Love and Mercy

   “I was standin' in a bar and watchin' all the people there
Oh the loneliness in this world well it's just not fair

Hey love and mercy that's what you need tonight
So, love and mercy to you and your friends tonight”

    Brian Wilson, “Love and Mercy” 

The 2014 movie “Love and Mercy” about musical genius Brian Wilson’s struggles with mental illness starred John Cusack and Paul Dano, both portraying the Beach Boys troubled leader, with Paul Giamatti as Wilson’s tyrannical quack therapist. The flashbacks centers on the making of “Pet Sounds” (1966) after Wilson ceased touring with the band, which cousin Mike Love ridiculed as not having the Beach Boys sound.  Love had a point, but it was unrealistic to expect Wilson to write about being true to your school, long for surfer girls or ruminate about when he grew up to be a man. More realistic was “In My Room,” where “I lock out all my worries and my fears” – in fact, for several years to come Wilson would largely confine himself to his bedroom.  “Sloop John B” has the old Beach Boys sound but ends: “I want to go home, why don’t you let me go home.” “Pet Sounds” was a commercial failure in the U.S. but hailed in Europe. The track “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is one of my favorite songs and describes an ideal world where we could “live together in the kind of worlds where we belong”  -  a pipe dream in the Chinese sense of the word. Two decades later, Wilson meets his future wife, who helps him on the road toward getting his life back again.  As credits roll, there’s a concert performance of Wilson singing “Love and Mercy,” first recorded in 1988, which bemoans violence and pain in the world.  Bono called it “one of the great songs ever written.”   

At bridge Dee Browne and I finished with a 61.81 percent, normally enough to win, but George and Sally Will scored 67.36.  We took two high boards from them or they’d have had a rare 70 percent game.  On the other hand, Lila Cohen and Pam Missman, who finished third, cleaned our clock or we’d have prevailed. Terry Brendel spoke of meeting his wife of 50-plus years at a Purdue computer dance.  The date Terry got matched up with didn’t show and Terry’s wife information wasn’t  computed, so  he took the initiative upon spotting her.  

Bowling opponent Ami Luedke recently retired after delivering mail for 40 years in New Chicago and Hobart.  We took two games from Dorothy’s Darlings; I rolled a 189 in the second one.  Then they got hot, but we held on for series.  Gene Clifford intends to drive to New York City with Dorothy Peterson to visit the maritime history museum by the Hudson River to see the USS Intrepid, a navy aircraft carrier that his brother served on during World War II.  Commissioned in August 1943, the Intrepid participated in several Pacific Theater operations, including the Battle of Leyte Gulf. After being torpedoed and hit by four kamikaze planes, crew members nicknamed it the Decrepit.  Prior to being decommissioned in 1974, the Intrepid participated in rescue procedures for the Gemini 3 crew and several Vietnam deployments. 

Dave and Nicole; below, Traymon Ray

Toni and I were Dave’s special guests at two East Chicago Central Black History Month back-to-back programs, which he coordinated with the assistance of women’s basketball coach Nicole Ford-Moore and teacher Aaron Duncil, the latter, like Dave, mentored by John Bodnar at Portage High School.  When Taymon Ray and Arceli Timajero sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the “Negro National Anthem,” I turned to see if students were standing, as often happens at Gary events. Poetry selections, chosen by Dave, included Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again” and “What If I Am a Black Woman?” by an unknown author. The first show featured African dance (I recognized Taymon Ray from ”Lift Every Voice”) and hip hop in the second hour.  Dave played guitar with students A. Silvas, J. Gutierrez, and K. Sparks on numbers by the Temptations and Bill Withers that he selected and for the finale sang “Johnny B. Goode,” complete with Chuck Berry’s trademark strut, breaking a guitar string in the process but carrying on as if nothing were amiss.  I needlessly worried the broken string would hit him in the face.  In the program he thanked Toni and me for our support, as well as numerous colleagues, Malcolm X, and Randall P. McMurtry of Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” played by Jack Nicholson in the film.  Afterwards, we chatted with School Superintendent Dee-Etta Wright, whom I had met last summer at James’s graduation party.

EC Central students & chaperones

The night before, Dave had chaperoned a school trip to the Chicago Bears training facility.  Friday evening, he participated in a “Dancing with the Stars” fundraiser.  We had planned to watch James’s former teammates bowl next morning and then have lunch at Culver’s like old times, but Daveput it off a week because he was exhausted after three school events within 28 hours. 

At Chesterton library I picked up a double-CD of classic rock selections; most I hear as much as I want to on the radio; but it included, incongruously, Don McLean’s “American Pie,” which I plan to mention during my Munster talk on Rock and Roll, 1960 next week in reference to the plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper (“the day the music died,” as McLean put it). Other tracks that attracted me were the Allman Brothers Band’s “Midnight Rider” (bringing back ancient memories of getting high with late-great artist Larry Kaufman) and “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart (ubiquitous emanating from boom boxes on Wells Street Beach in the early Seventies with the pungent smell of coconut tanning oil in the air).

Tara Westover’s memoir “Educated” didn’t get less traumatic once she enrolled at BYU in Salt Lake City; family crises kept pulling her back into dangerous and humiliating situations that left her badly in need of therapy, as her bipolar father judged her to be a menace in need of redemption for straying from Mormon practices and not submitting to his complete domination.  I started Charles Kuralt’s autobiography, “A Life on the Road” (1990), which contained anecdotes from when he and his CBS Sunday Morning crew logged more than a million miles “on the road.” For example, in Dillon, Montana, he asked a barber sweeping the floor: “Are you free?” “Nope,” was the reply, “I charge seven dollars.” On an Iowa truck stop men’s room prophylactic machine was scratched: “This gum tastes like rubber.” A wizened North Dakota farmer married over 40 years told Kuralt: “Kissing don’t last, but good cooking does.” Roger Welsch explained that the wind blew so hard on the Great Plains that farmers didn’t need weathervanes, “They just look out the window to see which way the barn is leaning.”

Kate Elizabeth Russell received a million-dollar advance for her debut novel, “My Dark Vanessa,” about a high school student’s affair with an English teacher.  When Kate began writing 20 years ago, she thought of it as a romance.  Three years earlier, she had been at dinner with Wallflowers front man Jakob Dylon (her dad was a local deejay) and learned that his favorite book was Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.  She found a copy and for years was attracted to much older men.  When the Me Too movement arose, Kate reread Lolita and realized the exploitative nature of many such relationships.  Nabokov himself told a Paris interviewer who found the protagonist “touching: “Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear ‘touching.”  To New York magazine writer Lila Shapiro, Russell pointed out this passage from Lolita after Humbert first seduced his 12-year-old prey:

    Humbert fantasizes about painting a lavish mural to depict what happened in the hotel room. “There would have been a lake.  There would have been an arbor in flame-flower.  There would have been nature studies – a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat . . . There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday.  There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging, red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

Russell explained: “It’s just gorgeous prose and then the last image of a wincing child.  It’s so easy to skim over.”  How I wish I could discuss Lolita with former IUN English professor George Bodmer, once a good friend, who assigned the book in an upper division course but stopped speaking to me over a university matter.

In researching the history of Gary Roosevelt for a Post-Tribune feature, Carole Carlson discovered that its origins stemmed from the aftermath to the infamous 1927 Emerson School Strike.  After Superintendent William A. Wirt transferred 14 honors students seeking college prep courses from the non-accredited Virginia Street School, approximately half the white students boycotted classes.  The Gary school board subsequently voted to oust both the newly enrolled students and several African-Americans living in the Emerson neighborhood who had already been at the school.  The NAACP represented three students who protested their dismissal, but both local judge Grant Crumpacker and the Indiana Supreme Court ruled against them. Carlson consulted my “City of the Century” as well as publications by historian Ronald Cohen and Dolly Millender, plus interviewed DeLynne Exum, the granddaughter of ousted student Hazel Bratton, and Vernon Smith, the son of victim Julia Allen.  While some classmates traveled to Chicago to continue their education, Smith said that his mother never finished her schooling: “They were spit on, pushed, and called the “N’ word. We always tried to get her to go to night school, but she began a family.  I think the pain [of what happened] continued until death.” How awful.  

Before her death in 2009 at age 96 Hazel Bratton Sanders told a Post-Trib reporter:

    The white students would line upon both sides of the sidewalk and stretch their arms over us.  We had to walk under them like under an arch.  They yelled out, “Go away, darkies.  This isn’t your school.”

Granddaughter DeLynne Exum told Carlson: “It was the indignity of how they were dismissed.  It was inhumane.  These were bright students.  It traumatized her.  When she was dying, she had nightmares of going through that gauntlet; she would relive it.”

above, Laura Gorski & Jeremiah Mellen; below, Reagan Smedley, Gorski, Luke Housman, photo by Ray Gapinski

Toni and I saw the final, sold-out performance of “Mary Poppins” at Memorial Opera House with the Hagelbergs, followed by dinner at Pesto’s.  As always, the production was well done with an excellent cast that included several familiar actors, including Jeremiah Mellen (Quasimoto in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) as chimneysweep Bert, Thomas Olsen as the policeman, and talented seventh grader Reagan Smedley (Susan Waverly in “White Christmas”) as Jane Banks. In the program Smedley revealed that when not on stage she enjoys singing, playing the piano, and hanging out with her friends – and added that now, given that major role, she can cross playing Jane Banks off her bucket list.  When we first saw Reagan on stage, she’d to sob at the final performance curtain call. It was touching watching her bravely fighting to smile and hold back the tears.

Darrow & Bryan, below, Fats Waller

Nicole Anslover invited me to her class on the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial.  She first explained the rise of rural-urban tensions during the 1920s and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.  I brought out how strong the KKK became in Indiana, especially in small towns such as Crown Point and Valparaiso, and that it was anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, not just anti-black.  After she noted that the ACLU sought a test case and described what transpired in the aftermath of the Tennessee legislature passing a law forbidding the teaching of evolution, I noted that the 1920s being an age of urban boosterism, Dayton, Tennessee, business leaders hoped to draw large crowds  that would put Dayton on the map.  Crowds came, but the publicity wasn’t exactly what the city fathers had hoped for.  This was the heyday of daily newspapers whose publishers loved lengthy trials, continuing sagas that could be hyped over days and weeks.  Students gave brief reports on Harlem Renaissance celebrities Cab Calloway (a Cotton Club bandleader who wore zoot suits), Fats Waller (we were treated to a YouTube of “Honeysuckle Rose”), and Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, who played trumpet in Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago before moving on to Harlem.

Near our condo a car bore a license plate beginning with a 3-digit number ending in zero followed by ORV. It sure looked like ORGY.  Dave and Angie refused a plate ending in NRA, the initials of the National Rifle Association.

Under Suspicion

“The moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he does becomes tainted.” Mahatma Gandhi

The dispiriting reports of high crimes emanating from the White House continue unabated.  What Senator Lindsey Graham dismissed as a “nothing burger” may be a tipping point in our nation’s history, one way or another, depending whether or not he gets away with it.  Ray Smock provides a historian’s perspective on what is a total disregard for the truth by Trump and his apologists.  Ray (below) wrote:

    Suspicion Always Haunts the Guilty Mind: so said Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI, written centuries ago but still a keen observation on human behavior. In modern parlance we call this “consciousness of guilt,” where a person who has lied or otherwise committed a wrongful act, lashes out at accusers, blames others, and concludes that he or she is being persecuted unjustly and is the victim of a conspiracy.

    In the case of President Trump, the single best way to lash out at his critics and accusers, most of whom have been members of the American press, is to universally declare all news reporting (other than Fox News) to be Fake News reported by “enemies of the people.” But now, in light of the Ukraine revelations, even Fox News is taking a more aggressive and critical stance. So who is left for Trump to blame? It is forces within his own government, a giant conspiracy against him called the Deep State, which is supposedly run by holdovers from previous Democratic administrations, especially from the dreaded Obama administration.

    On the basis of the information we have learned about the telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Zelensky on July 25, President Trump used the power of his office to withhold almost $400 million in military aid from Ukraine and used this as a lever to extract a “favor” from Zelensky to get dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. It violates American law, and it brings a foreign power into our presidential election. This information became such a bombshell, such a smoking gun, that Trump and his supporters have been dumbfounded by the public reaction as well as the new impetus in Congress to formalize an already on-going impeachment inquiry.

    This new political reality came from two sources. The whistleblower report that said the president was engaged in conduct that was of such a serious nature that the whistleblower was compelled to file a formal complaint. The Trump administration immediately set out to discredit the whistleblower.

But it was the second source of information that doomed the president. In response to the whistleblower report, President Trump released a summary transcript of the July 25 call with President Zelensky. In that report, the substance of the whistleblower’s report is totally confirmed. Donald Trump, for some unknown reason, blew the whistle on himself! 

Toni and I attended the wedding and reception of Roy and Betty Dominguez’s daughter Maria to Matt Ostrowski.  At our table were four friendly couples who are Roy and Betty’s Lake Dalecarlia neighbors. Young at heart Hessville native Dan, who like humorist Jean Shepherd attended Warren G. Harding school, told Toni she must be my daughter.  Sitting next to me, a Chicago contractor named Randy introduced me to an older guy also named Randy.  Their wives were Denise and Dorothy, so they referred to themselves as R2-D2, like the Star Wars robot. Roy, addressing me, as always, as Dr. Lane, told the group that he could not have written his autobiography, Valor, without my help. The elder Randy had not known about the book and immediately ordered it on Amazon.  Learning that I had published a history of Cedar Lake (near Lake Dale), they had many questions. One I couldn’t definitively answer pertained to pylons still noticeable in the lake, possibly remnants of the ice harvesting industry or a boardwalk. They were amazed at Cedar Lake’s rich history and familiar with the disparaging nickname “Cedar-tucky,” dating to the influx of Southern white World War II defense workers unable to obtain housing in Gary or East Chicago. I told of Crown Point snobs calling Cedar Lake students “lake rats.”  IUN grad Bob Petyko was proud to be one.

I was not surprised that Roy chose “Ave Maria” for the traditional first dance with Maria.  As he wrote in “Valor”: “Maria was born August 23, 1988.  At first I wanted a son, but after my sister Maria died in 1986 [at age 36] after a long battle with leukemia], I prayed for a daughter whom we would name Maria Virginia.” The deejay played “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis Presley, followed by a combination of electronic music and traditional wedding reception numbers such as “Twist and Shout.” Despite my gimpy right knee and Toni’s weak lungs, we danced to “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins, whom we saw years ago with Phil and Delia at the Holiday Star.  

I spoke to Patrick O’Rourke, who I’ve been interviewing about his union career representing teachers.  He was seated next to Lake County Prosecutor Bernard carter, a close friend of Roy and Betty. At the family table I greeted Roy’s brother Hector, who for many years worked with Nancy Cohen and Gloria Metz as a bailiff for a Gary city judge.  They’re all still in touch, Hector told me.  Roy introduced me to Betty’s siblings, and I noted how their father, a former Philippine army officer skilled in martial arts, had been a role model to Roy, who in “Valor” called him a Renaissance man. The photographer had set up a booth and funny hats for candid shots.  Good sports that he is, Roy accommodated several groups and people, myself included who wanted one with him.

I started David McCullough’s “The Pioneers,” about the settling of the Northwest Territory, but to my disappointment it concentrates almost entirely on Ohio and contains virtually nothing about pioneer Hoosiers.  I also picked up Billie Eilish’s 2017 CD, “Don’t Smile at Me.” My favorite cut, “(I’m Not Your) Party Favor,” about a break-up phone call, begins:

Hey – call me back when ya get this

Or when you’ve got a minute

We really need to talk

My favorite lines go:

Look, now I know

We coulda done it better

But we can’t change the weather

When the weather’s come and gone

The “Don’t Smile at Me” album cover reminds me of someone at the Lake Michigan beach huddling under the lifeguard stand on a cool, windy day.  “Ocean Eyes” repeats the verse, “No fair, you really know how to make me cry when you gimme those ocean eyes.”  Eilish appeared on SNL’s season debut hosted by Woody Harrelson.  Both were great. Eilish was born Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell 18 years ago in L.A. Her latest album, “When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” contained a single “Bad Guy,” which replaced Lil Nas X’s 19-week run at number one with “Old Town Road.”

Rehashing weekend activities with high school friend Gaard Murphy, I mentioned that hearing an Elvis Presley number at the wedding reception reminded me of a party where drummer Doug “Duff” Roberts, Robert Hosfeld, and a couple other guys banged out hits by Presley and other original Sun Records artists that sounded fantastic to one who had never before heard live rock ‘n’ roll music in such an intimate setting.  Scanning my 1960 yearbook, I noticed that Roberts hoped to become a professional musician and signed his photo, “To a nice guy and fellow bowler.”  I have no recollection of ever bowling with him, but who knows?  Memory works in strange ways. After school a bunch of us often jumped in Bob Reller or Pete Drake’s car, drove up Bethlehem Pike to Flourtown, picked up the latest WIBG Top 50 sheet at the record store, and either went bowling or played miniature golf. Doug Roberts must have been part of the group. I found Doug’s email address in the last reunion booklet and inquired about where the party might have taken place.  He responded (our first contact in 59 years) that he didn’t recall the specific gig but added: “Bob H. and I and several other players did do a short performance at our Class Night. There is even a picture in our yearbook attesting to our short-lived claim to fame.”

Before I spoke to Nicole Anslover’s Post World war II class about the civil rights movement in Gary and the rise of Richard Hatcher to become America’s first black mayor, she discussed the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, emphasizing Robert Kennedy’s moderating influence and back channel negotiations with the Russian ambassador in resolving the standoff.  A student asked why the U.S. hadn’t simply made Cuba a colony after the Spanish-American War, Nicole cited the Teller Amendment and noted that military occupation was a lengthy one.  I added that the U.S. kept control of the island but without taking responsibility for the welfare of Cubans, only American business interests.

Pet Sounds

“Wouldn't it be nice if we were older
Then we wouldn't have to wait so long?
And wouldn't it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong?”

    Beach Boys, “Wouldn’t it Be Nice?”

The 1966 album Pet Sounds, the brainchild of the Beach Boys’ troubled genius Brian Wilson, is considered a classic progressive pop concept album, but initially it received a lukewarm reception in the United States by those who foolishly dismissed the group as past its prime.  It opens with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” – also the title of Brian Wilson’s 1991 autobiography – and most songs deal with various issues of teen angst.  Its sophisticated production resembled Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound and Beatle album “Rubber Soul,” which Wilson admired and hoped to surpass in sheer brilliance.  The track “Pet Sounds” is an instrumental, and one band mate joked that the obscure title came from Wilson being able to hear animal sounds that others couldn’t, while another claimed it referenced the sounds couples made when they were making out below the neck - petting.

    Isobel Crawley: Oh, just one more thing.  The dog.  What should we do to stop Isis getting into the patients’ room?”

    Robert Crawley: I can answer that.  Absolutely nothing.”

    Scene in Downton Abbey TV series referring to a convalescent ward the Earl of Grantham was funding

Several dogs appeared in the series “Downton Abbey” over the years as the Earl of Grantham’s constant companion, including yellow labs Isis and Pharaoh and then Teo, a present from the Dowager Countess played by the magnificent Maggie Smith. In the recently released movie, which Toni and I saw over the weekend, Teo is back by his master’s side to greet King George V and Queen Mary when they pay a visit.  The film tied up several loose ends, was utterly charming, and drew a large audience, which applauded when the credits came on.

 portrait of Great Britain's Queen Anne

 “The Favourite” (2018), now on HBO, stars Rachel Weisz as Lady Sarah Churchill and Emma Stone as Abigail Masham vying for the affection of England’s Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), who reigned for 12 years beginning in 1702 at age 37.  The last Stuart monarch, the daughter of James II, she endured 17 pregnancies that ended with miscarriages, stillborn births or the baby dying in infancy except for one who succumbed at age 11.  By that time she was overweight, suffering from gout and poor eyesight, and barely able to walk.  The rivalry between Sara and Abigail was based in fact.  Jealous over being replaced, Sara did accuse Queen Anne of having a lesbian relationship with her successor as head of the royal bedchamber.  In “The Favourite” the Queen has a menagerie of 17 bunnies representing the children denied to her, evidently a flight of fancy on the part of the director since rabbits were then considered garden pests sometimes eaten but not fit to be pets.  

Our friends Dean and Joanell Bottorff raised dairy goats when they lived in rural Valparaiso and distinguished between pets, livestock, and wild animals.  Never name goats you might later slaughter for food, they advised from experience, as we prepared homemade pizza topped with sausage made from a goat we once knew as Buttercup. 

Listening to a CD by Carly Rae Jepsen and reading Hanif Abdurrzqib’s  essay titled “The Weekend and the Future of Loveless Sex” in “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us,” suddenly I heard a dog barking upstairs.  It was Maggie May, arriving with Dave, Angie, Becca, James, and two new friends, Asher and Kaitlyn, from Valparaiso University.  After pizza and ice cream we played Telestrations, where you alternatively draw and guess pictures passed around the table and see how far the final drawing has changed from the original.  For example, three Little Pigs morphed into Three Blind Mice and ended up resembling billy goats, the eighth person thought.  I’m pretty bad at it and often was a source of confusion, but it’s mainly for laughs , with no winners or losers.  It was great seeing James and meeting Asher and Kaitlyn, roommates who graduated from Indianapolis Ben Davis, named for a railroad executive who in the 1880s obtained a railway stop for his Marion County community. 

Over the years I’ve had many pets, beginning with the family dog Smokey, which I remember mostly from old photos. When Hurricane Hazel flooded the street in front of our home in the Philadelphia suburb of Fort Washington, Smokey got caught in the current and finally escaped two blocks away.  I was in college when the news reached me that he had passed away of old age.  During Phil and Dave ‘s childhood we had a dog Slaughter that an asshole neighbor shot and killed when he wandered onto his property and a cat that I ran over when he was under our parked car.  Lasting longer were a dog Ubu that was scared of its shadow and a fearless outdoor cat Marvin that knew to be wary of racoons but fought any stray cat that invaded his territory, often necessitating trips to the vet.  Pets belonging to various family members are frequent guests, but Toni and I have resisted all efforts to take on the responsibility of another pet.   

The grand 16-hour Ken Burns documentary Country Music opens with a shot of Thomas Hart Benton’s mural depicting musicians playing the fiddle, banjo, mountain dulcimer, and guitar as well as dancers, gospel singers and in the background a riverboat and train.   The banjo player is African American is playing a version of an instrument brought to America by slaves, and beyond the railroad tracks a group of black women can be seen dancing by the riverbank.  Benton painted the mural at age 84 for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville and meant for it to be enjoyed  by those who do not normally visit art museums. Burns discusses the influence of legendary black blues performer DeFord Bailey.  Born in Smith County, Tennessee, Bailey learned to play the harmonica at age three, and developed a distinctive style while bedridden for a year with polio.  Listening to stray animals and trains passing by, he developed an uncanny ability to imitate their sounds. During the 1920s Bailey became the first black musician to appear on the WSM radio program Barn Dance, which morphed into the Grand Old Opry.  He performed “Pan American Blues,” named for a train that ran between Cincinnati and New Orleans in 24 hours.  In 1928 Bailey recorded “John Henry” for Victor Records, which was released both in its “hillbilly” and “race” series. 

ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” paid tribute to the incomparable Cokie Roberts, who appeared on the program for many years with David Brinkley, Sam Donaldson, and George Will.  As Cokie once quipped, “They were looking for a skirt” and got much more than they bargained for.  Cokie more than held her own, as Donaldson’s anecdotes made clear.  Once when questioned about rumors of his womanizing, Texas Senator John Tower asked Donaldson to define womanizing.  As he was having trouble answering, Roberts simply said, “You know it when you see it.”  An attorney for President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal was trying to explain Clinton’s argument that oral sex wasn’t really sex, and Cokie interjected, “Would your wife buy that?”  The guest was speechless as the blood drained from his face. Donaldson recalled that when Clinton asked Cokie’s mother Lindy Boggs, retired from Congress and in her 80s, to serve as Ambassador to the Vatican, she was cool to the idea until Cokie said, “Take it, you can do two things you love, go to Mass and attend parties.”  Lindy accepted the assignment.

Ethyl Ruethman with Jordan Ramos; NWI Times photo by Steve Euvino; below, Greta Thunberg

A hundred supporters attended a Youth Climate Strike rally at the open-air pavilion in Portage, the NWI Times reported.  Organized by IUN student Ethyl Ruethman, it was part of a worldwide demonstration in advance of the United Nations Summit on Climate Change inspired by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.  Ruethman indicted the industrial plants, killing Lake fish, and  polluting the Calumet Region’s air, land, and water resources.  As her sign declared, “Time is running out.”  When Thunberg spoke in front of world leaders at the UN, she told them, “You have stolen my childhood with your empty words. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth – how dare you!”

In Nicole Anslover’s class on Fifties Baby Boomers I discussed coming of age during the birth of rock and roll.  Like most of my peers I preferred the rhythm and blues originals of such songs as “Goodnight Sweetheart” by Gary’s Spaniels to lame cover versions by the Maguire Sisters and, worse, Pat Boone (shudder) butchering Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruitti.”  I told of seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show from only the waist up singing “Hound Dog,” originally Big Mama Thornton tale and about a cheatin’ husband, not a lazy hunting dog.  Presley’s version of the 1957 hit “One Night” was first recorded by Smiley Lewis with the line “One night of sin is what I’m paying for” changed to “One night with you is what I’m praying for.”  To his credit, Elvis sang the original lyrics at live appearances and acknowledged his debt to black blues and gospel forebears.  According to writer Peter Page, Elvis was devoted to pets over the years, “including a turkey named Bowtie, a mynah bird that repeated the excuses he heard for Presley being unavailable (‘Elvis is asleep,’ ‘Elvis isn't available,’ ‘Elvis isn't here.’), two wallabies from Australian fans (he donated both to the Memphis zoo), various farm animals and many dogs - Sherlock, Brutus, Snoopy, Edmund, and Get Lo, a Chow he once had flown back and forth to Boston on his private plane for kidney treatment. He often gave dogs as gifts, such as the poodle, Honey, to his wife, Priscilla, for Christmas 1962.”

Cousin Tommi Adelizzi, 83, sent me a jpeg of a Lane Christmas card from when I was a teenager.  Tommi (Thomasine) would have been named James Buchanan Lane IV had she been a boy.  Instead, I carried on the name, of my great, great, great uncle, the country’s fifteenth President.   My grandson insists on being called James rather than some nickname. I haven’t seen Cousin Tommi since I was a kid and she a sophisticated teenager when her family came east from San Diego, California, where Uncle Jim had was a co-founder of Chicken of the Sea Tuna Company.  She planned the family reunion in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the home of Wheatland, President Buchanan’s estate, then was unable to  attend.  It was nice to see Smokey in the picture, one I  had forgotten about.

Cold War Kids

“You say you want to change the world

Well, do you believe in magic?

But you can only change yourself

Don’t sit around and complain about it.”

    “Complainer,” Cold War Kids

Cold War Kids formed 15 years ago.  Charter member Matt Maust thought up the name when visiting a park in Budapest and noticing that statues were missing.  They were of Socialist Workers Party leaders such as János Kádár and had been removed after the fall of communism.  “I am a Cold War kid, too,”Maust claimed, having been born in 1979.  After releasing a compilation CD in 2018 titled “This Will Blow Over in Time,” their newest album, featuring “Complainer” and “Fourth of July,” is “New Age Norms.”  I also consider myself a Cold War kid.  Because of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, at Fort Washington school we got under our desks during air raid drills in case the Russians dropped a hydrogen bomb in our midst.  Our Weekly Readertold of “human wave” attacks by “Red Chinese” hordes fighting Americans in Korea.  The Red Scare infected politics and produced such rancid demagogies as Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican from Wisconsin. Vestiges of Cold War rhetoric remain in Trump’s latest attempts to brand leading Democratic Presidential contenders as communists.

Having helped write the inscription, I was invited to a historic marker dedication ceremony honoring the legacy of City Methodist Church.  Reverend Curtis Whittaker (on right) of Gary’s Progressive Community Church, a leader of the Legacy Foundation urban revitalization group, was familiar with my portrait of Reverend William Graham Seaman in “Gary’s First Hundred Years” and according to the Post-Tribune’sCarole Carlson, stated:

  This was a church that fought against the evils of the time.  It wasn’t popular to speak on behalf of immigrants and blacks. This church took a stand.  If these crumbling walls could talk, they would tell you it wasn’t an easy decision to get involved in change.  Others in the church didn’t see the vision.

Lay criticism, racial polarization, and the onset of the Great Depression torpedoed Seaman’s dream of an inner-city church bringing together Gary’s fragmented community under the banners of faith and brotherhood and ultimately led to his being summarily transferred to a parish in Lancaster, Ohio. 

Pastor Whittaker’s hopefulness in the face of formidable obstacles facing his Emerson district neighborhood brings to mind Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay “Searching for a New Kind of Optimism,” written on Cape Cod as 2016 concluded with Trump poised to enter the White House.  Abdurraqib was listening to “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids, which contains the line, “It’s such a gamble when you get a face”and pondered what lay ahead for people of color and himself in particular:

  I have been thinking about the value of optimism while cities burn, while people are fearing for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, while discourse is reduced to laughing through a chorus of anxiety.  A woman in a Cape Cod diner the day after Christmas saw me eyeing the news and shaking my head.  She told me that “things will get better,”and I wasn’t sure they would but I nodded and said, “They surely can’t get any worse,”which is a lie we all tell, the one that we want to believe, even as there are jaws opening before us.

A half-century earlier, writer Norman Mailer pondered similar concerns as the tumultuous Sixties culminated with Richard Nixon in the White House and an American flag planted on the moon, presaging, Mailer feared, the jaws of technology and Big Brother opening before us.

A Saturday Evening Club (SEC) presentation by Jim Albers dealt with William E. Pinney, one of the organization’s charter members.  The event took place at Pinney-Purdue Agricultural Center in Wanatah and began with a tour conducted by Superintendent Gary Tragesser of the 486 acres of farmland that Pinney and daughter Myra donated “for the use and benefit of the trustees of Purdue University.”  According to the booklet “Celebrating 100 Years, 1919-2019,” the crops produced, mainly corn and soybeans, were connected to research projects pertaining to “hybrid and variety evaluation, agronomic practices, organic and conventional vegetable production, weed science, insect and plant disease management, climatology, and forestry.”  Superintendent Tragesser offered free watermelons to those on the tour. Mine proved to be delicious.

Born in 1847 in a La Porte County log cabin to Horace and Nancy Pinney, William E. Pinney attended Valparaiso Male and Female College, VU’s predecessor, and became a successful lawyer, banker, and real estate investor. He originally offered the 486 acres, approximately a tenth of his farm holdings, to his alma mater(being one of its trustees), but the school lacked the resources to manage it properly. Albers’s talk focused on Pinney’s civic activities. I learned that that the Saturday Evening Club (SEC), founded in 1903, was an all-male spinoff of the Mathesis Club, which began in 1897 with members of both sexes, and whose records, Albers noted, are housed in IUN’s Calumet Regional Archives (CRA), which he visited several times researching his talk. Women members of the Mathesis Club tended to favor literary matters, while the men preferred political discourse and debate about subjects deemed unsuitable for the opposite sex.  The two groups initially met on alternative Saturdays in members’ homes, which after SEC meetings, wives complained, stunk of cigar smoke for days afterwards.

The town of Wanatah, Albers noted, was named for a Potawatomi Indian whose name meant “knee deep in muck”– a fit description for much of the soil. That elicited a joke about a fire breaking out in a Wanatah farmer’s bathroom that fortunately did not spread to the house. The two times I recall being in Wanatah were to buy inexpensive furniture in the 1970s and to attend a memorial service for Kevin Horn’s father.  

Around 20 years ago, member Pat Bankston advocated that SEC membership be open to women, but the consensus among others back then was that wives wouldn’t be comfortable with their husbands meeting on Saturday night with other women that might be unattached and potential rivals for their spouse’s affection.  As a compromise, once each year a Ladies Night takes place featuring an outside speaker. Next April, for example, it will be Keith Gambil, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association. There is precedent, someone interjected, for inviting women to regular monthly meetings when the subject is germane to their field.  From the discussion I sense a general sentiment for going coed.

Each person was expected to comment on the presentation.  I praised the inclusion of historical background on the Pinney family, much of which came from Pinney’s 1923 presentation called “The Pioneers,” based largely on his Aunt Mary’s recollections.  During the taxing seven-week journey from Virginia, some days the wagons became so mired in northwest Ohio’s “Great Black Swamp” that the party could literally see the site where they had camped the evening before. I noted that when Valparaiso University acquired the Pinney property, its financial hardships had intensified to the point where bankruptcy was a distinct possibility, and trustees even considered selling the institution to the Ku Klux Klan.  In 1925 the Lutheran University Association came to the rescue and took control of the college.

Jim Albers passed out copies of Pinney’s 1923 paper “The Pioneers,” which related that his paternal grandparents both died soon after the arduous migration to LaPorte County, leaving two daughters and three sons, including Pinney’s father Horace, a Civil war veteran who claimed to have heard Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Here is an excerpt:

  The carrier pigeons, now extinct, came in wonderfully great flocks and were so numerous that at times of sowing wheat it became necessary to guard the wheat fields. An old German neighbor of ours was an expert in catching these wild pigeons with a net, and he kept what he called “stool pigeons” which he used as decoys to which he attached a net of some kind in which the wild pigeons became entangled.  In this way he caught pigeons by the bag full.  

  A remember sand hill cranes made annual visits, and when they took their flight from the ground about mid-day, they circled round and round each time getting higher and higher in the direction of the sun, nearly straight upwards, until they were mere specs and then disappeared among dazzling sunbeams.

IUN’s Theater Department put on free weekend performances of a modern version of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” set during Desert Storm.  The play, directed by students Stephanie Naumoff and Jay-Lan Halliburton, was staged at various Region outdoor venues during the summer. Professor Mark Baer played Brabantio while recent alumnus Brandon Hearne had the title role.  Melissa Downs played evil Desdemona

In Nicole Anslover’s class on the Cold War  era and Red Scare, students identified sources of anxiety after World War II, such as the so-called “fall of China,” the Korean War, and the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case. When she brought up the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and the baseless accusations of Senator Joseph McCarthy, I interjected that Republicans were desperate to find an issue to exploit after being out of power since 1932.  Victims of the Red Scare included not only academicians, librarians, and members of the Hollywood establishment but labor leaders, the target, I pointed out, of the HUAC hearings held in Gary.  Nicole discussed the 1953 Lavender Scare against homosexuals when an estimated 5,000 gays were hounded from government positions on the specious grounds that they were security risks possible susceptible to blackmail. Until recently the Lavender Scare received scant, if any, mention in textbooks.  Now “queer history” is in, if not universally accepted by the “Old Guard.”

2017 PBS documentary

Nicole showed a film clip designed for Cold War-era schoolchildren called “Duck and Cover” on instructions how to react to a sudden nuclear attack. An animated turtle demonstrated by ducking into its shell when Air Raid sirens went off.

 Myriam and Chris Young in 2016; photo by Erika Rose

Arriving at Gino’s with wife Myriam, colleague Chris Young spoke to book club members about Jim DeFelice’s “West Like Lightning,” covering the short-lived but legendary Pony Express.   In my introduction I noted that the book dealt with the social history of the American West as well as technological advances and business entrepreneurship. Chris provided an interesting analysis of how history intersects with memory, myth, and folklore.  He contrasted the Congressional support for expanding the postal service during the Early National period with late 1850sgovernment torpor at a time when sectional differences were coming to a head.  Those who hadn’t read the book were amazed that the Pony Express lasted barely more than a year. It was celebrated in dime novels and Wild West shows by those looking back with nostalgia to a vanishing era, similar, I noted, to present interest in rodeos.  Brian Barnes, who always reads the bimonthly selection, joked that in school he played a game called Pony Express, adding that it was similar to Post Office but with more horsing around. 

The Cars’ front man Ric Ocasek died, evidently from a heart condition exacerbated by emphysema.  WXRT’s Lin Brehmer credited him with being a true innovator respected by both purists and the general public.  I put on “Heartbeat City” in tribute – just what I needed.  Brandon Flowers of the Killers called Ocasek “my first king”and shared an email he once sent Ric to express his gratitude for enriching his life:

  My family was visiting my sister Amy in Layton, Utah, when I was 13 or so.  Her husband Kenny was stationed there at the air force base.  While we were out one day, my mother Jeannie gave me 10 bucks to but a cassette for the ride home.  It was a rite of passage!  All my buddies at that to me were listening to grunge or gangster rap.  I didn’t feel much like a gangster and was too tender for the heavy stuff.  My brother Shane was 12 years older than me and would play me bits and pieces from his record collection when I’d stay with him on occasional weekends.  Independence and adrenaline rushed through me on my way to the register to purchase The Cars Greatest Hits.  It set me on a path towards the adult I would become, towards the job I have, even towards the woman that I was blessed to marry.

I talked on the phone to Gaard Logan about Ocasek and legendary journalist Cokie Roberts, who succumbed to cancer, and put the Cars Greatest Hits CD on heavy rotation - just what I needed -  along with the Avett Brothers, The Beths, Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” and “Copper Blue” by Sugar. 

 Ray Smock with Cokie and Steve Roberts

Ray Smock wrote this tribute:

   The passing of Cokie Roberts has left a void in American journalism and in my heart, since she and her husband Steve, were friends of long standing, going back to the 1980s when my mentor in Congress was Cokie’s mother, Congresswoman Lindy Boggs. 

    One of Cokie’s last public appearances was this past July, when she and Steve came to the Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education in Shepherdstown, WV at my invitation to help us raise funds for our student intern program. The evening was a resounding success and everyone in attendance was treated to some of the best and most inciteful political discourse imaginable.

    Cokie was a pioneer among women in journalism and she wrote best-selling books about women in politics and in the life of the nation whose stories are often left out of the history books. She took seriously the admonition of Abigail Adams, who wrote to her husband John in 1776, when the new nation was being formed, “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”  

    I will always remember Cokie as the kind of woman Abigail Adams had in mind to   take this country forward.