Consumer Counterculture

    “The natural foods movement launched many citizens into activism for nutritional equity, food workers’ rights, and sustainable agriculture and contributed to the neoliberal definition of the marketplace as a force for social justice and self-fulfillment.” Maria McGrath

 Maria McGrath                                                                          Carol Flinders

In the introductory chapter to “Food for Dissent: Natural Foods and the Consumer Counterculture Since the 1960s,” titled “The Gathering Storm: Baby Boomers and Their Discontent,” historian Maria McGrath profiles Carol Flinders, co-author of “Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition” (1976).  In 1967, married with a two-year-old daughter and living in Berkeley, California, Flinders met future collaborator Laurel Robertson at an antiwar activity.  After involvement in encounter groups, potting, and eastern meditation, she reconnected with Robertson and joined the Food Conspiracy, a natural foods buying club.  Sharing Beat poet Alan Ginsberg’s contempt for “Supermarket America” as a symbol of capitalist America’s unchecked excesses and civic irresponsibility. Flinders, McGrath concludes, found community and purpose.  Nourishing the body with non-processed foods, she believed, had the potential to transform one’s life and help save the planet.  

 Selma Miriam and Noel Furie at Bloodroot Restaurant

McGrath, daughter of Upper Dublin High School classmate Susan Floyd, quotes hippie Raymond Mungo, author of “Total Loss Farm” (1970) responding to critics who claimed he had retreated from political action by moving to a Vermont commune: “We are saving the world.”  In other words, the personal is political, a rallying cry of student activists, feminists, queers, and natural foods advocates.  During the 1970s, McGrath concluded, cultural nonconformists attempted to create the markets services, and societies that matched their dreams for a better world in the pursuit of “right livelihood.”  One example, which Maria talked about at the Oral History Association conference in Montreal last year, is the vegan restaurant and bookstore Bloodroot Collective in Bridgeport, Connecticut, whose cookbooks proclaimed that carnivorous people were part of a “Blood culture” while vegetarians honored the cycles of nature. Lesbian owners Selma Miriam and Noel Furie are still keeping the faith 42 years after Bloodroot’s debut.

Justin Henry Miller, "Wannabe Satyr";     James Deeb, "Pyles Regiment" 

Toni and I attended John Cain’s annual Holiday Reading, “Don We Now Our Gay Apparel,” at Munster Center for the Arts.  Beforehand, we enjoyed the gallery exhibit “Things that go bump in the night,” whose paintings and sculptures had a ghostly Halloween flavor.   We ran into numerous Miller friends, including Karren Lee and Judy Ayers.  Elaine Spicer introduced me to folklorist Sue Eleuterio, who directs Goucher College’s graduate virtual writing center and is a consultant with the American Folklore Society.  She was familiar with my Gary books.  Last year Sue took part in a Walk the Line protest against oil pipelines running through residential neighborhoods in Griffith, Hammond, and East Chicago.   

 Susan Eleuterio with Vietnam Vets exhibit

The meal was vegetarian, featuring tomato bisque, quiche, fruit, rolls, salad, and pumpkin mousse.  It was nutritious, without processed foods so far as I could tell, and filling without leaving you stuffed like often the case at such functions. At the IUN table I talked to Mark Hoyert about meeting fellow Marylander Jim Muldoon.  Mark told me he was a History major about 10 years after I graduated, and that his favorite professor was military historian Gordon Prange, author of the popular account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and a consultant on the set of the movie. David Klamen asked about the rumor that the Jackson 5 had once lost a talent show at IUN.  It happened at Gary Roosevelt, I told him, when audience applause for a skit by high school jocks exceeded their ovation.  Papa Joe Jackson supposedly was so angry he kept the brothers up all night rehearsing.    

A somewhat embarrassed Art in Focus director Micah Bornstein, adorned with angel wings and halo, introduced John Cain and Jim West, who read a humorous 1950s account of a kid watching “The Lawrence Welk Show” in his pajamas with a cynical father and chain-smoking grandmother followed by one about a New York City family celebrating both Hanakkah and Christmas.  Last year, at his twenty-fifth Holiday Reading, John indicated it might be his finale. I’m glad he reconsidered; with some 300 people in attendance, it remains a popular and profitable affair. Toni and I find Cain to be charming, and by now he knows both of us by name.

 Marcia Carson on left

At bridge Jim and Marcia Carson were wearing Red for Ed Action t-shirts, having been among the 15,000 demonstrators assembling earlier outside the Indianapolis statehouse. For many years Marcia taught Art, a program that has suffered from draconian budgets and policies forcing educators to concentrate on preparing students for standardized exams to the neglect of cultural enrichment.  Indiana State Teachers Association president Keith Gambill told the crowd, “To the legislators in the statehouse today we say pencils down, time’s up.” Average pay for Indiana teachers is $51,000, less even than in most Deep South states.  Speakers also blasted a recent bill requiring teachers to complete 15-hour “externships” free of charge with local businesses as a condition of having licenses renewed. At Banta Center Charlie Halberstadt and I finished second to Chuck and Marcy Tomes by a single percentage point.  In out three hands head-to-head we played them pretty much to a draw.

Charlotte and Terry Kegebein

In bowling the Electrical Engineers took all 3 games from Portage Four despite having to spot them 28 pins.  Back from Georgia because his wife Charlotte is in the hospital, Terry Kegebein rolled a 530 series and after a 220-game quipped that he was still not bowling his weight.  Leading off, Joe Piunti rolled a 180 and won the league pot in game 2 for most pins over average.  Despite a sore shoulder I bowled 20 pins over average opposite Neda Gonzalez, who carried a 146 average.  Each game we were virtually neck and neck.

For IU’s Bicentennial oral history project, I interviewed IUN Dean of Health and Human Services Patrick Bankston, who will be retiring after 42 years of service to the university.  He grew up in a community near Rochester, New York, and majored in Biology at Hobart College before earning a PhD at the University of Chicago and teaching for five years at Hahnemann Medical College.  Bankston was proud of collaborating on a research paper with Nobel Laureate George Palade. When he was hired as a professor of anatomy and cell biology, only one year of medical school was available on the Gary campus. Classes took place in World War II “temporary” buildings that endured into the twenty-first century.  Bankston was instrumental in expanding the program to all four years and, more recently, launching an initiative that allowed graduates to take part in residency programs at area institutions. Among his heroes were predecessor Dr. Panayotis Iatridis, Congressman Peter Visclosky, Senator Richard Lugar, Indiana legislator Charlie Brown (who calls him “my brother from a different mother”), and his wife of 25 years Dr. Glyn Porter, an IU School of Medicine graduate whom he has known for 40 years.  “I guess she knew what she was getting into,” I quipped, as we concluded the productive 70-minute interview.

After the interview Bankston told me about recently attending a Muslim wedding of two former IU medical school graduates.  Years earlier, the Pakistani father of the bride brought her to meet with him while she was still in high school  in order to learn what was needed to become a doctor. Pat joked about his political career, “unsullied” by ever winning an election.  He was appointed to finish out the term of a Porter County commissioner and during his brief tenure found outside funding to replace a dangerous, century-old bridge in Union Township from the state and the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission (NIRPC).  During the ensuing election his opponent falsely claimed the project wasted local taxpayers’ money.  As Media Production Specialist Samantha Gauer, who taped the 70-minute session, was leaving, Pat said he hoped he didn’t bore her.  “No, I learned a lot,”  she replied.

Samantha Gauer

Valparaiso University professor Liz Wuerffel’s podcast students signed a “Thank You”card with expressions of gratitude for my guest appearance.  Noah wrote: “Keep history alive.”  Liz added: “I appreciate that you were willing to share your [interviewing] mistakes that helped you be a better oral historian and recorder, too.  Much appreciated!”  

Felicia Childress

Wuerffel’s Welcome Initiative co-founder Allison Schuette recently interviewed 101-year-old Felicia Childress, who moved to Gary from St. Louis during World War II.  Born prematurely in the house of her grandfather, a Baptist minister, she and a twin brother each weighed less than three pounds and were not expected to live. She knew the wife of Joseph Chapman, hired to head up Gary’s Urban League chapter, and initially came to help the Chapmans get settled.  Joe Chapman would play a key role in mediating the 1945-46 Froebel School Strike.  Childress recalled:

   When we came into Gary, we were coming up 5th Avenue, and I was amazed. I looked out the car window and there was tumbleweed blowing down the streets. I said, “This looks like the Wild West.” I could see sand hills between buildings and said, “It’s so flat.” Nobody had a house over two stories. I found out that everyone wanted to come to Gary because there was a mill. All the way down Broadway we could see the gates to the mill and realized that was why people came to Gary. In the old days, the mill would take the huge, molten steel and dump it directly into the lake. These were the days before EPA, and when that hot steel hit the water, Uh-whump! - it was so loud you could hear it past the borders of Gary. I cringed and said, “I don’t like it.”  But I’ll tell you what I did like. I learned about the South Shore.  I could relate to the South Shore because it looked so much like the streetcars in St. Louis. When I got on that South Shore, I looked out the window and there were trees. And then past that canal, you could see pheasants with beautiful feathers.  You could see the colors of their feathers as they would be flying through the trees. But they were soon gone, I think because whatever they were throwing into the mill was so frightening, and so they left. 

At Chesterton library I came across the Goo Goo Dolls “Miracle Pill” and found the 2019 CD irresistible.  Formed in Buffalo some 33 years ago, the band, featuring Johnny Rzeznik and Robby Takac, enjoyed two smash hits,“Iris” and “Slide,” in the late 1990s from the album “Dizzy Up the Girl” and then pretty much dropped out of the spotlight. The track “Autumn Leaves” differs from the 1945 Johnny Mercer standard, covered by countless crooners including Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Robert Goulet, Johnny Mathis and more recently, Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton, and Bob Dylan. An instrumental version by pianist Roger Williams became a number one hit in 1955. The Goo Goo Dolls “Autumn Leaves” contains these lines:

Life is change, we move on

And where you go,

I hope the summer goes along.

In my CD collection, lo and behold, was a nearly forgotten 1993 Sting album, "Ten Summoner’s Tales.”  Most titles were unfamiliar and fun to discover, and to my delight were the tracks “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You” and “Fields of Gold.”  Here are the latter's bridge lyrics:

        I never made promises lightly

        And there have been some that I've broken

        But I swear in the days still left

        We'll walk in fields of gold

Food For Dissent

“Industry don't pay a price that's fair
All the common people breathing filthy air
Roof caved in on all the simple dreams
And to get ahead your heart starts pumping schemes”

    “Neutron Dance,” Pointer Sisters

“Food for Dissent: Natural Foods and the Consumer Counterculture since the 1960s” by Maria McGrath is now in print.  At the Oral History Association meeting in Montreal last October McGrath spoke about the feminist Bloodroot Restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the subject of one of the chapters.  Tracing the natural food movement by focusing on vegetarian cookbooks, food co-ops, and health advocates, Maria explores, according to a University of Massachusetts Press announcement, efforts to harness principled shopping, principled eating, and cooperative entrepreneurship as tools for civic activism. Historian David Farber, author of “The Age of Great Dreams, wrote: “Well researched and intellectually rich, Food for Dissent joins an emerging literature that rethinks the counter-culture in American life, especially how it intersected with capitalism in the 1970s and reimagined whole sectors of the economy over the last fifty years.”  I congratulated Maria on the awesome accomplishment and suggested she submit a proposal about Bloodroot Restaurant for the International Oral History Association conference in Singapore next June. She replied, “Food for thought,” adding: “us food historians have to constantly watch out for food idiom/ catch phrase land mines.”

In a recent email Maria McGrath’s mother, former Upper Dublin High School classmate Susan Floyd employed the old saying, “Looks like the cat that swallowed the mouse.” I replied that in Northwest Indiana steel mills rats got to be so large and formidable, according to steelworker lore, that the expression was,“The rat that swallowed the cat.”  Management evidently released cats to deal with the rat menace, and they were never seen again.

Jeff Manes held a fish fry at his place by the Kankakee River on the same day as grandson James’s graduation party at the Portage Legion hall.  I was familiar with James’s bowling buddies and talked to several thespians who were in plays with him.  Dave’s friend Matt Simmons, who spent 19 days in a coma after a motorcycle crash, amazingly looked to be fully recovered.  He was tattooed and muscular, and I first thought he was former Voodoo Chili keyboardist Bob Heckler, who also once taught at Central and sometimes got mistaken for Matt. Simmons spoke highly of an IUN graduate class taught by Education professor Vernon Smith, who kept a jar of Jolly Rancher candy bars on the desk. If someone made a particularly salient comment, he’d toss the student a Jolly Rancher, something Matt started doing in class.   I initially thought Matt had said Jolly Rogers, the nickname for pirate ship flags that often bore a skull-and-crossbones.  The name has been used by many eateries, and a navy aviation unit and may have been an inspiration for Jolly Rancher Company in Golden, Colorado, which originally marketed hard candy, jelly beans, gum, and ice cream.

 pirate Paul Jones

I enjoyed chatting with East Chicago Central principal Dee Etta Wright, an IU Northwest grad who was with her cute two-year-old grandchild.  She recalled being at a 2013 semi-state playoff game when East Chicago upset football power New Prairie when Martayveous Carter scored on a fourth down play in overtime after New Prairie’s normally dependable kicker missed a last-second field goal.  Earlier QB Carlos Fernandez avoided a near-sack and threw a pass to TreQuan Burnet for a 64-yard TD. I was in the press box with Dave, who was announcing the game.  At the open house I pigged out on fried chicken, salad chip, salsa, and a delicious grape concoction that is Angie’s Aunt Linda’s specialty.  Brenden Bayer brought his family and told me that Revolution Brewing Company in Chicago has a robust porter named after labor radical Eugene V. Debs.  Brenden bought some cans for Michael, his dad, whose father was named Eugene. People were coming and going throughout the afternoon, and James was pleased with the large turnout

The last major league baseball player to bat over .400 was Ted Williams in 1941.  Born the following year in segregated Little Rock, Arkansas, Aaron Pointer accomplished the feat 20 years later while with the Salisbury, (N.C.) Braves of the South Atlantic League.  Pointer, whose sisters were Grammy winners in 1985 for the hit song “Jump (For My Love),” grew up in Oakland, California, competing on the playground against basketball great Bill Russell and major leaguers Joe Morgan, Vada Pinson, and Kurt Flood.  The Pointers shared a duplex with the family of cousin Paul Silas, who became an NBA all-star and coach.  During his .400 season, Pointer could not stay at the same hotels as white teammates and frequently had to eat meals on the team bus. Pointer had a brief major league career with the Houston Astros and then played in Japan and Venezuela. After becoming the first African-American Pacific-10 football referee, he served as an NFL head linesman while living in Tacoma, Washington, and enjoying a 29-year career serving Pierce County Parks and Recreation.

Anthony is N. Ireland

Phil, Beth, and Alissa stayed overnight at the condo and Delia and Anthony nearby at Delia’s brother’s place.  Toni showed Anthony a photo album she was putting together that included shots of when he was in Northern Ireland for a summer class arranged by the Grand Valley State overseas program of which Alissa is a coordinator.  Retiring to bed while Toni and guests were still going strong, I made blueberry pancakes and kielbasa one morning and scrambled eggs the next.  Alissa had a great story about my mother, whom she called Nana Midge, leaving her a piece of jewelry whose purpose was unclear but that is now known among some of her and Josh’s friends as Nana Midge’s roach clip. I’d like to think that would put a smile on her face if she were alive rather than, as the saying goes, make her turn over in her grave.

A photo of Ladies Aid Society members belonging to the Methodist Episcopal Church taken in March of 1907, less than a year after Gary’s founding, inspired Allison Schuette to compose a poem about these urban pioneers, no doubt wives of some of the fledgling steel town’s movers and shakers.  Who were these club women, one wonders, were they motivated by a social consciousness toward the poor or a desire to impose their Victorian values, including temperance, the less fortunate?  Ladies Aid societies formed during the Civil War to provide supplies to soldiers in combat, including medical care for the wounded.  After the war some functioned in a nursing capacity and worked to improve sanitary conditions for the poor. Gary’s society formed shortly after the arrival of the church’s first pastor, Reverend George E. Deuel and his wife.  Schuette wrote:

Ten women pose on the corner of 3^rdand Broadway, members 

of the Ladies Aid Society, Gary, Indiana’s first. It looks to be a cold

March day, trees barren, snow pack on the sidewalk. The women

are bloused and skirted, one slips her hands into her pockets, two wear hats 

(Sunday-best). I cast the women into roles: moralist, sassy wit,

caretaker, loyalist, agitator, heavy lifter, tender heart, 

mediator, backbone, force of nature. They stand not in front 

of the Binzenhof, one block over, where Methodist Episcopal meets

in a hall above the social club, but in front of Dr. Chester W. Packard’s

office. Happenstance? Optics? Patronage? The surgeon stands 

in the photo, tall and dour, black overcoat, black bowler, hands fisted in

pockets, apart and above, looking off camera. Why is he here?

Against the white blouses of the women, he draws my eye. I don’t want 

to make him the rooster that I have.

If we knew where our efforts landed, would we ever make the effort? 

In 1907, the Ladies Aid Society could not see that twenty 

some years later, City Methodist would dedicate a million-dollar 

gothic cathedral at 6^thand Washington, though maybe some of them

over the course of those twenty years worked very hard to ensure

it (and maybe some of them thought the money would be better

spent serving the poor). City Methodist at its height counted more

than 3000 members, the largest Methodist congregation in the Midwest,

a church built in large part through steel money, fate knit to the city’s.

Even Elbert Gary, that founding father, felt moved to leave his mark,

every organ note played beholden to him, until the notes foundered

into silence only fifty years after their first sounding. 

Listen, dear Ladies, to the voice of the future: as Gary's social 

makeup altered and better-off inhabitants moved away, the church 

fell into ruin, a disused church, abandoned, rotting away, cut

from the budget, closed for good, a casualty of the Indiana 

steel industry crash, a haunting piece of urban ruin.  There are truths 

and half-truths here, interpretations of documented facts—it did 

close in 1975; there were only three hundred and twenty

members left—but the whys and wherefores sit unpacked in the “altering” 

of the “social makeup” and the “casualty” of the steel “crash.” We need 

a surgeon, dear Ladies, to slice through that muscle.

I’ve been enjoying John Updike’s final collection “Licks of Love” (2000).  Like fiction writer Richard Russo, Updike is brilliant at brief descriptions of minor characters.  In “Cats” a Rutgers professor’s son-in-law Hiram is “unctuous and prematurely balding with a Princetonian complacency that makes one want to kick him.”  When Dave offers to pick up doughnuts while at the market, Hiram says, “We don’t believe in doughnuts.” Dave retorts,“Anybody here who doesn’t believe in pretzels?”  Common Updike themes are sex, aging, and religion.  In “Natural Color” a reference to a former lover’s red hair, Updike compared the social turmoil in a small new England town caused by exposure of the affair to a Unitarian-Congregationalist schism of the 1820s.

Trump responded to efforts by Congressman Elijah Cummings to investigate his administration by tweeting that the Baltimore legislator should spend more time cleaning up his rat-infested district, a racist insult previously levied against Georgia Representative John Lewis.  Cummings replied: “Mr. President, I go home to my district daily.  Each morning I wake up and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch.  But it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.” Robert Blaszkiewicz commented: “Better to have a few rats than to be one.”  The Baltimore Suneditorialized: 

  The most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin, and the guy who insists there are good people among murderous neo-Nazis is still attempting to fool most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his present post.

Dean Bottorff reported: “News from Keystone: This just in. The outcrop on Mt. Rushmore formerly known as Clinton Rock has been renamed Trump Rock.” I replied,“He’s a dickhead.”  

Deep Freeze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Izzy Young in 2014

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