Hold Steady

‘There's gonna come a time when the true scene leaders
Forget where they differ and get big picture’

    “Stay Positive,” The Hold Steady

Rolling Stone gave a plug to The Hold Steady’s forthcoming CD “Thrashing Through the Passions” on its latest “Quick List” of top new albums.  The Brooklyn band formed in 2003. Josh Leffingwell burned me their 2006 CD “Boys and Girls in America.  The first song, “Stuck Between Stations,” has a line that references Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” (1957):

There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together

“Chillout Tent” is about two young people at a rock concert who meet in a chill-out tent after being taken there by paramedics when they’d overdosed on mushrooms, then given oranges and cigarettes (for nourishment and stimulation?).  My favorite track is “Southtown Girls,” which contains a line “Hey Bloomington, what’d you let them do to you” (an IU reference perhaps?)and the much-repeated couplet:

Southtown girls won't blow you away
But you know that they'll stay

We celebrated Dave’s fiftieth birthday at BC Osaka in Merrillville, a Japanese restaurant whose buffet included a wide variety of dishes.  Many seemed spicy so I favored the roast beef, crab Rangoon, and salad along with small portions of Mongolian beef and a noodle dish, then finished with jello, ice cream, and cream-filled pastries.  Toni especially enjoyed the sushi selections, not my cup of tea.  The night before, Dave and Angie dined at Ivy’s Bohemia House, where Becca works, with several old friends.  Dave asked Toni details about the day he was born (in Washington, DC), and we discussed summer of ’69 news events, including the Apollo 11 moon landing, Chappaquiddick, and Woodstock. which would become a counter-culture symbol peace and harmony, with a half-million hippies gathering in a rain-drenched field without violence.  I’m not sad to have missed it, but those who went gained bigtime bragging rights. Toni and I saw Martin Scorsese’s documentary in the spring of 1970 at a venerable theater near Kensington and Allegheny in north Philly while visiting her parents Blanche and Tony. Performing at Woodstock fiftieth anniversary festival will be original artists John Sebastian, John Fogarty, Carlos Santana, David Crosby, and Country Joe McDonald, whose antiwar “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag” chorus went, “One, two, three what are we fighting for?”

I could hardly watch the news with two mass shootings that took dozens of lives in El Paso and Dayton – within hours of one another. More people died at the hands of the white supremacist in ten minutes than the average in El Paso for an entire year. Trump stayed away from El Paso mercifully and instead delivered a mealy-mouthed address from the White House and said nothing about banning assault rifles or mandating universal background checks. Kyle Telechan posted this comment:

    It's weird how quickly mental health suddenly becomes important to Republican politicians and pundits the few moments after a mass shooter is found to be a white supremacist, and how unimportant it becomes soon thereafter. If you want to claim that "mental health" is the base cause of these shootings, sounds like maybe we should work on getting a system where everyone can get the help they need regardless of their economic status?  No? We're going to forget about this in a few days until the next white kid with obvious supremacist views extinguishes more human lives? Also related, can you imagine how quickly they'd be racing to address this instead of hand-wringing and "thoughts and prayers"-ing if the mass shootings were inspired by ISIS? If you don't see their inaction as speaking volumes of their motives, you're not paying attention.

Mike Olszanski posted this Carl Sagan quote: “For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.”

On category in the Jeopardy Teen tournament was Vinyl.  I knew four of the five answers, including Juke box, revolutions per minute, turn-table, and 21 Pilots, a pop group Miranda turned me onto.

Knowing I’d seen Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Jonathyne Briggs asked if it was worth seeing  in a theater. I gave him an emphatic yes!  As Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers wrote: “The action jumps off the screen while setting up psychological provocations with a reverb that won’t quit.”

IUN math professor Jon Becker just published a book titled “The Flunked-Out Professor,” based on his college experience.  Here’s how Amazon advertised the Kindle edition:

   Jon has been kicked out of college.He spends his days playing video games and his nights delivering pizzas, with no motivation to develop a sustainable plan for the future. Recognizing this, Jon's girlfriend decides that she doesn't want to be stuck with a video game-addicted pizza delivery man for the rest of her life. So, she tells him to get his act together, or she will have to end their relationship. Jon feels like a total failure.
  SOUND FAMILIAR?

  Failure is a common part of life for everyone. But when we fail, most people make the mistake of identifying themselves as the failure instead of recognizing that they have experienced failure.In The Flunked-Out Professor,readers follow Jon as he makes a series of bad choices which get him kicked out of college and beaten down in life. Eventually, he chooses a new path--one that ultimately leads him back to the same college that kicked him out...as a faculty member!

Lou Nimnicht wrote a piece for Barb Walczak’s Newsletterabout competing in a tournament in Las Vegas.  He claimed that in the Friday Knockout he and his partner came in second of 25 teams, “despite losing to a squad whose average age was about 10!” Now if that was not a facetious exaggeration, it would be most unusual, as most competitors are seniors.  I will have to investigate.  Last year IUN student Meriah Isaza (below) interviewed Nimnicht for an oral history assignment.  I asked Terry Bauer, recently elected president of bridge Unit 154 for Northern Indiana, and he quipped that Nimnicht considers anyone under the age of 60 a kid. He added, however, that he’d lost at a tournament to 12-year-olds.

Global Warming

 “Which hands get to turn the final page?

In whose throat belongs the swan song

Crisis, warming, denial, change?”

         Parquet Courts, “Before the Water Gets Too High”

An article in New York Times Sunday magazine listed “Before the Water Gets Too High” by Parquet Courts as one of 25 songs that matter right now.  Robert Blaszkiewicz turned me on to the Brooklyn indie punk band, and I saw them live at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown, CA during a trip to see my mother timed around their appearance at my favorite watering hole.  One verse goes:

Glass barely bends before it cracks
Embedded down into our path
Paved in the crimson of our tracks
Without the chance of turning back

Favorite band Weezer’s “Can’t Knock the Hustle” also made the “songs that matter right now” list.  According to critic Lydia Kiesling, the tune is “relentlessly bouncy” but dark commentary on the gig economy, with such morbid lines as, “The future’s so bright I gotta poke my eyes out/ Running up my credit cards/ Selling lemonade by the side of the road.” 

Popular songs warning of environmental catastrophe date back at least to 1971, with Marvin Gaye’s lament “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology),” which included the lines, “Ah things ain’t what they used to be, no, no/ Oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas, fish full of mercury.”   In 1989 Frank Black and the Pixies predicted that “Everything Is Gonna Burn” in “Monkey Gone to Heaven.” As Pixies composer Charles Thompson put it:

There’s a hole in the sky

And the ground’s not cold

Though scientists have long been warning of the consequences of inaction and the first Earth Day occurred a half-century ago, troglodytes in the Trump administration persist in minimizing the crisis.  As Bill Clinton’s former vice president Al Gore put it, “There is an air of unreality in debating these arcane points when the world is changing in such dramatic ways right in front of our eyes because of global warming.”

“Funny Man” author Patrick McGilligan claimed that many of Mel Brooks’s comedic ideas sprang from childhood experiences.  The farting scene in “Blazing Saddles,” for instance, came from observing scenes in Western movies where cowboys ate beans and drank black coffee around a campfire.  Chosen to play dimwit Mongo, who knocks out a horse, Gary football great Alex Karras nailed the part in his film debut.  McGilligan wrote: “Karras would make the mentally challenged enforcer lovable as well as fearsome.”  At age 91 Brooks was planning a musical stage production of “Blazing Saddles.” Climate change doubter Ronald Reagan once blamed rising temperatures on cows farting.

Herb and Charlotte Read

Bridge partner Helen Boothe attended the memorial service for Save the Dunes activist Charlotte Read, whom the Post-Tribune’sAmy Lavalleyaccurately labeled a “fierce advocate for the Indiana Dunes and an ‘unstoppable force.’”  From a young age Charlotte and husband Herb were indefatigable in fighting to protect the environment.  In addition to serving as the first director of Save the Dunes Council, Charlotte held a similar position with Shirley Heinz Land Trust and was active in the Izaak Walton League.  Jeanette Neagu, who traveled to Washington with Charlotte to testify on behalf of creating a national park, told Lavalley:“She and Herb and Dorothy Buell and all the dunes people made an impression on me. They taught me that even if it seemed pie in the sky, if you work hard and organize, you can achieve.”

I got to know the Reads as a result of my involvement in protests by the Bailly Alliance during the 1970s and early 1980s to prevent NIPSCO utility company from building a nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Michigan near Bethlehem Steel’s Porter County mill and lakeside communities such as Dune Acres. A combination of legal challenges and direct action delayed the project long enough to convince NIPSCO to scrap it as cost prohibitive.  My sons’ Little League coach, Vince Panepinto, a local building trades union officer, grimaced upon seeing them carrying a sign reading “No Nukes!” During the mid-1990s I chaired an Oral History Association conference session about the Bailly fight titled “Hell, No, We Won’t Glow.”  On the panel were a representative from Greenpeace and Inland Steel union leader Mike Olszanski, who had opposed the plant while head of Local 1010’s environmental committee.  

Adam Higginbotham’s “Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster” is a searing critique of the Soviet bureaucrats responsible for overseeing the nuclear plant that exploded in 1986. Not only were they criminally negligent in ignoring known defects in the reactor but refused to accept the extent of the emergency once the meltdown occurred, exacerbating the damage and increasing the number of casualties.  Higginbotham sees a correlation between that calamity and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.

1981 Bailly Allance rally; Mike Olszanski second from left

 Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette

Toni reminded me to vote.  In Chesterton there was only one contested Democratic primary race, but I was interested in supporting a school referendum.  In neighboring Valparaiso, both Heath Carter and Liz Wuerffel, VU professors and friends on mine, triumphed and will be Democratic candidates for City Council in November.  I was disappointed that Gary mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson lost a bid for a third term to Lake County Assessor Jerome Prince, a seasoned politician with close ties to county clerk John Petalas and Sheriff Oscar Martinez, both of whom showed up at his campaign headquarters to congratulate him.  Apparently, a plurality of voters (there were nine candidates) believed city improvement projects were moving too slowly.  Just as the prospect of new casino money being available was an incentive for Scott King to run for mayor in 1995, recent developments permitting a land-based casino and development of Buffington Harbor made controlling City Hall seem more worthwhile.

Jerome Prince 

Ray Smock wrote: 

  Here We Go Again. Trump Exerts Executive Privilege Over Everything. Just Like Nixon, except this time Trump is too defiant to resign and he is challenging the House to impeach him because there are no Republicans in the Senate who will go down to the White House, like they did in 1974, and tell the president its time for him to go, and the Republicans will not vote to convict Trump in an impeachment trial. 

  Trump thinks he can win this one in the courts, and he thinks he can brand Democrats as sore-losing socialists and win a big re-election in 2020. He has the arrogance and audacity to hide behind the Mueller Report, the very report that shows he has broken the law. He and his defenders forgot what happened in the election of 2018. The investigations will continue. Why the GOP is hanging with Trump is beyond me. Where is there to go but down with this clown? Who can pick up the pieces at put the Republican Party together again?  

Leeah Nicole Mahon, an IUPUI oral history intern, sought information about former Dean of Student Services Golam Mannon, who a half-century ago was an IUN Educational Psychology professor.  I replied:

  I did not know Dr. Mannan, but he appears twice in a History of IU Northwest that I wrote with Paul B. Kern, “Educating the Calumet Region” (Steel Shavings, volume 35, 2005).  The first is in connection with the establishment of a Black Studies program in 1969, incidentally the second in the nation.  He served on a joint task force consisting of 4 faculty and 4 student members of IUN’s Black Caucus to implement the program.  Secondly in 1973 he helped establish a process for evaluating Chancellor Robert McNeill that led to the ineffective administrator’s resignation.

Chancellor McNeill proved incapable of leadership and, as George Roberts put it, “had some kind of emotional or nervous breakdown – he just fell apart.”  Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs William Neil put it more bluntly, calling McNeill a “wacko”:

 McNeill’s secretary’s typewriter drove him crazy, so at great expense he ordered a door with cork lining to seal out the sound. I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did.  He would accept no responsibility.  He was what in the army we called, to put it politely, poultry excreta. He pushed things off on everybody else and abhorred the thought of getting in trouble with the people in Bloomington.

 McNeill disliked business manager Gene Nacci.  He said, “Who hired that greasy little dick?”  Gene was very Italian-looking and effervescent. McNeill finally fired him. He also zeroed in on Education chairman Don Huddle, an overweight, very cocky operator. McNeill couldn’t stand him and set out to destroy him. 

  I had been asked to fill in for a semester, which lengthened to three and a half years.  It was fulfilling just as my 50 combat missions were fulfilling. I’ve got scars to show from both.

Latonya Hicks; below, Dave with E.C. Central league champs; Nayeli Arredondo third from right 

During an impressive program at East Chicago Central son Dave was honored as the school’s Teacher of Excellence for the sixth time in 25 years.  Dave arranged for his tennis team members and senior class officers to attend.  Introducing Dave, East Chicago Public Library public relations director Latonya S. Hicks said that she was a shy student who lacked confidence until motivated in Dave’s class.  Valedictorian Nayeli Arredondo, on the tennis team and the daughter of immigrants, praised Dave’s commitment to all students, including some that others’ might have given up on.  In the course of his thoughtful remarks, Dave quoted Socrates and from “The Big Lebowski,” to wit “The Dude abides.”  An elementary school recipient was thankful she’d found a job she’d gladly do for free, echoing a sentiment expressed by author Richard Russo in a commencement address.  Among the many people congratulating Dave was Richard Morrisroe, who during the 1960s was almost killed while a Freedom Fighter in the Deep South.  One of the most moving scenes I’ve witnessed occurred in 1979 when Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) was speaking at IU Northwest on the subject of Pan African socialism. Spotting Morrisroe in the audience, the Black Power advocate went over and embraced him.

 Richard Morrisroe

Arriving home as Cubs relievers blew a one-run lead in the ninth, I saw favorite player Jason Heywood hit a walk-off home run in the eleventh, second time that happened in two days (the previous night’s was a 3-run shot by Kris Bryant). When Marlins pitcher Wei-Yin Chen took the mound, announcer Pat Hughes was unsure how to pronounce the name, then added: “As George Carlin once said, one name that never caught on in China was Rusty.”

Miller resident Omar Farag posted a photo taken from his property and asked, “Where’s the beach?”  Neighbor Michael Greenwald responded: “They took it away from us when they built the Port of Indiana pier and changed the flow of the Lake. This was predicted in the 50s. The zero beach point is at Ripley or Pine.”

Funny Man

“My mind is a raging torrent flooded with rivulets of thoughts cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.” Hedley Lamarr, “Blazing Saddles”

The inside jacket for Patrick McGilligan’s new biography of comedian Mel Brooks, “Funny Man” reads: “He was born Melvin Kaminsky on his family’s kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928. Mel was a mischievous child whose role was to make the family laugh.  But beyond boyhood, and after he reinvented himself as Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily in the Kaminsky home proved more elusive.”  Brooks is perhaps best known for a string of hilarious movies, including Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein(both released in 1974), and the smash Broadway hit (a favorite of Toni and me) “The Producers” (2001-2007).  Gary football star Alex Karras played Mongo inBlazing Saddles and uttered the line,“Mongo only pawn in game of life.”  Brooks was a writer for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” during the 1950s and still getting laughs on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” 60 years later.

 Alex Karras in "Blazing Saddles"

My wittiest friend I had was David Malham, who, like Mel Brooks, could imitate others’ facial expressions and gestures.  He often told endearing stories about his Assyrian-American mom, and his personal anecdotes often poked fun at itself.  In one he made a TV appearance on the Jerry Springer show as a grief counselor and discovered his pin-striped suit’s coat and pants didn’t match. Terry Jenkins had a great sense of humor, and on the day friends were attending a service celebrating his life I thought of him often.  In IUN’s library lobby a girl was imitating her little sister’s funny way of waking. I said, “I can do that, too” – something Terry would have done – and got them to laugh.

In the car I heard a long set from 1972, when WXRT first came on the air and the year of the Watergate break-in.  I have been tuning in to 93.1 FM since the early Eighties, which qualifies me as a long-time listener. In quick order came songs by Jethro Tull, Little Feat, Todd Rundgren, Loggins and Messina, Harry Nilsson, plus two with drug references, the Allman Brothers Band’s “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More (leave your mind alone and just get high)” and “30 Days in the Hole” by Humble Pie. I can’t recall ever hearing Nilsson’s “Coconut,” about a brother and sister getting a belly ache from a lime and coconut concoction.  On a.m. radio that year, top hits included Don McLean’s “American Pie” and the soul classics “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers and “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green. My favorite White Sox, Dick Allen, had two inside-the-park home runs in the same game!  “Joker’s Wild” debuted in 1972. Three year-old son Dave loved hearing Jack Barry yell “Joker, joker, JOKER!”with increasing excitement.  Before long Dave actually understood how the game was played and got good at it.

Mike Olszanski insists on calling May 1 Labor Day, as around the world it is commemorated as International Labor Day. On May 1, 1886, workers in Chicago and other industrial cities demonstrated for an 8-hour day.  Spring celebrations date back to Roman times and often feature dancing around a maypole.  Old girlfriend Suzanna Dienna Murphy wrote:

Who is old enough to remember May Day traditions? We hung little so-called nosegays of flowers on our neighbors’ front door handles made of bouquets put through a doily and then ran so it would be a surprise. There were also of course Maypole dances with colorful ribbons extending out for girls in beautiful flowing dresses to hold and dance. It was very dreamy and sweet. The college where my Grampa taught Philosophy and Religion classes, Beaver College, always had such a celebration. That was in Glenside Pennsylvania. There was always a reception afterwards. I remember wearing a pastel dress and while gloves and a hat, even when I was very little. For some reason I also remember little decorated sugar cubes that had flowers on top. I have not seen those in many years.

Bishopstone Church, Sussex, England

Reacting to a photo of my bowling team (Electrical Engineers) on Facebook, Ray Smock wrote, “You can fix my wiring anytime.” It took me a few seconds to get the joke.  Jef Halberstadt, who worked at Bethlehem Steel with Terry Kegebein (their lockers were next to each other), asked about our name.  When the team formed 60 years ago, all charter members were electrical engineers at Gary Sheet and Tin, the name of the Cressmoor Lanes league where we bowled until three years ago, when we switched to Mel Guth’s Seniors at Hobart Lanes. At the bowling banquet I managed to get daughter-in-law Delia’s Uncle Phil Vera to take a selfie with me; he also sent one with uncles Larry Ramirez and Eddie Lopez, plus Jaime and Melody Delgado and jokester Angel Menendez.

NWI Times correspondent Joseph Pete sought information about Gary’s Memorial Auditorium, which opened in 1927, closed in 1972, and was badly damaged by fire in 1997. Scheduled for demolition to make way for a 38-unit senior and middle-income housing project, the five thousand-seat facility housed high school basketball games and graduations, wrestling matches, concerts, and speaking engagements by visiting celebrities. I compared its sad fate to the still functioning, 80-year-old Hammond Civic Center. Pete used this quote from our interview:

 Truman gave a “give ’em hell” speech there in 1948.  Frank Sinatra sang there for a Tolerance concert during a famous school strike over integration in 1945.  Half the white students had walked out of Froebel High School, and he performed to get them to go back to school.  Bobby-soxers came in from Portage and other outlying communities to hear him.  It was a big national story that was covered in Life magazine.

Joe Van Dyk, Gary’s director of redevelopment and planning, vowed that historic features will be preserved, including limestone, cornices, the keystone, and other ornamental hallmarks.

 Times photo by Kale Wilk

After I posted the article on Facebook, Paul Kern noted that he attended his first basketball sectional there in 1969; and George Sladic commented that his late wife’s graduation ceremony took place there.  Connie Mack-Ward had this warning:

 Demolishing what remains of this building & disturbing the soil immediately around it will release microscopic histoplasmosis spores into the air--the building was found too dangerous to enter by a feasibility consultant at least 30 years ago, because it contains a large amount of bird excrement, which contains the spores, as does soil which has contacted it.
  Histoplasmosis in humans is very minor, like a little cold, so rarely diagnosed and treated, but the scars it often leaves in the eyes (not visible without special examination) can leave one blind, and the scars can become active or bleed years & even decades later, again causing blindness.

 

Mayor Pete Buttigieg made the cover of both Time and New Yorkmagazine.  The unlikely gay presidential candidate named a dog Truman inspired by the thirty-third President’s quip: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”He told Time: “The idea that we just sort people into baskets of good and evil ignores the central fact of human existence, which is that each of us is a basket of good and evil.  The job of politics is to summon the good and beat back the evil.”  Trump, who unfailingly does the opposite, blasted the decision of the Kentucky Derby stewards to disqualify apparent winner Maximum Security for endangering other horses and riders by an illegal lane change, calling it an example of “political correctness.”  Grumpy Trump is unhinged.

After many days of rain, the weekend was glorious.  I did some bush trimming and eradicated numerous dandelions.  When I was a kid, Vic paid me a dime for every 50 dandelions I pulled up by the roots.  More fun was capturing night crawlers before fishing trips, especially after a downpour. Using a flashlight, I’d pounce on those popping out of the ground before they could wiggle back into their holes.  You could feel them struggling to get free from your grip.

At Memorial Opera House we saw the delightful musical comedy “La cage aux Folles,” starring Andrew Brent and Thomas Olsen as an aging gay couple who perform in a review as drag queen and owner/master of ceremonies.  Old friend Patti Shaffner played Jacqueline, a café owner hoping to perform in the gay revue. Seeing guys dressed as female dancers reminded me of seeing “Kinky Boots” in Chicago.  Originally a French play, “La Cage aux Folles” opened on Broadway in 1983 and enjoyed another successful run 28 years later.  Dick Hagelberg knew Olsen from the Northwest Indiana Symphony Chorus; afterwards, Olsen was with an entourage at Pesto’s Restaurant. 

New York Times Sunday magazine highlighted 25 songs“that matter right now,” beginning with Bruce Springsteen’s oft misconstrued “Born in the U.S.A.,” which he performed without accompaniment in “Springsteen on Broadway.” Beforehand, he told of grooving at shows starring Walter Cichon and the Jersey Shore band the Motifs and that Cichon got drafted and never returned from Vietnam. When the selective service board summoned Springsteen, he succeeded in evading being drafted, certain he’d meet the same fate. He told the audience: “I do sometimes wonder who went in my place. Because somebody did.”

My Way

“I've lived a life that's full
I've traveled each and every highway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way”

         “My Way,” Paul Anka

“My Way” was originally a 1967 French song, “Comme d’Habitude” (“As Usual”).  Paul Anka wrote English lyrics expressly for Frank Sinatra, whose recording became a hit and thereafter his signature song. Elvis Presley covered it on the 1973 album “Aloha from Hawaii,” and it became a staple at his live shows, as well as Anka’s.  The Sex Pistols recorded a punk parody version with profane and nonsensical lyrics (i.e.,“To think, I killed a cat, and may I say, oh no, not their way”).  The final lines: “The record shows, I’ve got no clothes, and I did it my way.”  Martin Scorsese used the Sex Pistols rendition at the end of “Goodfellas,” as credits rolled.

  Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols  

Grandson James may perform “My Way” at a Portage H.S. Outstanding Student competition. I assume he’s familiar with the Sinatra version, but I told him that at Omar Farag’s Elvis Tribute shows, when the final performer sings “My Way,” women rush the stage to get scarves from “Elvis,” emulating The King’s female fans over 40 years ago.  I’d love it if James did an Elvis impression – or, even better Sid Vicious.  When Dave (whose high school nickname was Sid) was at Portage, he and his buddies appeared as the Sex Pistols in an air band contest and got disqualified.

 Al Samter and Mike Olszanski, circa 1974

A relative of Al Samter saw his name on my blog and asked for more information.  I replied that he was a labor activist, poker player, pipe smoker, and jazz expert who died from throat cancer.  A New Yorker who moved to Gary as a steel mill “colonizer” for the Communist Party, Samter would show up at a mutual friend’s house at Christmas bearing gifts and two geese for the hostess to cook. After he retired from the mill, Al Samter was a district leader in S.O.A.R, (Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees) and hosted a dinner dance at McBride Hall that went from 4 p.m. until 8.  At the time we poked fun at the hours, but now it makes perfect sense.  He and an African-American deejay took turns spinning records, alternating between jazz and rhythm ‘n’ blues.  At one point Samter played a Dixieland number and led the crowd in a strut around the room.  He had class.  Mike Olszanski and I interviewed him for our Steel Shavingsissue “Steelworkers Fight Back: Rank and File Insurgency in the Calumet Region during the 1970s” (volume 30, 2000).  Here is part of what he told us:

  After the war I had worked for a small record store in New York and then got laid off.  The big chain stores starting reducing prices on phonograph records, which forced mom-and-pop stores to cut back.  I was on and off the unemployment rolls and finally decided to make use of my G.I. Bill of Rights and get into an apprentice program.

 Everybody was going into the big industries, so in April of 1949 I came to Northwest Indiana and applied for an apprenticeship.  They didn’t have any such programs open but were hiring for the summer.  They sent me out to the coal chemical plant, as a pump operator.  The summer job turned into a permanent job.  I stayed 37 years.  I never did get into the apprenticeship program.  My job, especially after they built a new chemical coal plant in 1955, paid more than I would have gotten in any of the craft jobs.  My department took light oils which come off the coke-making process and separated and distilled them into the industrial oils benzene, toluene, and xylene.

  I became a shop steward and got acquainted with African-American Curtis Strong, who was running for grievance committeeman. I wrote some of his material. After he got elected, I became a shop steward.  One of my jobs was to sign up new members.  There were still some old-timers who were not union members, but I kept signing them up until our department was 100% union.

  Like Curtis Strong, I belonged to the caucus that supported John Mayerick, who became President of 1014 and formed a Civil Rights Committee.  I became its secretary. At one point we decided to have a joint civil rights committee meeting at Local 1014’s headquarters.  Among those attending were Fred Stern from Youngstown and Jim Balanoff from Inland.  At that point the International decided they better recognize us, so they sent somebody in from the International.  It was one of the things that pushed them into having a civil rights division. 

When I published a Shavingsissue on the Calumet Region during the Postwar years (volume 34, 2003), I dedicated it to a dozen “Old Lefties,” including Al Samter, who kept the faith in a time of repression. Class-conscious activists for civil rights, trade unionism, and peace, they realized the need for a fundamental reordering of wealth and power if the nation were to remain true to its historic ideals.

I was pleased that Garrett Peck’s “The Great War in America” had plentiful quotes from acerbic H.L. Mencken, a second-generation German-American and Baltimore Sun columnist critical of American participation in the conflict and the resultant abridgement of civil liberties. He supported women’s suffrage, and expressed outrage at the postwar Red Scare roundup of radicals.  He ridiculed the Eighteenth Amendment, Prohibition. In “A Carnival on Buncombe,” Mencken wrote: “Between [Woodrow] Wilson and his brigades of informers, spies, volunteer detectives, perjurers and complaisant judges, and the Prohibitionists and their messianic delusion, the liberty of the citizen has pretty well vanished in America.”  As Warren Gamaliel Harding was on his way to victory in the 1920 Presidential election, Mencken sneered:“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by an outright moron.”

In an epilogue, Peck, on the advisory council of the Woodrow Wilson House  at 2340 S Street, mentioned that Wilson lived out his remaining years in a Washington, D.C., townhouse located in the fashionable Kalorama neighborhood. The outgoing President purchased a replica of the White House Lincoln bed and kept his oval office chair and gifts received during his Presidential trip to Europe, including a huge tapestry.  Peck added:

  Along with the transport vans carrying Wilson’s furniture was a truck bearing a special cargo: their wine collection. Prohibition had made the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol illegal, but not its possession. Wilson had no desire to leave behind his collection for President Harding, who was known to throw a good party. “In the shipment was a whole barrel of fine Scotch whiskey, besides a variety of rare wines and liquors,”the New York Times reported.

 George Remus

I learned from author Garrett Peck that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled title character Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby” (1925) after Cincinnati bootlegger George Remus.  An actor assumes the role of Remus in the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.”  Born in Berlin, Germany, and growing up in Chicago, Remus became a pharmacist and then a lawyer who took advantage of a loophole in the Volstead Act permitting alcohol to be sold in drug stores for medicinal purposes. He invested heavily in both pharmacies and distilleries.  After moving to Cincinnati, he’d have his own men “steal” liquor from the distilleries and resell it for huge profits.  Remus threw lavish parties at his mansion, nicknamed the Marble Palace.  One featured a 15-piece orchestra and aquatic dancers wearing scandalous bathing suits.  At another he gave diamond stickpins to male guests and new automobiles to their wives. His extravagant lifestyle attracted the attention of federal agents.  Remus spent two years in prison for bootlegging, during which time wife Imogene and her lover cheated him of his fortune, and she filed for divorce.  He had left properties, stock, and bank accounts in her name.  Freed, he fatally shot Imogene and, pleading temporary insanity, was acquitted.  Thereafter, Remus lived modestly in Covington, Kentucky and died from a stroke in 1952 at age 77.    

 Tom Brady

Even though I was rooting for New Orleans and Kansas City in the conference championships, the contests, both going into overtime, could not have been more exciting. When Rams kicker Greg Zuerlein nailed a 57-yarder, Bears fans couldn’t help but think that could have been their fate had they signed a competent place kicker.  As Tom Brady led the Patriots on consecutive clutch TD drives, one couldn’t help but admire the 41-year-old future Hall of Famer.  New England’s presence will give me a team to root against in Super Bowl LIII. Still, I feel sorry for Saints QB Drew Brees and Chiefs coach Andy Reed, who had several good years with the Eagles.

 Charles Eastman

The HBO movie “Bury My Heart in Wounded Knee” not only traced the cruel fate befalling the Lakota tribes during the late nineteenth century but described the life of Hakadah, a Santee Lakota tribesman who took the Christian name Charles Eastman and graduated from Boston University medical school.  At Pine Ridge Reservation in 1890, he cared for survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre.  He was subsequently dismissed by the Bureau of Indiana Affairs for criticizing its policies toward Native-Americans. He married reformer Elaine Goodale, and the couple had six children.

Season 3 of “True Detective” has Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff teaming up as Arkansas troopers Wayne Hays and Roland West on a case involving the murder of a 12 year-old and the disappearance of his 10 year-old sister.  During one racially charged exchange Ali tells his partner that he is not one of his tribe.

 David Parnell

I spoke in David Parnell’s freshman seminar on the history of IU Northwest.  IU Extension classes began a hundred years ago and expanded rapidly during the 1920s.  School Superintendent William A. Wirt started Gary College in 1932 intended for enable students unable to go away to college to earn a two-year degree. Classes met at Horace Mann after high school hours.  After World War II, Gary College ended, and IU Extension classes met at Seaman Hall in downtown Gary, as well as a facility in East Chicago until the move to its present Glen Park location in 1959.  Eight years later, IU Northwest, as it came to be called, held its first graduation ceremony as a four-year institution, outdoors, near its one building, Gary Main, (later renamed Tamarack and condemned after the 2008 flood). I explained that Kern and my collaboration combined social and administrative history, with Paul relying on written sources while I provided oral testimony both from student interviews and my own.  Parnell’s acclaimed book, “Justinian’s Men: Careers and Relationships of Byzantine Army Officers, 518-610,” takes a similar approach.  When I mentioned that to Parnell, he replied: “​That's true! I would become even more of a social historian if I could conduct oral interviews on ancient Byzantines. What a treat that would be.”

Because the class will be discussing future possibilities for IUN, I brought up past debates over possible merger with Purdue Calumet.  One student asked whether doing recent history led to controversies, so I brought up incidents involving my Steelworkers Tales and cedar Lake issues and the Anne Balay case, Another question involved Glen Park student hangouts, and I brought up taking evening classes to Jenny’s Café and the Country Lounge in Hobart.  Even though desegregation was occurring in Glen Park, several bars along Broadway were still hostile toward African-American customers.