Homefront

 “Baby baby baby, what's wrong with Uncle Sam?

He's cut down on my sugar, now he's messin' with my ham
I got the ration blues, blue as I can be
Oh me, I've got those ration blues”

         Ration Blues,” Louis Jordan

In Nicole Anslover’s World War II class I passed out copies of Steel Shavings, volume 46 in preparation for my appearance next week to discuss the Gary Homefront. I pointed out short sections for them to read beforehand on Pearl Harbor memories, civil rights activist L.K. Jackson, and Gary in 1942 as portrayed in Kendall Svengalis’ novel “The Great Emerson Art Heist.”  The Pearl Harbor section makes mention of Vic and Midge, 25 on Pearl Harbor Day, and awaiting my birth some two months later.  A fourth selection by IUN student Jessica Nieman about farm girl Jean Schultz Ellis demonstrated that much of Lake and Porter County was rural in those days.  Nieman wrote:

 The youngest of six, Jean gathered eggs, fed the chickens, and brought in the cows.  When Jean was 14, she had her eyebrows done for school picture day, and they swelled up.  “My mom was pissed,” she recalled.  Jean was first in her family to graduate high school.   She said, “At 16 you could stop going.  My older sister would buy me clothes to keep me in school. She wanted me to succeed.”  She was one of 28 graduates in Chesterton’s class of 1943.  Jean had started waitressing at Edward’s Barbecue when just 14.   She learned to drive in her mother’s 1934 Ford.   A Chesterton movie theater had midweek dime shows, which made for an affordable evening out. Jean also loved roller-skating.

above, Jean Shultz at 14; below, Jessica Nieman with "Pally" and Jean

Next I read several passages to demonstrate the city’s wartime blue collar nature and being home to dozens of ethnic groups, as well as Southern white and black newcomers needed in the mills and defense plants.  First I recited Robert Buzecky’s “Steel City, Stone City,” which begins: 

Buzecky, Militich, Rodriguez, Kowalak,

Thousands of Somebodies

From all over the planet.

Names make them different

Blue shirts and steel made them family.

I read brief excerpts from student articles by Lori Van Gorp (about Florence Medellin living in the heart of Gary’s red-light district) and Kristin MacPherson, who learned about her Italian grandparents Wilbur and Margaret from her father Donald Rettig.  Wilbur worked at a title company, drove a taxi, and kept the books for a bowling league.  Margaret worked part-time in the bowling alley kitchen and was famous for a cinnamon streusel coffee cake.  Donald told Kristin:

    My mom loved Dean Martin and Perry Como. The aroma of food was always in the air, with a pot of spaghetti sauce or soup on the stove. Noodles might be drying over chairs or homemade ravioli scattered over the dining room table. I will never forget my mom wringing a chicken’s neck and nailing it to the garage to clean it.  We had the biggest garden in the neighborhood. Everyone helped.  Mom canned tomatoes, beans, and beets and made pickles, jellies, and jams.  At Easter there’d be a lamb cake, and at Christmas containers of cookies were on each step going upstairs. No one ever left hungry.  

    My mother’s sisters would come over to play cards.  They’d speak Italian and laugh for hours.  We’d sneak under the big dining room table in hopes they’d drop some coins.  After bedtime we’d peek through the floor grate and watch them.

 Wilbur, Margaret and Don Rettig

Since Vee-Jay Records co-founder Vivian Carter was on the cover, I explained that during the war she joined the Quartermaster Corps and was stationed in Washington. D.C., broadening her horizons and discovering  musicians that she later recorded.  I explained that many black performers in the 1940s had crossover hits and were popular with white audiences, not only jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington but vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole (my father’s favorite) and harmony groups such the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots that influenced Gary’s own Spaniels, pictured on the back cover. Up-tempo band leaders such as Cab Calloway (who appears in the 1980 “Blues Brothers” film performing “Minnie the Moocher”) and Louis Jordan belted out “jump” music that presaged rock and roll. I had Nicole play YouTube excerpts from “If I Didn’t Care” by the Ink Spots and “Caldonia” by Louis Jordon and the Tympany Five.  The latter begins:

Walkin’ with my baby she's got great big feet
She’s long, lean, and lanky and ain’t had nothing to eat
She’s my baby and I love her just the same
Crazy ’bout that woman cause Caldonia is her name

Next week, I’ll play “Ration Blues” by Louis Jordan, which contains this verse:

They reduced my meat and sugar
And rubber's disappearing fast
You can't ride no more with poppa
'Cause Uncle Sam wants my gas

Speaking about the war in the Pacific, Nicole brought up the army’s use of Navaho code talkers (above) to communicate in the field, since almost nobody outside the tribe could speak their unique language.   The Japanese could never crack it.  After class a student named Heather had the magazine open to a page containing a photo of M to F transgender Dakota Yorke, a 2016 Portage High School homecoming queen finalist.  “Dakota’s my best friend,”Heather exclaimed, and showed me that she had sent a photo of the page to Dakota, who texted back that she was really excited and anxious to read what I’d written.

above, Dakota; below, woodcut by Corey Hagelberg

At bridge Dick and Cheryl had noticed a photo of son Corey’s woodcut “We All Share the Same Roots” in the new edition of “Gary: A Pictorial History” and inquired about obtaining it.  I offered to trade one for an out-of-print copy of the “Tales of Lake Michigan and the Northwest Indiana Dunelands” Steel Shavings (volume 28, 1998), which they produced three days later.  It contains an interview with a former bowling acquaintance whom I nicknamed “Slick Tom” where he talked about picking up girls along the Lake Michigan shoreline in his cabin cruiser.  The steelworker bragged:

 In the summer I’d trade with everybody to get on straight midnights so I could cruise the beach to see who I could pick up.  A good spot was Lake Street.  Usually I’d take a friend.  By 11 or 12 o’clock, girls would be out sunbathing.  You might pick up one, two, three or four girls.  It was easy.  You just looked to see who was waving their arms.  When a girl starts flagging down a boat, it usually sends a signal that they are ready to party.  You pulled in, and if they weren’t good-looking, you pulled back away.

 Once my cousin and I picked up two pretty-looking girls.  We thought they were in their mid-20s.  We zoomed out about a mile and a half and started drinking some wine.  We were getting out of our bathing suits when I asked one girl how old she was.  I found out the two girls were 14 and 15 years old.  Needless to say, we got them dressed very quickly and rushed them back to shore.

 If we saw a good-looking girl who didn’t wave, we’d get out the inner tube and tie it to the back of the boat. I’d get on it.  Then my buddy would race in close towards shore and spin the boat and make the tube go right into the beach.  I’d stumble up on shore and say, “Hey, my name’s Tom.  We need three people to water ski.  Would you like a boat ride and be an observer?”  That worked like a champ.  Initially, they might say no, they were engaged or married.  Once they were on the boat for a few hours, after some persuasion and some drink, the changes in their demeanor were amazing.

“Tales of Lake Michigan” also contains my interview with Region Dunes artist David Sander (1923-1999), who told me:

 I was in the navy during World War II. After my discharge, I went back to the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill.  I met and married a classical language student, who was not familiar with the Dunes.  One day we drove to have a look at them.  It just happened that we parked next to a station wagon that had a Chesterton real estate address.  We asked the lady to show us some land.  The first place she showed us, we bought, a 40-acre tract in Beverly Shores at the end of a road that had a house, a barn, and a set of batteries because we were too far for city electricity.

 The former owner was an old Hungarian farmer.  He and his wife lived in a little milk house for several months after we purchased the land. She used to walk to Chesterton and try to sell articles they no longer needed, like a butter churn.  She’d be saying things in Hungarian, and people thought she was crazy.  Finally their son came and rescued them.

 I started painting again.  Lake Michigan became part of my nature.  Mostly I painted the Dunes.  Without people.  People-less dunes. I found the less I put into a painting, the more original it was.  After all, a painting is a rendering of a subject, not the subject itself.  The details are not the subject of a painting. The true artist creates something which is an amalgam, different and presumably greater than either him or his subject.

I vividly recall scores of dunes paintings scattered all over Sander’s home, seemingly discarded, and not having the nerve to ask him for one or two.  Not long afterwards, he was dead.

 Marcus Brown; photo by Beverly Brown

After winning the first game from 2 L’s and 2 R’s, the Engineers had only one strike in the entire second game and lost by 70 pins, as Marcus Brown bowled in the 240s,well above his average.  I had felt a twinge in my upper leg and briefly considered sitting out the finale.  Then, after a spare, split and missed 10-pin, I strung six strikes in a row and then converted a a spare, finishing with a 221, my highest score since I started at Hobart Lanes.  I got several fist bumps from bowlers nearby.  The Engineers picked up an amazing 17 strikes in that one game to win handily and garner 5 of 7 points.  I edged Joe Piunti, who won game one for us, for most pins over average by a mere 2 pins for the four-dollar pot.  Afterwards, I asked Dorothy Peterson and Gene Clifford how they liked “Shrek: The Musical” Sunday. They enjoyed it, but a woman near them with a young girl was complaining about hearing three curse words.  That was news to me.  They must have been pretty inoffensive.  Gene and Dorothy have tickets for “Million Dollar Quarter” at the Munster Theater.

Dorothy Peterson

Zion Williamson on ground

Nike stock fell more than 1% after Duke star Zion Williamson’s sneaker imploded 33 seconds into a game with North Carolina and he injured a knee.  Nike had signed a lucrative deal with the university that mandated players wear their brand even though they received nothing but free sneakers while Coach K’s annual salary rose to in the neighborhood of 10 million dollars. What a farce.

Nonconformists

 “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” Juan Ramón Jiménez (below)

Ray Bradbury used the above Jiménez quotation as the epigraph for Fahrenheit 451 (1953), about a future authoritarian regime that burns all books (the title refers to the temperature in which they catch fire).  Bradbury was not only concerned about book-burning during the Red Scare hysteria but worried that the mass media conditioned people to become uninterested in literature.

In the hallway of IUN’s library/conference center Corey Hagelberg and Samuel A. Love put together a window exhibit displaying Calumet Regional Archives holdings of poetry books and magazines, including volumes by John Sheehan and William Buckley and issues of IUN’s award-winning Spirits literary magazine in connection with their “Gary Voices” project, funded by Legacy Foundation.  They are organizing poetry writing workshops and are soliciting contributors to submit a line for what they call a “public poem” about the city of Gary.

Preparing for a talk to a “Gary Voices” poetry team about my research into the social history of the Calumet Region, I took a close look at one of my favorite poems, James Hazard’s “Parents in Whiting, Indiana” and found a reference to Nobel Laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1956). Jiménez’s poem “Oceans,” published in “News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness,” edited by Robert Bly, brings to mind my friend Tom Orr’s sailboat being struck and sunk by a submarine off the coast of Spain:

  I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
                    And nothing
happens! Nothing...Silence...Waves...

    --Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

Bly translated Jiménez’s “I Am Not I” for the anthology “The Winged Energy of Delight” (2005):

     I am not I.
               I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die.

James Hazard 

“Parents in Whiting, Indiana” is about James Hazard's immigrant parents, who had a tumultuous relationship, exacerbated by drinking.  One night, Hazard wrote, “my parents came in slugging each other.  He towered, drunk and breathing through his nose, told me I’d have to be the man of the house now and gave me money.  I was shaking in my pj’s and my mother blamed him, which seemed about half right to this brand new man of the house.”  He and his sister, Hazard’s poem concludes, “hatched fantasies us dispossessed and dismembered in goddam Whiting where we’d been given false names and left on an unlucky doorstep with grownups who locked the door and loved us and made our lives so dangerous.”

Steel Shavings, volume 46, arrived from my new printer, The Papers, Inc.  It looks great and contains two of my favorite poems, Robert Buzecky’s “Steel City, Stone City” and William Buckley’s “Night Shift,” the latter about rollerbladers circling Crown Point courthouse while “cop cars cooled their engines by the Triple Play Saloon.”  My “Editor’s Note” opens with poet John Sheehan’s remark that: “Between wisdom and folly ain’t much difference, and when we are not afraid to be fools could be when we’re wise.” 

Over the years, the content of Steel Shavings issues has varied, but the emphasis has remained the social history of Northwest Indiana and featured work by IUN students, most recently journals and oral histories.  Volume 46 includes papers Steve McShane’s students wrote about teenagers coming of age during the 1980s. The next issue will include memories of the 1990s, including this paper by Karl Lugar, who interviewed Guy Rubalcaba, a Mexican-American who grew up in the Black Oak area of Gary and attended Grissom Elementary, Lake Ridge middle school, and Calumet High School. 

Guy Rubalcaba on guitar and cycle

Lugar wrote:

In school Guy was subject of daily bullying as he did not subscribe to the “grunge fashion” of the day.  After ignoring his tormenters to no avail, he did fight back on one occasion, and the bullies moved on to other targets of opportunity.  Guy’s favorite teacher, Mr. Joe Portman, grew up “dirt poor” and sympathized with kids in similar circumstances. He delivered food baskets to the community, while serving as the school’s work-study coordinator and truant officer.

Guy received a hand-me-down 1987 Chevrolet Monte Carlo from his brother, his first of many.   Once Guy received his driver’s license, he liked to hang out weekends at Johnsen’s Blue Top Drive-In in Highland.  It was there that he learned of the infamous Cline Avenue drag racing scene, which he became a part of, learning that not only must a car be fast but it must be handled well to win.   Gus and his father spent many hours in his dad’s auto body shop repairing and repainting cars. Some were for customers; others were resold. His mother worked in the steel mill and instilled in Guy the value of hard work and self-motivational skills.

              Guy’s love for music came from his father, who played Stevie Ray Vaughn, Otis Redding, and other rock and soul music in the body shop. Guy played guitar, starting at age five, and secured an audition for his band at the high school talent show.  Unfortunately, Calumet's assistant principal suspended one of the members for tardiness the day before the audition, ruining their chances. Guy later formed “Voodoo Prophecy” and toured the Chicago “Rock Box” bar scene. He also started a record label and signed several artists before tiring of the scene.  

              Guy has a multifaceted personality that is like removing layers from an onion: each is unique and unveils a different side of him. He was married briefly and is devoted to his two kids.  He has never taken drugs, or consumed alcohol, as he witnessed what those did to other peoples’ lives and wanted to avoid becoming a statistic.  Since the nineties, his life has taken wild turns that led to his becoming manager of a gentlemen’s club. 

in foreground, Boricuas Phil Vera and Larry Ramirez (holding shoes); Below, Tom Crean in loss to Wisconsin

At Hobart Lanes, after observing that my ball was not carrying, Gene Clifford gave me a couple tips and I finished with games of 151 and 183.  Nearby, Delia’s uncles’ team, the Boricuas (meaning Puerto Ricans, especially those living in the U.S), were wearing green “Irish” shirts for good luck.  Folks were discussing the ouster of IU basketball coach Tom Crean after a very disappointing season, as well as news reports that an IUN women’s volleyball coach had been fired and charged with sexual battery. According to published reports of the criminal complaint, the former coach at Bishop Noll, hired a year ago and not on IUN’s faculty, got in a play-fight with a 17-year-old referee, first smacking her on the butt and then kissing her against her will.  Stupid move and bad for the university’s reputation! 

 David Levine view of TR

In a New York Review of Books essay praising Stephen Kinzer’s “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire,” Jackson Lears wrote about America's continuing legacy of imperialism:

         The protection of foreign investment remained wrapped in the rhetoric of exceptionalism, which intensified after the United States emerged from World War II as the most powerful country on the planet.  Throughout the cold war and its successor, the war on terror, the exceptionalist creed maintained the international double standard – the willingness to pursue policies deemed intolerable elsewhere, the inability to imagine how Americans might react were other nations to behave as the United States does.

         The True Flag captures the tragic impact of American hubris: the concentration of unchecked power in the executive branch, the corrosive impact of secrecy ion public debate, the insulation of decision-making in unapproachable bureaucratic hierarchies [with] catastrophic consequences, from the counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines and Vietnam to the chaos arising from “regime change” in Iraq and Libya.