Imagine

“Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you

 

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one”

    John Lennon, “Imagine”

 

Dave performed “Imagine” on piano and dedicated it to Toni. As a kid, he’d play our piano in the basement rec room to relax, learning by trial and error.  A recent rightwing Facebook post called the song “Marxist” - can you imagine?  If it is a pipedream to imagine a world without war, government and religion, it is certainly not to be treated as dangerous enemy propaganda, only the wise words of a musical shaman too fragile for this world.

 

I had a relatively busy day compared to most during this pandemic.  Mike and Janet Bayer spent the night after visiting son Brenden and is family.  After breakfast I donned a face mask and got my toenails clipped at nearby Aqua Spa, first time in months.  They checked my temperature, squirted sanitizer onto my hands, and took me to a station that had a barrier between me and the young woman servicing me.  In the afternoon Dave and Angie stopped over, and in the evening I played Space Base via Zoom with Tom, Jef, Dave, Evan and Patti. With a scoop of ice cream I watched the news about Covid-19 spreading rapidly in Red states that re-opened precipitously and Trump denying he knew about Russian payoffs to Taliban terrorists who killed American soldiers. Also: Trump railed against Chief Justice John Roberts for striking down a Louisiana anti-abortion statute.

 

Suzanna Murphy wrote about living in a secure environment while her dad would soon be risking his life in the Korean War not long after surviving harrowing experiences in the Far East during World War II:

    The year was 1949. I was a few months past four. My mother and I had recently moved in with my grandparents in Wyncote, Pennsylvania in a beautiful old Victorian home.  We had been living in Lancaster before in an Amish home. My father had been sent overseas again and was soon to go to Korea for a very long time. I have vivid memories of my time at Grama and Grampa's home. One crisp morning, Grama was fixing oatmeal for breakfast and cooking cinnamon toast in the oven. WOR, from New York, was blaring on the small wooden radio on the kitchen cupboard. Their theme song was cheerfully playing: "Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile." I went down in the basement with Grampa to watch him stoke the furnace with coal. I heard a new voice in the kitchen and came up to find the milk man visiting with Grama and my mother. The milk was in glass bottles of course. I helped Grama feed the birds out the window. After breakfast I went down in the basement with her and helped her with the wringer washer and then went outside to hang the clothes on the line.  She said I could watch her sew a dress for me on the treadle sewing machine too. I had been sick a few days and was home from school. Grampa was going to Beaver College to teach, as usual. Later he would work on his sermon for the church where he was pastor. I would help Grama in the garden and then go for a walk with my mother down to Station Park. Those were the morning plans I was told. One thing I always knew. It would be peaceful and quiet and orderly and I would be safe and loved.

 

Suzanna was my first serious girlfriend. We met at an end-of-the-school-year party soon after I graduated from Upper Dublin and she from tenth grade.  I drove her home and received a kiss as my reward. We went together until I left for college. That summer I caught a terrible case of poison ivy on my arms working on an estate right around the time I was ready to put some serious moves on her.  Her dad was home all the time dealing with post-traumatic stress syndrome but I don’t recall ever meeting him. At a state fair with Suzanna and her mom, I saw Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong perform.  Now platonic Facebook friends despite and her being a Mennonite and our political differences due to her anti-abortion beliefs, Suzannah prays for me and tolerates my caustic comments to her most outlandish political posts.  To one conspiracy theory labeled “scary shit,” I replied, “Shit all right – bullshit.”  She chastised my vulgarity until I pointed out that I was using the same word as the caption.

 

Classmate Connie Heard Damon, who volunteers each year at a health clinic in Africa, posted this notice:

    While walking my dog at Trewelyn Park recently, I lost my key fob and was unable to get back in my car to drive home. Despite retracing my steps, I was unable to see the black fob in the advancing darkness. Several people stopped to ask if I needed help. One man even offered to drive me home to get my reserve fob. While I was waiting for my sister to come "save" me, a female runner stopped to ask if I needed help. She quickly offered, despite my protestations, to look for me and headed back through the woods.

    The next morning at daybreak I returned to the trail and started looking again- to no avail. When I got back to my car, there was a note on the windshield: I FOUND YOUR KEY. There next to the note was my key fob which I never thought I'd see again. I was in tears. No one was around.

    I wish I knew who found it so that I could express my gratitude. In these days when we seem to hear of so much negativity, what a joy it is to know there are generous, kind people who are willing to help a stranger. So, whoever you are, I hope you read this.  Thank you, and God bless you!!!

 

Nic

Gabriel

Ezkiel

Several Kenyans who appreciate Connie’s work were among the many commenters.  Gabriel Wafula responded: “What a good testimony.  When you plant goodness you will reap goodness.  You have been good to people who were strangers.  You have touched lives in Kenya.  The water borehole in Living Hope High school is serving a whole community. Don’t be surprised, a lot of good things are coming to you.  You shall flourish!” Nic Simiyo wrote, “Wonderful testimony, mum; good work rewards.” Ezkiel Shimbira added: “You always help many, you’re reaping what you plant.”

Valparaiso University curator and artist Gregg Hertlieb’s drawing elicited this comment from Sandy Appleby: “For sure . . . Covid the dreadful in the Southern swamps looking for those who believe they are invulnerable.”  I first met Sandy Appleby when she worked for Tri-City Mental Health Center in East Chicago and asked me to be an oral history consultant on a grant funded project dealing with Aging.  That led to similar collaborations on projects dealing with ethnicity, Alzheimers caregivers, and laid off steelworkers. Along with her colleague Olga Velazquez, who later became mayor of Portage, we took part in several scholarly conferences.  I hadn’t heard from Sandy in years. She introduced me to matriarch Maria Arredondo family, which led to the publication of “Maria’s Journey.”

Sandy and friend

Perilous Journeys

“The thing that has gotten me going is discrimination. I tried to be equal to, and as good as, the Anglos. I wanted to make as much money, speak as well, and have all the goodies as the dominant society. But no matter what I did, I was always a ‘Mexican’.” Julian Samora (1920-1996)

Julian Samora (above) was a pioneer in the field of Mexican-American studies.  He grew up in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, whose public park had a sign at its entrance reading, “No Mexicans, Indians or Dogs.”   He was a History major at Adams State College and received a PhD in Sociology and Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Samora taught for two years at Michigan State and spent the rest of his academic career at Notre Dame.  In addition to his academic accomplishments, he helped found the National Council of La Raza, the leading Mexican-American civil rights organization.  I read his book “La Raza: Forgotten Americans” (1966) in grad school.  Ed Escobar and I included an excerpt from his 1967 publication with Richard Lamanna “Mexican-Americans in a Midwest Metropolis: A Study of East Chicago" in our 1987 anthology on Latinos in Northwest Indiana, “Forging a Community.”

 Rita Perez and daughter Maria Arredondo, circa 1922

I’m putting the final touches on “The Journeys of Maria Arredondo,” a talk I’ll be delivering at Michigan State during a conference celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Julian Samora Institute.  Maria came to America from Mexico at age 7, 19, and 32, the final time after her mother had been deported.  Describing a confrontation with customs official on the third border crossing, I’ll quote this passage from Ramon and Trisha’s “Maria’s Journey”: 

    Early in the day they reached customs.

  “My children and I are going home to Indiana to join my husband,” she explained to the guard at the border. 

  “I think not, Senora,” replied the guard gruffly. “Nobody goes across without passports.”

  It was true.  She had no documents.  She had left them at home.  When she hurriedly left the States, her discouragement was such that she believed Mexico would be her home until she died; why bother with documents? She saw now that she had acted without thought, but it was too late.

  She explained again her intentions, but with no proof of her story, no papers supporting her claim, she was turned away once more.  Just when she was ready to abandon all hope, another border guard, noticing her distress, walked over to her.  He took in the desperation on her face and the 8 wide-eyed children who clustered around her.  “Go sit over there,” he pointed to some shade, “and wait until evening.  The guards are no so hard then.  They may let you cross, but be careful.  Don’t make them angry.”

  With that small amount of encouragement, Maria resolved to make one more attempt.  She prayed hard to her saints, pleading for a miracle.  That night the bedraggled little band tried to cross once more.  At first demands for documents were repeated.  As the night wore on, the guards relented somewhat and asked for proof that Maria had only been in Mexico a short time.  Did she have some receipts or other evidence that their stay had been less than six months?

 Tangible proof, however, was simply not to be had, no matter how hard they searched the two pathetic suitcases with their meager cache of clothes and sundries.

    Another guard gazed at the mother and her children.  Seeing the hopelessness in Maria’s lovely face, he cleared his throat and spoke for the first time since the border drama had begun: “I’ve been talking to this boy here [Pepe], and he’s answered every question in English.  He knows his name, his age, and where he lives.  He says his Dad is waiting for them in the States,” he said to his colleague.

  “So what?” replied the other customs man, disgusted with the delay caused by the family.  “They have no proof!”

  “Let them go,” answered the other.  “There’s no way this little boy could speak such good English if they’d been in Mexico any length of time.”

  Pepe had been discussing his life with the second guard in great detail and with enthusiasm.  His talkativeness proved the family’s salvation.  

  “Oh, very well, go.  Take those snotty-nosed kids and get out of my sight before I change my mind,”said the officer, tired of the aggravation.  It was late, and he wanted to relax and drink his coffee, not hassle with a nearly hysterical woman and her brood of sad-eyed kids.

  The guard motioned for them to cross.  Maria hustled the children into one of the many taxis stationed at the border before the guard could change his mind.  They were squished into the hot car before Maria allowed herself to believe they were truly going home.  

  As they crossed the long bridge to stateside, Jenny looked back.  “Wow, ma, look how long this bridge is!”

  “Don’t turn around!” Maria admonished her.  “What if they call us back?”  Wiser than Lot’s wife, Maria stared fixedly forward until they were safely delivered onto America’s soil.

Young Pepe (José Arredondo, 1934-2017) went on to earn a doctorate in Education from IU and be elected sheriff of Lake County. This is my final paragraph: “Finally, I’d like to acknowledge my intellectual debt to Julian Samora whose 1967 book about East Chicago, Indiana, “Mexican-Americans in a Midwest Metropolis” (with Richard Lamanna) was the starting point for my intellectual journey into this subject.  Samora proclaimed that family was the bulwark of Mexican tradition.  Maria would have agreed.”

 José Arredondo

Conservative commentator George Will criticized Republicans as “vegetative” for their “canine obedience” to that “scofflaw” Trump.  Well put.

Ray Smock wrote:

    President Trump likened the impeachment process to a lynching in the hopes of elevating the emotions of his supporters.  He wants us to believe that impeachment, a provision of the U.S. Constitution that gives the sole power of impeachment to the House of Representatives, and the sole power of conducting an impeachment trial to the Senate, is the same as a lynching, a word forever etched in American history with the most illegal acts of violent murder suffered mostly by African American men during a hundred-year war with terrorists in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

      Trump is accusing duly elected members of the House as being nothing more than vigilantes taking the law in their own hands just because they don’t like him and want to un-do the 2016 election.  This emotional narrative is the kind that demagogues like Trump thrive on. In Trump’s case, it is the only kind of narrative he can use.  He lives in a maelstrom of conspiracy theories, where everyone is out to get him.  His current narrative is but an extension of what we have heard for three years, that any and all investigations of the president are part of an extensive witch hunt with no basis in fact.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other members of the GOP have not described the process as a lynching. Indeed, most have eschewed such comparisons, except for the mercurial and inconsistent Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who agrees that Democrats want to lynch Trump.

Going on TV to announce that an American special operations raid resulted in the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr-al-Baghdadi, Trump couldn’t resist taking swipes at leakers and whistleblowers, thanking Russia for its cooperation, bragging that this was more important than the mission Obama ordered that killed Osama bin Laden, and claiming that before blowing himself up, Baghdadi was “whimpering and crying.” The latter was palpably untrue and certain to inflame Islamic extremists.  Replying to comments by columnist Jerry Davich, Robert Malkowski wrote: “Donald was rushed to the hospital for dislocating his own shoulder while patting himself on the back for 45 minutes.”

Michael Frisch emailed that it was good seeing me at the OHA conference, meeting Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette, and learning about their Welcome Initiative and Flight Paths project.  He added, in a reference to my longstanding magazine: “Glad to know Steel is still being Shaved, and I look forward to seeing the current issue.”  I replied that one was on its way.

In the Journal of American History Dylan Gottlieb’s “Hoboken Is Burning: Yuppies, Arson, and Displacement in the Postindustrial City” wrote that nearly 500 fires set by arsonists-for-hire in Hoboken’s Puerto Ricanbarrio killed at least 50 people and drove displaced residents to leave the city permanently, paving the way for a yuppie “rebirth” for the traditional blue-collar city (hometown of Frank Sinatra, son of Italian immigrants), situated just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.  Similar trends occurred in Chicago and Atlanta, the author concludes, as the arrival of yuppies signaled the beginning of a new phase of exploitation and profit-seeking.

I informed University Advancement that former trustee James W. Dye passed away and invited Media Specialist Erika Rose to make use of an interview I conducted last year published in Steel Shavings, volume 48.  My email stated:

    At the request of IU’s Bicentennial Committee, I interviewed James Dye, 87, a retired builder and major university donor. I showed Dye the Rev. Robert Lowery library study area funded by the James and Betty Dye Foundation.  It also offers scholarships to many IUN students. 

  Manager for IU’s football and basketball squads in the early 1950s, Dye recalled a Sigma Chi fraternity party that lasted 48 hours after the Hoosiers beat Notre Dame and then Kansas for the 1953 NCAA championship. He joked that IU probably gave him an honorary degree for attending so many losing gridiron contests.  

  Dye was an imaginative entrepreneur who built his first house by himself at age 20.  His company, the Landmark Corporation, built Mansards Apartments in Griffith.  On its tennis courts Dye competed with former Gary mayor George Chacharis and driver John Diamond.  Dye praised past IUN chancellors Dan Orescanin and Peggy Elliott and asked me about Chancellor Lowe.  I lauded Lowe’s participation in community affairs, History Department functions, basketball games, and student functions. 

 Gary Crusader collage

Jonathyne Briggs mentioned that he might include a unit of IU Northwest in his Spring seminar covering the year 1968.  I suggested he expand the project to concentrate on the city of Gary and wrote him this explanation: 

    Early in the morning of January 1, 1968, Richard Gordon Hatcher was sworn in as mayor and became the first African American to serve as chief executive of a significantly sized city.  During a year of riots (but not in Gary), assassinations, antiwar protests, and white backlash, Hatcher played a major role in national events, meeting with President Lyndon Johnson as Washington, DC, went up in flames, launching imaginative War on Poverty programs funded by the federal government, campaigning with Robert F. Kennedy as he sought the Democratic presidential nomination, and attracting major grants from foundations eager for his administration to be a success.  On the other hand, white flight and business disinvestment escalated, fueled by fear, racism, and corporate decisions beyond Hatcher’s control. Detractors turned the slogan “City on the Move” on its head, adding the words, “Yah, moving out” and asking, “Will the last [white] person to leave, please turn out the lights?”

    Students could make use of my Gary publications (“Gary’s First Hundred Years,” a Sixties Steel Shavings that includes an oral history of Hatcher’s first two years in office, a chapter in “Black Mayors”) as well as magazines, material in the Calumet Regional Archives, the Post-Tribune (on microfilm), as well as interviews on the Valparaiso University website Flight Paths and oral histories that students themselves conduct.  Perhaps the entire class could produce a podcast or documentary as a final project.  What was happening at IUN regarding Black Studies would fit within the context of Gary, regional, national, and international events.

In Elizabeth Strout’s “Amy and Isabell” daughter Amy resents her distant, nagging mother and enjoys the lunchroom chatter in the factory where she has a summer job.  Stout wrote:

  Everything talked about was interesting to her, even the story of the refrigerator gone on the blink: a half gallon of chocolate ice cream melted in the sink, soured, and smelled to high hell by morning.  The voices were comfortable and comforting; Amy, in her silence, looked from face to face.  She was not excluded from any of this, but the women had the decency, or lack of desire, not to engage her in their conversations either.  It took Amy’s mind off things.  

  Fat Bev hit a button on the soda machine and a can of Tab rocked noisily in place.  She bent her huge body to retrieve it.  “Three more weeks and Dottie can have sex,” she said. “She wishes it were three more months,” and here her soda can was popped open.  “But I take it, Wally’s getting irritated.  Chomping at the bit.”

  Amy swallowed the crust of her sandwich.

  “Tell him to take care of it himself,” someone said, and there was laughter.  Amy’s heartbeat quickened, sweat broke out above her lip.

  “You get dry after a hysterectomy, you know,” Arlene Tucker offered this with a meaningful nod of her head.

  “I didn’t.”

   “Because you didn’t have your ovaries out,” Arlene nodded again she was a woman who believed what she said.  “They yanked the whole business with Dot.”

  “Oh, my mother went crazy with hot flashes,” somebody said, and thankfully irritable Wally was left behind; hot flashes and crying jags were talked about instead.

Rolling Thunder

“You might as well expect rivers to run backwards, as any man born free to be contented penned up.  Let me be a free man and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.” Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain (Chief Joseph) 

Young Chief Joseph

Rolling Thunder

Operation Rolling Thunder represented a dramatic escalation of the Vietnam War, as Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1965 ordered an intense bombing campaign against North Vietnam that lasted four years and though ineffective in shortening the war resulted in untold Vietnamese casualties andmany American pilots, including John McCain, being shot down and taken prisoner.  It became the name of a Vietnam veterans advocacy group. In the mid-Seventies Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue toured extensively with a supporting cast that included Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn.  Rolling Thunder is also the name of a Six Flags roller coaster.

Garrett Peck’s “The Great War in America” argues convincingly that World War I (as the conflict was called only after World War II) was the most momentous event of the twentieth century, breaking up the Ottoman and Austria-Hungarian empires, spawning Bolshevism, destabilizing the Middle East to this day, killing millions, sparking Third World nationalism, and, due to defects in the Versailles Treaty, sowing the seeds of World War II. It marked a vast increase in the power of the federal government and America’s “coming of age” in world affairs despite an isolationist backlash domestically and led to postwar runaway inflation, strikes, race riots, a Red Scare, and an ignoble experiment, Prohibition. In the introduction Peck wrote:

  War leaves a scar on a nation’s psyche, one that never fully heals. . . Arlington, Virginia, is my home, and every Memorial Day it witnesses tens of thousands of Vietnam war veterans who descend on the nation’s capital in the motorcycle caravan known as Rolling Thunder.  The veterans seek an answer to unanswerable questions: What good is war, and is the sacrifice worth it?

General William Westmoreland (Waste-more-land) once claimed with unintended irony that life was cheap in Asia.  During the World War II Japanese occupation of Vietnam, approximately 4 million peasants died of starvation because their crops went to feed foreigners.  Never again, nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh vowed, would Vietnam be at the mercy of a foreign power.

Charlie Halberstadt and I finished fourth in bridge with 52 percent, just one bad hand from second place.  In another we scored an unbelievable 2800 points.  An opponent opened one Heart and Charlie overcalled a Spade. The player to my right bid 2 Diamonds.  I held 8 points, including three Spades and five Hearts, King, Queen, Jack, nine, deuce. I bid 2 Hearts, alerting Charlie that I had that suit covered in case  he wanted to bid No Trump.  The player on my left, thinking I was indicating a void in Hearts, eventually bid 4 hearts, doubled and re-doubled.  We set the contract down 5. 

I gave Dee Browne a copy of Barbara Walczak’s Newsletter that paid tribute to Dee Van Bebber.  She was grateful, feeling she needed closure since there were no funeral services for her friend.   Terry Bauer, who finished first with partner Dottie Hart, mentioned that a car dealer asked him to fill out a survey that included this surprising question, “Do you identify as male, female or other?”  Earlier in the day I got my driver’s license renewed, needing a passport and multiple documents showing my social security number and proof of where I lived.  Ridiculous. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles folks were very nice and, after all, didn’t make up the stupid regulations.

Miller’s Aquatorium Society will show movies as part of its 2019 fundraising efforts, including the 1927 film “Wings” (the first ever to win an Oscar, starring Clara Bow and with a minor role for Gary Cooper), “Red Tails” (about the Tuskegee Airmen), and Fellini’s “Strada,” starring Anthony Quinn. According to Greg Reising, when Myrna Loy received her award for best actress, she claimed that the statue resembled her Uncle Oscar, and the name stuck.  The ten=dollar contribution will evidently include free popcorn.

A New York Times puzzle clue was “one keeping a secret metaphorically.”  Toni got it: clam.

Chicagoan Barbara Proctor died, Maurice Yancy informed me.  Before founding the largest black-owned advertising agency in America, Proctor worked for Vee-Jay Records writing liner notes. In 1962 she negotiated a contract with EMI Records in London obtaining for Vee-Jay the rights to 30 songs by the Beatles, then an unknown commodity. She grew up in a “shotgun shack” without electricity or running water in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

Also dead at age 71 is Hobart H.S. and Notre Dame football great Bob Kuechenberg, a six-time All-Star guard with the Miami Dolphins who played on the 1972 undefeated team that went on to beat the Washington Redskins, 14-7, in Super Bowl VII. Washington’s only points were the result of a blocked field goal attempt in the final minutes.  In 2013 when President Barack Obama invited the 1972 Dolphins to the White House, Kuechenberg declined to attend, citing political difference.  What a jerk.

At bowling, with Melvin Nelson being on the DL with a bum shoulder, Terry Kegebein in Florida, and Frank Shufran serving as a pallbearer at a friend’s funeral, half-blind Dick Maloney filled in admirably, as did sub Bob Fox, wearing a Marvin Harrison Colts jersey.  After splitting the first two games, we were up 13 pins when the final bowlers, Bob Fox and Larry Hamilton bowled in the tenth frame.  Hamilton struck out, meaning Fox needed to mark and then pick up 8 pins for us to prevail.  He left the 6-10 but converted the spare and ended the series with a strike.

After summarizing a multitude of connections between Trump and the Russians in an essay titled “An American President as Russian spy,”  Ray Smock concludes:

  Trump may not even comprehend that he has acted as a tool of the Russian government. He sees Russia as a cash cow. I do not think national security concerns ever entered Trump’s head. He was and is thinking about personal riches from Russia. He thinks in transactions, not in long-term strategies. He likes the exotic thrills of a country where the rich and powerful don’t have to play by all the rules and laws of the United States. He sees himself as the American version of an unfettered Russian oligarch. He likes people who bully their way through life with their money and their power. He has a natural affinity for Russia. Russia treats him nice.

 front, Wayne Carpenter, Laverne Niksch; back, Yuan Hsu, Dave Bigler

Laverne Niksch achieved the rank of Ruby Life Master, having accumulated over 1,000 master points. Fellow bridge players celebrated with a cake provided by Trudi McKamey.  His partner Wayne Carpenter told Newsletter editor Barbara Walczak: “We started out playing bridge in college and played party bridge for over 30 years with our long-time friends. After graduating with a degree in “retirement,” we play as partners two or three times a week and plan on playing until we get it right. This has been a great ride, and I can’t think of a more deserving person.”

 Portage lakefront erosion by Kyle Telechan

Meteorologists are predicting that a monster blizzard is on its way over the weekend, with snowfall reaching 12 inches including lake effect.  So far, ice mounds have not formed on Lake Michigan’s southern shore but that may change with temperatures plunging into the single digits.  Lakefront erosion has already decimated beaches in Portage and Ogden Dunes, with man-made development hindering the ability of nature to replenish itself.

I might teach a once-a-week Fall History seminar at Valparaiso University dealing with the Calumet Region.  I have already spoken to VU classes taught by Liz Wuerffel and Heath Carter and will be lecturing this semester in a Sociology course and next semester in one of Allison Schuette’s.  I’d assign Powell A. Moore’s “The Calumet Region: Indiana’s Last Frontier” and Ramon and Trisha Arredondo’s “Maria’s Journey” and give students Shavingsissues on Gary, Portage, Cedar Lake, and Hammond.  They’d do a paper on a key event in one particular community’s history.  A second paper, a family history, would cover three generations and fit in with VU’s Flight Paths project, of which I am a consultant. I envision first summarizing topics such as the Region’s place in Indiana history and the coming of industrialization, and then have sessions on Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, Whiting, Cedar Lake, Chesterton, Portage, and Valparaiso with guest appearances and student presentations.  There will be a class devoted to family history and a possible field trip to Gary and perhaps Cedar Lake’s museum at the old Lassen Hotel.  

Jonathyne Briggs invited me to attend a History department meeting.  I replied in the affirmative and added that whenI saw him and others at the December Holiday celebration, it hit me how much I missed running my old colleagues on a regular basis at Hawthorn Hall. I also plan to bring up these two topics:

1.   Calumet Regional Archives: As I’m sure you know, the Archives is in disarray due to plans to fix the antiquated library heating and cooling system, but plans are afoot to open up some space for researchers on the second floor.  This is the latest from Steve McShane:

Due to the high costs of moving to Arts on Grant, that plan has been scratched.  The latest plan is to move the entire Archives to the library's second floor.  We mapped it out yesterday, and there appears to be enough square footage.  Physical Plant would create two "rooms", one very large, and one somewhat smaller.  They would be secured with locked doors and accessible, including a small space for our researchers to use the materials.  Before that plan can be enacted, however, the folks at IUB have to be satisfied that the temperature/humidity environment would be acceptable for archival materials.  Our head of Physical Plant, Gary Greiner, said he can provide data on the second floor's environment, but he hasn't sent it out yet.  Also, the space person from Bloomington is coming up next week, along with a rep from Iron Mountain, a company specializing in moving archives, to look over the situation.

2.   Indiana History course: I was disappointed that Steve McShane decided to cease teaching the course and that the replacements are only of the on-line variety.  Neither instructor has bothered consulting McShane or me regarding the content or research possibilities in the Archives, and I suspect that there is no longer emphasis on Northwest Indiana, as before.  I may be teaching a History seminar on the Calumet Region at Valparaiso University in the Fall.  Several instructors have made Gary and nearby communities an integral part of their course and already have had me as a guest lecturer.  Perhaps in the future I might consider teaching a similar course at IUN, maybe in conjunction with Chris Young,  although a previous effort to offer a Liberal Studies course died on the vine.  It had been my hope that Young’s interest in Hoosier history might eventually lead him to teach that subject, but his present duties apparently make that impractical, given the need to offer other upper division courses in his area of specialization

Journeys

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu

above, Pat Colander; below, Jillian Van Volkenburgh

I journeyed to the Center for Visual and Performing Arts in Munster for an Art in Focus presentation by Pat Colander, author of “Hugh Hefner’s First Funeral and Other True Tales of Love and Death in Chicago.”  I’ll be speaking to the same group in three weeks and wanted to check out the facilities.  Unfortunately, the building had lost power and the talk was moved to a dining room with only a podium for the speaker.  Rather than explore Hugh Hefner, to my disappointment she read a chapter about the 1982 Tylenol murders, when seven Chicago area residents died after swallowing Tylenol capsules laced with potassium cyanide. The crime remains unsolved, but Colander talked about two main suspects who, she speculates, may have acted together.  When Colander first wrote about the case, it inspired a spate of copycat cases of product tampering.  South Shore Arts Director of Education Jillian Van Volkenburgh plugged my upcoming talk and assured me there’d be equipment on hand for me to show photos and YouTube clips and play Vee-Jay hit records hit such as “Goodnight, Sweetheart” and “Duke of Earl.”

above, Maria and Arredondo siblings; below, Kenny Kincaid

I discussed “Maria’s Journey” in Purdue Northwest historian Ken Kincaid’s class on Hispanics in America. Authors Ray and Trish Arredondo were unable to attend.  Published by Indiana Historical Society Press, the book is required reading in numerous college courses, including Kincaid’s. Several years ago, Kincaid invited the three of us on a panel about the Latino experience in Northwest Indiana.  His wife is Peruvian and Ken next semester will be taking students to Cuba over spring break.  He seemed to have excellent rapport with his students.

Some 35 years ago I was oral history consultant for a Tri-City Community Mental Health Center project on ethnicity called “Pass the Culture, Please,” funded by the Indiana Committee on the Humanities. I conducted several interviews with the Spanish-speaking matriarch with son Ray as translator and taped a group session with her ten children during a Sunday gathering featuring plenty of Mexican food.  The transcript, which I published in a Steel Shavings issue (volume 13, 1987) contained Lorenzo Arredondo’s assertion that Hispanics prefer the phrase “spicy seasoning” to “melting pot” and this anecdote by brother Ramon (Ray):

  My teacher used to say, “Now don’t forget, this is America.  You go home and tell your parents you have to speak English.” I’d come home and I’d be speaking in English to my mom and she’d say, “What did you say?”  I’d tell her what my teacher said.  She said, “Well, you tell the teacher to come over here and make you eat.” 

Lorenzo added: “She had to sacrifice herself, not learning the [English] language to insure that we would carry on the [Spanish] language.”

Years later, Ray and Trish completed book-length manuscript and asked my opinion of it.  Finding it charming right up my alley as a social historian, I agreed to edit it and furnish chapter introductions.  I wrote the Foreword and IU professor John Bodnar, author of “The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America” (1987) did an insightful Introduction.  Bodnar wrote:

  Not unlike many immigrants from around the world at various times, Maria lived a life of hardship and turmoil. At key moments in her life decisions were forced on her.  As a child she had to follow relatives to Texas, living the life of a migrant in a boxcar.  Her mother coerced her into marrying at age 14 a man from a higher social station in the vague hope she could improve the family’s fortunes.  Throughout her adult life her spouse, Miguel, was generally insensitive to her needs and insisted she remain confined to her domestic duties. But Maria did not always let others shape the course of her life.  In the early years of the Great Depression, when the United States sought to return Mexicans to their homeland so that they would not compete with native jobs, Maria – scarred by her early years of deprivation in Mexico – refused to leave.  She only returned to Mexico with her children to care for her mother when the elder woman was deported.  Soon she brought her family back to America, despite her husband’s objections that he could not afford to support them.  Faced with countless forces that tried to run her life, Maria retained the ability to fight back and to seek what she thought was best for her children – traits that earned her their everlasting love.  When a Catholic priest once asked her to confess her sins, she retorted that with all the cooking, washing, and caring she did for a husband and ten children, “do you really think I’ve got time to sin?”

Kincaid’s students peppered me with questions and talked about their local history projects, some involving oral history.  Asked if, looking back, I’d do anything different, I wished I’d interviewed Maria’s children one-on-one and asked more intimate questions, about sexual behavior, for instance.  I talked about daughter Jenny, who the family wouldn’t talk to for two years after she defied their wishes and joined her boyfriend in California and then married.  Asked what my favorite parts were, I cited the chapter where Maria defied husband Miguel and journeyed from Mexico to Indiana Harbor with eight kids and another (Ramon) on the way.  I also brought up when Maria burned Miguel’s leftwing literature during the Red Scare, fearing that they might be deported as radio coverage of HUAC hearings taking place in Gary investigating the suspected communist sympathies of union leaders.   When I mentioned Ray’s statement that whenever he left town, he’d kneel before Maria or her mother Rita while she was alive and seek their blessing for a safe trip, two Latinas gave smiles of recognition and said it was the same in their families.  After student named Emily, noting my Rainbow Connectionz ribbon, told me the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, transgendered, Straight Alliance (LGBTSA) hosts a campus event where participants could dress and wear make-up as persons they’d like to become.  

I learned from Bucknell magazine that Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas (1884-1968) attended my alma mater for a year while his father was pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Lewisburg.  Thomas then transferred to Princeton after a wealthy relative paid his tuition, graduating in 1905 summa cum laude.  Thomas sometimes preached summers in his father’s church.

Granddaughter Alissa works with Grand Valley State University’s overseas program and recently hosted counterparts from other countries such as Ghana and China.  For several years, since meeting Isaac Kofi Spellino, he has expressed a desire to visit Ghana. A trip to Shanghai may also be in the works.

I knew all the Jeopardy answers in the Veep category, including Nelson Rockefeller, whom Gerald Ford appointed after taking over for Nixon, and Harry Truman’s running mate, Kentuckian Alben W. Barkley.  I’d also have cleaned up in the Etiquette category; my mother would have been proud.

The Cubs won game two of the World Series and this weekend will be hosting a Fall Classic game for the first time in 71 years. Ray Smock recalled childhood hero Lou Boudreau, who went on to become a Cubs broadcaster (nicknamed “Good kid”) for many years. Smock wrote:

Phyllis and I will be watching the World Series from West Virginia. Being old Sox fans from Harvey, Illinois, 18 miles south of Chicago’s Loop, will not diminish our desire to see the Cubs victorious. Ironically, the first World Series that is etched in my mind occurred 68 years ago, in 1948, when the Cleveland Indians won the World Series. Cleveland's manager/player that year was Lou Boudreau, who was from Harvey. The city had a big celebration parade for Lou that year and I was there, as a seven-year-old kid. As Lou rode past me in that parade down Harvey’s 154th Street, riding on the top of the backseat of a convertible, he waved right at ME!  For many years I kept a button from that celebration in my room.

Our neighborhood, while heavily Sox fans, contained quite a few Cubs fans too, including the family I hung out with the most, the Rowleys. Norm Rowley was a tough steel worker with a heart with a knife through it tattooed on his forearm. He was in the Seabees during WW2. His son Butch was my best childhood friend. We would watch Cubs games on WGN with Jack Brickhouse as the announcer. Another Cubs fan in our neighborhood was Sy Hayes, whose son Dinky was a good ball player. Sy was the local announcer at our Little League field. He would occasionally load his station wagon with neighborhood kids, and we would go to Wrigley Field.  So I have fond memories of both teams.

Lou Boudreau inspired and helped to build a Little League field I played in. The Boudreaus lived on 150th Street just a few blocks from the field. I grew up on 149th Street, on the other side of the B&O and Grand Trunk tracks. It was a working class neighborhood, and my house was just yards from a foundry where welder’s sparks flew.  I went to sleep every night to the rhythms of industrial noises, which were like music to me as a kid. Phyllis and I went to school with Lou Boudreau’s kids. A part of us will be rooting for the Indians because of this hometown connection, long ago and far away.

 Doge Enrico Dandelo

The objective of the Fourth Crusade, according to Pope Innocent III, was to liberate Jerusalem but instead climaxed with the pillaging of Constantinople, Byzantine capital.  David Parnell enunciated two theories to explain the chain of events.  The first claimed it was a conspiracy motivated by greed and hatched by Venetian doge Enrico Dandelo (reputedly 90 years old and nearly blind) to wrest control of trade and commerce from an economic rival.  While there is no contemporary written corroboration, the conspirators would have kept their plans secret.  In contrast, the so-called accident theory, what happened was the result of a string of unanticipated events. The academic dispute, I told Parnell after class, reminded me of conflicting interpretations of the Vietnam War.  Economic determinists regarded American participation as the logical culmination of American expansionism and that Wall Street turned against it when business leaders realized it was unwinnable.  On the other hand, the so-called quagmire theory views well-intentioned but ignorant American policymakers getting in deeper and deeper into what was in essence a war of national liberation until stuck there.