Turning 76

“Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been,” David Bowie

 Toni gets cookie at Ivy's Bohemia House from Amy Mackiewicz

Toni’s birthday falls on February 14, and we normally celebrate the day after so not to compete with the Valentine’s Day crowd.  Patrick O’Rourke treated me to lunch at Asparagus Restaurant, whose Vietnamese owners are friends of his, to talk about my next interview with him, so I took Toni an order of lobster and mango spring rolls.  We arrived home within minutes of one another, as Dave and Angie had taken her to lunch at Ivy’s Bohemia House.

Next day, granddaughters Alissa and Miranda arrived with Miranda’s boyfriend Will, whom we’d never met. He’s in Nursing administration and going for an MBA.  He’s been working with Spanish-speaking hospital out-patients in Grand Rapids on such matters as ensuring that they have a procedure in place for taking prescriptions at the proper dosages and times. At Toni’s request we dined at Craft House so that she could introduce our Michigan visitors to the beignet pastry fritters served with chocolate, strawberry, and caramel dipping sauces.  Beforehand, we shared an appetizer of Brussel sprout chips tossed with garlic parmesan butter and candied bacon; my entre, BBQ pork shanks, a haystack of onions, and Cole slaw, was delicious.Home in time for the conclusion of Maryland-Michigan State basketball.  Down by seven with minutes to go, the Terrapins scored the final 14 points, including 11 by Anthony Cowan (3 threes and 2 free throws), to beat the Spartans 67-60.

Sunday, I played board games with Dave and Tom Wade, including, at Dave’s request, Stockpile, which I’d only played a couple times but really enjoy, and Space Base, which I’d observed  at Halberstadt Game Weekend.  We said goodbye to our overnight house guests and prepared for a birthday party for Toni, which grew like Topsy, as the expression goes – originally referring to a slave girl in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1851) – to 20 people, including four of Becca’s Chesterton classmates.  Dave and Angie picked up Chinese food from Wing Wah and a chocolate cake from Jewel.

At bridge the previous Wednesday I partnered with Vickie Voller, whom I’ve known since she was an IUN student in the 1970s.  She’s an animal lover whose emails contain the quote, “Love is a four-legged word.” We finished above 50 percent.  She’ll be bringing her husband to my Art in Focus talk on Rock and Roll, 1960, and they plan to dance. I’ll start with “Hard-Headed Woman,” on the soundtrack of “King Creole” and Elvis Presley’s last recording before entering the army for two years in March of 1958 and subsequently reaching number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

At Hobart Lanes 83-year-old Gene Clifford told me his bowling career was over, doctor’s orders, due to COPT.  In our final game against Fab Four, the Engineers finished with a 1053, 173 pins over our handicap.  Joe Piunti, carrying a 130 average, rolled a 223. I finished with a 160 and 472 series, 30 pins over my average.

Over the weekend the August Wilson play “Fences” (1985) attracted a large audience at IU Northwest.  Directed by IUN alumnus and visiting professor Mark Spencer, it deals with an embittered former Negro League baseball player (Troy Maxson) now working as a garbageman in Pittsburgh and starred Darryl Crockett and Rose Simmons.  James Earl Jones appeared in the original Broadway production and Denzel Washington in a 2010 revival, with Viola Davis as wife Rose Maxson. 

While most high schools were off for President’s Day, both IUN and Valparaiso University held classes, having honored Martin Luther King Day.  My interview with Chancellor Bill Lowe was delayed a few minutes because of a fire alarm in Hawthorn Hall (caused by a faulty toaster, it turned out) that kept Samantha Gauer from getting the videotape equipment.  She thoughtfully alerted the Chancellor and me from her cellphone.  Lowe grew up in Brooklyn; his father was a police officer.  He majored in History at Michigan State and was in Ireland doing research during a time of civil rights demonstrations that became known as the Troubles. His administrative career took him to the Rust Belt cities of Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, and ultimately, Gary.

 confiscating bootleggers equipment in Gary (1926)

Invited to speak in Nicole Anslover’s class about Prohibition in Gary, I described the city in 1920 as containing 50,000 residents, mostly steelworkers, many foreign-born and often single men laboring 12 hours a day, seven days a week.  The year began with Gary under martial law occupied by army troops ordered to crush a two-month-old strike and jail union leaders whom General Leonard Wood branded as Reds.  Prohibition was anathema to men for whom the saloon was the center of their limited social life, where they drink, ate, and, in may cases, procured establishments that refused to pay off corrupt police officials.  At the Gary Country Club, the watering hole of the affluent, liquor flowed freely with no interference from law enforcement.  Some years, due to its reputation as an “anything goes” city, Gary attracted more tourists than Indianapolis, disparaged as “Naptown” or “India-no-town.” By 1930 former mayor R.O. Johnson, convicted in 1923 of violating the Volstead Act and sent to Atlanta federal penitentiary, was back in City Hall as mayor.

 partying at Gary Country Club (1926); Allegra Nesbitt standing, 2nd from right

Students asked me about race-relations in Gary during the Twenties, a time when Mill officials aimed to keep the labor force divided, and whether U.S. Steel built housing for workers as in Pullman, Illinois.  While the corporation provided home ownership opportunities on the Northside for managerial personal and plant foremen, unskilled workers were left to fend for themselves. Many boarded in bunk houses, sharing a cot with someone working the alternate 12-hour shifts. Nicole invited me back anytime; I thinking of returning in two weeks when the class discusses the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial featuring Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution.

Bob Greene (above), author of “When We Get to Surf City,” emailed:

     What a nice letter, Jim-- thank you.

    I really liked the excerpts from the book that you chose to include in your blog-- I'm especially glad that you took note of my observations about Jerry Lee Lewis.  No one has ever specifically mentioned that part of the book to me, but it's one of my favorites, and I'm pleased that you saw in it what I did.

    Just sang again the other night in Florida with a band called California Surf Incorporated-- all former Beach Boys musicians.  Randell Kirsch, from Jan and Dean, was playing with them, and one of the guitarists wasn't feeling well and didn't want to do his vocals, so they invited me to fill in.  It never gets less fun.

    Thank you again for what you said, and especially for the way you said it.  It means a lot to me.

I wrote back:

    Thanks for the nice response.  I saw Jerry Lee Lewis live in Merrillville, IN in 1980 (what a showman!) and recall him appearing a few years ago on Letterman with Neil Young, the only time Neil agreed to be on the show.

    I’m glad you’re still jamming with old Beach Boys.  My son was in a band until a few years ago and would invite me on stage to sing the chorus of Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.”

Having enjoyed the new Of Monsters and Men CD, I checked out their earlier album “beneath the Skin” (2015) and discovered “Slow Life,” which hardly describes the past hectic days.  One verse goes:

We're slowly sailing away
Behind closed eyes
Where not a single ray of light
Can puncture through the night

With my 60th high school reunion scheduled for October, I told planners Larry Bothe, John Jacobson, and Connie Heard that I’d work on classmates who don’t normally attend. Rehashing weekend highlights with Gaard Logan, a gourmet cook who claims she has no interest in the reunion but is always interested in hearing about Upper Dublin classmates, I described the beignet pastry fritters, Brussel sprout chips, and lobster and mango spring rolls.  Signing off, I called her sweetie, eliciting a chuckle and, “Take care , my friend.”

Diamond in the Rough

“Gary remains a diamond in the rough.  Some will say ‘very rough.’  That may be, but the best response is to keep polishing that diamond until it sparkles.” Calvin Bellamy

Civic leader Cal Bellamy wrote the NWI Times to take issue with its publicizing an obscure Business Insiderwebsite article written by two people who’ve never set foot in Gary labeling Gary America’s “most miserable” city – more mischief, in all likelihood, from editor Marc Chase, who has turned his dislike of Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson into a vendetta.  Bellamy cited Gary’s advantages of location and infrastructure and impressive recent developments, including Miller’s South Shore expansion and double-track project and IUN’s new Arts and Sciences Building.  He concluded: “Many fine people make their homes there.  Several neighborhoods show impressive vitality.”  Accompanying the column was a photo by John J. Watkins of Ryne Wellman kite surfing at Marquette Park.

Times correspondent Joseph Pete, who addressed me as sir when he phoned for background information about the 1919 steel strike, wrote an impressive feature article about the important and traumatic event in Gary’s past, which split the city along class and racial lines. On my advice Pete consulted “Black Freedom Fighters for Steel” author Ruth Needleman,  who asserted that during the work stoppage almost all of the 3,000 black workers hired during the war refused to break ranks with their comrades, mostly unskilled foreign-born laborers. “US Steel Board Chairman Elbert Gary’s strategy to divide the workforce along racial lines,” Needleman concluded,  “did not work.  Strong inter-racial solidarity built intentionally to avoid the conflicts developing elsewhere [in Eastern mills] prevented trouble.”

 union march down Broadway

Pete obtained four photos from Steve McShane to go with the piece, but the paper neglected to cite the Calumet Regional Archives as the source and instead simply wrote “Provided.”  After 4,000 army troops rounded up and jailed strike leaders branded as “Reds” and forbade public assemblies, skilled workers gradually broke with the rank-and-file, crippling the effort for an 8-hour-day and decent wages and working conditions.  Pete quoted extensively from “The Autobiography of Mother Jones,” written by a participant in the struggle.  She described World War I veterans marching in solidarity with the workers:

  Some 200 soldiers who had come back from Europe where they had fought to make America safe from tyrants, marched.  They were steelworkers.  They had on their faded uniforms and the steel hats which protected them from German bombs.  In the line of march, I saw young fellows with arms gone, with crutches, with deep scars across the face – heroes they were!  Workers in the cheap cotton clothes of the working class fell in behind them.  Silently the thousands walked through the streets and alleys of Gary.  Saying no word.  With no martial music such as sent the boys into the fight with the Kaiser across the water.  Marching in silence.  Disbanding in silence.

  The I saw another parade.  Into Gary marched U.S. soldiers under General Leonard Wood.  They brought their bayonets, their long-range guns, trucks with mounted machine guns, field artillery.  Then came violence.  The soldiers broke up the picket line.  Worse than that, they broke the ideal in the hearts of thousands of foreigners, their ideal of America.  Into the blast furnace along with steel went their dreams that America was a government for the people – the poor, the oppressed.

I interviewed Patrick O’Rourke about his 50—year union career representing teachers in Hammond and at the state and national level.  A born storyteller, O’Rourke had interesting anecdotes about such personages as American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker, Bechtel Corporation CEO Riley P. Bechtel, and conservative Indiana governor Mitch Daniel. Appointed to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards on Shanker’s recommendation, O’Rourke solicited a significant contribution from Bechtel, the nation’s largest construction and engineering company, and so impressed its executives that they offered him a position in public relations that would have made him a millionaire.  He turned it down since as a lifelong Democrat he foresaw irreconcilable conflicts between his philosophy and theirs.  Appointed to the Indiana Governors Education Roundtable by Democrat Joe E. Kernan, O’Rourke expected to be replaced when Mitch Daniels succeeded him but so impressed the governor-elect with his candor and wit that he was re-appointed.  “Daniels and I disagreed on almost all aspects of public education,” he recalled, but added that they respected one another’s intelligence and integrity. At O’Rourke’s recent retirement celebration, Daniels, now Purdue’s president, honored him, as did Cal Bellamy, Mayor Tom McDermott, AFT president Randi Weingarten, and State Representative Vernon Smith, a close friend.

Several  “Country Music” episodes document the long, remarkable career of “diamond in the rough” Johnny Cash, known as the “Man in Black” whose deep baritone voice embraced rockabilly, blues, gospel, and folk music.  His signature song ”Folsom Prison Blues” inspired Merle Haggard, a prisoner at San Quentin when he witnessed Cash perform it, to change the direction of his life.  Embracing an outlaw image, Cash once explained that his decision to wear black was “for the poor and the beaten down, living in the hopeless, hungry side of town, I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, but is there because he's a victim of the times.”  Banned from performing at the Grand Old Opry when dependent of pills and booze, Cash cleaned up his life and went on to host a network TV show featuring such controversial guests as Bob Dylan (they performed “Girl from North Country” together) and Pete Seeger (despite threats of censorship).  Seeger sang the antiwar ballad “Osceola’s Last Words” by Floridian Will Mclean, about a Seminole chief imprisoned in a dungeon who declares: “I shall not live among such evil men, who mock the sign of truce, this flag of white.”   Invited by Nixon to perform at the White House in March 1970, Cash refused a Presidential request to sing “Welfare Cadillac” or “Okie from Muskogee” and ended the show with “What Is Truth.”  Here are the final verses:

A little boy of three sittin’ on the floor
Looks up and says, “Daddy, what is war?”
“son, that's when people fight and die”
The little boy of three says “Daddy, why?”
A young man of seventeen in Sunday school
Being taught the golden rule
And by the time another year has gone around
It may be his turn to lay his life down
Can you blame the voice of youth for asking
“What is truth?”

A young man sittin’ on the witness stand
The man with the book says “Raise your hand”
“Repeat after me, I solemnly swear”
The man looked down at his long hair
And although the young man solemnly swore
Nobody seems to hear anymore
And it didn't really matter if the truth was there
It was the cut of his clothes and the length of his hair
And the lonely voice of youth cries
“What is truth?”

The young girl dancing to the latest beat
Has found new ways to move her feet
The young man speaking in the city square
Is trying to tell somebody that he cares
Yeah, the ones that you're calling wild
Are going to be the leaders in a little while
This old world's wakin’ to a new born day
And I solemnly swear that it'll be their way
You better help the voice of youth find
"What is truth?"

At the song’s conclusion, Cash said: “We pray, Mr. President, that you can end this war in Vietnam sooner than you hope or think it can be done, and we hope and pray that our boys will be back home and there will soon be peace in our mountains and valleys.”

The earliest literary reference to “diamond in the rough” is in John Fletcher’s “A Wife for a Month” (1624): “She is very honest and will be as hard to cut as a rough diamond.”  The expression came to mean a good-hearted person of exceptional character somewhat rough around the edges and lacking in refinement. Literally, before diamonds are polished, they lack glitter and sparkle.  In Disney movie Aladdin Jafar addresses the title character in the song “Diamond in the Rough” by declaring that beneath the dirt and patches and under the filth and the fleas, “you’re a diamond in the rough”:

And though you might need finesse,
and perhaps some sniffs disinfecting
You'll be the one who succeeds 

when the lamp of their needs collecting

I met Ron Cohen at an IUN gallery reception for Willie Baronet’s exhibit “This Is Awkward For Me Too,” featuring signs used by homeless victims begging for money, work, or food.  Ron gave me the September 2019 issue of Journal of American History, whose cover features a rally for whistleblower Philip Agee, a former CIA caseworker whose memoir “Inside the Company” (1975) exposed U.S. support for authoritarian Latin American leaders that led to grievous atrocities.  The British government subsequently expelled Agee despite protests from students and Labor Party MPs.  At the gallery I ran into bridge buddy Barb Mort with husband Ascher Yates and Marianita Porterfield, coming from an aquatic exercise class.  Marianita recalled her son J.J. and Phil being in the same class at Marquette School taught by Willa Simmons.

In Fantasy Football I am undefeated since a week one tie with Pittsburgh Dave and in first place a half-game ahead of Phil, whose record is 4-1.  The primary reason is that Carolina running back Christian McCaffrey (above) is having an MVP season.  Last week against Jacksonville he gained 237 yards rushing and receiving and scored 3 TDs. Meanwhile, the overall number one pick, Saquon Barkley has been out since week 3 with a high ankle sprain. Injuries are a crucial factor, so knock on wood that my guys stay healthy.

Hitting Home

    “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever.  Use a pile driver.  Hit the point once.  Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.” Winston Churchill

For a Flight Paths project that I’m involved with, Valparaiso University professor Liz Wuerrful posted interviews with African-Americans who attended Gary’s segregated East Pulaski School. Here is an excerpt from one titled “Hitting Home”:

    The school I went to in Detroit was what they say now was integrated. When I came here to Gary, there was an East Pulaski and a West Pulaski. East Pulaski was for my people, and West Pulaski was for other people. That’s the way it was. One of the buildings was a cooking classroom. We from East Pulaski would go to our cooking class, and make lunch for the children at both West Pulaski and East Pulaski. I don’t know if you realize, I don’t know if you realize, the shock to a child of 11 years old, almost realizing that you’re not accepted because of the color, and that was hard.

   Roosevelt was an entirely black school. I think there were two or three white students there because their parents owned property in the area. Froebel was the only integrated school in the area. Emerson had a few black students, but that was because they lived in the area. And my mother had to go to Horace Mann school in order to get me transferred from Roosevelt to Froebel.

   I read a lot. I’m what they would have called a nerd at the time. And I wanted to take mechanical drawing. They would not let me take that. And I was so upset. They did not want the girls to participate in things. They steered us to the cooking class, sewing class, and to a typist class.

   There is one thing that we all disliked: we were not allowed to go to swimming classes until Fridays. After we were supposed to take those swimming classes, they would drain the pool. When my mother found out, I thought for sure I was going to get kicked out of the school. I don’t know what she said, what she did, or what she had to do, but I was never allowed to go swimming, and they didn’t even put that on my schedule. I was glad because I didn’t feel like it was right because my first thing is, “Why do I have to go in there after they’ve been in there and it’s all dirty?”

   We started a club and we called it Fro-Ro, which was Froebel Roosevelt. We would get together, and have dances and sit around, even do our homework together.  That’s when we found out that the books Roosevelt had were almost five years older than what we had. The information that we had in our history books, even our math books, our literature, all of that was totally different from what they had. Why didn’t they have the same information available to them that we had? And that’s when it really started hitting home about how things were. I was starting to grow up and starting to see things the way my parents were seeing them. And I started to realize how much of a sacrifice they were making. They did a lot of things that were quiet. They did not come, they didn’t do the marching, and all this stuff that everybody else is doing. They did whatever they had to do to let them know that it wasn’t acceptable. They did it in a very quiet way. It was almost like they did not want us to see the hardship they were having to make it possible for us to get a very good education.

In “A Well-Kept Secret” a second respondent told Flight Paths interviewer Reagan Skaggs:

   Seventh grade, we had a speech teacher. She introduced us to black poets—black poetry—and all of us kids were shocked, like, “What? Black folks wrote poems?”We had never heard of it. I was elated, and I went home, and I told my mother. I said, “Momma, black folks wrote poems. Look at this! They wrote these poems!”Langston Hughes, to name just one, but there were so many! She didn’t know it either, of course, and she bought the very first book of poetry we owned - this expensive book - a book for twenty or thirty bucks was a lot for her.  It was a compilation of poems by African Americans, and then you had your Caribbean folk, and it also included Europeans. And that is a thick volume. It’s not in print anymore. I still have it to this day.  So that was a great sacrifice for her, but she bought that book, and boy, did I get into those poems. I loved them. I was so grateful to know about that.

   Throughout my life, looking at TV, movies, magazines, there was never, ever anything pleasant said about the continent of Africa, nor the brown, black people in it. It was always bad. It was always sad. It was not stuff that would make you feel proud and honored to be a part of that heritage. They never, ever spoke about Ancient Egyptians being chocolate people. That was a well-kept secret. I didn’t learn that until I was a grown woman. Actually, a very mature grown woman. When I went to Egypt, I saw the pictures on the walls, and the people were black, and dark, and brown, and I was in awe. This is really true. They were a black race, so why is it hidden? Why is it kept secret? Why is it never mentioned? All I ever heard was negative things, so, to learn that during the Harlem Renaissance we had these phenomenal poets step out, and writers, and I mean, you just didn’t hear about it in any form or fashion.

   You know, we’ve been so disconnected to those truths because we didn’t control things that would allow us access to that information. And it all has to do with this thing that’s called institutional racism. The group that’s in charge controls information as well. So, if you don’t have access to that information, you don’t know what your potential is. And the potential is always for greatness.

According to Noah Isenberg’s “We’ll Always Have Casablanca,” the idea for “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” the play that became the basis for what the author calls “America’s most beloved movie”originated during a trip writer Murray Burnett made to Vienna during the summer of 1938. What hit home was the utter terror Jews faced, including his wife’s family, as a result of Anschluss, Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria. After successfully smuggling out of the country some of her relatives’ prize possessions, including a fur coat wife Frances wore and diamond rings of each finger, Burnett visited a nightclub in the South of France.  An African-American pianist was playing jazz standards, providing respite from the insanity outside its smoky walls. The atmosphere was in stark contrast to the “tragedy and tears”Burnett had witnessed in Vienna and a perfect setting for a play, named for a Moroccan city Burnett never visited Casablanca in his entire life.

Depressing cable fare abounds, including movies about the breakup of a marriage (“Wild Fire”), a musician’s self-destructive path to eventual suicide suicide (“A Star Is Born”), and a lesbian marriage that turns sour due to one being a psychopathic murder (“What Keeps You Alive”).   “Big Little Lies” began its second season in the aftermath of an abusive husband having been murdered.  The pilot of the super-depressing mini-series “Euphoria” portrays teenagers as drug and sex obsessed misfits dependent on cell phones and bereft of meaningful adult role models.  Unlike “Big Little Lies,” which has a brilliant cast, I doubt I’ll keep watching “Euphoria.” The so-called comedy series “Barry” stars Bill Hader as a hired hitman taking acting lessons from the “Fonz” of old, Henry Winkler and killing his lady friend, a cop. Barry’s diabolical boss is a hoot.  When police close in on him, he manages to say something like “Thank heaven you’ve finally arrived.”

Charlie Halberstadt and I had an excellent bridge week, finishing second in the Chesterton game and first at Banta Senior Center in Valparaiso out of 12 pairs for a combined 3.86 master points each within 24 hours, by far my most ever. At Chesterton I was getting weak hands all evening until one contained 26 high card points, Ace, King, Queen, spot, spot in both Hearts and Diamonds, Ace, Jack, of Spades, and bare King of Clubs. I bid 2 Clubs, indicating at least 23 high card points, and Charlie responded 2 Diamonds, meaning 0 to 3 points. I went to 4 Hearts and made it on the nose.  Others playing an automatic 2 Diamond response to 2 Clubs didn’t get to game since the strong hand got passed out at 2 Hearts.  

Banta Center was once an elementary school; bridge opponent Knoefel Jones recalled the names of his first, second, and third grade teachers.  The latter, he claimed, collected a quarter from his students, promising they’d get a European pen pal, but they never did. That guy must have pocketed at least five dollars, I joked.  But think of how much money that would be today, he replied, straight-faced.  Knoefel is always joking around, so when he first told me his name (pronounced no-fell), I thought he was putting me on.  Knowing Tom and Sylvia Luekens were big Valparaiso University boosters, I told them grandson James was going to VU in the Fall and that I will be in a history session in October with professors Allison Schuette and Liz Wuerrfel in Salt Lake City.  When Sylvia said she knew Allison, I told of working on their Flight Paths project tracing the Gary roots of Valpo residents.

Barbara Walczak’s newsletter contained “A Poem about Alzheimer’s,” which began:

Do not ask me to remember

Don’t try to make me understand

Let me rest and know you’re with me

Kiss my cheek and hold my hand

Bridge players with mild Alzheimer’s often remain cogent at the card table. Bridge is great mental stimulation for retirees, even after the initial signs of what was once cruelly referred to as senility hits home.

Mel Allen

Samantha Gauer taped my hour-long interview with retired Hammond Teachers Federation president Patrick O’Rourke.  His father ran into New York Yankee announced Mel Allen while at a conference, leading to a lifelong friendship that provided Patrick with some of his most vivid memories, including a ping pong match with Mickey Mantle.  Allen loved Phil Smidt’s Restaurant in Hammond, and the two would meet there when the Yankees were in Chicago to play the White Sox. Elston Howard, the first Black Yankee, often slept at the O’Rourke home, unwelcome at the team’s hotel.  When New York faced Milwaukee in the 1957 World Series, 15-year-old Patrick got to watch the game from the Yankee press box.  In fact, O’Rourke claimed that “Ellie” Howard once saved his life after he fell off a pier and ended up under it until Howard reached down and fished him out.  

O’Rourke’s sister eloped at 16 with someone who was neither Irish nor Catholic.  When they returned from Iowa, the father and grandfather tried to have the marriage annulled, only to be told by the bishop that if it had been consummated (it was) to forget it.  The union lasted a lifetime and produced seven children.  O’Rourke still has a crooked knuckle from his seventh grade teacher at St. Joseph School in Hammond rapping him with a ruler. Once after he misbehaved, the nun made him recite the Gettysburg Address from memory.  Another nun refused to teach girls.  Forced to do so, she gave them huge amounts of homework and kept them inside during recess while the boys got off scot free.

I got a call from Michael Keating, who with Chris Smith has been photographing over 300 Indiana gyms over the past six years.  Many are featured in an Indiana Historical Society Bicentennial exhibit, and a book entitled “Hoosier Hardwood” is in the works.  Keating was familiar with my work and with the Calumet Region’s proud basketball tradition.  He knew that the remnants of Gary’s Memorial Auditorium, once the site of Sectional tournaments, was in danger of being demolished.  Asked my opinion of the best Region team ever, I mentioned the 1971 East Chicago Washington team with Pete Trgovich, Junior Bridgeman, and Tim Stoddard and the 2006 EC Central champions Trgovich coached starring E’Twaun Moore, Kawann Short, and Angel Garcia, then added two Gary Roosevelt teams that lost in the finals, the 1955 team with future NBA star Dick Barnett that lost to Indianapolis Crispus Attucks despite “Mr. Basketball” Wilson Eison outscoring Attucks star Oscar Robertson, 31-30, and the 1991 squad that lost in double overtime to Plymouth, with Scott Skiles scoring 39, including a miracle shot at the end of regulation. 

 Oscar Robertson

Keating has interviewed Emerson coach Earl Smith, whose Golden Tornado team my family followed closely.  In 1975 Emerson lost to Lafayette Jefferson in the Regional after a downstate ref called two egregious fouls on center Earner Calhoun Mays within the first few minutes. In 1977 we were in Hinkle Fieldhouse when Emerson won the Thanksgiving “Turkey Classic” with “twin towers” Wallace Bryant and Frank Smith (one of the teams was the Frankfort “Hot Dogs”).  I noted that in 1991, when Gary Roosevelt defeated Indianapolis Brebauf by 19 points in the state finals, it took a 40-point effort by Glenn “Big Dog” Robinson, including a game-winning, last-second jump shot, to win the Regional against East Chicago.  

The Jesuits who run Indianapolis Brebeuf defied the Archdiocese and refused to fire a lesbian teacher who married another woman, supposedly counter to church doctrine.  In retaliation the Archdiocese will no longer recognize Brebeuf as a Catholic school.  Shameful!  I’ve been following the story since niece Sophia Dietz, who attends Indianapolis Roncalli, told me about a popular guidance counselor fired from her school despite student protests.  I’m certain this would not have happened if Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin hadn’t been transferred to Newark.  Kirsten Bayer-Petras praised Brebauf’s stand and posted this statement by the school board:

  The decree follows a sincere and significant disagreement between the Archdiocese, on the one hand, and Brebeuf Jesuit and the USA Midwest Province of the Society of Jesus, on the other, regarding whether the Archdiocese or our school’s leaders should make final governance decisions related to internal administrative matters at Brebeuf Jesuit and, in particular, the employment status of our faculty and staff. Specifically, Brebeuf Jesuit has respectfully declined the Archdiocese’s insistence and directive that we dismiss a highly capable and qualified teacher due to the teacher being a spouse within a civilly-recognized same-sex marriage.

Agreeing with Kristen and the school board, Connie Mack-Ward wrote: “This is an outrage! It's perfectly ordinary for schools of orders within a diocese to run their school independently of diocesan interference. Jesuit schools are among the finest in the country--and that's because they're run by Jesuits!” 

first day of summer at Wells Street Beach, photo by Mary Ann Best

Summer begins and about time considering the cool, wet spring we've undergone.

Right Place, Wrong Time

I been in the right place but it must have been the wrong time
I'd have said the right thing but I must have used the wrong line

    “Right Place, Wrong Time,” Dr. John

New Orleans legend Dr. John (Malcolm John Rebennack) succumbed to heart failure at age 77.  The piano man, keyboardist and guitar player combined blues and psychedelic rock with traces of voodoo mysticism and Mardi Gras jazz.  Dr. John toured with the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, the Band, and many others.  The Rock and Roll inductee had a 1973 Top Ten hit with “Right Place, Wrong Time.” “CBS Sunday Morning” paid tribute to the ultra-cool Dr. John and commemorated the 1969 Greenwich Village Stonewall riots with a feature on gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny (1925-2011), dismissed from the U.S. Army’s Map Service in 1957 for being openly gay. In 1965 Kameny and other members of the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis picketed the White House to protest discrimination based on sexual orientation.

 Frank Kameny at 2010 Gay Pride parade

After an ABC camera recorded a D-Day survivor finding his buddy’s gravesite at Normandy American Cemetery, the deceased G.I.s family in Syracuse, New York saw the feature on TV and was able to talk with him via Skype.

Among the many tributes to World War II veterans on the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day was a Post-Tribunearticle about Ernie Pyle’s dispatches from Normandy that contained an interview with Phil Hess of the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in Dana, Indiana, the war correspondent’s home town.  Pyle’s stories of those who fought, Hess stated, “are necessary to really understanding the magnitude of the invasion and the indescribable toll it took on America’s young men.”  In a dispatch titled “A Pure Miracle” Pyle wrote of the killing field

 For some of our units it [the landing] was easy, but in this [Omaha Beach] special sector where I am now our troops face such odds that our getting ashore was like whipping Joe Louis to a pulp. Our men simply could not get past the beach.  They were pinned down right on the water’s edge by an inhuman wall of fire from the bluff. Our first wave were on the beach for hours before they could begin working inland.

A subsequent dispatch described the terrible human toll in the immediate aftermath of the landing.  Walking along the beach, Pyle saw bodies washing out to sea and then in again.  He stepped over what he presumed to be driftwood until recognizing the foot of a soldier half-buried in the sand. Noting that “soldiers carry strange things with them,”he not only found packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes and photos of loved ones but, a banjo and a tennis racket, the latter lying “lonesomely in the sand, clamped in its rack, not a string broken.” A dog was whimpering pitifully “looking for his masters.”

 Ernie Pyle at Anzio with G.I.s

Captain Waskow

Ray Boomhower devoted two chapters to Ernie Pyle in “Indiana Originals,” the only Hoosier so honored.  The first described his years as a roving reporter for Scripps-Howard newspaper chain traveling all over the country (and Western hemisphere) between 1935 and 1942 by car, train, plane, and occasionally horseback in search of human-interest stories.  The second highlighted his most widely reprinted column, “The Death of Captain [Henry T.] Waskow” on Mount Sammurco in Italy in January 1944, five months before the D-Day landing.  I was already familiar with the piece, having read it in my World War II class.  A shell fragrant had pierced his heart while Waskow was trying to shield another soldier.  Waskow had been dead for four days before his body could be retrieved and brought back to camp lashed to the back of a mule on a moonlit night. Pyle wrote:

    Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road. You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

   The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

   One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, “God damn it.”    That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, “God damn it to hell anyway.”He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

   Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: “I’m sorry, old man.”

   Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: “I sure am sorry, sir.”

   Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

   And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

   After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

 Patrick O'Rourke of the Hammond Federation of Teachers

At Asparagus Restaurant in Merrillville I met lifelong Hammond resident and teachers union leader Patrick O’Rourke, who has taught Labor Studies and Education courses at IUN.  When he mentioned former Gary teachers union leader Charles Smith, I mentioned playing poker at his home and that Chas, as I called him, introduced a seven-card stud, high-low game that he called AFT, after the American Federation of Teachers. Charles would put out a sumptuous spread and we’d all chip in five bucks, hardly enough to cover it.  Lefty stalwarts Al Samter and Fred Gaboury were regulars. That evening Miranda arrived, and we celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday. 

Kaitlyn and Miranda

Lights

Saturday Toni and I attended a wedding at the Miller Aquatorium. Kaitlyn, a friend of Miranda’s from Grand Rapids, was marrying a Syrian Muslim named Albaraa.  They apparently met at a rave, and he was very friendly when we chatted briefly.  Before the ceremony began, a bunch of the groom’s friends came in singing, clapping, dancing, and making squealing sounds.  Impressive. Phil, Kaitlyn’s soccer coach for several years, attended with Delia, as did three young ladies – Samantha, Niki, and Ann (a Warren, Michigan, police officer) who stayed at the condo with Miranda. We sat with Albaraa’s friend Hassan, who had just arrived from Saskatchewan, Canada, grew up in Toronto, and was a big Raptors fan. I told him that the capital of Saskatchewan, Regina, was a recent “Final Jeopardy”answer.  

I asked a young, tattooed woman with multi-colored hair whose portrait was adorning her upper leg and found out it was a Canadian singer Lights Poxleitner-Bokan, who goes by the name Lights. Most of her videos seem to be about intimate relationships.  “Skydiving contains these lyrics:

You pull me in
I'm doing things I never would do
My pulse, racing
I'm coming alive with you

After enjoying a Middle eastern meal sans alcohol, we attended Mike Chirich’s seventy-fifth birthday bash at Miller’s Gardner Center.  At one table were Bobby, Henry, and Joe Farag as well as several other family members.  I chatted with Danna Conklin, whose late husband audited several of my classes after he retired and became a friend and whose son was killed by a random bullet fired from near the Miller South Shore station as he was in his car near Lake Stereet and Route 20.  I gave Mike and Celeste tie-dye t-shirts with “Miller Beachcomber” inscribed on the front and “CHIRICH” on the back.   

 Michael Chirich

Fred McColly and Jimbo

Former student Fred McColly posted a decade-old photo taken on the day I retired and Dave’s band, Voodoo Chili, put on a mini-concert in front of IUN’s Hawthorn Hall.  I have on a dress shirt that Clark Metz had outgrown.  I thought of my old partner in crime while at Mike Chirich’s party since it was Clark who first introduced us.  On the way to Marquette Park for the wedding we passed his house on Oak Avenue, where we spent many afternoons joking around and looking out onto the lake.

Junedale concession stand

Sunday prior to James’s graduation from Portage, there was a family party that Dave missed due to East Chicago Central’s commencement.  He was able to be at the Portage ceremony on time, however.  Tamiya’s friend Charles and I shared Little League stories.  He played on a Junedale field in Glen Park that a half-century ago hosted the Senior League World Series, thanks to Joe Eckert, known as “Mr. Little league.”  Learning Charles was a Thea Bowman grad, I brought up former boys basketball coach Marvin Ray, who guided his 2010 team to the 2010 Class A championship.  Charles said that Rea falsely accused him of stealing a pair of shorts similar to those worn by the players that he’d had permission to take from the Lost and Found.

Cedar Lake Museum curator Scott Bocock sent clippings about boxing and wrestling matches staged at Lassen’s Resort in 1935.  One featured Gary’s Jack Kranz, who the year before had gone the distance in an 8-rounder against Joe Louis at Marigold Gardens in Chicago. According to Eye on the Ring,Kranz won the first three rounds and Louis the final five.  A 1942 Post-Tribunearticle reported on a wrestling match between Cedar lake native Am (Ambrose) Rascher and a seven-foot Swede named Hans Steinke.  As yet, Bocock has found no tangible evidence that Louis appeared at Lassen’s resort, as commonly thought according to local lore.  Steve McShane located a May 4, 1953 Post-Tribune clipping announcing Rascher’s appointment as an Indiana AAU commissioner that included his photo (below).