Old Man Teepee Pole

“Hold on to what is good

even if it is a handful of dirt

Hold on to what you believe

even when it is a tree that stands by itself”

         Traditional Pueblo poem

I ran into IUN Anthropology assistant professor Michelle Stokely, whose contract was not renewed despite her being a popular teacher and respected scholar who has published in such journals as Great Plains Quarterly and is the author of “My Father’s Name Was Zahtah: Constructing the Life History of Alfred Chalepah, Sr.” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).  Evidently IUN plans to run the Anthropology degree program with adjuncts. When Bob Mucci retired, he was not replaced either.  Michelle also taught Intro to Sociology, but students increasingly are taking that class on-line.  Michelle will probably lose her home and, like Anne Balay, is on the lookout for a job.  For years, the Anthropology Club has been one of the most active on campus, but I doubt it can survive without a faculty adviser. 

Cache Creek Cemetery

Archives volunteer Martha Letko showed me how to access Findagrave after I inquired whether she had written about her ancestors.  On that site I discovered this information on Native American Alfred Chalepah, Sr.:

  He was born Nov. 2, 1910, in Boone, on the allotment of Old Man Archilta, to Alonzo and Rose Maynahonah Chalepah. He received his name from his grandfather, Apache John. His Indian name is "Soo-tho-sche-yon," meaning Old Man Teepee Pole. He married Leota Evelyn Apoyatt on Sept. 26, 1934, in Hobart. He spent 42 years serving the government of the tribe, and after his retirement, participated as a cultural consultant and respected role model. He served as chairman of the tribe from 1978 to 1980. He also served as translator for the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Business Committee in the 1930s. He was knowledgeable about the Blackfeet Military Society, Apache language and Native American Church. At 97, he still participated in all Apache Ceremonials and participated in consulting the government of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma. He was the father of 16 children, and elder to 121 grandchildren and 32 great-grandchildren.  A smoking ceremony will be held at the Chalepah home.  Prayer service will be at the Comanche Community Center, followed by an all-night wake.

If I changed my name, a top candidate would be Old man Teepee Pole.  In Native American culture, old men are venerated, and a teepee pole is like a pillar of one’s home and family.

Hollis Donald paid tribute to the recently deceased mother of Clyde Robinson, who works with Anne Koehler in IUN’s library’s inter-library-loan department.  Donald wrote:

  Her touch was so tender; the voice will forever linger.  The honor that you built your lives upon, the sound that renewed your spirit – those days of joy will never be forgotten.  She was the family’s favorite dancer and singer – how could you forget?

Cal Bellamy

Rick Hug was on campus for a meeting of Cal Bellamy’s Shared Ethics Advisory Commission.  I mentioned having appeared on radio show panels with Bellamy, and Rick told me that Bellamy had written an award-winning article 16 years ago in the prestigious journal Public Administration Review.  I looked it up, and its title is “Item Veto: Dangerous Constitutional Tinkering.”  Bellamy frequently writes guest columns for the NWI Times.  In a 2014 effort he summarized the work of his commission:

  Northwest Indiana has always been a heavy industry, meat and potatoes type place. Our people come from all backgrounds and points of view. Sometimes, we are a little rough around the edges. Over the years, our families, churches and schools have helped to polish us, but more could be done. As president of the Shared Ethics Advisory Commission, I preside over a group of volunteers who train municipal employees on ethical decision-making.

Eve Gomez

Friday evening I attended a community forum sponsored by ALMA, IUN’s Latino student organization, entitled “Defending Immigrant Rights.”  Ably moderated by WLTH radio host Eve Gomez, the panel included IUN Minority Studies professor Raoul Contreras, former UBM (Union Benefica Mexicana) president Tony Barreda, and Reverend Cheryl Rivera, representing the Northwest Indiana Federation of Interfaith Organizations.  Barreda and Rivera have been active in protests that forced GEO Corporation to withdraw its proposal to build a for-profit immigrant detention center on property near Gary Airport.  The speakers pointed out that the existence of such a facility would lead to raids against undocumented people in order to fill its cells and maintain its profitability and inevitably split up families.  Rather than provide good-paying jobs for local residents, most work inside GEO prisons is carried out by inmates making about 13 cents an hour.  Tony Barreda emphasized that Mexican immigrants are not taking people’s jobs away.  He talked about growing up in Texas and working alongside immigrants hauling boxes of pineapples and bananas and picking cotton from sunup to sundown in hundred degree temperatures.  Eve Gomez said that she hated the designation “illegal alien” and that her father had once been an undocumented worker.

Tony Barreda and Rev. Cheryl Rivera

I was looking forward to hearing Reverend Rivera, who is from East Chicago and knows my son Dave, and she did not disappoint.  She talked about growing up in segregated Georgia and first encountering discrimination at a picnic when a policeman tried to separate her mother from her family, thinking she was white.  She identified herself as descended from slaves as well as a German Jew and that her husband is a first generation Puerto Rican immigrant.  She said she became an activist at age 15 when high school administrators tried to prevent a classmate from becoming homecoming queen because she was an unwed mother.  Rivera and others, including members of the football team, threatened to boycott homecoming unless school officials relented. 

I donated copies of my latest Steel Shavings to attendees and was pleased that student Ava Meux was in the audience, who’s in volume 44 several times.  She wants to do an independent study project with me, and I suggested doing an oral history of her grandmother, an accomplished pianist and youth choir director.  Representing ALMA was the son of Eugenia Arredondo, and I introduced myself as one who had helped edit “Maria’s Journey,” about his family’s matriarch.  Samuel A. Love, who first fought GEO’s scheme to locate a prison in Hobart, was pleased to see me.  He and Ava Meux appeared together on Jerry Davich’s radio show during that fight.

Jim Thorpe

“The great Jim Thorpe was Indian pride
The athlete of the century cast aside
They took his medals right out of his hand
And buried nuclear waste on Indian land”
“Jim Thorpe’s Blues,” Terri Hendrix

Salem Press sent me a review copy of Kate Buford’s “Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe.” It looks like a definitive biography. Buford describes Thorpe as “a gentle person, intelligent and funny, with many flaws” – among them, a serious drinking problem. Both a victim of prejudice and at times his own worst enemy, Thorpe was named the greatest all-around athlete of the first half of the twentieth century, easily outpolling Babe Ruth. He deserved the honor. Winner of two gold medals at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics for the pentathlon and decathlon, he was stripped of those titles by self-righteous American officials (even though the statute of limitations had run out and international Olympic officials weren’t demanding such action) because he had received money for playing on a semi-professional baseball team, something that Ivy League college players did all the time. The whole concept of amateur status was a vestige of upper class snobbery; in fact, in ancient Greece Olympic athletes competed for valuable prizes. Thorpe later played major league baseball and football. In 1983, thirty years after his death and following the retirement of President Avery Brundage (an insensitive racist who once said, “Ignorance is no excuse”), the International Olympic Committee reinstated his titles. Buford’s book dispels several myths resulting from racist stereotypes, such as that Thorpe was such a natural athlete he didn’t even train or that he refused a private meeting with the Swedish monarch and said, “Thanks, king,” at the awards ceremony. In addition to the Terry Hendrix song, Bill Reiter and Fat Back Caine also recently produced “Injun’ Jim Blues,” a tribute of sorts but told from the perspective of someone begging for money to buy wine. One line goes, “Man, I used to be the kind of guy that you hoped your son would become.”

Author Kate Buford formerly produced a book about actor Burt Lancaster, most famous for the kissing scene on the beach with Deborah Kerr in “From here to Eternity.” A flaming liberal rumored during the Red Scare to be a commie, he opposed the Vietnam War and supported antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968. He won an Academy Award for portraying the evangelist preacher Elmer Gantry and also played a prisoner in “Birdman from Alcatraz.”

It was at the 1912 Olympics that Hawaiian swimmer Duke Kahanamoku won a Gold medal in the 100-meter sprint. Eight years later he repeated the feat at age 30. Four years later he finished second to Johnny Weismuller, who went on to play “Tarzan” in the movies. I saw Kahanamoku, also a surfing legend, shortly before he died in the mid-Sixties while living in Hawaii. A restaurant near Waikiki that bore his name was where Don Ho and the Aliis played at that time. Kahanamoku served as sheriff of Honolulu for 30 years and was treated with much more honor in his later years than Thorpe. Buford writes that in 1941 a New York City establishment, Hubert’s Museum, whose main attraction was a flea circus, paid washed up athletes Jack Johnson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and Thorpe to greet customers and be available for autographs.

In response to my last blog posting Michelle Stokely thanked me for changing my reference to Comanche Chief Quanah Parker from “half-breed” to “mixed blood.” Jim Thorpe was also of mixed blood, approximately three-eighths Sauk and two-eighths Potawatomi. Michelle thanked me for mentioning the the article about the World War II pilots adrift at sea in “Vanity Fair,” which she included in a care package a female soldier in Afghanistan. Darcy Wade informed me that bloggers on Post-Trib reporter Jerry Davich’s site, called “Observations from the Edge,” were buzzing over his reaction to the question, is the survival of Gary vital to the health of the Region? After claiming that he had long hoped for the best for his hometown, Davich had written: “We had better hope not, because I don’t see Gary rising out of its depths any time soon.” One guy responded, “Great attitude, jerk.” Another called the city of Gary “the White elephant in the room.” Someone identifying himself as “Escape from NWI” wrote, “Gary needs NWI, NWI needs Gary. If you want all of NWI to turn into a classless, suburban strip mall, with no culture, no identity, and not a distinguishable feature, so be it. It is going to take the death of a bigoted, narrow-minded generation of people to turn Gary around.” A couple years ago Davich did a humorous column about communities’ misleading welcome signs. He suggested these realistic alternatives for Miller (“Where Property Taxes Finally Caught Up to Us”), Hobart (“Salvador Dali Did Our Zoning”), and Ogden Dunes (“We Have a Guard House and We’ll Use It If Necessary”). A blogger suggested this for South Haven: “We have Valpo addresses, Portage schools, Wheeler phone numbers, and all the vandalism you could ask for.”

A journal accepted Chris Young’s article on presidential proclamations that I helped edit for him. In the spring he is team-teaching a course on the American presidency with Nicole Anslover. Hope to sit in on it occasionally. I composed the following paragraph in the hopes of getting faculty to have their students keep journals next semester: “I have decided to reprise my “Ides of March 2003” Steel Shavings issue (volume 36) by publishing journals written in March of 2011. In addition to asking previous contributors to once again keep journals, it would make a good class assignment. Students could become published authors and contribute to the documenting of the contemporary social history of the Calumet Region by providing intimate, personal accounts of their daily lives. To gear the assignment to course themes in 2003 I had students in my History class about the 1970s make observations based in part on what they read or saw on TV shows depicting that era. Similarly, Chuck Gallmeier asked students in a Sociology class about the Family to make references to family dynamics. A course on Religion and American Culture would lend itself to ruminations on church experiences. Fine Arts majors could keep a photo journal with captions. In fact, plentiful photos would be a welcome addition to all papers. The Women’s Studies Gender and Sexuality course offers numerous possibilities. I’ll make available copies of volume 36 so that students might get some idea of how others have handled the assignment. Let me know if you think this assignment might work in one or more of your classes. Should students not want their names used, they can provide pseudonyms. I’d be happy to attend your class to explain the project and the historical value of journals. The journals should be typed, in Microsoft Word if possible, to make editing easier.”

Steve McShane, who will have his Indiana History students keep journals, recently put a display about Latinos in Northwest Indiana in the Library/Conference Center lobby. Among other things, it includes a facsimile of the “Maria’s Journey” book cover, an Arredondo family picture, photos of Mexican Americans coerced into getting on a repatriation train during the Hoover years of the depression, a photo of Lake County Sheriff Roy Dominguez with Hillary Clinton, and Seventies flyers from Latino protest groups. Steve mentioned that John Davies thought I’d make a good speaker at Vivian Carter’s Wall of Fame induction, but I suggested they get an African American instead or maybe Tom Higgins, who worked at WWCA when she had her radio program.

Wendy likes the idea of the tiara mystery story, and both she and LeeLee contributed to this paragraph: “Wendy was uncertain when the tiara disappeared. Saturday morning before riding to the airport she attended the reunion breakfast in the lobby of the Hilton Gardens, leaving suitcases near the front door. When her town car arrived, the driver waited patiently as Wendy said her final good-byes. He then took care of her baggage all the way to airport check-in. Back home, her regular limousine driver secured them from baggage claim. It was only when she went through her suitcases the next day did she realize the tiara was missing. She was certain that she had put it in her Louis Vuitton French bag, a gift from a dear friend. She had intended to carry it on the plane, but with a shopping bag full of presents for her grandkids and a purse bursting with reunion souvenirs, the expensive bag was out of her sight for a few hours. The airline representative may have assumed that it contained valuables and, if criminally inclined, could have alerted a partner. But who would take the tiara when much more valuable items were among the belongings, including the bag itself, worth at least a thousand dollars? Or had someone back at the Hilton Gardens already snatched the tiara, a jealous classmate of Wendy’s, perhaps? That was what she wanted Captain Cardinal to find out.”

I enjoyed “Morning Glory” despite finding the plot about a young producer saving a network rival of “Today” and “Good Morning America” to be rather unrealistic. Rachel McAdams, splendidly daffy in “Wedding Crashers” and “Sherlock Holmes,” played a bright workaholic. Harrison Ford was a hoot as the reluctant veteran newsman whom she recruits to be co-anchor with always-worth-watching Diane Keaton, who calls her “Gidget” and raps with 50 Cent and DJ Whoo Kid on “Candy Shop” (“I’ll take you to the candy shop. I’ll let you lick the lollipop”) a true highlight. One verse goes, “I melt in your mouth girl, not in your hands, ha ha.”

Among the flurry of emails regarding condo business was a call for a board meeting. I was able to get the day changed from Wednesday to Tuesday, so I can still bowl. Leo Rondo is hosting it, and I’ll be taking notes as secretary for the first time.

Northwest Phoenix Article

Adam Hazlett, a reporter for the IU Northwest student newspaper, the Northwest Phoenix, did a feature article on the autograph party and pep rally. A photo of me singing the chorus of “Surrender,” with drummer John in the background (son Dave was jealous), is captioned, “Jim Lane joins Jimbo’s Jammers for a jam session in the Savannah Center lobby.” I was pleased at how the article emphasized that it was a History Club function and that there were quotes from club president Heather Hollister, who mentioned being pleased with the turnout of people inquiring about club functions, and secretary Sabrina Atchley, who said, “This party is pretty poppin’” and that "we are here to support Dr. Lane." The article started out, “For Dr. Jim Lane, retirement is a flexible condition.” Several people on campus commented on the article, including CETL director Charlotte Reed, who, based on the photo, asked if I were a member of the band. Also in the Phoenix issue was an article about the Women’s Clothesline Project that Anne Balay helped organize, which has been on display in the student union and movingly bears witness to violence against women. Anne is quoted as saying that designing the t-shirts was an emotional experience and that sometimes students started crying while doing it.

Lunched with cafeteria Monday regulars, including Jim Tolhuizen, George Bodmer, Alan Lindmark, Ray Fontaine, and Michelle Stokely, who on the way back to our offices mentioned that she is working on an article about a Kiowa Indian tribal calendar. Many in the nineteenth century were done on buffalo hide. Almost all have some depiction of the 1833 meteor shower that lit up the sky – in fact, that is a key way experts can date them. Michelle and Ray are very well versed in Native American lore. A week ago when Political Scientist Jean Poulard was claiming that our culture was superior to others and citing religious toleration as a key reason, Michelle mentioned that Native Americans didn’t have freedom of religion until 1975. The subject of fishing came up, and I mentioned that our furnace man Chuck returned from a Tennessee River fishing trip in Alabama with bags of croppies and blue catfish for us. That led to the subject of noodling, catching catfish with one's bare hand, which is popular in Oklahoma and elsewhere in the South. Had never heard the term before.

Sent a copy of Sam Barnett’s AREA Chicago article to Senate Historian (and Maryland grad school buddy) Don Ritchie, who replied, “Thanks, many a night I did homework while listening to Jean Shepherd on WOR radio in NYC. He always had a breathless way of storytelling. I enjoyed your interview. You and I are reaching the fossil stage of life where young historians come to interview us!” I also sent Sam’s interview to IU history professor John Bodnar, whose book “The Transplanted” was a major influence on how I examine the immigrant experience. I’m also hoping Bodnar will take a look at Sheriff Dominguez’s autobiography, which I have been working on for six months and is just about done. Bodnar wrote an excellent introduction to Ray and Trish Arredondo’s book “Maria’s Journey,” due out in the spring.

Interviewed Vice Chancellor David Malik, who is also director of the FACET program on teaching excellence. Tome Trajkovski brought his assistant, Aaron Pigors, along, so one camera was trained on Malik and the other on me. Malik was especially interesting talking about teachers having to imagine what goes on in their classrooms from a student’s point of view and things done at a retreat he planned that simulated teachers being in students’ shoes. He also mentioned that he would write personal letters to bright students who had done well in his Chemistry course encouraging them to pursue that discipline and how surprised and gratified students were to hear from him that way. Afterwards Malik talked about the great MAC computer he’d ordered for my use, and I told him I’d “earn” it. One idea is to put excerpts of interviews on the FACET newsletter. He also invited me and a cameraman to the spring retreat, where we could do interviews with a variety of people and videotape some of the events.

Received in the mail from Salem Press my second choice of books to review, journalist Clay Risen's “A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination.” My first choice had been “Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture.” Perhaps in anticipation of it coming I finished Richard Russo’s novel “That Old Cape Magic.” It is about a troubled marriage but has moments of high comedy and some unforgettable characters, including Jack the protagonist’s moronic jarhead twin brothers-in-law Jared and Jason. The main character is an English professor whose parents were also academicians who resented the fact that they were stuck at a state university in Indiana. The most endearing characters are Korean-American Sunny Kim, who has a crush on Jack's daughter (Jason and Jared take it upon themselves to loosen him up), and hot-to-trot Marguerite, who Jack meets at one wedding and takes to his daughter's wedding a year later while separated from his wife.

Risen’s “A Nation on Fire” starts with this quote from former Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz’s “The Dark and the Fair”: “We learn, as the thread plays out, that we belong less to what flatters us than to what scars.” In the index I found three references to the city of Gary, Indiana. The first mentions Mayor Richard Hatcher attending a crisis meeting with Lyndon Johnson at the White House, along with other Black leaders (Hatcher told me the whole time he was anxious to get back to Gary). Next Risen mentions that in those cities like Gary where major racial disturbances didn’t occur “competent antiriot mechanisms [were] in place and [Hatcher] made the point of showing [himself] in the streets as soon as possible” (the Mayor also enlisted the help of members of the state championship Roosevelt High School basketball team). Then, contradicting himself, Risen alleges that Hatcher cancelled plans to attend the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr., “because of renewed rioting in his city.” Instead of “renewed rioting” Risen should have said something like “the threat of rioting.” In his prologue Risen laments the paucity of books that discuss the aftermath of King’s assassination. One excellent study, however, is Ray Boomhower’s “Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary.” RFK, of course, was in Indianapolis when he told a shocked crowd of King’s death and appealed for compassion in the face of bloodshed. Perhaps in part for this reason. Indianapolis also escaped a race riot.