Welcome Initiatives

“Time to get up

Time to go to class

Time to tell bigots who bother me

To kiss my ass.”

         “Time,” Morning Bishop (1979)

Morning Aarona Bishop moved to Gary in 1967 and after raising more than a half-dozen kids graduated from IU Northwest in 1980 at age 38.  A few years later, she founded a children’s theater troupe at the YMCA, which became the Morning Bishop Theatre Playhouse.  Bishop also directed productions with adults at a variety of Gary locations.  Thanks to numerous grants, she was able to find a permanent home on Lake Street in Miller beginning in 2004.  Morning Bishop Dilworth passed away in 2015, and as her obituary stated, “she was a wife, mother, advocate, and complete community force.”

The NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) awarded Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette (above) a hundred-thousand dollar grant for their Welcome Project initiative, “Flight Paths: Mapping Our Changing Neighborhoods.”  They are partnering with nine area organizations, including IUN’s Calumet Regional Archives.  The project, in their words, will feature “a multi-media initiative  to help users engage and analyze factors contributing to de-industrialization and the fracturing of neighborhoods, communities, and regions in post-industrial America.”  They conclude: “Flight Paths will prove an invaluable source to anyone who wants to understand why – fully 50 years after the height of the modern Civil Rights movement – the extent of both racial segregation and racial inequality in the United States remains as jaw-dropping as ever.”

Jimbo and Ron at Lake St. Gallery book signing; on left is Ken Schoon

Ron Cohen arranged for VU History professor Heath Carter and I to have lunch with him in Miller, and we ended up at Bakery Café after finding Captain’s House closed.  We talked about ways area History departments have periodically cooperated in the past (unfortunately, not much) and future possibilities. I have spoken in Heath Carter’s class on the Civil Rights movement in Northwest Indiana and offered to talk about Jacob A. Riis in an upcoming one covering settlement houses during the Progressive Era.  In the Spring Carter also has a seminar on Trump’s America, which will trace past Evangelical and populist movements and compare the present administration with previous presidents.  With Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen and National Enquirerbuddy David Pecker plea bargaining with regard to paying hush money to  porn star Stormy Daniels and a Playboyplaymate Karen McDougal, it would be ironic if the House of Representatives brought impeachment charges against him on matters of sex, as Republicans did with Clinton.  I hope lawmakers concentrate on more important matters (actual “high crimes”) in regard to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

 Karen McDougal

At Chesterton Y I partnered in bridge with octogenarian Dee Browne for the first time, and we did well despite being unfamiliar with each other’s tendencies. There were five and a half tables.  After having very few biddable hands, the round we sat out we’d have had a grand slam.  Several top area players competed, including life master Trudi McKamey and Dave Bigler, who thanked me for the DVD copy of our interview and is making one for his grandson.   My best hand was when I doubled a 4-Heart bid (I held five Hearts including the Ace King as Dee was void in them), which went down four, earning us 800 points for high board.  Barbara Mort, learning that Toni plays but doesn’t like duplicate, invited us to her place on a Monday evening when she and Kris Prohl deal out practice hands. Toni promised to consider it after the holidays.

above, Billy Foster; below, Tanice Foltz and Bonnie Neff

I was disappointed that jazz pianist Billy Foster did not play at IUN’s Holiday party, but at least the choir re-assembled for a fifth year under Kathy Malone’s direction.  With Rick Hug indisposed, its lone male member was retired Education professor Ken Schoon.  Once again, the highlight was audience participation for “12 Days of Christmas.” On the seats were slips of paper instructing what you’d represent; mine read“2 Turtle Doves,”meaning that on 11 occasions, I was to stand and sing that line. Old pro David Parnell coached me on how to bob my head in a pecking motion.  Near us Sociologists Chuck Gallmeier and Kevin McElmurry twirled as they belted out “A partridge in a pear tree”a dozen different times.  Will Radell was leading a group of swans a swimming, while choir members were acting out all the verses, Tanice Foltz most expressively. Afterwards I chatted with historians Jonathyne Briggs and Diana Chen-Lin; both have daughters in college that I first met as young kids.  Chancellor Bill Lowe noted, “I see that you’re wearing a tie,”and I replied, “Yes, it matches my sneakers.”  It’s part of our yearly routine since at a previous Holiday celebration he quipped that my tie went with my sneakers. When Garrett Cope was in charge of arrangements, the event was held in the Savannah gym and featured entertainment by Gary high school choral groups. Now downsized, it takes place in the conference center, and few faculty attend.  The food was plentiful, and I took two beef sandwiches and two brownies home for Toni’s dinner.

 scene in "Blue Velvet"

Neither Alan Barr nor George Bodmer attended despite the former having retired this semester, which just ended, at age 79 and the latter scheduled to depart in the spring.  Doug Swartz quipped that he’ll soon be the old man in the English department.  Each previous spring, Barr has taught a film class. A couple years ago, I audited one on erotic movies and saw such notable classics as “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” (1989) and “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1960).  I recall Alan telling the students that most worthwhile films are made outside the United States.  A critique was due each week, and Alan wanted them succinct, thematic, and original rather than a lengthy summary of what happened or what other reviewers thought. Barr liked my essay about a scene in David Lynch’s nightmarish “Blue Velvet” (1986) where drug dealer Dean Stockwell is lip-synching to Roy Orbison’s sorrowful lament “In Dreams” (about a lover existing only in one’s sleep) while crazy Dennis Hopper mouths the words nearby and a man dances with a snake.

 Barr (white shirt) retirement; to his right, Bodmer, Mary Russell, Doug Swartz

Both Barr and Bodmer have been forces to be reckoned with regarding faculty governance and staunch believers in the primacy of research in tenure and promotion decisions, although not, unfortunately, in Anne Balay’s case.  For years, until they began shunning me over that matter, they were fond lunch companions. Some years ago, Bodmer was seriously injured when struck by a car as he was jaywalking across Broadway.  While he was recuperating, I sent him an Anne Tyler novel.  He later told me that his wife enjoyed it.  Since then, he’s frequently predicted he’d be remembered as the person responsible for getting traffic lights installed near the spot of his accident.  In addition to his scholarly output in children’s literature, Bodmer does minimalist etchings (he’d often send me home with samplings to elicit Toni’s opinion). Unless I’m mistaken, he taught a class to homeless Chicagoans.  While his sardonic classroom persona and biting criticism of mediocre work (criticisms leveled at Balay) turned off some students, others, including son Dave, poet Sarah McColly, bowling buddy George Villareal, and steelworker Dave Serynek, found his classes stimulating.  Serynek told me that he ended his academic career with a bang, reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita” in Bodmer's class.  George used to wear a Chairman Mao cap, once changed a flat tire for me, and has a cool wife. 

 Bodmer etchings

Doris Guth at Mel Guth's funeral service (2016)

At Hobert Lanes the Electrical Engineers took 5 of 7 points from Better Without Phil (the name of a former teammate who left to form his own team), which spotted us 99 pins a game.  Five frames into the match, we had squandered the 99-pin lead and trailed by 60 pins.. from then on we pretty much bowled them even. Both Terry Kegebein and I finished the series more than 50 pins over our average; I rolled games of 165, 146, and 158 with only a handful of strikes but just one split.  Opponent Larry Ramirez has a mean lefty hook.  Twice he threw gutter balls followed by several strikes in a row.  “I got mad,”he said both times.  Our Mel Guth Seniors league selected Doris Guth as our sportswoman of the year.  A few years ago, the Engineers won two games from her team, Best Friends, and when she began the third game with two strikes, Dick Maloney said,“Take it easy on us.”  Doris replied with an expletive.  Last week my 765 handicap series was second highest to Jaime Delgado’s 772. Next week is the Holiday banquet, and opponent Phil Magdiak promised to bring fresh smoked Polish sausage from Misch brothers grocery in Calumet City. I’ll bring my usual, deli pickles.

ABC nightly news ran a feature on Genevieve Purinton, the 88-year-old originally from LaPorte reunited with her daughter Connie thanks to DNA findings.  Christina Caron, the New York Timesinvestigative reporter who broke the story, emailed me that Genevieve had moved in with her sister before giving birth at age 19 at Gary’s Mercy Hospital because her mother had warned her that her father would “kill” her if he learned about the pregnancy.

Valued Archives volunteer Maurice Yancy gave me a hand-made Happy Holiday card with this composition:

  Back in the day I thought I was

All that . . . an a bag of chips, 

Today I’m an old guy with memories

Flapping lips!!!!!

I met Allison Schuette and Liz Wuerffel at Hunter’s Brewery in Chesterton.  We celebrated the NEH grant coming through, and I suggested they get in touch with Kenny Kincaid at Purdue Northwest so they could expand their “Flight Paths” to include Latinos from the Indiana Harbor district of East Chicago.  Latinos comprise approximately 7 percent of Valparaiso’s population, they told me. Many, I’m sure, trace their family history to either Gary or East Chicago.  One of their interns interviewed her father, Steve Walsh (below), formerly a Post-Tribune investigative reporter and now affiliated with a San Diego PBS station.  Walsh once covered the statehouse in Indianapolis during legislative sessions with regard to matters affecting Northwest Indiana.

Precursor

“Every writer creates his own precursors.  His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”  Jorge Luis Borges

Blind during the final three decades of his life, Argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) employed an existentialist perspective in tales that take flight into the realm of fantasy.  Struck by the absurdity of the Falklands War  between his country and Great Britain, in 1985 he wrote, “The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.”

Peter MacLeod’s “Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham” examines the decisive Seven Years War battle for Quebec, which ended French rule in Canada and was a necessary precursor to the American Revolution, removing, as it did, the need for protection from the Mother Country and resulting in onerous taxes against which colonists rebelled.  MacLeod employs diaries and memoirs of numerous participants, including midshipman Ashley Bowen, who on July 15, 1759, aboard the HMS Pembroke told General James Wolfe, “I come from New England with a company of volunteers to serve His Majesty in the reduction of Canada.”  Born in 1728 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, 15 miles northeast of Boston, Bowen lost his mother when eleven.  His father, after marrying a rich widow who didn’t want him around, apprenticed young Ashley to a brutal sea captain who beat him several times daily with a cat o’ nine tails (a multi-tailed whip).  Over the years seaman Bowen traveled to England, South America and all over the North Atlantic.

 "Enema of the State" artwork

At Chesterton library I picked up Blink-182’s “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket” (2001) after reading a New Yorker article about the punk band.  Blink-182’s hit single “All the Small Things” on the 1999 album “Enema of the State” is one of the best songs of all time.  Reviewer Kelefa Sanneh called the follow-up CD “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket” “by turns peppy, sulky, and stupid – Blink-182 at its finest.”  The titles read like an ode to a bad relationship – “Happy Holidays, You Bastard,” “Story of a Lonely Guy,” “Give Me One Good Reason,” “Shut Up,” and “Please Take Me Home (Too Late It’s Gone).”  In “Stay Together for the Kids” is this wistful line: “What stupid poem could fix this home, I’d read it every day.”  While Green Day was the first enduring mainstream pop-punk band, something eluding the Ramones, 20 years ahead of their time, Sanneh claims that Blink-182 spawned more imitators than any band since Nirvana.  The reconstituted group’s new CD, “California,” is a hit, as is its single “Bored to Death.”

Ten years ago, SALT columnist Jeff Manes interviewed 93 year-old Lowell historian Richard Schmal, who described the town in his youth and the family’s Schmal Hotel:

  Lowellians had more public transportation in the 1920s than we have today.  Twice a day, you could take a Model T bus to Crown Point and hop on the streetcar to Gary, which was quite a shopping mecca.

  Chicagoans would ride the 10 o’clock train from the city to the Schmal Hotel for our chicken dinner on Sundays.  Huge platters of chicken and mashed potatoes piled high in big bowls were served family style.  We charged $1.  The hotel had a huge dining room.  Everybody sat at long tables.  After they’d eaten patrons would relax in the parlor or music room, then go back on the 4 o’clock train.  The city folk would take jugs of our sulphur water back with them.  They claimed Lowell had the same water they were accustomed to paying big money for when they took the Monon (Railroad) down to French Lick.

  The old-timers would congregate out in the sunshine where Nellie Jayne’s Café is located. They’d spin interesting yarns.  Some of them were Civil war veterans.

I like the designation Lowelians – kind of like “Orwellians.”  Schmal’s precursor, like mine, was Timothy H. Ball, a circuit-riding preacher and teacher who was Lake County’s first historian.  During the interview Schmal’s daughter Mary, decorating a Christmas tree, came across a small box with this note: “Ornaments from 1905.  First used in the Schmal Hotel.”  

In Renata Adler’s “Speedboat” Jen meets a middle-class African American whose son won a scholarship to Yale but dropped out in order to pursue a musical career.  In the mid-Sixties I gave up a full scholarship to Virginia Law School in order to pursue my dream of becoming a teacher.  My father’s pained reaction was compounded when my brother a month later quit Carnegie Tech and hitchhiked to California before drafted into the army. Vic later became reconciled to our decisions but died before I obtained my History PhD or my brother a law degree.

The Cubs won a three-game series against Seattle over the weekend. After a Cubs rout, game two featured three close plays at home plate in the late innings.  In the rubber match the Cubs rallied for three runs in the ninth to tie the score and won it in the twelfth when pitcher Jon Leister executed a perfect safety squeeze with two strikes to score Jason Haywood from third on yet another close play at the plate.  Five different Cubs played leftfield, including Travis Wood (between two stints on the mound), who made a spectacular catch against the wall.

Phil made a surprise visit as Dave, Tom and I were playing board games.  I finished tied with Tom in both Amun Re and St Petersburg only to lose both by the tiebreaker. While we battled in Acquire over supremacy in Festival and American stock, Phil and Dave wisely opted for the expensive companies, Imperial and Continental, and both finished ahead of us, with Phil prevailing.

Doug Ross of the NWI Times wrote about the 1916 election when two Hoosiers, Democrat Thomas R. Marshall and Republican Charles W. Fairbanks, were vice-presidential candidates.  In one of the closest contests in American history Woodrow Wilson won a second term by narrowly carrying California.  Marshall, Wilson’s running mate, became famous for saying, “What this country needs is a good 5-cent cigar.”  When presiding over the Senate, the story goes, he sat impatiently while blowhard Kansas Senator Joseph Bristow began sentence after sentence with the phrase, “What this country needs . . .”  Ross wrote:

  After about 10 or 11 times of hearing that phrase, Marshall leaned over to Harry Rose, assistant secretary of the Senate, and said, “Bristow hasn’t hit it yet. What this country really needs is a good 5-cent cigar.”

After that incident gained him notoriety, Marshall told an Indianapolis newspaperman, “I have traveled lots of miles and probably had a million cigars sent to me since my remark about what this country needed. But it is still elusive.”

After reading my commentary on the Doug Ross column Ray Smock wrote:

  What this country needs is Cuban cigars, and it looks like we will finally get them!  My favorite Hoosier politician remains Eugene V. Debs. He got 3% of the presidential vote in 1920 while in jail. And nobody called him Crooked Gene.  Trump is so crazy that he is imploding before our very eyes. Why more Republicans are not abandoning him is an equally disturbing sign of insanity.

Pulitzer-Prize winning author David McCullough and distinguished documentarian Ken Burns have set up a Facebook page for historians to enumerate the dangers of Donald Trump becoming president.  McCullough has written: “So much that Donald Trump spouts is so vulgar and so far from the truth and mean-spirited. It is on that question of character especially that he does not measure up. He is unwise. He is plainly unprepared, unqualified and, it often seems, unhinged. How can we possibly put our future in the hands of such a man?”

 Jerry Davich (left) selfie with Jimbo, Anne Balay and Marilu Fanning

I met Post-Trib columnist Jerry Davich, “Steel Closet” author Anne Balay, and former truck driver Marilu Fanning for lunch at Flamingo’s.  Anne has interviewed more than 40 gay and transgender long-distance truckers, many at truck stops during required 34-hour layovers.  Questioning Anne about her findings, Davich frequently uttered “Gotcha” in response to her statements.  Earlier that day Davich had written about a 74 year-old woman who met her octogenarian third husband playing bingo at an assisted living facility.  I told him it was sobering to realize she had been my age.  Both Jerry and Anne expressed surprise that I was 74.  As others revealed their ages, we were all surprised that Marilu was 64. 

 Marilu Fanning when still Michael

Marilu seamlessly added anecdotes to Anne’s description of challenges facing transgender truckers.  Even though she transitioned a little more than ten years ago, she had been cross-dressing, albeit not openly, even while married with children and showed us a 1987 photo of her in a skirt flashing a sexy leg.  When Jerry took a selfie of us, she said she hoped her large arm was out of the photo.  She expressed envy of another m to f “tranny” who has a naturally feminine voice (not so for Marilu).  Unlike some LGBTQ’s she admired Kaitlyn Jenner despite her conservative politics. I recalled that when Diane Sawyer interviewed Jenner, some critics thought she dwelled too much on “plumbing” questions and sexual preferences. I asked Anne if lesbians are accepting of the growing number of those formerly in their ranks who are transitioning to men.  Anne put it this way: many of us who loved being with butch lesbians have no desire to be with a man.  Evodently at gay bars one is beginning to notice a disproportionate number of femme lesbians.

Before leaving Miller, I picked up flyers from Michael Chirich to distribute at IUN about the mid-September Lake Street Fest that will feature Wirt-Emerson’s 20-piece jazz ensemble, Asia’s Dance Factory performers and a host of other entertainers.   Ron Cohen loaned me Tom Piazza’s “My Cold War” (2003), about a historian’s attempt to come to grips with his family’s past.  Ron told me that IUN Fine Arts professor David Klamen has quit to take a position at UMass.  I told him that John Hmurovic donated numerous old East Chicago yearbooks to the Calumet Regional Archives and that fellow volunteer Maurice Yancy found a photo of his older brother Raleigh with the Paul Robeson Glee Club in a 1941 East Chicago Washington yearbook.

Raleigh Yancy, 2nd row, 3rd from left, with Paul Robeson Glee Club; below, Alissa and Josh apply for marriage license