4 Dead in Ohio

“Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?”

    Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

Fifty years ago, Ohio National Guardsmen fired on unarmed demonstrators at Kent State University who were protesting President Richard Nixon’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam by invading Cambodia, killing four and wounding nine others.  Shortly before, “Tricky Dick” had labeled students “bums.”  Early that day, Mississippi police killed two students and wounded 12 at Jackson State. 

Millions of college and high school students all over the country boycotted classes in protest over the more widely publicized event at Kent State.  At the University of Maryland, demonstrators blocked Route 1 adjacent to campus; state troopers invaded campus and beat up many peaceful protestors. When I received my PhD degree weeks later, the university was still under martial law. I went through the ceremony wearing a peace sign.

IUN colleague Patricia Hicks was a student at Kent State at the time of the massacre.  At the time her mother was a Math professor. She recalled:

    On May 4, 1970, I lived in Tri-Towers where all of the action was at Kent State. Bullets literally came through my residence hall to the extent that we had to hide under our beds!! This was on Beloved Mother's birthday!! Seeing this on TV, she drove to Kent State that day. They refused to let the parents on campus; HOWEVER, my Mother, being the Taurus that she was, they HAD to either let her on campus or kill her!! So she made it on campus to see for herself that the campus had been evacuated!!!

Vicki Wakoczeski wrote: “I was at Valpo.  Demonstrators on campus.  Administration building (Kinsey Hall) was torched; destroyed half of the music school.”  University historian Richard Baepler recalled students sitting-in at Kinsey Hall; he was vice president of academic affairs at the time and attempted to calm the situation by various means, including playing the piano.  He told the Vidette-Messenger: “The fire was ruled an arson. Eventually officials learned a couple of students who were under the influence of drugs, had set the fire, never intending it to get out of control, he said. While they were never prosecuted, they were expelled from the university.”

Rick Scott remembered:

  We were only 300 miles away in West Lafayette, Indiana, when this happened. I remember rallies at Purdue, a place that had been normally a sedate and conservative campus, protesting Nixon’s April 30th announcement about expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia. All hell broke loose that weekend beginning, Friday, May 1st, with a protest outside the ROTC building. After the Kent State killings a few days later, I seem to recall a strong National Guard presence at Purdue and the spring semester ending early (as it did at many schools). I read James Michener’s Kent State: What Happened and Why, a thorough and devastating account. He concluded the fatal shootings were an accident, and has been criticized by those who’ve concluded it was manslaughter or even murder. Intentionality of the young soldiers or their leaders is a difficulty aspect of that tragedy to discern. Regardless, 50 years ago the politicized culture war hardened.

Finished the HBO series on the Atlanta child murders of 40 years. In all likelihood a KKK member was responsible for several of the killings, but Georgia law enforcement authorities covered it up and let all the blame fall on Wayne Williams, convicted of killing two older young men, for fear, unlikely though it was, of setting off a race war.

Miranda appeared in a YouTube video made in a Nashville bar by boyfriend Will Kramer’s band SWT Justice, performing a rollicking rock number, “Last Call.”  It’s an interesting side of Will not apparent on first meeting him. Becca will be a freshman in the fall at Belmont College in Nashville, which hosts an annual country music conference.

Like me, Indiana Historical Society historian and Traces editor Ray Boomhower often posts about Hoosier events and people of historical significance.  Recent entries, which I suspect get mentioned in Boomhower’s new book “To Be Hoosiers” have dealt with astronaut Virgil Grissom, Civil War hero and Ben-Her author Lew Wallace, and President Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893) as responsible for preserving Yellowstone and Sequoia national parks and Grand Canyon Forest Preserve. Like Theodore Roosevelt, whose preservation efforts are better known, Harrison was an avid hunter who enjoyed shooting waterfowl on the Kankakee River, including once on Lew Wallace’s houseboat.

Tom Streit of Indiana Humanities posted this interesting experience:

This past weekend, I launched my kayak from the Hazel Dell Park landing heading downstream the White River toward Broad Ripple. Although I’ve taken this trek regularly, I noticed something I’d never seen before, just north of Oliver’s Woods. At the very top of a sycamore tree sat two eagles and their family of eaglets. Each eagle would swoop down, grab something and bring it back up to its family. I think I watched them for what seemed like an hour before trying to film them for our INSlowMoments campaign. I pulled out my phone from its waterproof bag to capture the footage when some iconic guitar chords rang out.      “Little ditty ’bout Jack and Diane, two American kids doing the best they can.”      Three kayaks came cruising around the corner. One had a boombox strapped to the front, on full blast, as if the sounds of nature was the problem and Johnny Cougar was the solution. My moment of quiet reflection had passed.     My kayak had been idle so long that it felt wrong disturbing the shore as I pushed away. My noisy neighbors gave me a hat tip and kept on their good time. As I paddled away, the Coug started to fade around the bend and my station tuned back into a chorus of sparrows, cardinals and the snare of a woodpecker.     I might not have been able to capture it on video, but that Slow Moment will stick with me for a long time. I hope you find your own Slow Moment somewhere near you—maybe even in your own backyard.

Super Tuesday

“It’s a good night.  I’m here to report that we are very much alive.  It may be over for the other guy,” Joe Biden

Like the much-hyped Super Bowl, Super Tuesday does not always produce dramatic results; but in 2020, as CNBC reported, “Joe Biden is the front-runner again after he shocked the world.”  The tide began to turn three days before, in South Carolina.  After U.S. House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn endorsed him, Biden cruised to a landslide primary victory over Bernie Sanders thanks to overwhelming support from African Americans. Pundits doubted this would have a major impact on Super Tuesday since many voters had cast their ballots early, Biden was almost out of money, and his campaign had almost no foot soldiers on the ground in key states such as California, Texas, and Minnesota.  Then, in short order, billionaire Tom Strider, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Senator Amy Klobuchar, seeing the handwriting on the wall, dropped out of the race and endorsed Obama’s former vice-president.  On election eve, Texan Beto O’Rourke embraced him at a rally where both Buttigieg and Klobuchar made eloquent speeches on his behalf. Biden won 9 of the 13 contests, including Texas and Minnesota, and picked up almost as many delegates in California as Sanders.  Next day, Mike Bloomberg dropped out and threw his support to Biden.  Elizabeth Warren has suspended her campaign, so it appears to be down to a two-candidate contest.

For the first time in weeks, I am cautiously optimistic about Trump being a one-term president. That’s the most pressing issue for most Democrats, and Bernie heading the ticket would be a disaster.  At bridge Terry Brendel was similarly buoyed by the outcome.  When someone, probably a Republican, said she wasn’t for Sanders but thought others were unfairly ganging up on him, I replied that other Democrats should gang up on him, he’s not even a Democrat but rather an Independent and socialist.  Had Republicans ganged up on Trump in 2016, I added, maybe the country would have been spared the scourge of his unprincipled presidency. 

Here’s Ray Smock’s take on the sudden shift in momentum:

     It appears that Democratic Party primary voters had an epiphany when Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, and a powerful voice in South Carolina politics, endorsed Joe Biden for president. Congressman Clyburn cut through all the campaign hype and talked from his heart about how fearful he was about the situation in our politics right now. He said we were at an “inflection point," a time to change the arch of our political trajectory because we cannot sustain the current situation. While Clyburn mentioned issues such as affordable and accessible healthcare, education, and housing, he talked mostly about Joe Biden’s integrity and his commitment to the cause of good government. He said it was an inflection point because we needed “to restore the country’s dignity; the country’s respect….”He said “I know Joe. We know Joe. Most importantly, Joe knows us.”

    Jim Clyburn’s emotional call for decency and integrity in our nation and in the person we send to the White House struck that deep chord in many voters. It cut through the fog of the campaign and its myriad issues. We want normalcy to include dignity and respect. If our leaders do not have integrity, if they cannot speak honestly to us; if they do not have strong character, a character not measured in TV debates but in what we see in their hearts, then we will continue to be fearful of our future. It’s not that the other Democratic candidates lack honesty and integrity, or any appearance of normalcy, so much as the strong perception that Joe Biden stood for these things above any other issue. He conveyed a presidential gravitas the others could not match.

    We want desperately to believe that normalcy includes goodness. We want a person that can unify the nation and begin to heal the wounds of vicious partisanship that have too long dominated our politics. The Super Tuesday elections confirmed what Jim Clyburn set in motion. We will see if the upcoming primaries will sustain the amazing momentum, a leap toward normalcy, that Democrats see in Joe Biden, as if for the first time.  Democratic Party primary voters across the board said Joe Biden best exemplified the qualities that make him the standard bearer who can do battle against a president who does not appeal to our better angels and is not normal.

Lois Turco responded to Ray’s post and photo of Biden: “I like a President who eats ice cream in a cone. Normalcy is comforting.”

After a historian labels our sixteenth president a self-serving, racist politician who hated abolitionists, as Fred Kaplan does in “Abraham Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War” (2017), one might expect a cool reception in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.  Reviewer Daniel Feller, University of Tennessee Knoxville historian and editor of the  Andrew Jackson papers, didn't disappoint; he skewers Kaplan as incompetent and his book as incoherent, then lists several dozen factual inaccuracies, including Lincoln leaning toward Jackson’s Democratic Party before that party came into existence. Feller concluded: “Kaplan’s sanctimonious prating about what Lincoln should have known and should have done is at first grating and in the end insufferable. . . There are many fine books out there worth buying and reading.  Don’t waste your time on this one.”

Lincoln funeral train

Faring much better was “Mourning Lincoln” (2015) by Martha Hodes, reviewed by John McKee Barr, who praised its “thorough research, stirring prose, and aptly placed quotations.” Here’s how Barr summarized the reaction of most Northerners to Lincoln’s assassination : “Astonished.  Astounded. Startled. Stupefied.  Thunderstruck.  A calamity.  A catastrophe.  A dagger to the heart.  A thunderbolt from a clear blue sky.  The feelings that had engulfed the confederates less than a week earlier now overtook their conquerors.”  Barr acknowledges that most Southerners were overjoyed, Copperheads not unhappy, Radical Republicans apprehensive but hopeful that Andrew Johnson would be more malleable, and freedmen devastated and in intense mourning. Nearly a million people witnessed the Lincoln funeral train as it meandered on a 1,654-mile journey from Washington, DC, to a tomb in Springfield, Illinois, lying in state at a dozen locations, including Indianapolis and Michigan City, Indiana.

Driving to Miller, I dropped off my new Steel Shavings to Ron and Nancy Cohen and Celeste and Michael Chirich.  Ron gave me a New York Review of Books issue with a Kara Walker drawing on the cover. Accompanying the article by Zadie Smith, “What Do We Want History to Do for Us?” was a 1994 illustration showing two grotesque woman, slave and mistress presumably, bound by a rope, whose identities were forced on them rather than chosen.  Mike and Celeste had just returned from Puerto Rico, where they had stayed at a condo a block from the Caribbean.  One night they heard police cars and helicopters hovering overhead, attempting to capture, they learned later, a boatload of immigrants who’d arrived illegally from the Dominican Republic. I had intended to drop off a magazine at Ayers Realtors for Judy and Gene Ayers, but police cars were blocking traffic – apparently a traffic accident.

In Breakfast of Champions author Kurt Vonnegut’s alter ago Kilgore Trout, an unappreciated science fiction writer whose only outlet for his work was in porno magazines, found this message in the men's room of a seedy New York City movie house: “What is the Purpose of Life?”  Trout’s answer: “To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe.”  In “Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style” (2019) Suzanne McConnell noted that the implication, as a Vonnegut character put it, was that the creator was “the laziest man in town.”  Thus, it was up to writers to be that conscience.

Vonnegut poked fun at pretentious critics. Midland City English teachers, he wrote, constantly berated students for grammatical mistakes, incorrect pronunciation, and poor choice of words:

  They would wince and cover their ears and give out flunking grades and so on whenever students failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War.  Also: students were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn’t love or understand incomprehensible novels and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.

    The black people would not put up with this.  They refused to read books they couldn’t understand – on the grounds they couldn’t understand them.  They would ask such impudent questions as, “Whuffo I want to read no 'Tale of Two Cities?' Whuffo?”

    Patty Keene (a white waitress who had dropped out of high school and had programmed herself in the interest of survival to be stupid on purpose) flunked English when she had to read and appreciate Ivanhoe, which was about men in iron suits and the women who loved them. And she was put in a remedial reading class, where they made her read The Good Earth, which was about Chinamen.

Vonnegut claimed to be in the business of making jokes and compared his method to setting a mousetrap: “You build the trap, you cock it, you trip it, and then bang!”  Here is an example from “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” about quixotic philanthropist Eliot Rosewater, son of a conservative Indiana senator, who believed Kilgore Trout to be a genius:

    “You know,” Eliot said to the Senator, “Kilgore Trout wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors.  That was the national purpose.  There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.”

    “This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors.  But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more.  He went right to the root of the problem.”

  “Uh huh,” said the Senator.  He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarrassed by his son.  “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?” he suggested to hasten the tale to a conclusion  

   “No.  As I say, the hero was a dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.”

In a Bridge Bulletin letter titled “Worst Hand Ever?” Ken Parker claimed that, sitting West at a game in Leland, North Carolina, he was dealt a hand containing four 2s, four 3s, three 4s, a 5, and a 6. After North bid a Diamond, his partner doubled, a force bid once South passed.  Parker bid a Spade, his only 4-card suit, and his partner raised to 4 Spades.  Parker actually made the bid after getting a favorable opening lead.  I scratched (that’s a good thing, meaning I earned master points) at Chesterton Y on Tuesday with Joel Charpentier and  at Banta Center on Wednesday with Dottie Hart.  On the final hand Dottie made 3 Spades doubled for high board.

Liz at El Camino Real, by Al Schuette

Liz Wueffel emailed: “Allison and I are in Santa Fe on spring break and enjoying the full sun. It’s cold at night, being 7000 ft above sea and the start of the Rockies, but beautiful during the day. Today we’re off to the Georgia O’Keefe museum and then we’ll hike a bit!”  I replied: When the OHA was in Albuquerque, I was in Santa Fe with Toni and granddaughter Alissa when she was a pre-schooler.  We toured a Native American museum.   It happened to be near Halloween and merchants were welcoming trick-or-treaters.  Alissa didn’t have a costume, so Toni put a camera around her neck and she went as a tourist.  Making out like a bandit, on the bus ride back to Albuquerque Alissa handed out treats to fellow OHA passengers.  An unforgettable memory.

Bowling against Just Friends, the Engineers won the first two games but in the third were down 13 pins going into the final frame.  Our leadoff man Joe Piunti doubled to get us close.  I threw a strike and then buried my next ball only to leave the ten-pin.  Frank had an impossible split but picked up 2 of the 3 pins, keeping us close. Our clean-up man, Don Geidemann doubled but so did theirs, Denny Cavanaugh, so we lost by 3 pins. We made them earn it though.  Mikey Wardell seemed delighted to receive Steel Shavings, which mentions the delicious fudge he often brings to share.  In fact, I enjoyed a caramel treat he offered me.  George Leach, to whom I’d given a copy the week before, enjoyed the remembrances of retired Gary cop Al Shanahan, passed on to me by Jesse Salomon.  George recalled such Glen Park joints where Gary veteran cops hung out as Pete and Snooks and Junedale Tap, which on Friday nights served delicious fried lake perch dinners.  

March has been designated National Reading Month in honor of Dr. Seuss’s birthday.  Miranda read “Wonder” by R.J. Palacio to her students, the story of a kid born with facial bone abnormality who enters public school in fifth grade after having previously been homeschooled.  A reviewer for The Guardian concluded that it has “such charm and heart, even in the sad parts,” and called it a “great emotional journey that . . . will leave any reader feeling better.”

James is on a two-week semester break from Valpo U. At dinner we had leftover Chinese fortune cookies for desert. Mine read: “You are the master of every situation.”  If only that were true.

Halloween

Missy and Marianne Brush

“He made too many enemies
Of the people who would keep us on our knees”

         “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead,” XTC

When he was in high school 30 years ago, Robert Blaszkiewicz turned me on to the British post-punk band XTC, which rarely toured because frontman Andy Partridge often experienced uncontrollable stage fright.  On Halloween WXRT played “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead,” even though its connection to All Saints Day is tenuous. Here’s my favorite verse:

Peter Pumpkinhead put to shame
Governments who would slur his name
Plots and sex scandals failed outright
Peter merely said
Any kind of love is alright

But he made too many enemies
Of the people who would keep us on our knees
Hooray for Peter Pumpkin
Who'll pray for Peter Pumpkinhead?

Growing up in Fort Washington, PA, I’d go Halloweening, and neighbors would beseech us to come inside so they could guess who you were. Last night, Toni and I gave out candy to plenty of Halloweeners in nice costumes, but nary a one was wearing a mask.  That made sense in terms of comfort and safety, plus we could recognize kids we knew.  James, however, dressed as Papyrus, a major character in the role-playing video game Undertale.

 James as Papyrus

When my family moved to a new suburban subdivision outside Detroit in the mid-Fifties, the houses were close together and homeowners just distributed treats without fanfare, allowing us to really cash in.  One year, I went trick or treating with Phil and Dave in Miller as an outlaw and received more candy than they did; maybe I seemed threatening.  On isolated Maple Place, within the National Lakeshore, we got virtually no Halloween traffic except friends who made a special trip.  When Alissa lived with us, we’d drive her to neighborhoods in Hobart and Miller.  One year it was pouring, and she really cleaned up since few kids were out and folks felt sorry for her.

 Frank Leslie's Illustrated cartoon: 1876 Republican candidates Henry Wilson, James G. Blaine, 

Roscoe Conkling, Oliver Morton, Elihu Washburn

The current issue of Indiana Magazine of History contained A. James Fuller’s “‘A Bloody Shirt and a Pair of Ripe Ruby Lips’: Reconstruction, Sex Scandals, and Oliver P. Morton’s Bid for the Presidency in 1876.” A wartime governor and Radical Republican Senator, Morton once described the Democratic Party as “a common sewer and loathsome receptacle into which is emptied every element of treason.”  The Hoosier Stalwart was a top-tier candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1876 despite health concerns and morality issues.  Ruthless and vindictive, he was a notorious womanizer.  While governor, Morton allegedly demanded carnal favors from a woman who sought a pardon for her brother and seduced wives of military officers he sent to the battlefield. When he suffered a stroke, wags claimed that the cause was a sexually transmitted disease.  Branded a lecherous scoundrel, the Chicago Times, a Democratic organ, ran a story headlined, “Hellish Liaisons and Attempted Seductions by Indiana’s Favorite Stud Horse.”  On the first ballot at the Republican National Convention, nonetheless, Morton finished second behind Senator James G. Blaine, but Ohioan Rutherford B. Hayes emerged as the nominee on the seventh ballot.  Hayes would go on to lose the 1876 election to Samuel Tilden only to have a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats concoct a backroom deal that elevated “His Fraudulency” to the White House.

 New Yorker illustration by Nick Little

On the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s protest against the Roman Catholic Church that sparked the Protestant Reformation, Joan Acocella’s New Yorker article “The Hammer: How Martin Luther Changed the World” asserts that the story of his hammering the 95 Theses to the doors of Wittenberg’s Castle Church never occurred.  What Luther did was send his broadside to the local archbishop.  Most theses dealt with the odious sale of indulgences, but the most important theologically were sola fide (by faith alone as the basis for salvation) and sola scriptura (truth as revealed by the Bible alone).

At Chesterton library, I checked out a Specials CD and Finn Murphy’s “The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road.”  I’m hoping that the author deals with gay, lesbian, and transgender truckers and adds to what I learned from proofreading Anne Balay’s forthcoming book.  Known by the handle U-Turn, Murphy drove an 18-wheeler nicknamed Cassidy, carrying belongings all over America.  The memoir seems candid, witty and, of course, written from a male perspective. In the Introduction, I learned that freight-haulers generally look down on operators of moving vans as bedbuggers driving roach coaches and that Murphy doesn’t buy into what he called the trucker myth:

I don’t wear a cowboy hat, Tony Lama snakeskin boots, or a belt buckle doing free advertising for Peterbilt or Harley-Davidson.  My moving uniform s a black cotton jumpsuit.  I’m not from the South and don’t talk as if I were.  Most telling, and the other guys can sense this somehow, I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom or any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.

In her Sixties class, Nicole Anslover showed excerpts from Martin Luther King’s “Mountaintop” speech and Robert F. Kennedy’s remarks to supporters in Indianapolis announcing Dr. King’s death. I was moved to tears and wondered how many students felt a similar emotion.  When I studied at Bucknell under historian William H. Harbaugh in 1963, an equivalent passage of time would have been the bygone World War I era.  Still, Harbaugh made the crackdown on dissenters then seem relevant.  I told the class about driving through Washington, DC, ghettos neighborhoods within sight of the White House that had been burned to the ground during the riots following King’s assassination and how Gary’s Mayor Hatcher hurried back from a meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson to “keep a lid” on his city.

Aaron Davis (above), having embarked from Fort Wayne on a months-long trip to California, posted: “This is what an exhausted and wet bicycle tourist looks like. I'm sexy and I know it.”  He added:

  Rode 113 miles over the last two days, with over a mile of climbing, through the cold and rain of the Kentucky autumn. Suffice to say I'm pleased with my willingness to push myself while on the bike. On the other hand, I still have plenty of room for growth when it comes to shunning comfort after my rides are finished. Spending too much money on motels. What can I say? I like showers and beds and electricity. Crazy, right? Anyway, I could wax philosophical about how I should feel regarding how I do feel, but I need to go to bed. Riding to mammoth cave national park tomorrow, where I'll camp one or two nights. Then probably to Nashville. Oh, I reached the 500-mile mark today, on day 15 of my tour. Not too shabby.

Lane Family Album

above, Angie; below, Becca and James as Papyrus

Miranda's family at Parkview Elementary party

Dave with Jennifer Nemier and Nayeli Arredondo Guerra