Social Distancing

“Put simply, the idea of social distancing is to maintain a distance between you and other people — in this case, at least six feet. That also means minimizing contact with people. Avoid public transportation whenever possible, limit nonessential travel, work from home and skip social gatherings — and definitely do not go to crowded bars and sporting arenas.” New York Times

below, "Let the online teaching begin" Liz photo of Al

Coronavirus pandemic updates are totally dominating the news.  Hoarders are panic-buying items such as toilet paper while others, often Trump supporters, believe news reports to be a hoax or an anti-Trump conspiracy. Democratic frontrunners Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders debated on CNN without an audience, and the candidates did an elbow bump rather than shake hands.  Illinois is closing bars and restaurants for the foreseeable future (Indiana followed suit the following day) except for carry-out, yet at O’Hare Airport passengers returning from overseas had to stand in crowded lines for up to four hours in order to pass through customs. Students at every level from preschool to grad school will be working from home. Overseas programs, such as those Alissa directs at Grand Valley State, are in chaos.

In the past 24 hours Banta Center closed and Chesterton Y drastically limited services, so no duplicate bridge. I called off bowling, and teammate Frank Shufran’s knee surgery got cancelled at the last moment. According to a CBS anchor, Isaac Newton apparently invented calculus while working in isolation during the plague years of 1665-1666.  With Trinity College, Cambridge closed, Newton returned to his family estate and worked on his own so successfully that he later referred to that period as the annus mirabilus or “year of wonders.”

After watching Willie Geist discuss binge-watching a TV series on NBC Sunday Today, I checked out “Better Things” on FX, which New York magazine had praised.  Pamela Adlon portrays a single mother and sometime actress with three precocious daughters and an unbalanced mother who likes to swim naked uninvited in a neighbor’s pool.  I was disappointed that I couldn’t get the first couple episodes free On Demand and that commercials interrupted the action every few minutes but nonetheless watched the three available shows with growing interest.  With a husky voice and gravelly laugh, Adlon looked and sounded familiar; I learned that she had been a regular on “Californication.”  Season 3 of “Better Things” almost didn’t happen because  original co-star Louis C.K. was banished after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct.  

Sociologist Chuck Gallmeier studied social distancing, not as a way to prevent catching contagious diseases but as a means of avoiding unwanted interchanges in public places.  Examples are checking email messages while on elevators and closing your eyes seated on airplanes.  I need to consult with Chuck on latest developments, as Americans keep readjusting their lives.  Whereas government officials recommended avoiding crowds of over 100 and then 50, now the number is down to ten.  

In Richard Russo’s “Chances Are,” about three college buddies (Teddy, Lincoln, and Mickey) reuniting 45 years later on Martha’s Vineyard, squeamish Teddy faints dead away when a singer he recognizes as the daughter of a long-lost girlfriend joins Mickey’s band on stage and belts out the opening lines to “Nutbush City Limits.”  

A church house, gin house
A school house, outhouse
On highway number nineteen
The people keep the city clean
They call it Nutbush

Written in 1973 by Tina Turner about her hometown of Nutbush, Tennessee, so small it doesn’t appear on most state maps, at a time when she was suffering at the hands of an abusive husband, “Nutbush City Limits” has an ironic tone, as seen in these lyrics:

No whiskey for sale
You get caught, no bail
Salt pork and molasses
Is all you get in jail

  . . .

Quiet little old community, a one-horse town
You have to watch what you're puttin' down

Rock critic Rick Hasted wrote: “’Limits’ is the key word, as she artfully sketches a circumscribed life [in a place] more like somewhere to escape [from] than like a rural idyll.”      

Buddy Johnson orchestra

Riley “B.B.” King’s autobiography, “Blues All Around Us” describes growing up in a Mississippi Delta sharecropping family. His first vivid memory: braiding his mother Nora Ella’s hair after she had worked all day picking cotton.  From his great-grandmother, a former slave, he learned that blues songs unburdened the soul but also served as a survival mechanism, for example, warning that “massa” was near.  Attending a one-room schoolhouse, Riley had a bad stutter and was more interested in girls than learning.  Nonetheless, teacher Luther Henson impacted his life, convincing him that justice would ultimately prevail over evil.  Hanson’s nephew Purvis performed in Buddy Johnson’s nine-piece orchestra, evidence of the possibility of reaching brighter horizons.  In 1944 the Buddy Johnson Band had a number one rhythm and blues hit, “When My Man Comes Homes,” with Buddy’s sister Ella Johnson on vocals.

 

Toni and I saw B.B. King, who died five years ago at age 90, headline a “House Rockin’ Blues” show at Merrillville’s Star Plaza.  Also on the bill: Buddy Guy, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and Albert King.  At B.B. King’s Blues Club in Memphis with the Migoski’s on the thirtieth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, the performer on stage announced she wouldn’t be playing Elvis songs for tourists but made a reference to Elvis admiring the Blues that was not uncomplimentary.

High school classmate Phil Arnold called and asked if I were a history buff.  As a historian, I replied, I might be called that.  Rummaging through decades-old possessions, he unearthed a map showing Montgomery County, PA, during the period of the American Revolution, including places where General George Washington stayed.  I was familiar with Valley Forge, of course, my home town, Fort Washington, and Whitemarsh, where our Cub Scout Memorial Day parade would end, but not Camp Hill or other places he mentioned.  He’s planning on mailing it to me. As always, I asked Phil to say hello to Bev, unfailingly upbeat despite myriad health concerns.

Phil and Bev Arnold, 2009

According to university scuttlebutt making the rounds, a few longtime professors have never interacted with students via the internet and don’t intend to start, despite expectations that they do so during the current crisis. When I retired a decade ago, rudimentary methods of contacting students online were in place, and I had begun to post assignments and other important messages.  It’s hard to believe that a handful of old-timers are resisting the inevitable. Distance learning is certainly better than none at all.

Looks like no more guest appearances in history colleagues’ classes this semester.  In the fall, if all returns to normal, Nicole Anslover will offer a class on Women in Politics.  Unlike 1990s governors Ann Richards (Texas) and Christine Todd Whitman (NJ), most early women governors and members of Congress succeeded deceased husbands and only served out the remainder of their terms.  Two exceptions were Texan Miriam “Ma” Ferguson and Hattie Wyatt Caraway of Arkansas. Ferguson’s husband had been impeached while governor and barred from holding future public office, so “Ma” ran in his place, winning a two-year term in 1924 and again in 1932.  Making no secret that she would lean on her husband for advice, Ferguson used this campaign slogan: “Me for Ma, and I Ain’t Got a Durned Thing Against Pa.”

Hattie Caraway took over husband Thaddeus’’s Senate seat in 1931 and the following year threw her hat into the ring, proclaiming, “The time has passed when a woman should be placed in a position and kept these only while someone is groomed for the job.” Senator Huey Long of neighboring Louisiana campaigned for her, and she became the first woman U.S. Senator to serve a full term.  In 1938 Hattie got re-elected after surviving a primary challenge from Representative John McClellan, whose slogan was, “Arkansas Needs Another Man in the Senate.”  Caraway lost a bid for a third term against Congressman J. William Fulbright, a former Razorback star football player and Rhodes scholar.

Morning Haiku

i pick

up your breath and

remember me

         Sonia Sanchez, “Cuernavaca”

 

Miller Beach Arts and Creative District is kicking off National Poetry Month at the Gardner Center with a screening of “Love Jones” (1997), whose main character Nina (Nia Long) recites two of Sonia Sanchez’s compositions from “Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums: Love Poems” (1998).  Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1934, Sonia Sanchez (Wilsonia Benita Driver) grew up in Harlem, formed a writers’ workshop in Greenwich Village that included Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), and helped develop the nation’s first Black Studies program at San Francisco State University during the late 1960s (IUN launched a similar one just months later).  Maya Angelou has said, “Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest.”   In 1970 Sanchez wrote “right on: white America”:

this country might have

been a pio

                neer land

once.

        but.      there ain’t

no mo

           indians             blowing

custer’s mind

                   with a different

image of america.

                        this country

might have

               needed shoot/

outs/daily/

               once.

                      but.  there ain’t

no mo real/white                all-American

                                        bad/guys.

just.

      u & me

            blk/and/un/armed.

this country might have

been a pio

               neer land           once.

                                            and it still is.

check out

              the falling

gun/shells               on our blk/tomorrows.

Sanchez’s books of poems include “Homegirls and Handgrenades” (1984) and “Morning Haiku” (2010).  Of Japanese origin, a haiku is an unrhymed verse of three lines written in the present tense, usually invoking an aspect of nature and containing five, seven, and five syllables.  Here’s one by Sanchez that follows that 17-syllable pattern:

There are things sadder

than you and I.  Some people

do not even touch.

After Toni and I spent three days in Stockholm with beat poet Izzy Young, a friend of Ron Cohen, Izzy was so thankful for Toni buying him socks (imagine surviving a Sweden winter sockless), he composed a haiku in her honor and presented it to her at his Folklore Institute the morning we left for an International Oral History Association conference in Göteborg.  The title of my talk: “The Professor Wore a Cowboy Hat (And Nothing Else): Ethical Issues in Handling Matters of Sex in Institutional Oral Histories: Indiana University Northwest as a Case Study.”

Peter Aglinskas treated me to a taco lunch at Cha-Cha’s on West Ridge Road in Gary, which has great Mexican meals.  Peter joked that so many “Noir” films appeared during the 1940s and 1950s that he could keep his “Thursday Night Noir” series at Valparaiso University going indefinitely.  Peter being an accomplished classical guitarist, I suggested that to set the mood he start programs with something from the movie soundtrack.  For “Touch of Evil” on April 21, he could choose among many Henry Mancini numbers, such as “Strollin’ Blues” or “Pigeon Caged.”   Mancini employs Latin jazz accents evocative of Tijuana during the 1950s.  Peter is considering a “Noir” series in Europe.  He already knows several foreign languages and is taking advanced French with IUN master teacher Scooter Pegram.

Michael Boos passed along a flattering email from Sherry Meyer, who attended my talk at Calumet College.  Some of the insights she delineates came from audience members during Q and A.  Sherry references to somebody having taped the talk for a Calumet Heritage website.

  Jim Lane's talk on the steelworkers of Gary and East Chicago - along with the cadre of works he and others have published to document life in this steel region - really brought the Calumet's heritage to life last evening.  Of the many aha's:  IUN's Swing Shift program, Cedar Lake's WWII worker housing and shuttle service, weekend homeward migrations from the mills down 41 to the South, the country's 1st/2nd Black Studies program, LGBT work life in the mills, immigrant experiences, the urging of parents that kids get educated and escape the mills and the experience of being the first college student, changes in the workforce over the century, labor and environmental activism, women workers, women's work, absentee mill owners, government regulation, and I can't wait to see the video posted.

-->

Eden Leon Interviewed Bari and Ron Siwy, who have been married for 47 years.

Bari Lynne Finnegan was born on June 18, 1946, in a Hammond hospital; her family lived in Robertsdale, a small, close-knit community nearby of mainly Eastern and Central European immigrants that was part of Whiting.  Bari was brought home to her grandparents’ house where her mother Mari Ellyn had been born in 1908.  Mari Ellyn was very religious and used to tellBari:  “Some things in your life are planned, it’s fate, and no matter what you did or what you say you can’t change it because that is how your life is supposed to be.”  Most white ethics have died or moved away from Robertsdale. The ones still there are referred to as the “diehards.”  Most people who live there now are Hispanic.

Bari’s sister Charlene was ten years older. “It was sort of like being an only child,” Bari recalled. Bari went to St. John, a Catholic school in a Slovak parish, from first through eighth grade.  Sister Superior, the head nun, disapprovingly said Bari was a Jewish boy’s name.  Bari was Irish but never wore green to school, not even on St. Patrick’s Day. They didn’t own a car because there was no need for one. Everything was within walking distance.  Bart’s job at Standard Oil and the bowling alley were right up the street.  Bari recalled: “My dad would go bowling and we girls would go shopping every Saturday.”  The family used to shop in downtown Hammond, but those store are now gone.  When Char got engaged to a fellow who went into the military, his parents allowed her to use the car whenever she wanted.  Char and Bari would go to Chicago a lot take longer shopping trips.  Bari attended high school at Hammond Clark.

Bart’s brother and sister would come from Canada and spent the Christmas holiday.  On December 26 they’d go to Marshall Fields in Chicago to see the tree in the Walnut Room.  Then they’d walk to the Fair Store on State Street to see the lights. “My aunt for Canada was blind but going to the fair store was her favorite part of coming out around this time of the year,” Bari recalled.  In the summer Standard Oil hosted a family picnic at Wicker Park.  At Halloween the family would attend a fun house put on by the Whiting Community Center, which now is the YMCA. Bari’s family always went to the July fourth parade and then to a carnival at Whiting Park.  They’d go on rides and play games until sunset and the firework show started. Her mother’s family and friends would sit on lawn chairs in a big circle and watch the kids play before the fireworks show.

In November of 1964, Bari didn’t have didn’t have a date to cousin Bonnie’s wedding, so Bonnie’s fiancé Jerry set her up with a guy in his poker club. At the last minute the guy was drafted into the military. After high school she dated a wounded Vietnam veteran.  One day during a snowstorm he died in a car accident. Bari fell into a depression do to this loss. To make her feel better a friend snuck Bari into a bar where she met steelworker Ronald Siwy.  Two and a half years later, on October 26, 1968, Bari and Ron got married. 

Bari with her dad Bart

Ron was from a large Polish family, and when Bari got pregnant in 1971 his dad wasn’t thrilled when they named the son Patrick after Bari’s grandfather, saying, “What, are you trying to make an Irishmen out of him?”  At the time they were living in a third floor Whiting apartment.  Their search for a house ultimately led them to Hobart.  One Christmas Eve Ron stayed up all night putting together all kinds of toys.  He recalled: “It was a mess! Pieces everywhere. Extra screws but not enough of other parts.”  Next morning Patrick ignored the toys and played with the boxes.  

One Thanksgiving people arrived unexpectedly so Ron bought a frozen turkey.  Bari told him to soak it in cold water in the basement sink. He put it in the one the washer drained into.  Bari recalled:  “I had just started a load of dirty diapers. I went downstairs to check my load, and there is a frozen turkey floating on top of all this dirty water!   I grabbed the bleach and just started scrubbing that turkey. I don’t know if it tasted good but it was the cleanest turkey we ever ate.”

Ron with Mike and Patrick

Ron is retired from Inland Steel (now ArcelorMittal), and Bari works at Hobart YMCA. Patrick and Michael (born in 1980), are both married with children. “I went from having no grandchildren to having 5 in a matter of two years,” Bari exclaimed excitedly.  “We have had our up and downs, but life is like a coin, you can spend it anyway you want but you can only spend it once.” 

   

Jeff Manes interviewed nudist Scarlett Schmitt, 50, who owns and operates Ponderosa Sun Club in Roselawn, started by her grandfather, two uncles, and her father in 1965.  The name came from the TV show “Bonanza,” where the Ponderosa patriarch Ben Cartwright had three sons.  Scarlett described the two-day Nudes-a-Poppin’ festival, which has been co-hosted by such celebrities as Kid Rock, Gene Simmons of Kiss, Al Lewis (Grandpa Munster, whom troglodyte Ted Cruz resembles) and Dennis Huff, owner of the Bunny Ranch in Reno:

  Nudes-a-Poppin' was created by my dad in 1975 as a way of getting more people interested in this place.  There is a $60 admission fee. More than 4,000 people attend. We have an outdoor arena for mud wrestling and wet T-shirt contests. That's also where we crown our king and queen. This year's Nudes-a-Poppin' will take place July 16th and 17th. It's adults only and the only time cameras are allowed.

Manes reported: “Will spend my birthday with Thomas Hendryx, Esq, the grandson of Vito Manes, and my first cousin, at U.S. Cellular Park. We will dress as though it were a Bears game.  Why is it that every time I go to a game Danks is pitching for the Sox?”  Even though it was snowing hard, the game took place and predictably, John Danks gave up five runs in two innings; Chicago lost 7-1.

Due to bowling I missed IUN Asia Day, which in the past has featured delicious food, a fashion show, dancing, and other cultural activities.  As bad as I bowled, I should have opted to say at the university. The first place team, Fab Four, swept all three games from the Engineers.

Phil Arnold noted on his Elvis blog that outlaw country singer Merle Haggard, who died on his seventy-ninth birthday, recorded a tribute album to Presley that included “In the Ghetto” and “Don’t be Cruel.”  Arnold wrote: “Goodbye Merle Haggard.  You will be missed.  Say hi to Elvis for us.”  Haggard’s most famous ditty, “Okie from Muskogee,” about a small town where kids weren’t hippies and didn’t smoke marijuana, has been recognized as a a spoof and even recorded by the Grateful Dead. 

 from left, Julie Kern, Rita and Bob Smith, Paul Kern

Paul and Julie Kern returned from their two-month adventure in California.  While there he read “The Octopus” by Frank Norris (about railroad baron Leland Stanford) and books about the Gold Rush and anti-Chinese pograms.  Rita and Bob Smith, who live in Valpo most of the year, watched the Kern cat at The Villages while they were gone. 

Author Beth Bailey

Jonathyne Briggs will be discussing Beth Bailey’s “Sex in the Heartland” (1999), about the 1960s sexual revolution in the university town of Lawrence, Kansas.  Like at Bucknell when I was an undergraduate, there were rigid curfews for coeds and spring panty raids at women’s dorms.  Alfred Kinsey considered the latter as a form of flirtation with connotations of sexual violence, as well as a rebellion against authority.  As Kinsey put it, “All animals play around.”   The sexual revolution was a rebellion against the gulf between what Kinsey had called the overt and covert sexual culture.  Bailey wrote:

  The sexual revolution was never a single, coherent movement.  [It] was an amalgam of movements and impulses joined in the chaos of that era.  They were often at odds with one another, rarely well thought out, and frequently without a clear agenda, but they shared a powerful impatience with the hypocrisy and repressiveness of the sexual status quo.  In the last years of the 1960s Americans, quite correctly, saw the sexual revolution as one facet of a whole panorama of social upheavals and crises that were shaking their society to its very foundation.  

Turn, Turn, Turn

“A time for love, a time for hate,

A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.”

    Pete Seeger, “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

At the Gardner Center Ron Cohen introduced a documentary about legendary folk singer Pete Seeger.  Beforehand we dined at the Bakery Café with him and Nancy, Linda Anderson, Barbara Cope, Bill and Pamela Lowe, and Chuck Gallmeier and Barb Schmal.  The bar area was packed with Friday afternoon  regulars that included attorney Scott King and retired Gary teacher Jim Spicer.  Chancellor Lowe recently returned from meetings in Louisville and was pleased to learn that Jeff Manes recently interviewed his administrative assistant Kathy Malone about the Voices of Love community choir.  Among Bill’s souvenirs was a Louisville Slugger bat, which he intends to put in his office near the Bruce Springsteen poster.  I told my story about getting a call in the hospital from Bruce Bergland shortly after he became chancellor.  When he called me Jim, I replied that friends called me Jimbo.  Just then we lost connection, and I feared he’d hung up on me.  He called back and ever since called me Jimbo, even though there were times when I’m sure he uttered something profane under his breath.

Ron had copies of “The Pete Seeger Reader” on hand that he co-edited with James Capaldi.  He stressed that Pete’s primary purpose was educational, not only in teaching audiences songs but imparting their political message.  Seeger also put out the classic book “How to Play the Five-String Banjo.”  In the early 1950s his group The Weavers had a string of popular hits, including Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene,” but then they were blacklisted.  It would be nearly two decades before Seeger performed on TV.  He sang “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on the Smothers Brothers show only to have it excised from the telecast.  At Tommy and Dick’s insistence he appeared again without being censored.  I recall the thrill of seeing Pete on “Sesame Street” teaching workers songs in Spanish to kids and having them sing verses along with him.  In 1994 President Bill Clinton presented him with the National Medal of Arts.  Other recipients included Harry Belafonte and Dave Brubeck.  Roger McGuinn, formerly of the Byrds, performed “Turn! Turn! Turn!” at the ceremony.  Seeger also wrote “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”  The documentary had clips of Bruce Springsteen extolling Seeger and his monumental influence.  Pete helped get his beloved Hudson River cleaned up and believed change has to begin at the community level.

A Sports Illustrated article on Martellus Bennett, like me a Pisces, quoted the Bears tight end explaining his sign of the zodiac, usually portrayed as two interlocking fish in this manner: “There are the downstreams; they just go with the flow and everything that happens.  They’re just cool about it.  Then there’s the upstream ones, the ones who try to change the world and do things differently from the way they were done.  They’re not easygoing.  I’m an upstream one.”  So am I.

Time humorist Joel Stein declared 2013 “The Year of Not Trying Too Hard.”  Pope Benedict resigned; the government couldn’t design a decent Obamacare website; 60 Minutes didn’t properly fact check its Benghazi story; and a gullible San Francisco TV station anchor claimed that the Chinese pilots of a downed plane were Sum Ting Won, Ho Lee Fuk, Wi Tu Low, and Bang Ding Ow. “Congress,” Stein wrote, “passed fewer laws than any other year in American history, including the 1970s, when members of Congress were high and sleeping with one another.”  Then he added: “During all that laziness, the stock market soared, unemployment went down, the deficit was reduced, the Middle East became a little more stable, and a baby was apparently cured of AIDS.  Maybe for 2014 we should just take a nice, long nap.”

Saturday I picked up a Philly Steak at Subway (8.75 plus tax) and grocery shopped at Jewel, which gives away stamps redeemable for dishware.  Someone had left a bunch on my check-out counter, and I scarfed them up just ahead of another lady eyeing them.  Sorting through my CDs in search of two from Phil Arnold, “Santa’s Songs” and “Christmas Blues,” I found a one he burned for me of 25 Fifties hits by the likes of Elvis, Ray Charles, Dion, and Fats Domino, plus one I hadn’t heard in many a moon, “Angel Baby” by the Originals.  On a whim I called Phil, and we chatted about high school classmates and college football (he was about to root on Florida State, while I would be hoping for Michigan State to beat Ohio State). Alissa had gathered with several college friends to root for the Spartans, successfully, it turned out.

Spotting an in the Sunday Chicago Tribune article about the ten 2013 albums “that mattered most,” I was amazed that Parquet Courts, the band I’ll be seeing at Pappy and Harriet’s in January, at the top of the list.  The author, G.K., wrote: “The wickedly funny yet pointed and often poetic lyrics nail the limbo between youth and adulthood.”  I ordered a bunch of them from Best Buy for Christmas presents.

For his piano solo in a program Sunday James performed “Luigi’s Mansion” from memory.  In the Nintendo game Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon the Mario franchise character attempts to capture ghosts in five haunted mansions with a vacuum cleaner.

There were some wild NFL finishes, including three TDs in the final two minutes in Baltimore’s victory over Minnesota and an apparent Steeler TD on the last play of the game nullified because part of the runner’s shoe touched the sideline.  My favorite: the Eagles scored 28 points in the fourth to overcome a big lead by Detroit.  I thought I had a good chance to win the weekly pool if the Bears beat the Cowboys.  They slaughtered them on Monday night football, but Nick Barclay edged me out by a single point.  Before the game brother-in-law Sonny called to say he’d be rooting for Chicago since their winning would benefit the Eagles.

Alysia Abbott’s “Fairyland,” is getting sadder and sadder as AIDS exacts a fearsome toll among the author’s father’s friends.  Steve Abbott writes: “Come morning I’ll be the only good fairy left in Town.”  During Alysia’s senior year at NYU she learns that her father, too, is dying and goes to care for him.

Some of Anne Balay’s critics pilloried her for using the children’s book “Nappy Hair” by Carolivia Herron, believing the term “nappy” to be derogatory toward African Americans, even though it won the Coretta Scott King Picture Book Award.  A white teacher in Brooklyn who used the book in a class of mainly black and Hispanic children received complaints and even death threats from numerous parents.  Reviewer E.R. Bird wrote: “I decided to check out the infamous ‘Nappy Hair,’ once considered so damaging by so few (and yet so vocal).”  Another customer stated: “As a 23 year-old black feminist, I really enjoyed this book.  The term nappy for my generation is not as degrading as people have made it out to be. As a child my mother told me that my hair was nappy and we celebrated it.  I believe we need to teach our children to celebrate diversity.  Hair texture is like skin complexion, it comes in a wide range, yet we are one people! CELEBRATE DIVERSITY!!!!”

Samuel A. Love posted a photo of Gary’s Midtown neighborhood, once a bustling, overcrowded neighborhood, now looking deserted.  It’s nice being Facebook friends with IU South Bend Women’s Studies professor April Lipinsky, whom Sheriff Dominguez called “a jewel of a person.”  A recent post mentioned her being broken-hearted over the death of her father-in-law, Glenn Smith.  She passed on this story about him: “When he heard that Ken and I met in a feminist criticism course, his response, with a twinkle in his eye, was, ‘Oh, really? Which feminists were you criticizing?’”

Steve, Nick, and Aaron "Beamer" Pickert; photo by Kim Pickert

Brother-in-law Steve Pickert wrote: “I went to the kids' place last night to watch the Critter (Nick) while they made pierogies. Well he wanted to go outside to shovel the snow. I was already sorry I bought him the toddler snow shovel. I left him in his pajamas and put on his fall hoody and socks and shoes and mittens (but no thumb in thumb hole). The idea was that he would get colder quicker and we could come in. I wore damp gloves and wet sneakers. It took more than 30 minutes for him to agree to go back in, the little Eskimo. If only there had been some wind we could have come in earlier. I did teach him how to shovel snow. Push the snow holding the shovel at the right angle and when the shovel was full flip the snow off. He kept lifting the shovel shoulder high to flip the snow, with me calling out, "too high...too high" and he laughed and laughed.  I also taught him the shovelers’ chant: ‘shovel … shovel … work … work … work … ‘ and he laughed and laughed.  The kids let me stay for dinner and they cooked up a few pierogies. Mmmmm … mmmm.’”