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.

Sundown Towns

“By 1970, exclusion was so complete that fewer than 500 black families lived in white suburban neighborhoods in the entire metropolitan Chicago area.” James W. Loewen, “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism” (2005)

Most famous for “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” first published in 1995, James W. Loewen in the 1970s  had a textbook turned down by Mississippi educators on the grounds that it was too controversial.  Sundown towns, Loewen discovered, existed from Maine to California, including the Hoosier state.  Sometimes the discrimination was blatant, and in Southern Indiana it was not uncommon for motorists to come across signs crudely addressed to African-Americans, warning, “Don’t let the sun go down on you.”  Jews and other minority groups sometimes encountered similar hostility when attempting to move into suburban communities. 

In Northwest Indiana, suburban police forces often intimidated drivers passing through their communities, and realtors rigidly enforced the color line.  During the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan had been active in many Hoosier towns, and the Klan almost purchased Valparaiso University at that time.  According to John Gehm’s “Bringing It Home” (1984) the Klan erected a sign by the Valpo city limits reading “NIGGERS OUT BY SUNDOWN” that remained for some years.  Two black students registered for classes at VU in the fall of 1946 but were told to wait until second semester so that a statement in the city charter that read, “No blacks are allowed to sleep in Valparaiso overnight” was amended.  Then they allegedly were given notes from the mayor to carry with them granting them permission to be in town in the event they ventured off campus after dark.   

Indiana Humanities kicked off a ten-city film series tour (on March 6 the venue will be at IUN’s Bergland Auditorium) at Valparaiso University by showing two documentaries of particular interest to me, “From Sundown to Sunrise” by Pat Wisniewski (left) and Tom Desch and “Larry from Gary” by Miller resident and Columbia College professor Dan Rybicky (below).  I sat with Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette, who introduced me to two VU students connected with the Welcome Project and Jon Hendricks, VU director of photography, whose wife Becca works for IUN in University Advancement.  A large crowd was on hand, including former Post-Trib columnist Jeff Manes, a good friend whom I hadn’t seen in over a year, IUN Vice Chancellor John Novak, and Katherine Arfken, a Performing Arts professor who knew Pat Wisniewski from when she was an IUN student.  Once a steelworker, Wisniewski returned to school in her 40s and graduated in 2009. She and Jeff Manes collaborated on “Everglades of the North” (about the Kankakee March) and she worked with Lee Botts in producing “Shifting Sands” (about efforts to save the dunes). I'm in it, and when people tell me they saw me on TV, I'm fairly certain that's why.

“From Sundown to Sunset” told the story of the Cotton family becoming the first African Americans to live in Valparaiso.  They were residing in Chicago’s segregated housing project Cabrini Green, where close to 15,000 African Americans lived, when the met Walt and Loie Reiner.  A navy veteran and former VU football coach, Walt had moved his family to Chicago after founing a group called Prince of Peace Volunteers interested in working with Cabrini Green residents.  Four years later, when the Reiners prepared to move back to Valparaiso Robert’s mother expressed regret that her family couldn’t do so as well, it became the Reiners’ mission to make that happen.  When realtors refused to deal with the Cottons, the Reiners arranged for volunteers to construct a house for them near their own.  As a result, both families received death threats and other forms of harassment. Volunteers guarded the Cotton home at night for over a year. Appearing on the film, Robert Cotton, who was 12 at the time of the move, recalled her sister being fearful upon spotting a stranger lurking outside their home and his deciding, bare-chested, to guard the door with a machete in his hand.  Cotton went on to graduate from VU, and there’s a clip of him speaking to students in Allison Schuette’s class. In 2015 residents elected Cotton to the Valparaiso City Council;  he was re-elected in 2019.  The film ends with him first being sworn in and his mother wiping tears from her eyes as he recited the oath.

above, Reiners; below, Robert Cotton

Larry Brewer

Renaldo Maurice

“Larry from Gary” highlights teacher Larry Brewer’s efforts to teach dance to young people despite great obstacles.  Brewer graduated from Gary’s Horace Mann High School and taught for 35 years at Emerson School for the Visual and Performing Arts, which closed down last year.  Brewer is interviewed outside the ruins of Horace Mann, where as a student he participated in a demonstration on behalf of Martin Luther King Day becoming a national holiday, inside the ruins of City Methodist Church’s Seaman Hall, where he once performed, and at the two former sites of defunct Emerson School. He’s seen working with dancers, and the film includes performances by former students, including Reginald Maurice, who went on to study at Juilliard School and dance with the prestigious Alvin Ailey Company.  I was pleased to see Larry, sitting in front of me, be greeted by numerous well-wishers.  A few years ago, he directed a program at the old Miller School that grandson James participated in, learning hip hop dance moves.

A third film showed the tremendous effort it took to put out a small-town paper.  It reminded me of the Chesterton Tribune, in existence since 1882 and performing a vital community service. It’s probably destined to survive, if at all, as an online publication.  At intermission IUN performing arts professor Kathy Arfken greeted me warmly.  Sensing I was trying to place, she said that, inspired by former colleague Anne Balay’s example, she recently decided to let her hair go naturally white.  It looks great.  We talked about photography professor Gary Wilk, who retired a few years ago. I told her we used to party with him during the 1970s when artist Larry Kaufman was his mentor.

Photographer Kay Westhues sought information about a Gary district known as Black Oak.  Among other things, I recommended my Vietnam Steel Shavings issue that has excerpts from Joe Klein’s “Payback” describing the “scuffy” home town of Vietnam veteran Gary Cooper (who would subsequently die in a shoot-out with Hammond police while suffering a pstd-induced flashback) and the distinctive blue-collar counter-culture emerging there in the late-1960s that promised “sex, drugs, mayhem, and good music.” Klein wrote:

    It was harsher, more anarchic and, in a way, more hedonistic than its better-known progenitor.  There was none of the philosophical posturing, little of the youthful idealism.  If a Fonda was admired, it was not Jane (who was despised even by the antiwar veterans) but brother Peter and his motorcycle. Steel workers didn’t “experiment” with drugs; they used them; they weren’t searching for illumination, just escape.

    They tended to favor the wilder fringes of rock music, disdaining the existential angst of Simon and Garfunkel for the less subtle pleasure of Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad.  They grew their hair long (and left it that way, long after most of the campus radicals returned to the fold and discovered the 25-dollar hairstyling parlor), and they began using some of the words they’d heard on television: the police became the “pigs,” the factory bosses the “establishment,” and “party” became a verb as well as a noun.  Their rage was diffuse; they weren’t rebelling against their parents so much as the utter dreariness of factory life itself.  Those who talked revolution were mostly interested in tearing the old mess down.

David Rubenstein included an interview with A. Scott Berg, author of “Lindbergh,” in his new book “The American Story.”  “Lucky Lindy” was the world’s first mega-hero after his 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic at age 25.  Previously, he’d performed dare-devil feats, including wing walking and parachute jumping, as a barnstorming pilot and survived close calls delivering mail between Chicago and St. Louis.  Berg claims that Lindbergh turned down all endorsement offers upon his triumphant return from Europe and that in 1929 the shy Minnesotan and his bride Anne Morrow were virgins on thei wedding night.  They went on to have six children, the eldest who was abducted from his crib and killed.  Between 1958 and 1967, unbeknownst to his wife or author Berg until after his biography was completed, Lindbergh fathered seven children by three German women. Because he was an isolationist prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt rejected his efforts to serve in World War II.  Nonetheless, Lindbergh advised American pilots in the Pacific and with General Douglas MacArthur’s blessing flew on 50 combat missions. Somewhat of a racist, he was no doubt more comfortable fighting Japanese than Germans.

Since IUN only carried Elizabeth Keckley’s “Behind the Scenes: or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House” as an ebook, Anne Koehler ordered it for me inter-library loan.  A copy arrived from VU that contained an informative foreword by historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  I was most interested in Keckley’s relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln, for whom she made over a dozen dresses and became a close companion of the First Lady. After publication of the book, Keckley was criticized for revealing White House secrets, but the anecdotes were tame compared to present-day gossip.  Mary Todd Lincoln was very suspicious of the men around her husband, in particular Salmon Chase and William Seward.  When Lincoln was about to appoint Andrew Johnson military governor of Tennessee, she told him, according to Keckley, “He is a demagogue and if you place him in power, mark my words, you will rue it some day.”  She also detested generals George McClellan as a “humbug” and Grant as “an obstinate fool and a butcher.” She was uncomfortable with Abe interacting with comely women during social engagements. One story has Mary telling the President prior to a reception not to flirt with the ladies and saying, “You know well enough, Mr. Lincoln, that I do not approve of your flirtations with silly women, just as if you were a beardless boy, fresh from school.”      

Toni and I celebrated our 55th wedding anniversary at the Craft House in Chesterton. Normally we don’t get dessert, but the highlight of the meal was sharing nine warm beignet pastry fritters served with chocolate, strawberry, and caramel dipping sauces.

Anniversaries

“If you want to know what aspect of the moon landing was discussed most in the bullpen, it was the sex lives of the astronauts.  We thought it a terrible arrangement that they should go three weeks or more without any sex life.” Jim Bouton, “Ball Four” (1970)

 hatless Jim Bouton in 1964 World Series; with his baseball diary

Former New York Yankee relief pitcher Jim Bouton, author of a sensational insider look at major league baseball players, died at age 80.  Sportswriter Peter King called “Ball Four,” which sold over 5 million copies and discussed players cheating on their wives and carousing in fleshpots, the greatest sports book of all time.  Bouton had won 39 games in 1963-64 as a Yankee starter, but a sore arm turned him into a knuckleballer. Written candidly in the form of a season-long diary, “Ball Four,” according to Washington Postwriter Matt Schudel, “captured the humor, profanity and pathos of amajor league clubhouse.”  Bouton revealed that superstar centerfielder Mickey Mantle sometimes nursed a hangover on the field and that he once closed a bus window on kids hoping for an autograph. Ostracized by many former friends, Bouton was allegedly blackballed by major league owners after refusing to agree to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s demand that he repudiate his own book. During the 1970s Bouton pitched for several minor league teams before briefly catching on with the Atlanta Braves in 1978, compiling a record of one win and three losses. Schudel wrote:

   He continued to throw his knuckleball for another 20 years, competing against players less than half his age in semipro leagues until he was in his late 50s.

  “You see,”he wrote in “Ball Four,” “you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

 

















Neil Armstrong; Perry Bothers

In Sports Illustrated S.L. Price wrote about brothers Gaylord and Jim Perry winning three games on the day of the moon landing fifty years ago. San Francisco Giant Gaylord Perry not only hurled a complete game victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers, he hit the first home run of his long career in his 485th time at the plate. In Seattle, meanwhile, older brother Jim of the Minnesota Twins pitched 11 shutout innings, the final two of a suspended game against the expansion Pilots (who would move to Milwaukee after a single year in the Emerald City) and a nine-inning complete game gem in the regularly scheduled contest. He told reporters, “I’d have liked to have seen the guy set down on the moon, but I’ll see it tonight on the news.”  Six years later, when Jim Perry’s son got married, he ran into astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon and a childhood friend of the bride’s father. 

Walt and Loei Reiner; Walt later in life

The Neighbors Project in Valparaiso is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary.  Originally named the Valparaiso Builders Association, the citizens group formed in response to pleas from African-American families living in Chicago to obtain affordable housing in a community that provided families a safe, healthy environment.  Working with VU faculty and Lutheran church members, co-founders Walt and Loie Reiner encountered opposition from residents anxious about a handful of black families moving into their community and fearful that this was just the vanguard of a larger influx, resulting in the lowering of property values.  “We were not very popular in the early days,” Loie Reiner recently told Post-Tribcolumnist Jerry Davich, who added: “Building homes in lily-white Valpo for black families from Chicago was viewed as an intrusion, at its best, and an invasion, at its worst, by fearful townspeople.”Nonetheless, Valparaiso Builders Association ultimately prevailed.  One young family member, Robert Cotton, is presently a city councilman. 

 NWI Times photo by Rob Earnshaw

Walt Reiner passed away in 2006, but Loie at age 90 is still active in the organization, renamed Neighbors Project in 1984.   I met Loie at VU historian Heath Carter’s house; both Heath and his wife, who have an African-American son, became active in various Neighbors Project endeavors.  Under the direction of longtime member and current chairman Paul Schreiner the organization has built affordable houses, using for the most part volunteer labor. In addition, in the Hilltop neighborhood the organization has established a child care center, an after-school enrichment program aptly named Walt’s Place, as well as a health care facility and an adult education program.

Valparaiso U. grad Loie Reiner and James Schreiner receive 2016 honorary degrees 

On This Day website mentions these past July 12 events: 1804, Alexander Hamilton succumbed to a gunshot wound at the hands of duelist Aaron Burr; 1959, Surgeon General Leroy Burney warned that cigarette smoking may lead to lung cancer; 1976, “Family Feud” debuted on ABC; 2013, Malala Yousafzai addresses the U.N. on the need for women to have access to education; 2017, a giant iceberg broke away from the Larsen ice shelf in Antarctica.  On the day, 2019, a tropical storm caused massive flooding along the Gulf coast, and Trump’s Labor secretary Alex Acosta resigned under pressure for having let billionaire child molester Jason Epstein off with a slap on the wrist 11 years ago while U.S. Attorney.  Smarmy Special Persecutor Ken Starr was one of Epstein’s high-powered mouthpieces.

I’ve been asked to make an Art in Focus presentation next season in Munster.  Three years ago, I spoke on Vee-Jay do-founder Vivian Carter.  The following year the title of my talk was “Rock and Roll in 1958: A Dance Party.”  Though they were well-received, I wasn’t invited back last year.  The reason, I found out later, was that program director Jillian Van Volkenburgh had left to pursue a career as an artist in New York City and her replacement was unfamiliar with me.  Since next year is the fiftieth anniversary of graduating from high school, I’ll talk about “The State of Rock and Roll in 1960: A Dance Party.” I’m super-excited.

I’ve been reminiscing with childhood friend Judy Jenkins and Sammy Corey’s name came up.  He, Judy’s brotherTerry, and I were really close growing up.  When we moved to Fort Washington in 1950, the Coreys were next door neighbors.  Midge joked that she’d sometimes find Sammy in my bedroom reading comic books, when I wasn’t even there.  We spent many days in a clearing we made in the woods across the street from your place. Summers during junior high we’d play penny ante poker games for hours.  His dad once took us to Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, which first opened in the nineteenth century, and I almost lost my lunch on a ride nicknamed “The Whip.”  In high school Sammy would take his grandparents’ Chrysler to a race track (without them knowing it) and enter drag races.  He was a dare devil.  Once he drove the Chrysler onto an ice-covered field near Upper Dublin, floored it, and then turned the wheel so the car would squeal and then slide and slide.   He went to Susquehanna College just down the way from Bucknell, and one weekend I double-dated with a friend of his girlfriend up to visit.  We ended up making out in twin beds of the girls’ hotel room.  After college we had dinner, and he spent most of the time trying to sell me life insurance.  I didn’t see him much after that, but about 30 years ago my brother Rich and I played cards with Sam at Terry and Gayle’s Doylestown house and shared a joint that someone had brought. Sadly, I don’t think I’ve seen him since. Judging from a decade-old photo I found, I wouldn’t recognize him.

Sam Corey, Jr.