Great Adventure

“When a great adventure is offered, you don’t refuse it.” Amelia Earhart

 

Growing up in Atchison, Kansas, Amelia Earhart earned the reputation of being a daredevil and tomboy who believed girls should have the opportunity to do anything a boy could do.  Her first plane ride in 1920 changed Amelia’s life; becoming an aviatrix became her passion. By the following year, she had saved enough money to pay for flying lessons from highly-regarded instructor Anita Snook. Within a few years she was a seasoned pilot.  In 1928, in what was a well-planned publicity stunt, Earhart was a passenger in a transatlantic flight piloted by Wilmer Stultz, admitting, “I was just baggage.” Upon returning to America she and the two-person crew received a ticker tape parade in New York City and a reception with President Calvin Coolidge. Due to her resemblance in appearance to Charles Lindbergh, she was dubbed by the press “Lady Lindy.”  Determined to prove her mettle on her own, in 1932 Earhart completed a 14-hour solo flight across the Atlantic, battling strong winds, icy conditions, and mechanical problems.  Her celebrity status led to frequent appearances and commercial endorsements. In 1935, I learned from historian Ray Boomhower, Purdue University hired Earhart to be a counselor to female students and established a Fund for Aeronautical Research in her name that helped in purchasing a twin-motored Lockheed Electra for Amelia’s next great adventure.

By 1938 Earhart had decided to attempt an around-the-world flight and have an account of it be the penultimate chapter in a memoir that would raise money for further aeronautical research and exploration.  After a false start, the ill-fated flight began June 1, 1938, in Miami, Florida. Flying to South America and then east to Africa and Southeast Asia, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan had completed 22,000 miles in a month and had just 7,000 miles to go, across the Pacific.  From Lae, New Guinea, the next leg was 2,570 miles to Howland Island.  She never made it; the plane went missing and a radio frequency snafu caused a waiting naval vessel to lose contact with her plane.  Her last message was that the Lockheed Electra was running out of fuel.  Despite an intensive search, no trace of her or the plane was ever found.

 

Earhart’s disappearance has been the source of speculation and conspiracy theories that exist to this day.  Indeed, it is the primary reason people remember her.  Because America would soon be at war with Japan, some claimed her plane had been shot down and Earhart captured, accused of being on an intelligence mission, and executed.  Romantics wondered wishfully if she and Noonan had escaped to a deserted Pacific island; more likely, they landed on a coral reef that eventually submerged.  Most experts believe the plane simply ran out of fuel, crashed into the Pacific, and sank to the bottom of the sea.

 

My great adventure was leaving law school and traveling to Hawaii to commence working on becoming a History professor. For as long as I could remember, I’d planned to become a lawyer, and for three summers I’d worked at distinguished Philadelphia law firms as a mail room messenger. I observed young associates working 60-80 hours a week hoping to make partner, an outcome that seemed to depend on whether they could generate business for the firm.  In other words, not as glamorous a situation as on the “Perry Mason” series.

 

My senior year at Bucknell, I took Education courses and student taught, which I thoroughly enjoyed. At Virginia Law School many students were undecided over careers or had been pressured into being there. After a dorm mate committed suicide, I started contemplating whether, much as I enjoyed most law school classes, the legal profession was for me.  On a whim I looked into the University of Hawaii’s graduate program and discovered the History chair, Herbert Margulies, was someone whose work on the Progressive Era I admired.  I wrote Margulies a letter, and he urged me to apply and indicated I could receive an assistantship that would cover tuition and pay me a couple thousand dollars.  After meeting with Bucknell mentor, Dr. William H. Harbaugh in Lewisburg, PA, (hitchhiking part of the way) who warned me I’d never be rich and have at least a half dozen years of schooling yet but told me to go for it if that’s what I really wanted, I took the plunge with Toni’s consent. I’ve never looked back and marvel at how well it worked out and that I had the nerve to do it.

 

Toni agreed to move up our wedding date six months, after which we drove her Volkswagen Beetle across the country (a Southern route since it was mid-January 1965, a time when Yankees were viewed with suspicion), shipped the VW from California on to Honolulu, and boarded a plane.  I began work on a Master’s degree, and Toni obtained a job at a downtown law firm. We found a small apartment on Poki Street (why we later named a cat Poki) about a mile from the Manoa campus and close to a bus stop for Toni to commute to work while I walked to classes.  Some evenings we’d hang out on Waikiki Beach near nightclubs with live Hawaiian music and once splurged at Duke Kahanamoku’s for dinner and a show featuring Don Ho of “Tiny Bubbles” fame. I did research at Iolani Palace and we spent a glorious week on the then-barely developed island of Kauai (below, left).  Since phone calls were prohibitively expensive, we’d send and receive audio tapes from our families. I retain many other fond memories of our 18 months on Oahu and have been back to the islands several times since.                 Graduation, 1966

My adventure pales in comparison with the millions of immigrants to America, including Toni’s grandparents.  John Petalas posted a 1922 photo (below) of charter members of AHERA (American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association, founded to counter bigoty emanating from hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan  Anne Koehler, who emigrated from Germany many years ago, wrote about spending a delightful evening with friend Dorothy: “We were sitting in the car at Weko Beach in Bridgman, Michigan where they play taps at sunset during the summer. A car pulled up halfway. Dorothy talked to the driver and found out that he was from Germany. We started to talk from car to car and I found out that this spry gentleman is 92 years old. He hails from Stuttgart in southern Germany and came to this county in the 1950s. He remembers growing up under Hitler and barely missed being drafted toward the end of the war. I was happy to find out that he shared my dislike of our president.”

Dominguez family and George Van Til

My “Great Adventure” post received close to 50 replies, many from former students, including Jim Reha and Sarah McColly, collaborators Roy Dominguez and George Van Til, niece Cristin and nephew Bobby, with whom I’ve shared some adventures.  In the New York Review of Books “Personals” section was this message titled “In the Time of Corona”: “Chinese-Russian grandmother, youthful 60s, seeks a kind, self-supporting, healthy single man 60-70s with whom to share some life - enjoying career tai chi, theater, War on Drugs, Buddhist meditation, and more.” War on Drugs must refer to my favorite band that nephew Bob Lane and I saw perform at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown, CA.

Readable History

"No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.” David McCullough

Historian Ray Boomhower has been sharing quotations from distinguished members of his profession, including David McCullough (above) who has written acclaimed biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams and, my favorite, “The Path Between the Seas,” about how the Panama Canal came about. Another statement I subscribe to that Boomhower referenced is by Samuel Eliot Morrison: “With honesty of purpose, balance, a respect for tradition, courage, and, above all, a philosophy of life, any young person who embraces the historical profession will find it rich in rewards and durable in satisfaction.”

Historians I most admire, such as Doris Kearns Goodwin and David Maraniss, write for a large audience rather than just specialists in a particular field.  When my Maryland PhD advisers Sam Merrill and Louis Harlan said that my dissertation, “Jacob A. Riis and the American City,” was very readable, I took that as a compliment. The only boring chapter, in my opinion, albeit necessary, was the one analyzing “How the Other Half Lives” (1890), the urban reformer’s famous study of New York City Tenement House Conditions and their immigrant dwellers.  My history of Gary, “City of the Century,” was based on weekly newspaper articles intended to reach a wide readership and elicit feedback. Nothing against journal articles (I’ve written my share of monographs), but I believe that serving Clio, the muse of history, includes striving to educate an informed citizenry.

 

One of the striking characteristics of the era of Coolidge Prosperity was the unparalleled rapidity and unanimity with which millions of men and women turned their attention, their talk, and their emotional interest upon a series of tremendous trifles -- a heavyweight boxing-match, a murder trial, a new automobile model, a transatlantic flight.” Frederick Lewis Allen, “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s”

F. L. Allen

The Gold Standard of contemporary popular history is Frederick Lewis Allen’s “Only Yesterday,” published soon after the “Roaring Twenties” ended.  The title is a perfect encapsulation of the belief that anything in the past – even seconds ago – is worthy of study by historians even if dissecting a larger perspective must wait.  “Only Yesterday” remains a pathbreaking example of the importance of social history, covering manners and morals, Prohibition and the rise of gangsterism, sports, advertising, automobility, and entertainment as big business, plus fads, dance crazes, and headline-making trials  such as Sacco-Vanzetti, Leopold-Loeb, the Scopes “Monkey” Trial and the most widely covered – Hall-Mills, about the murder of two lovers, a minister and his choir director.

Flappers

As a practitioner of contemporary history from the bottom up who is writing a blog, I ask myself how best to cover this plague year of pandemic, an unhinged president, economic disaster, and total disruption of one’s daily routine.  A believer that the personal is political, I try to describe the effect of this “new normal” on myself (a senior citizen to whom Covid-19 could be a death sentence), my family (including grandchildren still in school), my university, community, region, and, by extension, the country and world. Wish me luck.

Kaiden Horn (above), the former bowling teammate of grandson James made The Times by virtue of winning a state USBC scholarship.  The 2020 Wheeler graduate told Karen Callahan that he grew up in a bowling family and that was something he and his dad Kevin bonded over: “He’s coached me my whole life. We always talk about bowling and watch bowling. Without that, a major part of myself would be missing.”

 

Post-Tribune correspondent Carole Carlson wrote about the legacy of Richard Gordon Hatcher as a civil rights leader and urban mayor for 20 years beginning in 1968. She interviewed some of his most faithful supporters, including former adviser Carolyn McCrady and Dena Holland Neal, daughter of Deputy Mayor Jim Holland, who recalled passing out lollipops with Hatcher stickers in 1967 on her school bus at age 14.  Hatcher instilled Gary’s black citizens with a sense of pride but could not prevent the city’s economic decline despite obtaining millions of federal dollars for programs that benefitted the poor. By setting an example and encouraging others to seek public office at a time after Martin Luther King’s death when many Black intellectuals were despairing of the political system, Hatcher was responsible for inspiring many Black elected officials who emulated his example. I spent over a hundred hours interviewing Hatcher, my political hero and intellectual mentor.  I wanted the final product to be his autobiography, but, ever a humble man, he preferred it to be guideposts on how Blacks should proceed in the face of systemic racism, a phrase Hatcher never used.  A devout Christian, unlike me, he never gave up believing that all souls were redeemable.

 

I’ve been binge watching the Showtime series “Homeland.”  Discovering that it was about to embark on a ninth season, I started at the beginning.  When the original storyline didn’t end after 12 episodes, it seemed the denouement was imminent, but it seems further from the end as I approach the midway point of season three.  Nonetheless, I love the main characters, CIA agents Carrie (Claire Danes) and Saul (Mandy Patinkin), and the peripheral one as well. And each episode features unexpected twists and turns.

 

Former IUN colleague Don Coffin, whose field was economic history, believes that the current pandemic will be most devastating on middle-tier colleges. Elite institutions such as Harvard and Yale will have the prestige and endowment resources to ride the situation out, while affiliates of public universities and community colleges, in his words, “are about access and affordability; they’re the Honda Civics of higher ed. There’s always a market for that.”  Four-year schools in non-metro areas with regional reputations and high tuition, he predicts, may face widespread closures: they were fragile before the pandemic, often offering discount rates of 50 percent or more; the pandemic simply removed what little cushion they had left.”  To make matters worse Trump is threatening to cancel student visas and deny them access to online courses.  Coffin wrote:

These rules are unconscionable. Students should not be used as hostages to force colleges to be complicit in accelerating the spread of a pandemic, either to enhance somebody’s perceived shot at re-election or to satisfy a lust for racism. It’s wrong. Colleges have to protect their students -- all of their students -- as best they can. In a pandemic, that’s hard enough already. Now we have to add “political predators” to the list of dangers. But is in decent financial shape.

 

I responded: IUN has been developing quality on-line (distance education) courses for almost a decade (too much so I’ve argued).  On the other hand, wonderful middle-tier schools like Valparaiso University are suffering, and 45 (I won’t repeat his name) is making the situation worse by fucking around international students, the lifeblood of many universities since, in most cases, they pay full tuition.

 

As the temperature again exceeded 90 degrees, power went out in Dave’s Portage subdivision and his family spent the night.  That evening James won a close Space Base game, his second in a row.  Next morning, he was trying to adjust his fall VU schedule in the face of one cancellation and the other class now on-line.  I got my first haircut in four months at Quick Cut.  Longtime barber Anna gave 20-year-old James his first haircut.

Flight Paths

 “Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking.” Justin Cronin

Historian Ray Boomhower wrote: “On this day in 1943, Charles Hall of Brazil, Indiana, became the first African American pilot, and Tuskegee Airman, to shoot down an enemy fighter aircraft in World War II, blasting a German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 Würge out of the sky while escorting B-25 bombers in his P-40 fighter on a mission over southwestern Sicily. Hall flew 198 mission during the war, becoming the first African American to win a Distinguished Flying Cross. A real Hoosier hero.” After the war Major Hall worked at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma until 1967, four years before his death.Terry Allen in center

In “They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967” David Maraniss described the death of Lt. Col. Terry Allen, Jr. during the battle of Ong Thanh.  The son of General Terry Allen, a veteran of both World Wars known as “Terrible Terry,” he left a wife and three daughters behind in El Paso and began having second thoughts about a military career after realizing that his marriage was on the rocks and another man was living in their house.  Commanding the famed 28^th infantry regiment known as the Black Lions, Allen died in an ambush while directing an assault on an enemy base camp.  He preferred overseeing his troops by helicopter but was ordered to be on the ground, where an overall view of events was denied him.  Cautioned by Lieutenant Clark Welch to wait for re-enforcements, Allen, prodded by superiors, was overconfident that he could accomplish the mission.  Maraniss wrote:

    His determination to stay on the battlefield was a manifestation of the pressure coming down, all the way down, from President Lyndon Johnson, who wanted good news and enemy body counts, to General William Westmoreland, who believed the war could be won by search-and-destroy missions in which the First Division pursued the enemy overland relentlessly, to General John Hay, who was feeling the heat for being too cautious, to Colonel George Newman, who wanted the Black Lions and their commander out there on the ground, not just searching but destroying, to Lieutenant Colonel Allen, who wanted to prove that he could do it.

Terry Allen’s father had written in a booklet on combat leadership, “The battle is the payoff.”  His son died slumped behind an anthill, cut down by AK-47 machine-gun fire, his body riddled with bullets and an eye shot out, one of 161 casualties, including 64 dead.  Against all evidence, the military brass declared Ong Thanh a great victory. By the time the senior Allen learned of his son’s death, he had already begun a decline into dementia.  As his condition worsened, he’d tell people, using the present tense, “Terry is a good soldier.  Terry would never get ambushed.” Though he took no part in the tragic fire fight, General Hay would be awarded a Silver Star for it.

 

Confirming through contacts that his son was dead, General Allen, according to Maraniss, went on a long walk and asked himself, “Why my son?  Why not me?”  As he prepared to get official notice from the commander of Fort Bliss, “Terrible Terry” steeled himself, muttered “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” and thought, “This is the house of an infantryman.  There will be no tears.”

 

Mary McDowell

I watched the final two episodes of historian Heath Carter’s series on unsung heroes whose religious faith made a difference in people’s lives and in the course of American history.  “The Angel of the Yards” described the half-century of settlement house work by Mary McDowell, a protégé of Jane Addams who ministered to the needs of poor people at Chicago House, located in the Windy City’s notorious “Back of the Yards” neighborhood. “A voteless people is a hopeless people” examined the lifelong activism of Amelia Boynton, who was knocked unconscious by troopers in 1965 on Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, an event that led to the 1965 Voting Rights Acts.  More than three decades earlier, Boynton had started the Dallas County Voters League in an attempt to secure the ballot for African Americans. In 2015 at age 103 Boynton crossed Edmund Pettus bridge next to President Barack Obama.

Amelia Boynton in 1965 ad 2015

Elizabeth Wuerffel interviewed Heath Carter on May 25, 2020, about why American cities such as Gary, Indiana, were so rigidly segregated after World War II despite the opportunities supposedly available to returning African-American servicemen during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.  One factor Carter emphasized was the practice of redlining:

    Black veterans found themselves effectively unable to take advantage of the G.I. Bill’s offer of a cheap FHA subsidized mortgage. This was because of the practice of redlining. Redlining is named for these maps that were used in conjunction with FHA mortgages. If you pull up one of these maps, you’ll see neighborhoods that are color-coded: yellow, green, blue, and red. Red were what the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation thought, at least, were the highest-risk neighborhoods and those were neighborhoods that had high concentrations of persons of color. Fundamentally, at some level, the grading system governing these maps reflects kind of just a racist point of view on the mid-20th century American city where, in many ways, race is being taken as a proxy for risk.

    If you’re an African American veteran who’s going into a bank to try to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, the banker would say, “Oh, where’s the home you’d like to buy? Oh, it’s in this neighborhood? Let me pull up my map.” They’d look on the map, if they didn’t already know. And that neighborhood’s graded red which means that it’s considered too risky for them to give you an FHA subsidized loan. And so what redlining meant [ was that] Black Americans were effectively boxed out of the housing market, and Black residents find themselves crammed into very tight quarters and are paying, often, an incredible premium. They’re often paying vastly more for rent in a kind of very challenging neighborhood than they would pay for a mortgage in a middle-class white neighborhood. So this was one of the sort of central obstacles for Black Americans seeking to kind of make their way in postwar America.

Mayor Jerome Prince of Gary, like his predecessor Karen Freeman-Wilson and longtime state legislator and educator Vernon Williams, grew up with a mother who stressed the value of education as a necessary path to a productive life.  Though a teenage mother living in modest circumstances, DaNita Marshall never wavered in that belief, Prince recalled in an interview on June 22, 2020 by Elizabeth Wuerffel for the Valparaiso University Flight Paths Project.

 

Born in St. Louis, DaNita Marshall moved from Chicago to Gary with her mother, stepfather and ten siblings from in 1956 at age ten to live with her grandmother in a one-story, three-bedroom, 700-square-foot flat on Indiana Street, later renamed Martin Luther King Drive.  When she was 17, DaNita frequently visited her grandmother, who had moved back to Chicago after deeding the house over to DaNita’s parents.  On one such visit DaNita established a relationship with Lloyd Williams and subsequently became pregnant.  On August 16, 1964, DaNita gave birth to a son at Gary Methodist Hospital, whom she named Abner Jerome Marshall in honor of her grandfather.  The baby’s first bed was a bassinet made out of a drawer.  In 1969 DaNita married David Prince, and the young family moved to the newly built East Point Terrace apartments.  They were its first residents; in fact, the cement was sill moist, so DaNita etched her and David’s names outside their unit.  Neighbor kids teased their son incessantly about his name, which was the same as a character in the TV series “Bewitched” and the comic strip “L’il Abner.”  Eventually he persuaded DaNita to change it to Jerome Abner Prince. His dad, meanwhile, had joined the marines and served in Vietnam. In 1973 the couple split up, and DaNita moved in with an aunt in Glen Park.

Prior to fourth grade, Jerome Prince, who presently is Mayor of Gary, had gone to a virtually all-black school.  Recognizing that he could use more structure and discipline with a father figure no longer on the scene, DaNita enrolled him at St. Mark’s School on Ridge Road.  His teacher was Sister Elise, and for the next four years he had mostly white classmates.  He learned how to fit in and with DaNita’s prodding spent many long evenings doing homework. Jerome went to Lew Wallace High School and in his junior year became a father. He decided to follow David Prince’s example and join the marines immediately after graduating in 1983.  After 13 weeks of boot camp, Jerome married his teenage sweetheart De Anna Slaughter, and she and their son moved to Concord, California, I the San Francisco Bay area to be with him. 

 

One reason Jerome had enlisted in the marines was because the employment situation in Gary had become dire by the 1980s, with U.S. Steel employing far few workers than in previous decades. Returning to Gary in 1986 after completing his tour of duty, Jerome asked his mother for advice.  DaNita, a sales director for Mary Kay Cosmetics, suggested he seek a career in sales.  His work in real estate led to a position in the Calumet Township Assessor’s office as a real estate deputy.  In 1998 he was elected a Gary Precinct Committeeman.  One of his goals was to get streets in his neighborhood repaved.  Prince remembered:

  I thought that all I had to do was make some noise and get other people to join me, and so we took that path. I actually initiated a petition, took it around my neighborhood, and we submitted it to the administration at that particular time, and I don’t think it got a second look. It became very clear to me that you have to do a little bit more than this, but more importantly, you have to be in the position to effectuate change.  I quickly discovered that I could have a greater impact and connection to the constituents as a councilperson.

In 1999 Prince unseated longtime incumbent Cleo Wesson and became city councilman for Gary’s Fifth District.  Twice re-elected, he became a member of the Lake County Council in 2014 to fill a vacated seat. From there he successfully ran for Lake County Assessor, and in 2019 he defeated incumbent mayor Karen Freeman-Williams.  Crediting DaNita with setting him on the right path at critical times in his life, Prince claimed that she was his toughest task master, more than any marine drill instructor.

Mayor Jerome Prince and wife De Anna

Juneteenth

 "If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to how far you can go.”

    James Baldwin

 

On June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, Union General Gordon Grange informed former slaves that they were free. Almost immediately, freedmen began celebrating Emancipation or Jubilee Day with festivals featuring food, songs, parades, and speeches.  Most states have declared Juneteenth a Day of Observance, and, ironically, Trump’s idiotic determination to hold a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth brought national attention to the date and furthered a movement to have June 19 declared a national holiday.  Better, methinks, to press for national health insurance, a living minimum wage, and election day being a national holiday with no more voter suppression.

Chesterton Juneteenth march by John Luke

 

Robert Cotton

Angel Smith

An impressive crowd numbering in the hundreds participated in a Chesterton Juneteenth march from the police station to Centennial Park.  Organized by Chesterton High School English teacher Becky Uehling and others, it featured speeches by African-American Valparaiso city councilman Robert Cotton and a poetry reading by CHS grad Angel Smith, now a senior at Stanford. Though the temperature was in the mid-90s, I marched the final four blocks and found a seat in the shade.  Cotton recalled neighbors in the Chicago projects, where he grew up, mourning the deaths of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King.  Now in his 60s, he substitute teaches in several communities, including Chesterton, in order to expose himself to students who may never have had a black teacher. Attesting to the importance of history, Cotton confessed he didn't know about Juneteenth until he was in his 30s.

 

Richard Russo’s 2012 memoir “Elsewhere” describes growing up in a New York mill town that, in miniature, mirrored Gary, Indiana’s sad fate in the face of deindustrialization, mechanization, and globalization.  Russo’s hometown of Gloversville manufactured not only top-quality gloves but other leather goods. By the 1970s Gloversville commercial district had become, in Russo’s words, “a Dresden-like ruin,” but during the 1950s on a Saturday afternoon “the streets downtown would be gridlocked with cars honking hellos to pedestrians.” Like Gary’s Palace Theater Gloverville’s Glove Theatre would be packed with adolescents.  Russo recalled:

    Often, when we finished what we called our weekly “errands,” my mother and I would stop in at Pedrick’s.  Located next to City Hall, it was a dark cool place, the only establishment of my youth that was air-conditioned, with a long thin wall whose service window allowed sodas and cocktails to be passed from the often raucous bar into the more respectable restaurant.  Back then Pedrick’s was always mobbed, even in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Mounted on the wall of each booth was a minijukebox whose movable mechanical pages were full of song listings.  Selections made here – five for a quarter, if memory serves – were played on a real jukebox on the far wall. We always played a whole quarter’s worth while nursing sodas served so cold they made my teeth hurt. Sometimes, though, the music was drowned out by rowdy male laughter from the bar, where the wall-mounted television was tuned to a Yankees ball game, and if anyone hit a home rum, everybody in the restaurant knew it immediately.

Russo lamented that by the time he graduated in 1967, “you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul.”  The restaurant area of Pedrick’s had closed, and the bar was “quiet as a library.”

 

Ray Smock wrote:

One of the news items that did not get a lot of attention but that drove home the depths of systemic racism, and the many guises it can take, was the announcement by Walmart that it would no longer keep black cosmetics and beauty supplies under lock and key. The following is from a story in the New York Times of June 10: “Walmart will end its practice of locking up African-American beauty care products in glass cases, the retail giant said on Wednesday after a fresh round of criticism that the policy was a form of racial discrimination. Hair care and beauty products sold predominantly to black people could be accessed at certain stores only by getting a Walmart employee to unlock the cases, some of which featured additional anti-theft measures.”

When Sears closed its Gary store during the 1970s, it was making a handsome profit; but with South Lake Mall opening, corporate executives figured African Americans would come to Merrillville whereas most whites wouldn’t shop in Gary.  The lame excuse they gave Mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher: shoplifting, something easily remedied.

 

Ray Boomhower referenced an article Robert L. Sherrod wrote for Time about the heroism of African-American marines during the invasion of Saipan in June 1944.  Although most were serving as ammunition carriers and in beachhead unloading parties, many found themselves forced into combat.  Boomhower wrote:

    When the Japanese counterattacked the Fourth Marine Division near Charan Kanoa, twelve African Americans were thrown into the defense line and offered a stiff resistance, killing fifteen of the enemy. Sherrod quoted a white marine lieutenant from Texas as commenting on the incident: “I watched these Negro boys carefully. They were under intense mortar and artillery fire as well as rifle and machine gun fire. I saw no Negro running away. They all kept advancing until the counterattack was stopped.”

    Other black marines volunteered to carry badly needed ammunition to frontline units and joined fellow marines in hunting down snipers. Sherrod added the African Americans were credited with being “the workingest men on Saipan, having performed prodigious feats of labor both while under fire and after beachheads were well secured. Some unloaded boats for three days, with little or no sleep, working in water up to waist deep.”

    What did not make it into Sherrod’s published Time article was a remark one of the black marines made upon seeing army troops begin to land on the island: “It must be safe. Here comes the army.” Later, Sherrod learned that Admiral Chester Nimitz’s command in Hawaii had refused to allow such a statement, remarking that “no correspondents’ stories will be approved which reflect on Army in comparison with Navy or Marines,” and his story had “flagrantly violated” the restriction. For his part, Sherrod said he had included the quote to show the “high state of morale among Negro Marines.”

 

Anne Koehler wrote:

The current storm over statues and what to do with them brings me to another story from my childhood. The Aschberg is the highest elevation for our area, which is just under 100 meters or roughly 300 feet. Here stands the 21-foot tall statue of Otto von Bismarck. He was the Reichschancellor under Kaiser Wilhelm II and played a significant role in the fact that my home area remained German and did not become part of the Danish Kingdom. The statue was built and first erected on the Knivsberg in North Schleswig. When that part of Schleswig-Holstein was ceded to Denmark in 1919 as a result of a plebiscite, the statue was dismantled and moved south. The head was sawed off to make it fit into the railroad carriage for transport. A lengthy odyssey ensued; at times it was stored in a warehouse, at others in a barn. Different locations competed for the statue. In 1930 it was erected in its current spot. Bismarck proudly leans on his sword, looking into the hilly landscape, marked by fields surrounded by hedgerows. The hedgerows prevent soil erosions from wind and house birds and animals as well as provide firewood. The Aschberg and Bismarck were favorite outing locations. Sports and other events took place there. As children we would climb up on the side of the statue and sit on the crown to the right side. After the second World War precious metal was stolen from the sword for scrap.

 

Paul Kern replied: “Bismarck’s unification of Germany through three wars and his authoritarian rule left a dubious legacy. The Second Reich was based on Prussian domination of the rest of Germany. Bismarck liked to have internal enemies, first the Catholics in the Kulturkampf and then the Social Democratic Party in the anti-socialist law, policies that left Germany deeply divided religiously and politically. It was no accident that the fifty-five years after Bismarck were catastrophic for Germany.”

 

In the Chesterton Tribune “Echoes of the Past” column this item from June 18, 1895, a time when the country was in the throes of a Depression as devastating as the 1930s disaster: “The tramp element is getting thicker than ever.  It is not an uncommon occurrence to se 125 or 20 men lying around the water tower and living off the fat of thase land.”  Prior to 1895 most social reformers, such  Jacob A. Riis, thought tramps were lazy bums who shirked work.  The economic calamity convinced him otherwise.

Tomfoolery

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.” Mark Twain

Thomas Skelton

The origin of the word “tomfoolery,” meaning to acting even worse than a fool, comes from England in the time of William Shakespeare.  Thomas Skelton was a sadistic jester at Moncuster Castle in Cumbria who allegedly played vile jokes on those whom Sir William Pennington disliked, once cutting off the had of a butcher with whom
his master’s daughter had fallen in love with his own knife.  Rumor had it that he’d sit under a tree and tell passersby who asked for directions to take a path that led to quicksand and their death.

Trump’s latest tomfoolery is to announce that despite the pandemic he’ll be holding a MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, location of the infamous 1921 massacre that killed scores of black people and destroyed their neighborhood. The original date was June 19, known as “Juneteenth” and celebrated when slaves learned of their emancipation. Attendees have to sign a waiver agreeing not to hold sponsors liable in case they catch Covid-19.  Imagine. Trump also announced that he’d be giving his Republican National Convention speech in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 27, the sixtieth anniversary of that city’s notorious “Axe Handle Riot,” when a Klan-inspired white mob attacked peaceful black demonstrators with axe handles.  Trump has also criticized those who wish to rename the dozen military bases (Bragg, Hooker, Benning, etc.) named for Confederate leaders. 

Don Coffin passed on this statement by former General David Petrakis: “For an organization designed to win wars to train for them atinstallations named for those who led a losing force is sufficiently peculiar, but when we consider the cause for which these officers fought, we begin to penetrate the confusion of Civil War memory. These bases are, after all, federal installations, home to soldiers who swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. The irony of training at bases named for who took up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others, is inescapable to anyone paying attention. Now, belatedly, is the moment for us to pay such attention.”

Even more damning was a recent statement by former Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis, branding Trump the first president in his lifetime “who does not
try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”  The country has not been so polarized in 50 years, since Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate. Some, referencing the poem “Second Coming” (1919) by William B. Yeats, fear the center won’t hold and that the country is slouching toward anarchy. But for the prospect of voting Trump out of office in November, they may have a point. Here are the first lines of “Second Coming”:

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world 

Republican Senator from South Carolina Tim Scott, an African American, appeared on the Sunday talk shows to tout a bipartisan legislative proposal for police reforms regarding the use of choke holds, no-knock procedures, and compiling a record of complaints against individual.  When Scott described to fellow Republican legislators how he’d been stopped and hassled numerous times by cops, including after he’d become a member of Congress, they supposedly were shocked and mortified.  While I doubt that anything meaningful will come from Scott’s efforts, given Trump’s intransigence to any gesture of compromise, Republicans are clearly worried about a possible election debacle.

 On Flag Day historian Ray Boomhower quoted Norman Thomas: “If you want a symbolic gesture, don’t burn the flag; wash it.” The flag Trump seems most eager to defend lately is the Confederate Battle flag.  In fact, when NASCAR announced that Confederate flags were not welcome at its events, he ridiculed the decision-makers. 

Former Valparaiso University History professor Heath Carter, now at Princeton
Theological Seminary, has made available on Facebook a lecture series he’s
giving at Nassau Presbyterian Church on the church during times of crisis. Introducing
himself, Carter noted that the series will offer both comfort and cautionary
tales. The initial one dealt with racism during a time of epidemic - the 1793
yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia, founded by Quaker William Penn as the
“City of Brotherly Love” and then the nation’s capital and largest city. Noted
doctor Benjamin Rush, believing African Americans to be immune to the disease,
convinced many free blacks to nurse the sick with dire consequences. Not only did
many perish, others were unfairly blamed for thefts and for spreading the disease.
After the terror abated, members of St. George’s Church, heretofore integrated,
voted to restrict blacks to the balcony. When Richard Allen refused to obey the edict and was forcibly removed, the other black members walked out and subsequently founded Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, which is still in existence. Meanwhile, at Valparaiso religious leaders and many others of good will participated in a peaceful vigil and later a die-in to honor and mourn the black victims of police violence.

photo by Allison Schuette

Liam off camera

Sampter in sports jacket

Alissa visited overnight, and James celebrated his twentieth birthday with friends Andrew, Nate, and Liam. Dave got them to go on Facebook and sing Smash Mouth’s “All Star” (You’re an all star, Get your game on”). Janet Bayer found a1990 photo her
friend Anita took of a Going Away party for the Bayers upon their move to Vermont. I’m wearing a blue vest and tie and except for the nerdy glasses was looking quite dapper but, I wrote Janet, not as dapper as Al Sampter, mentor to my mentor, Mike Bayer.

Eleanor Bailey wrote:

    On This Day-June 15, 1943 -77 years ago. The town of Sumava Resorts in Newton County Indiana had been flooded for several days. (May-June flood Kankakee River 1943). We lived on the first road to the left. Mother was expecting her third child and our family was staying temporarily at the home of Dr. Raymond Merchant, who made house calls and had his office in his basement, in Lake Village. My brother Bill was born at Gary Methodist Hospital on June 15. I remember being in the car and crossing the railroad tracks at entrance to Sumava. There was a sign
that read 15 miles an hour to avoid dust. The flood waters were half-way up on
the sign post. R.I.P. Bill Bailey (1943-2014).

I was tempted to respond with the song title, “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” but feared it would be taken the wrong way.  I befriended Eleanor Bailey thinking she was a high school classmate, but she knows mutual friend Kay Westhues – so I don’t know Eleanor very well.

Anne Koehler wrote about growing up in Germany with two brothers and a sister on a farm in Damendorf, northern Germany, less than a two-hour drive from the Danish border.

    The farm was medium sized with a variety of crops and animals. We grew wheat, barley, rye, potatoes, sugar and regular beets, flax, alfalfa. There were horses, about 25 milk cows, turkeys, ducks,laying hens and pigs. We were located in an end moraine.  Rocks and stones would surface every year and had to be picked off the fields. They were crushed and used for roads.- Our little pond in back of the garden had diving boards in three heights. This is where the children from the whole village would gather for a swim. We had to share it with calves and pigs, which did not bother us in the least. Great times until one day a boy drowned. A trained diver found him, but he could not be revived. It was a sad experience. - The low fields behind the farm would flood and freeze over in winter, making a splendid skating surface. The older boys would play ice hockey, we would skate or be be pulled on sleds. We also had a chair-like sled, -- In those days we did not own a milking machine. A hired man was singly in charge of milking the cows. Occasionally he got days off. So on Easter 1955. We had to help with the chores. I had gone to a party in the village tavern the night before and was hung over. While milking the cow Undine, my visiting cousin Hermann from southern Germany decided to take a photo. He captioned it: The city dweller says: oh that's where the milk comes from. The cow looks really good. It is a Holstein!!!