No Walls

“Strangers are exciting, their mystery never ends.  But there’s nothing like looking at your own history in the faces of your friends.” Ani DiFranco

 Ani DiFranco

Grammy-winning folk singer Ani Di Franco’s memoir, “No Walls and the Recurring Dream” has received rave reviews.  The title refers not only to the outspoken feminist’s candor about intimate thoughts and recurring dreams but to a Buffalo, New York, carriage house where she grew up with a suicidal brother and distant parents. Other than the bathroom, it literally had no walls, just single rooms on the first and second floors. At age 18 an angry, “anti-everything” punker craving human connection, Ani shaved her head, explaining in an NPR interview: “I didn't want to be a sex object and there I was playing in bars you know mostly surrounded by men with drinks in their hands. And I was getting attention for not the right reasons. I wanted a different kind of power, I think.”  Now married with two children, she wrote of being a nude model when a struggling artist in Manhattan and while hitchhiking with a female lover escaping from a driver intent on raping them.

Michael Jordan’s number 23, Walter Payton’s 34, and Bobby Hull’s number 9 were more famous, but my favorite Chicago ball player wore jersey number 22.  Bill Buckner, who died at age 69 after a struggle with dementia, unfortunately, will always be remembered for a grounder that went through his legs at first base in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series between the Red Sox and the Mets.  Previously, during eight seasons with the Cubs, Buckner was a pro’s pro, winning the batting title in 1980 with a .324 average and leading the league in doubles during his 1981 All-Star season. He never struck out more than two times in a game or as many as 40 in an entire season. In contrast, Cubs All-Star Javier Baez fanned five times against Houston on Memorial Day and sluggers commonly strike out 150 times in a season.  “Billy Buck” hammered out over 2,700 hits during a 22-year career.  During that time only Pete Rose had more.  Appearing in a 2012 episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Buckner endures pedestrians mocking him; nobody seesg his autograph while sitting next to popular Met Mookie Wilson. He muffs a ball Larry unexpectedly tossed at him but nobody but emerges the hero, catching a baby falling from a building that’s on fire.  Buckner’s successor on the Cubs, first baseman Leon Durham, misplayed a grounder in the final game of the 1984 National League playoffs against San Diego that cost them a chance to play in the World Series for the first time since 1945.

On Memorial Day 96-year-old Pete DuPré, rising from a wheelchair, played the National Anthem on harmonica at a women’s soccer exhibition between the United States and Mexico.  Very moving. The veteran had taken part in the D-Day landing at Normandy.  At Applebee’s with Dave’s family I paid tribute to Angie’s grandfather Tom, and Toni did the same for her dad Tony, both World War II veterans. In Japan Trump ridiculed potential Democratic rival Joe Biden and praised North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, He is considering pardoning a Navy SEAL accused of killing a young girl and an old man in Iraq, as well as an unarmed captive.  Shameful, as many decorated veterans have emphasized. My childhood friend Paul Curry, who died in Vietnam, would have liked Justin Moore’s “The Ones That Didn’t Make It Home.”  It begins:

Tour was up middle of June
She was plannin' a welcome home barbecue
Green bean casserole, grandma's recipe

There was a knock on the door around two o’clock

Two uniforms and her heart stopped
Yellow ribbon 'round an oak tree, blowin' in the breeze

Dean Bottorff vented his anger at Trump’s perversion of Memorial Day by posting comments by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez explaining that Trump is a symptom of a system desperately in need of repair and a New Yorkercover entitled “The Shining.” The latter depicts Republican toadies Mitch McConnell, William Barr, and Lindsey Graham shining their leader’s shoes.  On a happier note the dedication of Indiana Dunes National Park, Indiana’s first and only such place designated place took place at the Paul Douglas Center in Gary.

dedication photo by Steve Spicer

Curtis and Phil Reid

Haverford graduate Phil Reid, a student of Anne Balay’s whom I met at an oral history conference last October in Montreal, stopped by with his brother Curtis on their way home to Colorado.  At Craft House we discussed Phil’s plans to enter AmeriCorp s and teach inner city kids in Baton Rouge. I gave him a copy of Steel Shavingsthat describes our hanging out in Montreal at a Chinese joint for lunch and McKibben’s Irish Pub that evening. At our session, organized by Balay, moderated by Donald Ritchie, and titled “Teaching Ethical Oral History Methods to Undergraduates” Phil talked about interviewing Philadelphia neighborhood residents about graffiti works of art.  I wrote: “Phil announced he’d be reading his remarks since he was nervous and delivered them with breakneck speed but got a hearty round of applause.”

Though warned by Gaard Logan that Rohinton Mistry’s 599-page historical novel A Fine Balance” was incredibly heartbreaking, the characters were so compelling, I stuck with it till the very end.  Horrible things happen to the main characters as they live through the nightmare of India during the “Emergency” of the mid-1970s, when corrupt officials razed slums and forcibly sterilized innocent victims in the name of progress and efficiency. Student Maneck Kohlah briefly found contentment boarding with 42-year-old Dina Aunty, tailors Ishvar and Om, and a litter of kittens.  After spending eight years in Dubai, where his social life was as barren as the desert landscape and young female immigrants were often enslaved.  Maneck returns to Mumbai to find that Dina Aunty has lost her flat and aged beyond her years.  Living with her brother, she tells Maneck he should shave off his beard because “it makes you look like a toilet brush.”  It’s the closest she comes to exhibiting any emotion.  Ishvar has lost his legs and Om has been castrated; both have been reduced to beggary.  Ironically, just before Maneck decides to step in front of a speeding train, he is splattered with crow droppings, which his mother claimed was a sign of impending good fortune.

Alissa called from Ireland.  After Anthony enrolled in a Grand Valley State overseas course through her office of overseas programs, a chaperone couldn’t go, so Alissa took her place. What a great experience for both, Alissa the seasoned world traveler, Anthony on his first such adventure.

The Spring 2019 issue of Traces magazine arrived with boxer Joe Louis on the cover to go with my article “The Champ: Joe Louis and Race-Relations in Gary.” The only other time I made the cover, for Gary pugilist Tony Zale, it was also a bare-chested shot.  Describing the front cover photo editor Ray Boomhower used this quote by Langston Hughes asserting that after each Joe Louis victory, “thousands of black Americans would throng out into the streets across the land to march and cheer and yell and cry because of Joe’s one-man triumphs.”John C. Shively’s “Battle Stations: John Wooden, Fred Stalcup, Jr. and the Attack on the USS Franklin” dealt with a Hoosier Purdue grad who died aboard an aircraft carrier crippled by a Japanese air strike during World War II. A fellow Boilermaker, legendary basketball player and coach John Wooden, would have been aboard instead of Stalcup had he not come down with appendicitis right before it sailed for the Far East.

attack on U.S.S. Franklin, March 1945

At bridge I gave Sharon Snyder a copy of Traces and told her I mentioned her father-in-law, Post-Tribunepublisher H.B. Snyder’s role 70 years ago in making sure African Americans were not excluded from the newspaper’s annual tournament at previously segregated South Gleason Golf Course.  Alan Yngve said that when he lived in Dune Acres he used to compete in sailboat races with B.G. Snyder, whom Sharon married.  When I brought up bowling, I learned that Judy Selund’s 81-year-old partner Don Geidemann had a 210 average.  I asked if they had any interest in subbing on Thursday afternoons.  I told Judy that Bob Selund’s photo was in Barbara Walczak’s newsletter citing the bridge players who had passed away during the past ten years.

Bob Selund

History chair Jonathyne Briggs asked me to attend senior David Hill’s thesis defense about the legacy of U.S. expansionist policies in Central America. He broke his presentation down to the pre-Cold War, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods.  While our rationale for meddling in these countries’ affairs shifted over time, the end result remained the same, to the detriment of the people, many of whom are presently seeking asylum in America. Once companies such as United Fruit had a stranglehold on these countries’ economies; now it’s international banks.  Hill was impressive even though his thesis seemed overly broad.  I questioned him about the role of the Catholic Church in these countries and our training Central American police and military officers serving repressive regimes.  Chris Young recommended that Hill not concentrate exclusively on external factors, citing a legacy of corruption and gangsterism, and the absence of a large educated middle class as partly responsible for the current situation.

"Bubbie"

“Once you’re gone you can never come back

When you’re out of the blue and into the black”

         Neil Young, “My My, Hey Hey”

Ann “Bubbie” Zucker passed away at age 99.  She was born at the dawn of the modern era, January 1, 1920, in Geisin, Russia. She and her parents, Gertrude and Chaim Stookal, left their native country shortly after the Bolsheviks came to power, then made their way to Chicago.  Ann’s family history reminded me of Gary attorney Paul Glaser, the son of impoverished Jews who came to America after participating in a failed 1905 uprising against Czar Nicholas II.  She and three siblings grew up in the Windy City, and Ann became a secretary after high school.  In 1953 she married Dr. Edward Zucker and served as his office manager. Her obituary stated: “She was a devoted mother to her loving children Victor (Eva), Eric (Haengmi) and Amy (Tim) as well as her four grandchildren Jessica, Andrew, Melissa, and Zoe.”  Former neighbor Mona Stern recalled the time long ago “when we lived next door to Ann and Ed and our kids played together.”

Coming across Ann Zucker’s obit, I found myself wondering how she got the nickname “Bubbie.”  On the same page was an “In Loving Memory” announcement for Christopher “Cricker” Smith of Valparaiso on the fourth anniversary of his death at age 28.  His dad wrote: “You told me that your biggest fear was that people would forget you after you were gone.  We will not let that happen!”  

When my great-aunt Ida Frace Gordon lived with my family, she subscribed to her hometown paper, the Easton Express, for the express purpose of checking the obits for any mention of past friends and acquaintances. My interest is more from a historic perspective, but I get a kick out of coming across colorful nicknames and anecdotes among the solemn words and list of loved ones.  My centennial history of Gary contains a section titled “Ides of March 2003” where I mentioned notices for two St. Timothy’s Church mainstays, Leona Hill and Ophelia Marsh Davis, as well as Lucille “Sweet” Ford-Burnell, a soprano in the Jerusalem Baptist Church choir.  I noted: 

 The write-ups in the Post-Tribune included nicknames (often “papa” or “momma”) and special talents (poet, southern cooking, fisherman) but few clues about the cause of death beyond the ubiquitous “after a brief illness.”  One was left to speculate over the passing of 19-year-old West Side grad Angela Lorraine Windom-Robinson, 27-year-old Wallace grad Rodney L. Pace, Jr., and 30-year-old Wirt grad Terrance “Sean” Ligé.

Timemagazine referred to actress Tessa Thompson as “a queer woman of color”who’d been in tentpole films, an expression unfamiliar to me.  I have since learned that the phrase describes movies (in Thompson’s case, as Valkyrie in Marvel’s “Avenger” series) that have as an ancillary purpose the advertising of toys, games, and other products sold by the franchise.  

In the Post-Tribune an anonymous Quickly submission used the phrase “Crimea River”(i.e., “cry me a river”)about Russian Maria Butina, imprisoned for conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent. In addition to being a song by Justin Timberlake, the expression “cry me a river,”according to Urban Dictionary, is a sarcastic reference to someone who is being a drama queen.  Since many call in Quickly comments, one wonders if the author wanted it printed as “Crimea River” or the Quickly editor was being clever.

 Jim and Marcia Carson

"Marsha" from Pillow Drawings by Larry Kaufman

At bridge I complimented Marcia Carson on her Art in Focus talk about paintings of mothers and children and mentioned one piece that reminded me of drawings by Larry Kaufman, a photo-realist whom Toni studied under at IUN and a close friend during the 1970s.  It turned out that Marcia had taken classes with Kaufman at Bloomington and again while completing a master’s degree at IUN.  Marcia worked on a mural painted on the side of Jenny’s Café next door to where the Fine Arts department was then housed.  One night a dog got into the building and took a leak on a drawing Toni had done of industrial pipes, confirming, Larry quipped, that it was a realistic rendering.

A man bridge buddy Helen Boothe knew well attempted to commit suicide by drinking anti-freeze.  Ugh!   Helen noted that while there had been times when she felt melancholy, she had difficulty understanding depression. Her partner Dottie Hart and I felt the same way.  No matter how down in the dumps, there’s never been a time when I couldn’t think of something to live for.  I told Helen and Dottie that when my dad dropped dead at age 50 from a sudden heart attack, I kept my grief bottled up inside until a few months later, when Toni placed a photo of Vic in a prominent place.  Gradually I began to recall happy memories instead of focusing on regrets, like when I was at the University of Maryland and Vic called from the Baltimore airport, saying that he had a two-hour layover and wondered if I wanted to join him.  I begged off, saying I was busy, and never saw him again. 

Helen brought up that her husband suffered from Alzheimer’s the last 14 years of his life, so I mentioned that Midge’s assisted living facility in California brought patients from the euphemistically named “memory care” ward to Friday afternoon entertainment.  Many mouthed the lyrics of old standards that the piano player was singing.  Helen recollected that she and her husband were at a church service, and he knew the words to the hymns, even the second, less familiar stanzas.  Former Chicago Bears football player Ted Karras flowered after moving to a Memory Care facility.  “He’s even singing again,”wife Anna told me. Helen knew Ted’s sister Helene, whom I interviewed for a Traces article about brother Alex Karras.

Ted Karras honored at Bears game; below Charlie Halberstadt

I partnered with best friend Charlie Halberstadt both at the Chesterton game and one next day at Banta Center in Valpo, which Charlie directs. He guarantees that nobody sits out, so I’d have been paired with someone else had there not been an even number of participants.  In both games we finished above 50% and earned master points. I wish I could have bid or played a couple hands differently, but neither hurt us all that much.

 Viceroy Louis Mountbatten

Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance” has this acerbic comment on how the 1947 partition of India, which Mahatma Gandhi vociferously opposed, impacted the family fortunes of main character Maneck Kohlah:

   Maneck’s family had once been extremely wealthy.  Fields of grain, orchards of apple and peach, a lucrative contract to supply provisions to cantonments along the frontier – all this was among the inheritance of Farokh Kohlah, and he tended it well, making it increase and multiply for the wife he was to marry and the son who would be born.

   But long before that eagerly awaited birth, there was another, gorier parturition, when two nations incarnated out of one.  A foreigner (Viceroy Louis Mountbatten) drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth.  And the orchards, fields, factories, businesses, all on the wrong side of that line, vanished with a wave of the pale conjuror’s wand.

Dean Bottorff in Loogootee, Indiana

Former Maple Place neighbor Dean Bottorff posted a photo Jonell took of him and his motorcycle in Loogootee, Indiana.  When I suggested they drop by, he replied:

We thought about visiting you but we were on a somewhat tight schedule with some 3,000 miles to cover in eight days. Our goal in Indiana was Clark County to visit the monument of John Henry Bottorff who was an Ensign in Capt. Michael Wolf's Company of the Berks County Pennsylvania Militia in the Revolutionary War ... the namesake of all Bottorffs after having changed his name from Johannes Heinrich Batdorf ... perhaps because of anti-German sentiment during the Revolution. Clark County was heavily populated with Bottorffs who were among the first settlers there in the very early 1800s.  Rich Bottorff is now very fond of this quote [from Baird’s history of Clark County]: “It is seldom indeed that a Bottorff is found who is not well-to-do and the name has become synonymous with thrift and industry. Originating in Germany representatives of this family became identified with Indiana at an early day.”

Granddaughter Becca asked for advice for a school project on the subject of how the Cold War affected American popular music during the 1980s.  I suggested analyzing Jackson Browne’s 1986 album “Lives in the Balance,” which during a time when the Ronald Reagan administration was aiding murderous Contra counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua against the socialist Sandinistas warned against the country “drifting toward war” in order to defend business interests.  One line charged that the government was using Cold war rhetoric to justify supporting groups that kill their own people and employing propaganda to sell the American people wars the same way as advertisers sell us clothes and cars. Fortunately, memories of the Vietnam fiasco were still vivid, putting a damper on Reagan’s options.  At a time when National Security Council director for political-military affairs Oliver North and other rightwing operatives were breaking the law to secretly provide weapons to the Contras, Jackson Browne concluded “Lives in the Balance” with these words:

I want to know who the men in the shadows are

I want to hear somebody asking them why

They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are

But they're never the ones to fight or to die

And there are lives in the balance

There are people under fire

There are children at the cannons

And there is blood on the wire