Electrical Storms

 “The lofty pine is oftenest shaken by the winds; High towers fall with a heavier crash; And the lightning strikes the highest mountain.” Horace, Roman poet during the reign of Augustus

One hundred years ago, according to the Chesterton Tribune’s “Echoes of the Past” column, a severe electrical storm struck Northwest Indiana. Hawley Olmstead, President of the Prairie Club, was struck by lightning near his group’s clubhouse in the Lake Michigan dunes and died instantly. His friend Kenneth Ross, was caught in an undertow and drowned. A bolt of lightning struck a horse belonging to Chesterton resident Mrs. Joseph Wozniak, knocking it to the ground and rendering it unable to walk for some time. Mail service aviator Frederick Robinson took off from Gary, but the dire weather conditions forced him to make an emergency landing in a field near the Porter Swedish Lutheran Church.

When we lived atop a sand dune within the Indiana National Lakeshore, now a national park, we frequently observed lightning storms nearby over Lake Michigan. If they were accompanied by loud thunderclaps, we grew apprehensive. Usually, the worst consequence was losing power, though sometimes we’d be without electricity for hours or even days. Once, however, a bolt of lightning hit our house. While in the kitchen we smelled a worrisome odor emanating from the fireplace room. Our record player had been damaged; the smell was an electrical fire, and sparks were coming from the appliance. Toni quickly unplugged the device from the power source (the socket) and, except for the foul odor, averted greater damage. Later we found evidence out back that our house had been struck.

Golden Gate Bridge and orange sky

Thunderstorms are causing hundreds of wildfires throughout the west coast that have burned millions of acres, forced the evacuation of thousands of residents, and left the air quality in cities such as San Francisco so poor that breathing it into one’s lungs for a sustained length of time is the equivalent to smoking a carton of cigarettes. Fierce winds, draught conditions, and intense heat due to global warming have created near-apocalyptic conditions. As California governor Gavin Newsom declared, the future climatologists warned us about is upon us.

Oregon blaze

Jerry Pierce wrote that his mother in Oregon is living less than 30 miles from one of the many out-of-control fires.   Ray Smock recalled:

    I can remember when the skies in Gary, IN and Pittsburgh, PA looked forest-fire orange most of the time, sometimes depending on the wind, or when a stagnant inversion layer held smokestack emissions low. And the smell was awful. We got rid of a lot of the industrial pollution, only to succumb to our global failure to keep the planet's atmosphere from carbon dioxide pollution. Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, but burning forests make it all too visible in other ways.

    As the physicist George Feynman reminds us, trees come from the air. They take in carbon dioxide from the air. They take in water that falls from the air. They convert carbon dioxide into a carbon-based thing called wood. They exhale some of the oxygen. When they burn, they release all their carbon dioxide, all their wood, and return to the air and leave a residue of ash.

    The fires will get worse. The skies will be orange more often. The CO2 in the air will increase. Nature is out of balance already. Not from the old industrial pollution, which helped, but from our current disregard over the last 30 years to stop the imbalance. This is so far beyond the old industrial pollution. Humans have just about changed the planet enough that we have basically ruined it for future generations. Even the trees, from which our species evolved, have turned on us because we have made it too hot for them to keep helping us.

When a teenager living on Third and Fillmore in Gary, Dorothy Mokry recalled trying to cross Fourth Avenue when it started storming and having her hands upright when she got a shock on her left hand and actually noticed sparks coming off her fingers.  It freaked her out and ever since, she worries about being outside during a lightning storm. She added: “Plus, now I have hardware in my ankle and always worry that it’s like an electrical conductor.” 

Before delivering a talk on “Novels as Social History” to my Saturday Evening Club (SEC) colleagues via zoom, Dave helped me get set up so the lighting and background were adequate.  After mentioning books I read on my own, such as “Peyton Place,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Advise and Consent,” “Hawaii,” and “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash,” plus so-called nonfiction novels by “New Journalists” Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer, I cited novels I assigned in twentieth-century American history courses, such a “The Jungle,” “Babbitt,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Native Son,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Breakfast of Champions,” and “Rabbit Is Rich.” Finally, I read excerpts from my three favorite current favorite writers: Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth Strout.

Larry Galler and Pat Bankston; below Vonnegut self-portrait 

As customary, each SEC member reacted to the talk for 5-10 minutes.  Most were complimentary.  Former IUN colleague Pat Bankston, now living in Florida, brought up having read the nineteenth-century William Thackeray novel “Vanity Fair” in college.  VU emeritus professor Hugh McGuigan noted that Charles Dickens and other English novelists first published their works in serialized form in magazines. Ben Studebaker brought up the current vogue for fantasy novels such as the Harry Potter series.  Larry Galler quipped that I was the first SEC speaker to use the utter the phrases mother fucker and blow job.  I had observed that many libraries banned Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” (1969), supposedly because it contained dirty words.  In one scene in question G.I. Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s alter ego, froze under fire, prompting Roland Weary to yell, “Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker!”  Then Vonnegut added: “The last word was still a novelty in the speech of white people in 1944. It was fresh and astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked anybody – and it did its job. It woke him up and got him off the road.” I also quoted from John Updike’s  novella “Rabbit Remembered” where grandson Roy joked about Bill Clinton’s sexual proclivities during the Senate impeachment trial:

   One wisecrack went: “President Clinton was visiting Oklahoma City after the May 3rd tornado and a man whose house was demolished put up a sign: HEY BILL HOWS THIS FOR A BLOW JOB.” His father thought to himself, “After this Lewinsky business, even kindergarten kids know about blow jobs.”  

Consumer Counterculture

    “The natural foods movement launched many citizens into activism for nutritional equity, food workers’ rights, and sustainable agriculture and contributed to the neoliberal definition of the marketplace as a force for social justice and self-fulfillment.” Maria McGrath

 Maria McGrath                                                                          Carol Flinders

In the introductory chapter to “Food for Dissent: Natural Foods and the Consumer Counterculture Since the 1960s,” titled “The Gathering Storm: Baby Boomers and Their Discontent,” historian Maria McGrath profiles Carol Flinders, co-author of “Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition” (1976).  In 1967, married with a two-year-old daughter and living in Berkeley, California, Flinders met future collaborator Laurel Robertson at an antiwar activity.  After involvement in encounter groups, potting, and eastern meditation, she reconnected with Robertson and joined the Food Conspiracy, a natural foods buying club.  Sharing Beat poet Alan Ginsberg’s contempt for “Supermarket America” as a symbol of capitalist America’s unchecked excesses and civic irresponsibility. Flinders, McGrath concludes, found community and purpose.  Nourishing the body with non-processed foods, she believed, had the potential to transform one’s life and help save the planet.  

 Selma Miriam and Noel Furie at Bloodroot Restaurant

McGrath, daughter of Upper Dublin High School classmate Susan Floyd, quotes hippie Raymond Mungo, author of “Total Loss Farm” (1970) responding to critics who claimed he had retreated from political action by moving to a Vermont commune: “We are saving the world.”  In other words, the personal is political, a rallying cry of student activists, feminists, queers, and natural foods advocates.  During the 1970s, McGrath concluded, cultural nonconformists attempted to create the markets services, and societies that matched their dreams for a better world in the pursuit of “right livelihood.”  One example, which Maria talked about at the Oral History Association conference in Montreal last year, is the vegan restaurant and bookstore Bloodroot Collective in Bridgeport, Connecticut, whose cookbooks proclaimed that carnivorous people were part of a “Blood culture” while vegetarians honored the cycles of nature. Lesbian owners Selma Miriam and Noel Furie are still keeping the faith 42 years after Bloodroot’s debut.

Justin Henry Miller, "Wannabe Satyr";     James Deeb, "Pyles Regiment" 

Toni and I attended John Cain’s annual Holiday Reading, “Don We Now Our Gay Apparel,” at Munster Center for the Arts.  Beforehand, we enjoyed the gallery exhibit “Things that go bump in the night,” whose paintings and sculptures had a ghostly Halloween flavor.   We ran into numerous Miller friends, including Karren Lee and Judy Ayers.  Elaine Spicer introduced me to folklorist Sue Eleuterio, who directs Goucher College’s graduate virtual writing center and is a consultant with the American Folklore Society.  She was familiar with my Gary books.  Last year Sue took part in a Walk the Line protest against oil pipelines running through residential neighborhoods in Griffith, Hammond, and East Chicago.   

 Susan Eleuterio with Vietnam Vets exhibit

The meal was vegetarian, featuring tomato bisque, quiche, fruit, rolls, salad, and pumpkin mousse.  It was nutritious, without processed foods so far as I could tell, and filling without leaving you stuffed like often the case at such functions. At the IUN table I talked to Mark Hoyert about meeting fellow Marylander Jim Muldoon.  Mark told me he was a History major about 10 years after I graduated, and that his favorite professor was military historian Gordon Prange, author of the popular account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and a consultant on the set of the movie. David Klamen asked about the rumor that the Jackson 5 had once lost a talent show at IUN.  It happened at Gary Roosevelt, I told him, when audience applause for a skit by high school jocks exceeded their ovation.  Papa Joe Jackson supposedly was so angry he kept the brothers up all night rehearsing.    

A somewhat embarrassed Art in Focus director Micah Bornstein, adorned with angel wings and halo, introduced John Cain and Jim West, who read a humorous 1950s account of a kid watching “The Lawrence Welk Show” in his pajamas with a cynical father and chain-smoking grandmother followed by one about a New York City family celebrating both Hanakkah and Christmas.  Last year, at his twenty-fifth Holiday Reading, John indicated it might be his finale. I’m glad he reconsidered; with some 300 people in attendance, it remains a popular and profitable affair. Toni and I find Cain to be charming, and by now he knows both of us by name.

 Marcia Carson on left

At bridge Jim and Marcia Carson were wearing Red for Ed Action t-shirts, having been among the 15,000 demonstrators assembling earlier outside the Indianapolis statehouse. For many years Marcia taught Art, a program that has suffered from draconian budgets and policies forcing educators to concentrate on preparing students for standardized exams to the neglect of cultural enrichment.  Indiana State Teachers Association president Keith Gambill told the crowd, “To the legislators in the statehouse today we say pencils down, time’s up.” Average pay for Indiana teachers is $51,000, less even than in most Deep South states.  Speakers also blasted a recent bill requiring teachers to complete 15-hour “externships” free of charge with local businesses as a condition of having licenses renewed. At Banta Center Charlie Halberstadt and I finished second to Chuck and Marcy Tomes by a single percentage point.  In out three hands head-to-head we played them pretty much to a draw.

Charlotte and Terry Kegebein

In bowling the Electrical Engineers took all 3 games from Portage Four despite having to spot them 28 pins.  Back from Georgia because his wife Charlotte is in the hospital, Terry Kegebein rolled a 530 series and after a 220-game quipped that he was still not bowling his weight.  Leading off, Joe Piunti rolled a 180 and won the league pot in game 2 for most pins over average.  Despite a sore shoulder I bowled 20 pins over average opposite Neda Gonzalez, who carried a 146 average.  Each game we were virtually neck and neck.

For IU’s Bicentennial oral history project, I interviewed IUN Dean of Health and Human Services Patrick Bankston, who will be retiring after 42 years of service to the university.  He grew up in a community near Rochester, New York, and majored in Biology at Hobart College before earning a PhD at the University of Chicago and teaching for five years at Hahnemann Medical College.  Bankston was proud of collaborating on a research paper with Nobel Laureate George Palade. When he was hired as a professor of anatomy and cell biology, only one year of medical school was available on the Gary campus. Classes took place in World War II “temporary” buildings that endured into the twenty-first century.  Bankston was instrumental in expanding the program to all four years and, more recently, launching an initiative that allowed graduates to take part in residency programs at area institutions. Among his heroes were predecessor Dr. Panayotis Iatridis, Congressman Peter Visclosky, Senator Richard Lugar, Indiana legislator Charlie Brown (who calls him “my brother from a different mother”), and his wife of 25 years Dr. Glyn Porter, an IU School of Medicine graduate whom he has known for 40 years.  “I guess she knew what she was getting into,” I quipped, as we concluded the productive 70-minute interview.

After the interview Bankston told me about recently attending a Muslim wedding of two former IU medical school graduates.  Years earlier, the Pakistani father of the bride brought her to meet with him while she was still in high school  in order to learn what was needed to become a doctor. Pat joked about his political career, “unsullied” by ever winning an election.  He was appointed to finish out the term of a Porter County commissioner and during his brief tenure found outside funding to replace a dangerous, century-old bridge in Union Township from the state and the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission (NIRPC).  During the ensuing election his opponent falsely claimed the project wasted local taxpayers’ money.  As Media Production Specialist Samantha Gauer, who taped the 70-minute session, was leaving, Pat said he hoped he didn’t bore her.  “No, I learned a lot,”  she replied.

Samantha Gauer

Valparaiso University professor Liz Wuerffel’s podcast students signed a “Thank You”card with expressions of gratitude for my guest appearance.  Noah wrote: “Keep history alive.”  Liz added: “I appreciate that you were willing to share your [interviewing] mistakes that helped you be a better oral historian and recorder, too.  Much appreciated!”  

Felicia Childress

Wuerffel’s Welcome Initiative co-founder Allison Schuette recently interviewed 101-year-old Felicia Childress, who moved to Gary from St. Louis during World War II.  Born prematurely in the house of her grandfather, a Baptist minister, she and a twin brother each weighed less than three pounds and were not expected to live. She knew the wife of Joseph Chapman, hired to head up Gary’s Urban League chapter, and initially came to help the Chapmans get settled.  Joe Chapman would play a key role in mediating the 1945-46 Froebel School Strike.  Childress recalled:

   When we came into Gary, we were coming up 5th Avenue, and I was amazed. I looked out the car window and there was tumbleweed blowing down the streets. I said, “This looks like the Wild West.” I could see sand hills between buildings and said, “It’s so flat.” Nobody had a house over two stories. I found out that everyone wanted to come to Gary because there was a mill. All the way down Broadway we could see the gates to the mill and realized that was why people came to Gary. In the old days, the mill would take the huge, molten steel and dump it directly into the lake. These were the days before EPA, and when that hot steel hit the water, Uh-whump! - it was so loud you could hear it past the borders of Gary. I cringed and said, “I don’t like it.”  But I’ll tell you what I did like. I learned about the South Shore.  I could relate to the South Shore because it looked so much like the streetcars in St. Louis. When I got on that South Shore, I looked out the window and there were trees. And then past that canal, you could see pheasants with beautiful feathers.  You could see the colors of their feathers as they would be flying through the trees. But they were soon gone, I think because whatever they were throwing into the mill was so frightening, and so they left. 

At Chesterton library I came across the Goo Goo Dolls “Miracle Pill” and found the 2019 CD irresistible.  Formed in Buffalo some 33 years ago, the band, featuring Johnny Rzeznik and Robby Takac, enjoyed two smash hits,“Iris” and “Slide,” in the late 1990s from the album “Dizzy Up the Girl” and then pretty much dropped out of the spotlight. The track “Autumn Leaves” differs from the 1945 Johnny Mercer standard, covered by countless crooners including Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Robert Goulet, Johnny Mathis and more recently, Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton, and Bob Dylan. An instrumental version by pianist Roger Williams became a number one hit in 1955. The Goo Goo Dolls “Autumn Leaves” contains these lines:

Life is change, we move on

And where you go,

I hope the summer goes along.

In my CD collection, lo and behold, was a nearly forgotten 1993 Sting album, "Ten Summoner’s Tales.”  Most titles were unfamiliar and fun to discover, and to my delight were the tracks “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You” and “Fields of Gold.”  Here are the latter's bridge lyrics:

        I never made promises lightly

        And there have been some that I've broken

        But I swear in the days still left

        We'll walk in fields of gold

Independently Blue

I’ve never seen a bum pushing a shopping cart with a flag sticking out

of his can, but I’m not saying that doesn’t exist.

This is America, after all.

         “Independently Blue,” Julien Poirier

According to Matthew Zapruder, Julien Poirier (above), a San Francisco poet, employs a “casual and anarchic wit, love of high and low culture and willingness to be sentimental – but also a California surrealism.”  Zapruder selected “Independently Blue” for inclusion in The New York Times Magazine and described its mood as bemused disgust with just a hint of optimism. Here’s the entire poem:

It’s easy to fly a flag when you live in a nice house
in a beautiful city.
Things have worked out nicely for you,
and you think everyone can agree
this is the greatest country on earth.
The Bay Area is full of hikers with portfolios.
Goggles in German skycar ride my ass past the prison.
The day they break that prison down
to a funhouse, and the rapists to mirrors,
I’ll fly a flag.
I’ve never seen a bum pushing a shopping cart with a flag sticking out
of his can, but I’m not saying that doesn’t exist.
This is America, after all.

J. Michael Ferguson’s Oral History Review essay on George Lepre’s “Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted their Officers in Vietnam” noted that fragging was rare until after the Tet Offensive.  Then, during a four-year span between 1968 and 1972, as army morale deteriorated due to a seemingly pointless war, the numbers became staggering: almost a thousand reported instances, with hundreds injured and at least 57 dead. Lepre debunks the common myth of soldiers in the field tossing fragmentation grenades into the tent of gung ho officers who needlessly placed their lives in danger.  Indeed, most fraggings occurred in noncombat support units where lives were not at risk.  More likely, it was over personal conflicts or trivial matters such as reprimands over hair length, falling asleep on guard duty, or drug use.  In fact, many fraggings took place while the offenders were high.  Thus, Lepre concludes that rather than being understandable efforts at self-preservation, fragging were malicious acts of murder.  The breakdown in discipline, Ferguson writes, “was a reflection of the social upheavals of the late 1960s, including the questioning of authority, racial tensions, and drug experimentation.”

 Pat Bankstown looks on as Dr, Janet Seabrook of Community Health Net signs letter of intent

IUN Medical School dean Pat Bankston has achieved a long-sought goal to give students access to residence training at a health care institution in Northwest Indiana.  Doctors frequently practice medicine in the area where they completed their residency, so this will help combat the shortage of local physicians.  As Erica Rose wrote for IU Northwest News: “Leaders from nine Northwest Indiana health care institutions gathered at Indiana University School of Medicine to sign a formal letter of intent leading to the creation of the Northwest Indiana Graduate Medical Education Consortium.  The signatures represent a promise from leading health care providers in the region to create and apply for residency positions in their organizations.”

 Grace Teuscher, second from left

Saturday after I made pancakes and Polish sausage for James and took him bowling, Toni and I drove to niece Lisa and Fritz Teuscher’s place in Granger, a South Bend suburb. Lisa’s sister Mary Ann and kids Bella and Ben were visiting from Tampa, as well as sister Michelle from Indy.  I had a delicious steak sandwich from Jersey Mike’s in Mishawaka and learned there’s also one in Schererville.  I chatted with Grace, a tenth grader who plays several instruments and is in pep band.  Brother Oliver was sporting long blond hair, like his swim teammates (he’s a diver).  We mostly sat around the kitchen table telling funny stories. Lisa and Mary Ann recalled a hair-pulling brawl over borrowed clothes.  Screaming that they were animals, their mother tried breaking it up by whacking them with a broom.

The Sunday TV basketball games (first IU and then the Bulls) were blowouts, with my teams on the losing end, so OnDemand I found “You Can Count on Me” (2000), a taut drama about siblings Sammy (Laura Linney) and Terry (Mark Ruffalo) from upstate New York whose parents died in a car accident.  She has an eight-year-old (Rory Culkin) whose father abandoned him.  All were rebels in their own way, the kid by flooding his pancakes with syrup.  The soundtrack included several Steve Earle numbers, including the haunting “Pilgrim,” recorded with the Del McCoury Band. 

I am just a pilgrim on this road, boys
This ain't never been my home
Sometimes the road was rocky long the way, boys
But I was never travelin' alone 

We'll meet again on some bright highway
Songs to sing and tales to tell
But I am just a pilgrim on this road, boys
Until I see you fare thee well 

Ain't no need to cry for me, boys
Somewhere down the road you'll understand
Cause I expect to touch his hand, boys
Put a word in for you if I can

I loved Ruffalo in “The Kids Are All Right” as a sperm donor for a lesbian couple who starts a relationship with his two biological teenagers.  Linney recently played Lorraine Sullenberger in “Sully” (2016).

Governor Eric Holcomb signed an executive order declaring the West Calumet Housing Project in East Chicago a disaster emergency, something predecessor Mike Pence egregiously refused to do despite dangerous levels of lead and arsenic in the soil.  Holcomb also pardoned Keith Cooper, wrongly convicted of armed robbery and “abandoned” (Cooper’s words) by Pence.  In the Post-Tribune Quickly” column was this comment:

  Thank you to Governor Holcomb and the Indiana legislature for overturning all of former Governor Pence’s backward actions.  It’s new day in Indiana, and we have a new direction, free from the ridiculous shackles.

Keith Cooper, photo by Zbigniew Bzdak

Twenty years ago, Cooper was walking home from the grocery when police stopped him over an alleged purse snatching.  While exonerated of that offense, he was charged, on the basis of faulty eyewitness testimony, with breaking into an apartment, demanding money and drugs, and shooting a victim in the stomach.  A victim of racist law enforcement practices, Cooper denied any involvement but had inadequate counsel and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.  The case began to unravel in 2005 when the Indiana Court of Appeals overturned co-defendant Christopher Parish’s conviction.  Cooper was offered the choice of a new trial or immediate release as a convicted felon.  He chose the latter, as he was desperately needed at home. His wife and three young kids had been living in homeless shelters and his mother had lost her house to foreclosure.

In 2008 Elliot Slosar, interning with the Exoneration Project, discovered that an Indiana state police lab report kept from jurors found that DNA from a hat the shooter left behind eliminated Cooper as a suspect.  Three years ago, DNA evidence pointed to a Michigan inmate serving time for murder.  Meanwhile, the key eyewitness recanted his testimony, and the Indiana parole board unanimously recommended that Cooper be pardoned.  Pence ignored the request, an inaction attorney Slosar called disgraceful. Cooper stated, “He abandoned me, but thanks to Eric Holcomb, I got my name back.  I want to shake his hand.  I want to give him a hug.  And I want to tell him he gave me my life back.  Justice has prevailed.  We won.”

In “Retired bricklayer far from sedentary,” Post-Trib columnist Jeff Manes wrote an excellent profile of Gene Clifford.  After a bowling quote from the movie “Kingpin” (1996) Manes began: “It was Indiana University Northwest professor emeritus James B. Lane who tipped me off about interviewing Gene Clifford. Jimbo and Geno bowl in a senior league on Thursday afternoons in Hobart.”  After exploring Clifford’s 43-year career as a journeyman bricklayer, the piece touched on why his email address began: HuntFishBowlFly.  Regarding bowling, Clifford recalled:

              I've been bowling for over 60 years. After retiring, I volunteered as a coach for a high school boys and girls bowling team for 12 years. I still bowl in two leagues. I'm averaging about 175, which is 20 pins down from my normal average. I slipped on the ice and hurt my back a few years ago. A week ago, I had a 268 game with eight strikes in a row.

          There was a bowler by the name of Gene Rhoda from Valparaiso who was on the pro tour for five or six years. We went to high school together. In fact, the two of us washed dishes together at Strongbow Inn. I bowled in a pro-am with Walter Ray Williams and Mark Roth once in Oak Lawn, Illinois.

Walter Ray Williams, Jr., first bowler to win 100 PBS tournaments

Manes mentioned that Clifford built model airplanes as a kid and in his spare time constructs birdhouses and bird feeders.  On Thursday, I’ll see if he’ll sell me one of the latter.

 St.Joseph's College Church

St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer is closing due to a debt of $27 million and annual deficits of nearly $5 million.  With a population of less than 6,000, the city will be sorely affected. Retired English professor John Groppe stated: “I’ll feel a tremendous sadness come the fall, when I pass the college. It will be a ghost town.  I don’t think that’s yet to be felt by the community at large. But it will be, come August, when a whole new class would have come in, with parent bringing kids to campus – they’re not going to be here. We’ll know, Saint Joseph’s wasn’t quite resilient enough this time. That’s devastating for all of us.”

IUN’s Kathy Spicer posted this message:       

  IU Northwest has reached out to officials at Saint Joseph’s College to provide assistance and flexibility to students seeking to continue their education. We welcome Saint Joseph’s College students to apply to any of our more than 70 degree programs and are committed to helping facilitate a smooth transition. This includes providing personalized, one-on-one assistance with transfer options and waiving the application fee for admission to the university.

Lady Gaga with Metallica; below, Twenty-One Pilots receive Grammy

Grammy highlight: Lady Gaga joining Metallica to sing “Moth Into Flame” from the heavy-medal band’s CD “Hardwired . . . To Self-Destruction.  The final lines go:

Sold your soul

Build the higher wall

Yesterday

Now you’re thrown way

Same rise and fall

Who cares at all?

Seduced by fame

A moth into the flame

Addicted to the

Fame

Marianne Brush, who saw Twenty-One Pilots recently in Chicago, enjoyed watching Tyler and Josh strip down to their underwear upon winning the award for best pop performance for their song “Stressed Out.”

 Peter Aglinskas; NWI Times photo by John J. Watkins

Peter Aglinskas is up for an IU Founder’s Day teaching award, so I wrote this recommendation, which he said truly made his day:

            I believe Peter Aglinskas to be a master teacher.  I have observed him in the classroom, speaking to community groups about world music, and hosting a “Film Noir’ series at Valparaiso University.  He is learned but not pedantic, engaging in an interactive manner, and extremely enthusiastic about the importance of his subject matter.

In a class at IU Northwest on the history of popular music, Aglinskas seamlessly went from talking about a piece of music to playing a few notes on a piano.  Students had an excellent rapport with him and appeared to feel free to inject their opinions without fear of being put down or made to feel stupid.  Quite the opposite.  I learned new insights about a subject I thought I knew a lot about.

Aglinskas is excellent classical guitarist, and I saw him perform at Lubeznik Center for the Arts in Michigan City.  Evidently, he thought he was hired to play background music during an art exhibit, but more than 50 people gathered expressly to listen to him, including several of his IUN students.  In between numbers he provided a scholarly account of the song as well as anecdotal comments on why the particular songs appealed to him.  He was charming, and it was for many of us an evening to remember.

His “Film Noir” series has become so popular, it is still going strong in its third season.  Each time I’ve attended, I’ve seen retired IUN faculty and staff, as well as community leaders.  Aglinskas is a tremendous ambassador for the university and a personification of topnotch faculty community service. When I read the mission statement of IUN’s Center for Innovation and Scholarship in Teaching and Learning, to wit, “creating and sustaining a diverse community of learners requires faculty to commit to facilitating learning opportunities for all of their students,” I could think of no better example of one who lives up to that ideal than Peter Aglinskas.

Diana Chen-Lin will be offering a course on East Asian popular culture. She knows about Korean singers Rain (“It’s Raining”) and Psy (“Gangnam Style”), whose success has spawned a glut of boy groups, one of the most popular being BigBang. 

Joe Gomeztagle gave an excellent presentation on “Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China” by Jung Chang.  Gomeztagle noted that among her accomplishments was banning foot binding of women.  After I noted that Jung Chang’s was a more balanced view of Cixi than found in most works by American or Chinese scholars, Joy Anderson said male authors have a tendency to disparage women in history and cited the demonization of Mary Todd Lincoln as an example.   With Joe was his boos SPEA dean Karl Besel (below), who has a book coming out entitled “Passing the Torch: Planning for the Next Generation of Leaders in Public Service.”  It seems especially relevant as Baby Boomers in increasing numbers are facing retirement.  Besel co-authored a previous book entitled “Back to the Future: New Urbanism and the Rise of Neotraditionalism in Urban Planning.”

Below, Coach Ryan Shelton

IUN Lady Redhawks fought gamely against undefeated St. Francis University in Joliet, Illinois.  The Fighting Saints were quicker than the Lady Redhawks and executed numerous fast breaks. Their 6’1” power forward Jordan Giddings dominated inside and for good measure hit a couple three-pointers.  Once again, I enjoyed the energy coming off the bench of Weslee Wilson and Alexis Blake, and the hustle of the Redhawks’ “Big Three” of Nicki Monahan, Bernadette Grabowski, and Grayce Roach.  At halftime Coach Ryan Shelton honored Monahan for scoring over 2,000 points during a four-year career, second only to Sharon Houston.  It’s difficult for Shelton to recruit black players since those with talent generally get scholarships away from the Region. Still this year’s 23-5 record isn’t too shabby.