to take pictures of Soviet industrial workers.  In 1936 she joined Life as its first female photojournalist, a relationship that continued for 21 years and then, despite the onset of Parkinson’s disease, occasionally until 1969. One of her most famous shots was of flood victims in 1937 standing in front of a sign reading “World’s Highest Standard of Living.”  In 1948 she photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi just hours before he was assassinated. 

 John Bushemi

Wearing a sweater given to me as a subscriber of Sports Illustrated with SI on the front (for supplemental instructor, I joked), I began Nicole’s class by showing a two-minute YouTube trailer for “See Here, Private Hargrove” (1944), based on Marion Hargrove’s account of basic training at Fort Bragg.  One of his best friends was Gary private Johnny Bushemi, who went on to work for Yank magazine and died under fire on an island in the Pacific.  Next I provided this summary of Gary during wartime, which I titled “From Depression to Boom Times”:

 Almost 80 years have gone by since America’s participation is what oral historian Studs Terkel called “The Good War.”  Among those Terkel interviewed for his 1984 history of World War II was journalist Mike Royko, who grew up in one of Chicago’s ethnic, working-class neighborhoods similar to many in Gary. Royko recalled newsboys shouting “extra, extra” in the streets, ration coupons and Victory gardens, white-helmeted wardens threatening to report blackout violators to the F.B.I., his sister becoming a “Rosie the Riveter,” names of dead soldiers being added to a flagpole marker, and listening attentively to radio broadcasts about such faraway places as Bataan, Anzio, Guadalcanal and Normandy.  As vivid as those memories were to the so-called “Greatest Generation,” events of that critical era have faded in the nation’s collective memory.  All but a few Americans are too young to remember Pearl Harbor or to have heard President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech. Riding through Gary, it is hard to imagine how vital its once bustling industrial plants were to the fate of the planet at a time when the Northwest Indiana homefront was the world’s leading steel producer.  Almost overnight, it seemed, the lean years of the Great Depression disappeared  as Region mills began producing for war.  Accompanying the economic boom were social transformations, especially in race-relations and relationships between the sexes.

 pan man Rosalie Ivy; below, transfer car operator Mae Harris; photos by Margaret Bourke-White

All-Out Americans summer camp at Dunes State Park

I showed about 20 Bourke-White photos of Region “Rosies” that were easily accessible on the Internet.  When I first tried to use some of them in “City of the Century” Time/Life wanted an arm and a leg that Indiana Press declined to pay. I followed them with photos depicting activities of the All-Out Americans, Gary students under the supervision of Mark Roser who organized scrap iron drives, Clean Plate campaigns, and other homefront efforts.  Students enjoyed a pin-up photo of U.S. Steel war worker Shirley Anne Franzitta, which she described during a 1992 interview conducted by IUN student William Kehoe:

 I wrote about 17 guys in the service.  I always wrote different letters for each person, all hand-written.  I have pictures of all these guys; one from Oklahoma reminded me of Tarzan. One named Frank thought I was in love with him, so I had to stop writing him.  They all thought I cared for them and wanted to meet me after they got home.  One of the guys, Don Nelson, made a grass skirt and top out of parachute strings.  It must have taken a lot of time.  The skirt was beautiful, and he wanted a picture of me in it.  It wouldn’t go all the way around my waist.  I was a little bit chubbier than what he thought.  I had to have a piece added in.  Everyone I was writing got a picture.  

 The Gary YMCA held USO (United Service Organizations, a military support organization) dances downstairs.  Several of us girls would go and dance or talk to the G.I.s There were no camps around here, so they’d mainly be boys on leave.  If you went to Chicago, you’d find G.Is and sailors especially. There were no silk stockings to buy.  Some girls painted their legs.  If it rained, you had runny legs.  Gas was hard to come by.  If you had a car, you’d go in groups, like to a skating rink in Chesterton; then afterwards we’d go out and eat something and maybe dance to music from a juke box.  We used to have parties at home and play post office.  Aunt Dorothy, who was about 40 years old, used to be post mistress.  She loved the part.  Everyone had a number,  If it was called, you’d go to the post office and be kissed.  Then another number would be called and someone would come in and kiss you.  
  One night at a party a guy pulled me up and we started dancing to “Don’t Wanna Set the World on Fire.”  I just went crazy; I just loved dancing.  Five or six of us from the mill would catch the old Shoreline bus and go to Madura's Danceland by Lever Brothers in Hammond.  Married girls, single girls we all went there and danced. No one went home with anybody unless they would take us all home.  Otherwise we’d come home on the bus.  They served soft drinks at Danceland.  You never drank – well, hardly ever.    

 In those days you just flirted.  I didn’t feel I had to wiggle anything.  Men didn’t expect a kiss on the first date and were lucky to get one.  You knew when was enough.  You did some things but not enough to sweat it out monthly.  You could pet, even heavy pet, but that was it. We kissed with our mouths closed.

I met Shirley when she worked for the Hobart Gazette at a time when the company printed my magazines.  She showed me her World War II scrapbook that contained many priceless photos including a U.S. Steel Halloween party and a mill bowling banquet, as well as the grass skirt pin-up.

Tom Harmon, middle, back row

I showed the class covers of Traces magazines that featured Gary sports heroes Tom Harmon (“Old 98,” the “Galloping Ghost”) and Tony Zale (Gary’s “Man of Steel”).  A four-letterman at Horace Mann, Harmon was a two-time All-American running back at Michigan and then joined the air force.  Shot down over China, he was missing for a month and feared dead until escorted to safety by Chinese villagers who rescued him. Zale became world middleweight champ a year before Pearl Harbor and joined the navy when war came.  With championship prize fights banned, Zale was inactive in the ring during what would have been his peak years physically. Joining the navy, he became a physical education instructor and good will ambassador on war bond drives.  He went on to have three brutal title fights with Rocky Graziano, winning the rubber match that nonetheless took a heavy toll on his health.  In 1949 he retired after a loss to Frenchman Marcel Cerdan. I met him several times in his later years and found him to be charming and self-effacing; in fact his second wife hoped I’d ghost-write his autobiography.  He died in 1997 at age 84.

 Zale knocks down Graziano

I discussed with the class four short readings from Steel Shavings, volume 47, and mentioned that I had no war memories, having been born in 1942. I did relate old friend (and IUN colleague) John Haller’s anecdote about being with his parents on a military base at a service marking war’s end.  His parents, like other adults, bowed their heads in prayer; upon opening their eyes they were horrified to discover that little Johnny had several wads of gum in his mouth that he had discovered under folding chairs.  I ended with a YouTube video of “Ration Blues” by Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five that featured people dancing wild versions of the jitterbug. If I’d had a few more minutes, I’d have shown a cartoon making fun of Hitler for the satirical Spike Jones number “Der Fuhrer’s Face.”  In a recent Jeopardy tournament nobody recognized that he was the band leader of the City Slickers.  Listening to their wacky compositions, such as “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” was my first musical memory. 

Spike Jones

Meanwhile, Trump was in Hanoi, meeting again with Kim Jong Um, fruitlessly it turned out while former “fixer,” Michael Cohen told a Congressional committee headed by Elijah Cummings about dirty deeds undertaken on behalf of the president.  Here is Ray Smock’s reaction:

  The most significant point of Michael Cohen’s 7-hour testimony before the House Government Oversight Committee was that it was in public. It was televised for all to see and its purpose was public education about the president of the United States. Michael Cohen pulled back the curtain on Donald Trump and revealed an ego-driven con man, a racist, and a man who has covered up crimes of one kind or another most of his life.  Many of us concluded this on our own long ago from other evidence. But hearing it from one of Trump’s most trusted lieutenants, a man convicted of crimes of his own making and crimes committed on behalf of President Trump, will be fresh news for millions of Americans who do not follow politics and national affairs closely.

  This is the way we begin to check the president. We begin by shedding light in dark places and letting the American people see for themselves the extent of the damage Trump is doing to the nation and the extent to which he is destroying government institutions and the Republican Party. Whatever comes from the Mueller investigations or the cases underway in the Southern District of New York that are focusing on Trump’s businesses and financial matters, it is important for Congress to help educate the public about matters of vital importance to us all. Today the education began in earnest.

Homefront

 “Baby baby baby, what's wrong with Uncle Sam?

He's cut down on my sugar, now he's messin' with my ham
I got the ration blues, blue as I can be
Oh me, I've got those ration blues”

         Ration Blues,” Louis Jordan

In Nicole Anslover’s World War II class I passed out copies of Steel Shavings, volume 46 in preparation for my appearance next week to discuss the Gary Homefront. I pointed out short sections for them to read beforehand on Pearl Harbor memories, civil rights activist L.K. Jackson, and Gary in 1942 as portrayed in Kendall Svengalis’ novel “The Great Emerson Art Heist.”  The Pearl Harbor section makes mention of Vic and Midge, 25 on Pearl Harbor Day, and awaiting my birth some two months later.  A fourth selection by IUN student Jessica Nieman about farm girl Jean Schultz Ellis demonstrated that much of Lake and Porter County was rural in those days.  Nieman wrote:

 The youngest of six, Jean gathered eggs, fed the chickens, and brought in the cows.  When Jean was 14, she had her eyebrows done for school picture day, and they swelled up.  “My mom was pissed,” she recalled.  Jean was first in her family to graduate high school.   She said, “At 16 you could stop going.  My older sister would buy me clothes to keep me in school. She wanted me to succeed.”  She was one of 28 graduates in Chesterton’s class of 1943.  Jean had started waitressing at Edward’s Barbecue when just 14.   She learned to drive in her mother’s 1934 Ford.   A Chesterton movie theater had midweek dime shows, which made for an affordable evening out. Jean also loved roller-skating.

above, Jean Shultz at 14; below, Jessica Nieman with "Pally" and Jean

Next I read several passages to demonstrate the city’s wartime blue collar nature and being home to dozens of ethnic groups, as well as Southern white and black newcomers needed in the mills and defense plants.  First I recited Robert Buzecky’s “Steel City, Stone City,” which begins: 

Buzecky, Militich, Rodriguez, Kowalak,

Thousands of Somebodies

From all over the planet.

Names make them different

Blue shirts and steel made them family.

I read brief excerpts from student articles by Lori Van Gorp (about Florence Medellin living in the heart of Gary’s red-light district) and Kristin MacPherson, who learned about her Italian grandparents Wilbur and Margaret from her father Donald Rettig.  Wilbur worked at a title company, drove a taxi, and kept the books for a bowling league.  Margaret worked part-time in the bowling alley kitchen and was famous for a cinnamon streusel coffee cake.  Donald told Kristin:

    My mom loved Dean Martin and Perry Como. The aroma of food was always in the air, with a pot of spaghetti sauce or soup on the stove. Noodles might be drying over chairs or homemade ravioli scattered over the dining room table. I will never forget my mom wringing a chicken’s neck and nailing it to the garage to clean it.  We had the biggest garden in the neighborhood. Everyone helped.  Mom canned tomatoes, beans, and beets and made pickles, jellies, and jams.  At Easter there’d be a lamb cake, and at Christmas containers of cookies were on each step going upstairs. No one ever left hungry.  

    My mother’s sisters would come over to play cards.  They’d speak Italian and laugh for hours.  We’d sneak under the big dining room table in hopes they’d drop some coins.  After bedtime we’d peek through the floor grate and watch them.

 Wilbur, Margaret and Don Rettig

Since Vee-Jay Records co-founder Vivian Carter was on the cover, I explained that during the war she joined the Quartermaster Corps and was stationed in Washington. D.C., broadening her horizons and discovering  musicians that she later recorded.  I explained that many black performers in the 1940s had crossover hits and were popular with white audiences, not only jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington but vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole (my father’s favorite) and harmony groups such the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots that influenced Gary’s own Spaniels, pictured on the back cover. Up-tempo band leaders such as Cab Calloway (who appears in the 1980 “Blues Brothers” film performing “Minnie the Moocher”) and Louis Jordan belted out “jump” music that presaged rock and roll. I had Nicole play YouTube excerpts from “If I Didn’t Care” by the Ink Spots and “Caldonia” by Louis Jordon and the Tympany Five.  The latter begins:

Walkin’ with my baby she's got great big feet
She’s long, lean, and lanky and ain’t had nothing to eat
She’s my baby and I love her just the same
Crazy ’bout that woman cause Caldonia is her name

Next week, I’ll play “Ration Blues” by Louis Jordan, which contains this verse:

They reduced my meat and sugar
And rubber's disappearing fast
You can't ride no more with poppa
'Cause Uncle Sam wants my gas

Speaking about the war in the Pacific, Nicole brought up the army’s use of Navaho code talkers (above) to communicate in the field, since almost nobody outside the tribe could speak their unique language.   The Japanese could never crack it.  After class a student named Heather had the magazine open to a page containing a photo of M to F transgender Dakota Yorke, a 2016 Portage High School homecoming queen finalist.  “Dakota’s my best friend,”Heather exclaimed, and showed me that she had sent a photo of the page to Dakota, who texted back that she was really excited and anxious to read what I’d written.

above, Dakota; below, woodcut by Corey Hagelberg

At bridge Dick and Cheryl had noticed a photo of son Corey’s woodcut “We All Share the Same Roots” in the new edition of “Gary: A Pictorial History” and inquired about obtaining it.  I offered to trade one for an out-of-print copy of the “Tales of Lake Michigan and the Northwest Indiana Dunelands” Steel Shavings (volume 28, 1998), which they produced three days later.  It contains an interview with a former bowling acquaintance whom I nicknamed “Slick Tom” where he talked about picking up girls along the Lake Michigan shoreline in his cabin cruiser.  The steelworker bragged:

 In the summer I’d trade with everybody to get on straight midnights so I could cruise the beach to see who I could pick up.  A good spot was Lake Street.  Usually I’d take a friend.  By 11 or 12 o’clock, girls would be out sunbathing.  You might pick up one, two, three or four girls.  It was easy.  You just looked to see who was waving their arms.  When a girl starts flagging down a boat, it usually sends a signal that they are ready to party.  You pulled in, and if they weren’t good-looking, you pulled back away.

 Once my cousin and I picked up two pretty-looking girls.  We thought they were in their mid-20s.  We zoomed out about a mile and a half and started drinking some wine.  We were getting out of our bathing suits when I asked one girl how old she was.  I found out the two girls were 14 and 15 years old.  Needless to say, we got them dressed very quickly and rushed them back to shore.

 If we saw a good-looking girl who didn’t wave, we’d get out the inner tube and tie it to the back of the boat. I’d get on it.  Then my buddy would race in close towards shore and spin the boat and make the tube go right into the beach.  I’d stumble up on shore and say, “Hey, my name’s Tom.  We need three people to water ski.  Would you like a boat ride and be an observer?”  That worked like a champ.  Initially, they might say no, they were engaged or married.  Once they were on the boat for a few hours, after some persuasion and some drink, the changes in their demeanor were amazing.

“Tales of Lake Michigan” also contains my interview with Region Dunes artist David Sander (1923-1999), who told me:

 I was in the navy during World War II. After my discharge, I went back to the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill.  I met and married a classical language student, who was not familiar with the Dunes.  One day we drove to have a look at them.  It just happened that we parked next to a station wagon that had a Chesterton real estate address.  We asked the lady to show us some land.  The first place she showed us, we bought, a 40-acre tract in Beverly Shores at the end of a road that had a house, a barn, and a set of batteries because we were too far for city electricity.

 The former owner was an old Hungarian farmer.  He and his wife lived in a little milk house for several months after we purchased the land. She used to walk to Chesterton and try to sell articles they no longer needed, like a butter churn.  She’d be saying things in Hungarian, and people thought she was crazy.  Finally their son came and rescued them.

 I started painting again.  Lake Michigan became part of my nature.  Mostly I painted the Dunes.  Without people.  People-less dunes. I found the less I put into a painting, the more original it was.  After all, a painting is a rendering of a subject, not the subject itself.  The details are not the subject of a painting. The true artist creates something which is an amalgam, different and presumably greater than either him or his subject.

I vividly recall scores of dunes paintings scattered all over Sander’s home, seemingly discarded, and not having the nerve to ask him for one or two.  Not long afterwards, he was dead.

 Marcus Brown; photo by Beverly Brown

After winning the first game from 2 L’s and 2 R’s, the Engineers had only one strike in the entire second game and lost by 70 pins, as Marcus Brown bowled in the 240s,well above his average.  I had felt a twinge in my upper leg and briefly considered sitting out the finale.  Then, after a spare, split and missed 10-pin, I strung six strikes in a row and then converted a a spare, finishing with a 221, my highest score since I started at Hobart Lanes.  I got several fist bumps from bowlers nearby.  The Engineers picked up an amazing 17 strikes in that one game to win handily and garner 5 of 7 points.  I edged Joe Piunti, who won game one for us, for most pins over average by a mere 2 pins for the four-dollar pot.  Afterwards, I asked Dorothy Peterson and Gene Clifford how they liked “Shrek: The Musical” Sunday. They enjoyed it, but a woman near them with a young girl was complaining about hearing three curse words.  That was news to me.  They must have been pretty inoffensive.  Gene and Dorothy have tickets for “Million Dollar Quarter” at the Munster Theater.

Dorothy Peterson

Zion Williamson on ground

Nike stock fell more than 1% after Duke star Zion Williamson’s sneaker imploded 33 seconds into a game with North Carolina and he injured a knee.  Nike had signed a lucrative deal with the university that mandated players wear their brand even though they received nothing but free sneakers while Coach K’s annual salary rose to in the neighborhood of 10 million dollars. What a farce.