At the Archives

“Archives are the pay dirt of history.  Everything else is opinion,” Germaine Greer

 

above, Dick Meister, below, Gary Nabhan

Dick and Joan Meister visited IUN’s Calumet Regional Archives seeking information on Save the Dunes pioneers Dorothy Buell and Ed Osan for an upcoming program of the Ogden Dunes Historical Society.  At the previous meeting the topic was Diana of the Dunes.  Dick and I talked about Carson Cunningham, now coaching at Carroll College in Montana, who taught history courses both at IUN and DePaul, where Dick was Vice President of Academic Affairs.  Both of us tried to get him hired at our respective schools.  Dick and Joan told me about Gary Nabhan, a 63 year-old University of Arizona professor who grew up in Gary (his father Theodore was a city councilman) and is an expert on ethnobotany and seed saving (preserving indigenous plants).  Among Nabhan’s many books are “Cross-Pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry” (2004) and “Food, Genes, and Culture: Eating Right for Your Origins” (2013).  In 1977 Nabhan wrote a poem about Diana of the Dunes for Great Lakes Review (Winter 1977) in which he refers to Diana’s home as “the Land of Sacred Reeds and Sand,” which J. Ronald Engel refers to in “Sacred Sands: The Struggle for Community in the Indiana Dunes” (1983). The poem contains these lines, imagining Diana swimming in Lake Michigan:

stroking the water

your breath pulsing    pulled on

by some aquaspheric force

too strong to be called current.

 Scott Williams

Vicki and Scott Williams visited the Archives in search of a copy of my Portage Steel Shavings.  Last November Scott was elected to the Portage city council and wants to know more about the city’s history.  Vicki and Scott were neighbors of mutual friends Peg and Corky Horvath.  Son Tom went to high school with Phil and Dave and drops in to see us whenever he’s visiting from Germany.  Vicki, whose maiden name was Wisneski, was attending IUN when I started teaching in 1970.  Interviewed by Nancy Ferro for a Shavings issue on the history of IUN (“Educating the Calumet Region,” volume 35, 2004), she recalled her hippie English Composition professor and first meeting Scott.

     Morrie Scheckman was out there on the edge.  He had shoulder-length hair and wore jeans.  After I missed an exam, he gave me his address in Chicago so I could come make it up.  After black students pressured the university into offering Black Literature, they didn’t have anybody to teach it.  I took both L101 and L102 with Scheckman, who was Jewish and very sympathetic to civil rights.  Most students in the class were white.

     I met my future husband in an evening Geography class.  I was retaking it because I flunked the first time.  I needed a map, but the bookstore had closed early for inventory.  Scott was in the hall and saw how upset I was.  He had an extra map and offered it to me.  He said, “I figured I’d screw up, so I brought an extra one.”  We enjoyed the Tuesday and Friday dances.  About three months later we were married.  We tracked down the professor, who also taught at Valparaiso, and invited him to the reception.  He said, “Well, if anything goes wrong, don’t blame me.”

On the same page as Nancy Ferro’s interview with Vicki Williams is an article Emily Schuetz wrote about T.J. Stoops, who was a freshman in 1968 and is presently IUN’s Director of Sponsored Research.  Schuetz wrote: “Her real name was Tedgena, but a young man in English class called her Tomato Juice because of her red hair.  Later he shortened it to T.J., and soon everyone started calling her that, even family members.”

Julie and Paul Kern in 2011

Paul and Julie Kern having embarked on a trip from Florida to California, he reported: “On a cold, rainy miserable day we are in the Texas Hill Country.  At least we were able to enjoy a nice dinner at a restaurant overlooking the Guadalupe River.”  Forty years ago, Paul took our family to a cabin in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina.  During the drive we played tapes of Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band on the Run” and the Eagles’ “On the Border.”  A recent blog of mine entitled “Already Gone” that mentions Eagle Glenn Frey’s death has (for me) gone viral, with well over 200 hits, four times the normal amount and easily surpassing the previous most popular one, on the legacy of Region radio and television personality Tom Higgins.

The Archives has been a beehive of activity these past few days, in addition to the presence of our numerous volunteers.  John DeGan brought nephew Mike to see family letters in the Carl Krueger Collection, a treasure trove of correspondence by several family members that Toni discovered in a foot locker at a house within the National Lakeshore about to be demolished.  Another visitor was looking at our yearbook collection.  Student Devin Dove, interested in Gary history, was checking out my Eighties Shavings.

An East Chicago Central student needed information about IUN scholarships, so I met with Director of Admissions Dorothy Frink.  She was very pleasant and extremely helpful, even providing suggestions about matters that I didn’t think to ask about.  She hasn’t met former Admissions director Bill Lee, whom I occasionally run into at the credit union, so I might try to arrange it.

Student organizations manned tables in Savannah Center.  The Muslim group gave away cookies and had a sign reading, “Meet a Muslim.”  No sign of the History Club, defunct since popular professor Jerry Pierce left unwillingly, or the LGBT group Connectionz, whose former faculty adviser Anne Balay will be speaking at Valparaiso University next month.  She was also given the boot.

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Toni and I enjoyed “Brooklyn,” about an Irish immigrant set in the early 1950s.  The scenes on board the ship that brings her to New York City, the boarding house where she rooms, and of the department store where she works are very realistic.  At Christmas Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) volunteers to serve dinner to homeless men, and a priest tells her that these people built America’s, roads, railroads and bridges.  Very moving.  As the New Republic’s Will Leitch put it, “I could have hung out with everyone in Brooklyn for hours: it’s a world you won’t want to leave.”  Near the end of the film Eilis tells a newcomer to America, “You'll feel so homesick that you'll want to die, and there's nothing you can do about it apart from endure it. But you will, and it won't kill you... and one day the sun will come out and you'll realize that this is where your life is.”  Brooklyn is one of eight films nominated for best picture, and Ronan is nominated for best actress.

I wore a favorite shirt for one final time.  It has a frayed collar, and the left sleeve ripped.  I often wore it on airplane trips because of its pockets and warmth.  Archives volunteer Dave Mergl gave me a nearly identical one, but, of course, I doesn’t feel as comfortable.  When I look at old photos, I often notice what I’m wearing, so I won’t forget it.

Dick Maloney bowled despite a sore thumb (with a black nail) that was the result of catching it in a door.  I rolled two 149s and would have had a third if I’d converted a 6-10 at the end of the second game and then struck.  With five strikes in a row opponent Doris Guth bowled a 235.  Twice pins fell after she’d turned away, just before the rack came down.  I should be so lucky.  My final frame I needed a strike to win my second quarter pot (paid out every tenth strike).  I left the 6-10, spared, and as my next ball curved into the pocket, jumped up as all the pins fell.  Collecting the quarters, I told Mel Guth, “I only do that on my last ball.”  My back ached later.

Uncivil War

“The GOP is a football team that’ll do anything to win,” Richard Linklater.

I sent a note to Ray Smock stating that the difference between the two (right) wings of the GOP is that the crazies (read Sarah Palin) want to impeach Obama while Speaker John Boehner’s troops want to sue him.  Characterizing Boehner’s “chickenshit” move as an outrageous campaign ploy that should be laughed out of court, Ray wrote:

“What this means is that before the House breaks for the fall campaign season they will spend floor time laying out the case against Obama. Everything they hate about him will be on display. It will be Obamacare, the Keystone Pipeline, Benghazi, foreign policy, Obama’s use of executive orders, the whole ball of wax. Somehow from all this they plan to craft a lawsuit that has enough specific charges for the federal court to consider it without puking first.

So the Republicans have settled on a plan short of impeachment to keep feeding red meat to the base through November. The base has been bombarding House Republicans asking them why they haven’t impeached the President yet. So this is their answer. They are going to sue his black ass. Let it all hang out, the hatred, vitriol, and the big smear.  Will we ever see again a civil government in America, where we focus on our real enemies in the world and quit destroying one another?

Boehner is taking a page from Newt’s playbook from the 1980s by using C-SPAN to spread the case against the president. Every House Republican will get a chance to stand up and condemn the president and pound the table so the home folks will know that their guy or gal hates the president.  The fall campaign theme for Republicans is that whatever is wrong with America it is the President’s fault.”

Working on Dunes Highway

Dick Meister and Ken Martin donated a copy of their recently published pictorial history of Ogden Dunes to the Archives.  In 1923 by Samuel Reck and Colin Mackenzie headed a group that purchased 500 acres from the estate of Francis Ogden.  Samuel and Anne Reck built the first full-time residence on land overlooking Lake Michigan.  Due to the lack of roads, the most practical mode of transportation was horse and wagon.  In 1925 twenty landowners successfully petitioned the Porter County commissioners to incorporate as a town.   Three factors were crucial to the shoreline community’s success. During the 1920s the construction of Burns Ditch waterway drained land suddenly available for development.  Second, business magnate Samuel Insull purchased and improved the Chicago, South Shore and South Bend electric railroad.  Finally, a new Dunes Highway (U.S. 12) linked Porter County to Chicago and Michigan.

Chris Young lent me Jay Winik’s “April 1865: The Month That Saved the Nation.”  It looks well written and deals with the final days of the Civil War, including the Union victory at Petersburg, the capture of Richmond, Southern plots to launch guerrilla warfare, General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the beginnings of Reconstruction.  The author, a former senior staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, witnessed bloody civil wars in Cambodia, Central America, Africa, the Balkans, and elsewhere, and sought to learn, in his words, “how a young and still embryonic America avoided the terrible and tragic fate that has beset so many other countries.”   Nonetheless, more than 700,000 Americans died to preserve the union, and the price of sectional peace was the abandonment by Republicans of former slaves when they became a political liability.

 Winslow Homer's Defiance

In a New York Review of Books essay entitled “Our Monstrous War,” Civil War historian James M. McPherson wrote: “Disease was even more lethal than combat.  Fetid water, poor and insufficient food, bad sanitation, clouds of flies and other insects, extreme weather, and primitive medical knowledge caused dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid fever, pneumonia, malaria, and a host of other maladies that carried away twice as many soldiers as did fighting.  Lice and chiggers were ubiquitous; no soldier escaped the misery they caused.”

Dave Serynek asked me to recommend a biography of little-known president Rutherford B. Hayes.  There were several to choose from, believe it or not, but the one I found most interesting was by Harry Barnard, whose “Eagle Forgotten” on Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, is one of my favorite books.  Like Altgeld, Hayes was pretty much forgotten when Barnard’s volume first appeared in 1954, despite his having been a Civil War officer, three-time Ohio governor, member of Congress during Reconstruction, and dubious winner of the most disputed Presidential election in American history.  As Thomas Wolfe quipped about Hayes and Harrison: “Which had the whiskers. Which the burnsides; which was which?”  Again quoting from Wolfe’s essay “From Death to Morning,” Barnard hoped to portray Hayes as a man “torn, as we have been, by sharp pain and wordless lust, the asp of time, the thorn of spring, the sharp, the tongueless cry,” and who sought “new lands, the promise of the war, and glory, joy and triumph, and a shining city.”  Heady, ambitious stuff – maybe oo ambitious.  It appears that Barnard avoids discussing Ruddy’s sex life.

Despite the horrors of combat, Colonel Rutherford Hayes relished the opportunity to prove his manhood in a just cause.  At South Mountain a musket ball fractured his arm, taking him out of action for two months.  Once he drew his pistol on a soldier about to flee from the battlefield and threatened to kill him if he didn’t fight.  Barnard wrote: “The soldier fought and lost his life, after which Hayes said that he had given the man a hero’s death instead of a coward’s, and what could be better than that?”  I hope Hayes subsequently lost sleep over causing that man’s death.

 Volunteers in Indiana's Ninth Regiment

Will Radell spoke to youngsters participating in a week-long Civil War camp at Westchester Historical Museum, as well as several parents, staff members, and guests, including recently retired Education professor Paul Blohm.  Will wore a woolen Union uniform and had pitched a tent held up by tree limbs.  Speaking as if he were in the Ninth Indiana Infantry Regiment, he mentioned how it was composed mainly of volunteers from Northwest Indiana and their contributions during the bloody battles of Shiloh and Gettysburg.  The kids had many questions, especially about his weapons.  He explained that muskets could only fire, at best, three shots a minute.  Soldiers rarely utilized their bayonets, preferring to use the butt end as a club during hand-to-hand combat.  For one thing, if you stabbed the enemy, the bayonet might get stuck in him.  Describing re-enactments, Will said that some “hard core” participants refused any modern amenities, but he always took bug spray and sunblock with him.

I watched the 1998 update of the Charles Dickens novel “Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, with, as a special bonus, Anne Bancroft and Robert DeNiro.  Like the Dickens story, a young orphan becomes a successful gentleman due to a secret benefactor.  Paltrow as Estella was stunning in scenes where she poses naked for Hawke and later seduces him.

The second reception in three days featuring Corey Hagelberg’s work, this time with wine, beer and food prepared by Cheryl and Kate, was a big success.  Many Millerites attended, including Gene and Judy Ayers, George McGuan, Robin Rich, Marty Bohn, and Bill Carey, whom I hadn’t seen in years and didn’t recognize without a beard.  Corey told Toni that her art was a big influence on him growing up.  We have several of his pieces that he’s given us over the years and decided to buy one of the woodcuts on display.  Samuel A. Love posted great photos showing Corey’s new salvaged art as well as his woodcuts. 

Kay Abraham and Ish Muhammad with Toni and Ann Fritz in background

Shortly after we arrived home, six guests arrived for the weekend, Mike and Janet Bayer, daughters Shannon and Kirsten, and Kirsten’s boys Dane and Nicholas.  It didn’t take the kids long to acclimate themselves.  As Kirsten said, they are like sharks, never still.  Or tornadoes.  I stayed up until one in the morning and eight hours later cooked eggs, sausage and potato latkes for everyone.

John Fraire, whose article on baseball teams in Indiana Harbor appeared in Indiana Magazine of History, invited me to a reception in Crown Point.  The purpose was to introduce his new bride to his Midwest friends and relatives.  During the 1970s I was good friends with his brother Rocky, who recently sent me a novel her wrote about steelworkers.  I was flattered to be asked and took along a copy of Ray and Trish Arredondo’s “Maria’s Journey,” for which I and wrote the Afterword and edited.  Omar Farag and Rocky Fraire greeted me when I arrived, followed shortly by John and new bride Martina.  During a brief ceremony John choked up saying the two times he really wished his mother were alive to be there were when he received his PhD and at his wedding to Martina, whose strength and loyalty to family reminded him of her.  Later he told an anecdote about her at age 78.  A young woman came up to her car window in a mall parking lot cussing her out for allegedly cutting in front of her.  She listened calmly, but when the woman wouldn’t stop, she told her, “Don’t make me get out of the car or I’ll slap you silly.”  The woman quickly made her exit.