Homecoming

“Poetry is a sort of homecoming,” Paul Celan

I provided free copies of Steel Shavings, volume 47, at a Homecoming “Legacy” lunch for IUN grads and their children or grandchildren presently enrolled.  Alumni Relations director Paulette LaFata invited me to stay, so I made myself a salad and sat with Annalynn Morin and her mother Jean, who were at a table by themselves.  Annalynn is a Biology major active in several student groups; Jean took classes with Ron Cohen and remembered him fondly as a folk music expert.  Afterwards, I watched IUN’s Lady Redhawks defeat the Madonna University Crusaders, from Michigan judging from where their players hailed from. IUN’s best player Grayce Roach looks to be 100 percent recovered from a finger injury.  Veterans Michelle Borgen, Gina Rubino, and Chloe Salman also played well. Freshman Brittney Williams from Merrillville came off the bench to grab several rebounds and score two terrific follow-up shot on hustle plays.  I congratulated Coach Ryan Shelton, also IUN’s athletic director, on the university getting accepted into the CCAC (Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference) and expressed condolences on the death of assistant Ken Markfull.

Brittney Williams while at Merrillville; Times photo by John Luke

James as "narrator"

Grandson James was a narrator in the Portage H.S. play “Ten Ways to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse.”  Phil and Delia came in for the occasion.  Unbeknownst to me, James starts out in the audience.  Minutes before the curtain went up, Becca nudged me, and I turned to see him beaming just a few rows behind us.   Slightly deaf, I had trouble understanding much dialogue, but James belted out lines loud and clear.  In the program bio James quoted from the Nintendo game WarioWare: “It’s pizza time!  Oh yeah, no money.” 

 Z. Kierstead’s“I could’ve dropped my croissant”is from a YouTube vine gone viral.  Maria Sosa’s “No”is in honor of Rosa Parks, whose refusal to yield her seat sparked the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Makayla Butala’s “Don’t let the muggles get you down”is from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Meghan Smeltzer repeated a popular meme, “This is so sad.  Alexa, play Despacito.”  Toni sometimes calls upon digital assistant Alexa for crossword puzzle answers. “Despacito” is a song by Luis Fonsi.  Senior thespian Angelo Jarvis thanked former theater director Kevin Lee Giess, unfairly terminated on school board orders, “for allowing me my first opportunity.”

 Tom Wade, Waiting to see Obama at Gary Genesis Center

Obama photo by Kyle Telethon

Tom and Darcey Wade were part of a standing-room only audience at Gary Genesis Center that heard Barack Obama campaign for Indiana Democrats.  Beforehand, Tom stood for 90 minutes to obtain two free tickets and then another 90 minutes waiting to get inside, as rumors had circulated that not everyone would be able to get in.  Close to the stage with Darcey in a wheelchair, both got to shake the former President’s hand as he was leaving.  On Facebook Tom confessed to having a man-crush and wrote: “We will not wash our hands for a long while! He is such a gregarious, beautiful man.”

Major Brent Taylor, 39, mayor of North Ogden, Utah, and father of seven, died in Afghanistan at the hands of someone he was training during his second tour of duty there with the U.S. National Guard.  Previously, he had served two tours in Iran. His assassin, a member of the Afghan National Defense Force, was immediately shot and killed. Brent Taylor was a true hero, a selfless public servant at home and abroad.

Region author and Times correspondent Jane Ammeson praised Ken Schoon’s new book, “Swedish Settlements on the South Shore of Lake Michigan."  Schoon noted, “Many Swedes came first to Chicago, which at one time had more Swedes than any city on Earth except Stockholm.”  Ammeson quoted extensively from Schoon’s account of Joel Wicker, son-in-law of French fur trader Joseph Bailly, whose estate near Chellberg Farm in Porter has been preserved by the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Wicker hired Swedish newcomers  to chop down trees for use as railroad ties and fuel for steam engines.  Schoon wrote:

  Logs were also needed to build and heat homes and for cooking.  When enough trees were cut down, Wicker then sold the land to his Swedish employees who then cleared the land for farming.  Other Swedes found employment as farm laborers and working for sand and ice-mining companies, and as blacksmiths and carpenters.

  As the immigrants had more money, many purchased their own farms or started businesses in town.  The first licensed embalmer in Indiana was carpenter John Lundberg, a Chesterton Swede.  

Svanti Nordstrom (above with Fredrika); photos from Verlaine Wright

Schoon’s bibliography lists my Portage Shavings and a 1974 Post-Tribune article titled “Swedes started new church” about Miller pioneer Syena “Svanti” A. Nordstrom, who learned of the area from friends in LaPorte and Baillytown.  He wrote idyllic, albeit, exaggerated accounts of Miller’s scenic beauty and job opportunities that convinced former neighbors to join him.  He was acting pastor of Bethel Lutheran Church.  In October 1874 the congregation met for the first time in a one-room log schoolhouse.  A minister from Baillytown came periodically to preach and conduct communion; in his absence Nordstrom performed emergency baptisms.  Ruggedly handsome with yellow, curly hair and a long, flowing beard, Nordstrom, one parishioner recalled, “had the bearing of a man that you could not help but respect.”  Wife Fredrika died in 1888 at age 70, but Svanti, three years younger, lived another 22 years.

Cindy inside abandoned Horace Mann School 

Photographer Cindy “Cupcake” Bean sent Ron Cohen and me shots taken inside abandoned Horace Mann, including one of a letter from a Japanese visitor back when the K-12 “unit school” was implementing the vision of progressive educator Superintendent William A. Wirt.  The Gary school, in decent shape when it first closed, has been reduced to the scrap heap of history.  I told Cindy about the upcoming “Gary Haunts” South Shore exhibit in Munster featuring work similar to hers.

I picked up a needed win in Fantasy Football over nephew Bob to improve to 5-4.  Bob’s QB Mitch Trubisky threw only one TD pass, to Bears tight end Trey Burton, whom I had in the lineup because the Eagles’ Zach Ertz was on a bye week.  Trubisky earned Bob just 8 points; my backup QB (for Carson Wentz), Ben Roethilsberger got me 24, including a TD on the ground while Trubisky’s similar end zone effort ended a half-yard short.

James Lane voting for first time

George Van Til and Jimbo; photo by Jim Lazarus

On election day former Lake County Surveyor George Van Til invited me to lunch at Old Chicago Restaurant in Merrillville.  At the table were county auditor John Petalas and wife Karen, Lake County Democratic chairmen Jim Wieser, former Timesreporter Jim Lazerus (who came from California to volunteer for Senator Joe Donnelly, North Township Board member Peter Katic, writer Douglas Simmons, and current Lake County surveyor Bill Emerson.  They were pessimistic about Donnelly’s chances but otherwise guardedly confident.  Katic recalled election day gatherings at recently demolished Old Mill restaurant.  Wieser recalled former Lake County politician Andy Holinga inviting party members to his house, where he’d bang his huge fists on the kitchen table with such emphasis that things on it would fly into the air.  Petalas, a former student whose father owned a shoe repair shop on Broadway, first near Thirteenth and then in Glen Park, invited me to Rep. Peter Visclosky victory celebration that evening at Croatian Hall, but I was playing duplicate bridge. 

Barbara Walczak’s bridge Newsletter contained a photo taken at the Gary game of participants dressed in Halloween costumes, including Barbara Stroud, Charlotte Abernethy, Barb Walczak, Helen Miller, Daryl Fraley, Carolyn Potasnik, Alta Allen, and Trudi McKamey.  Pretty cool.

Charlie Halberstadt and I finished in the middle of the pack with 51.37%. Charlie told me about a player with a new partner who was asked what happened with her previous one.  “Bridge divorce,”she replied.  We edged out Terry Bauer and Dottie Hart, who usually clean our clock.  In one hand playing 3 No Trump against them, I had eight sure tricks but needed a finesse to make the contract.  If it failed I’d go down two.  It worked!  I was very disappointed in the results in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee; but, asMichael Moore said, Democrats swept the races in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, the three states whose electoral votes in 2016 elected Trump, a tumor on the body politic that hopefully is receding in influence.

At lunch, Miller resident Douglas Simmons had told me I could find his books on Amazon.  His bio states: “Read, so that you may know. Write, so that you may tell what you know. Tell, that others to come may also know: The written word is the light that leads us all through the darkness that is ignorance.”  Well put. He continued,“Having been, over the years (along with lesser pursuits) employed as soldier, postal worker, carpenter, caterer, photographer, professional musician, a millwright, an overhead crane operator, and last to this day an adventurer who sometimes pauses to muse about his wanderings,without fail, no matter the diverse undertakings of my life, I have been a writer.”  In “Reluctantly Collected Poems” (2013) – Simmons would rather have his poems read one at a time - is one I particularly like titled “I Spoke”:

Thinking that I had no words;
I spoke no more.
Thinking I had done it all;
I closed the door.

Thinking I had heard the world;
I closed my heart.
Thinking to escape the pain;
I drew apart.

Then you were there laughing
At a voice I didn't hear.
Hoping I might laugh again;

               I spoke: to draw you near.  

As days shorten with winter in the air and snow predicted in 48 hours, I thought of “Homecoming” by Romanian-born Jew Paul Celan (1920-1970), who survived a Nazi work camp but intentionally drowned in the Seine River:

Snowfall, denser and denser,
dove-colored as yesterday,
snowfall, as if even now you were sleeping.

White, stacked into distance.
Above it, endless,
the sleigh track of the lost.

Below, hidden,
presses up
what so hurts the eyes,
hill upon hill,
invisible.

On each,
fetched home into its today,
as I slipped away into dumbness:
wooden, a post.

There: a feeling,
blown across by the ice wind
attaching its dove- its snow-
colored cloth as a flag.  

Saints and Sinners

“They say I am impersonal.  I want you to know I am the only candidate who said he would get rid of [FBI director] J. Edgar Hoover and that is a person.” 1968 Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy

In Jonathyne Briggs’ seminar on 1968 Youth Rebellions I discussed why so many Americans were protesting the Vietnam War, namely the atrocities committed by our “killing machine,” composed of 500,000 troops carrying out “search and destroy” missions in “free fire zones” and utilizing heinous weapons (i.e., cluster bombs, Agent Orange, and napalm) in an unwinnable conflict against people who wanted their country united and free from foreign domination.  The autocratic leaders we supported against Ho Chi Minh, the George Washington of his country, were crooks and former French collaborators.  After mentioning my participation in the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, I read from Norman Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night” about the incarceration of Quaker pacifists who refused to accept a plea bargain:                    

     Some of [the women] refused to eat or drink and were fed intravenously.    Several men at the D.C.    jail would not wear prison clothing.  Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole.  There they lived in cells so small not all could lie down at once to sleep.  For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor.  For many days they did not eat or drink water.  Dehydration brought them near to madness.

Then Mailer wonders:

  Did they pray, these Quakers, for forgiveness of the nation?  Did they pray with tears in their eyes . . . “O Lord, bring more suffering upon me that the sins of our soldiers in Vietnam be not utterly unforgiven – they are too young to be damned forever."

“Armies of the Night” rests in a bookcase next to favorites “Breakfast of Champions” (Kurt Vonnegut), “Rabbit Is Rich” (John Updike), and “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories” (Jean Shepherd).  In “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” the Mailer book the class is reading, the author tells 1968 antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy that his 1960 nominating speech on behalf of Adlai Stevenson (during which the Minnesota Senator said, “Do not reject this man who made us all proud to be called Democrats”) was the second greatest oration he’d ever witnessed.  Taking the bait, McCarthy inquired about who was better.  Vito Marcantonio, Mailer replied, in 1948 at Yankee Stadium in front of 50,000 people.  That occasion was a Progressive Party rally for anti-Cold War Presidential candidate Henry Wallace.  Like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Marcantonio was a democratic socialist.  I told Jon’s students that although McCarthy and Mailer were on the correct side of history in their views about Vietnam, neither was a saint – and, in Mailer’s case, more a sinner – a notorious bully and womanizer who on the final night of the convention unwound at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy club.

Addressing California delegates at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, An embittered McCarthy answered charges that he would be a passive President:

      Well, a little passivity in that office is all right, a kind of balance, I think.  I have never known what active compassion is.  Actually, compassion, in my mind, is to suffer with someone, not in advance of him.  Or not in public necessarily.  But I have been, whether I have been passive or not, the most active candidate in the party this year, raising issues all the way.

 above, Eugene McCarthy; below, Ethan Schmidt

Nicole Anslover was a good friend of Ethan Schmidt, the American History professor at Delta State gunned down by an apparently crazed adjunct.  Schmidt and Nicole were both grad students at the University of Kansas.  The murderer, Shannon Lamb, first killed his girlfriend and after a police chase took his own life.  According to the Daily Mail, Lamb had gotten a nasty spider bite on the cheek that caused him a great deal of anxiety. Lamb claimed he shot his girlfriend by mistake when she tried to prevent him from committing suicide. Police remain baffled about why he had wanted Schmidt dead.  The two hardly knew each other, and Schmidt was by all accounts a good family man.  David Parnell took over Nicole’s Monday class so she could attend the funeral.

Visiting the Archives was Archie Allen of Clover Lane Media in pursuit of photographs for a two-hour documentary about civil rights in Indiana.  Vernon Smith had given him a copy of “Gary’s First Hundred Years,” and I pulled out “Gary: A Pictorial History” plus pictorial histories of Miller Beach and Glen Park so he could compile a list for Steve McShane.

In Steve’s class to find out how the students’ oral histories were progressing (nearly all had identified their subject), I read from Anastasia Polite’s reminiscences to give them ideas about aspects of ethnicity, including parental influences, home life, food, church, and social events.  In an interview for “Daughters of Penelope” Tasia recalled her parents insisting that she speak Greek, being served wine with meals (which she hated), and her grandmother taking her to St. Constantine’s Church.  Tasia added:

     My dad was very pro-Greek, but he hated the church.  He wouldn’t go, and my mother agreed with him, whatever he said.  He thought church was nonsense.  A fraud.  He hated the priests.  I think he had a bad experience in Greece with one of them.  His big thing was, “Never be alone with a priest.”  We’d have to go to confession, and he’d try to stop us. 

     When I was growing up, I probably went to hundreds of weddings.  People bought food for their weddings at our stores.  In those days nothing was catered.  The family cooked fried meatballs and Greek lamb in the church basement.  Everybody was welcome.  There were no formal invitations.  When somebody was getting married, we went to the weddings.  The ceremony was held in the church, of course, and the receptions were downstairs.  Later the church added a bigger hall.

     My dad was a beautiful dancer.  It seemed that dancing was when his soul came out.  There were a lot of Greek gatherings in those days.  Nearly every week a band would be playing, and we’d go to the church hall to dance.  When he got up, there would be a whisper, “Vlasie’s going to dance.”  Everybody would gather around to watch him, like in the movie “Zorba the Greek.”  Once one of the more forward, well-endowed women got up and started to dance with him.  He completely ignored her and went on with his dance, pretending she wasn’t there.

        

Professor Allison Schuette of Valparaiso University, co-director of the “Welcome Project,” will meet with me regarding a Gary initiative titled “Flight Paths: Mapping Our Changing Neighborhoods.”  In an interview for that project Valpo mayor Jon Costas, who grew up on Gary’s West Side in a house later purchased by Dolly Millender, asserted that the year 1967 was a “turbulent time” – a “perfect storm” - in terms of Black protest nationwide and local tension due to Richard Hatcher being elected mayor.  His family joined the “white flight” shortly after a Halloween incident.  Jon was walking home after trick-or-treating with his older brother and friends when suddenly a gang of African Americans surrounded him.  The others fled, but Jon had his candy stolen and feared for his safety until a gang member said, “Leave him alone, he’s just a kid.”

above, Mayor Jon Costas; below, Yogi Berra

New York Yankee Hall of Fame catcher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra passed away at age 90.  A hero to my dad, he famous, especially when Yankee manager, for off-the-wall “Yogi-isms,” such as, “It ain’t over till it’s over” and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  He once said, “Always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise they won’t come to yours.”

above, Jeff Manes; below, Union Mills Sectional champs

Jeff Manes interviewed Matt Werner, author of “Season of Upsets,” about Union Mills, the 1950 high school basketball Sectional champions who defeated Michigan City Elston, which had an enrollment of 1,000 students compared to 65 at Union Mills.  Werner told Manes that he spent about three years researching and writing the book and interviewed more than 70 people.

Is nothing sacred?  The blurb for Molly Geidel’s “Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties,” in the University of Minnesota “Critical American Studies” series, proclaims:

  The practice of development work, embodied by iconic Peace Corps volunteers, allowed U.S. policy makers to manage global inequality while assuaging their own gendered anxieties about postwar affluence.  Geidel traces how modernization theorists used the Peace Corps to craft the archetype of the heroic development worker: a ruggedly masculine figure who would inspire individuals and communities to abandon traditional lifestyles and seek integration into the global capitalist world.

 statue of Junipero Serra in San Gabriel, CA

On American soil Pope Francis canonized Spaniard Junipero Serra, an eighteenth century Franciscan monk, despite protests from 50 California Native American tribes.  Valentin Lopez declared: “We’re stunned and we’re in disbelief.”  Deborah Miranda wrote, “The missions ended up killing about 90 percent of the California Indians present at the time of missionization.”  Historian Carey McWilliams called missions “charnel houses” where victims were pressed into forced labor and infected with deadly diseases.  In The Guardian Andrew Gumbel wrote:

       When the Native Americans rebelled, which they did on at least two occasions, the rebellions were put down in brutal fashion. When Native American women were caught trying to abort babies conceived through rape, the mission fathers had them beaten for days on end, clamped them in irons, had their heads shaved and forced them to stand at the church altar every Sunday carrying a painted wooden child in their arms.

Writing from a federal prison camp in Terre Haute, George Van Til began, “Hello my friend,” While his health is still shaky, his spirit was lifted by a visit from Dana Holland Neal and Carolyn McCrady and he’s pleased at my interest in coming, adding: “I’m fortunate that I’ve had visitors every weekend – family plus friends – but as the novelty wears off, who knows?  Representative Charlie Brown came down with former State Rep. Peter Katic.”

above, Charlie Brown; below, Peter Katic