Homecoming

“Poetry is a sort of homecoming,” Paul Celan

I provided free copies of Steel Shavings, volume 47, at a Homecoming “Legacy” lunch for IUN grads and their children or grandchildren presently enrolled.  Alumni Relations director Paulette LaFata invited me to stay, so I made myself a salad and sat with Annalynn Morin and her mother Jean, who were at a table by themselves.  Annalynn is a Biology major active in several student groups; Jean took classes with Ron Cohen and remembered him fondly as a folk music expert.  Afterwards, I watched IUN’s Lady Redhawks defeat the Madonna University Crusaders, from Michigan judging from where their players hailed from. IUN’s best player Grayce Roach looks to be 100 percent recovered from a finger injury.  Veterans Michelle Borgen, Gina Rubino, and Chloe Salman also played well. Freshman Brittney Williams from Merrillville came off the bench to grab several rebounds and score two terrific follow-up shot on hustle plays.  I congratulated Coach Ryan Shelton, also IUN’s athletic director, on the university getting accepted into the CCAC (Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference) and expressed condolences on the death of assistant Ken Markfull.

Brittney Williams while at Merrillville; Times photo by John Luke

James as "narrator"

Grandson James was a narrator in the Portage H.S. play “Ten Ways to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse.”  Phil and Delia came in for the occasion.  Unbeknownst to me, James starts out in the audience.  Minutes before the curtain went up, Becca nudged me, and I turned to see him beaming just a few rows behind us.   Slightly deaf, I had trouble understanding much dialogue, but James belted out lines loud and clear.  In the program bio James quoted from the Nintendo game WarioWare: “It’s pizza time!  Oh yeah, no money.” 

 Z. Kierstead’s“I could’ve dropped my croissant”is from a YouTube vine gone viral.  Maria Sosa’s “No”is in honor of Rosa Parks, whose refusal to yield her seat sparked the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Makayla Butala’s “Don’t let the muggles get you down”is from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Meghan Smeltzer repeated a popular meme, “This is so sad.  Alexa, play Despacito.”  Toni sometimes calls upon digital assistant Alexa for crossword puzzle answers. “Despacito” is a song by Luis Fonsi.  Senior thespian Angelo Jarvis thanked former theater director Kevin Lee Giess, unfairly terminated on school board orders, “for allowing me my first opportunity.”

 Tom Wade, Waiting to see Obama at Gary Genesis Center

Obama photo by Kyle Telethon

Tom and Darcey Wade were part of a standing-room only audience at Gary Genesis Center that heard Barack Obama campaign for Indiana Democrats.  Beforehand, Tom stood for 90 minutes to obtain two free tickets and then another 90 minutes waiting to get inside, as rumors had circulated that not everyone would be able to get in.  Close to the stage with Darcey in a wheelchair, both got to shake the former President’s hand as he was leaving.  On Facebook Tom confessed to having a man-crush and wrote: “We will not wash our hands for a long while! He is such a gregarious, beautiful man.”

Major Brent Taylor, 39, mayor of North Ogden, Utah, and father of seven, died in Afghanistan at the hands of someone he was training during his second tour of duty there with the U.S. National Guard.  Previously, he had served two tours in Iran. His assassin, a member of the Afghan National Defense Force, was immediately shot and killed. Brent Taylor was a true hero, a selfless public servant at home and abroad.

Region author and Times correspondent Jane Ammeson praised Ken Schoon’s new book, “Swedish Settlements on the South Shore of Lake Michigan."  Schoon noted, “Many Swedes came first to Chicago, which at one time had more Swedes than any city on Earth except Stockholm.”  Ammeson quoted extensively from Schoon’s account of Joel Wicker, son-in-law of French fur trader Joseph Bailly, whose estate near Chellberg Farm in Porter has been preserved by the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Wicker hired Swedish newcomers  to chop down trees for use as railroad ties and fuel for steam engines.  Schoon wrote:

  Logs were also needed to build and heat homes and for cooking.  When enough trees were cut down, Wicker then sold the land to his Swedish employees who then cleared the land for farming.  Other Swedes found employment as farm laborers and working for sand and ice-mining companies, and as blacksmiths and carpenters.

  As the immigrants had more money, many purchased their own farms or started businesses in town.  The first licensed embalmer in Indiana was carpenter John Lundberg, a Chesterton Swede.  

Svanti Nordstrom (above with Fredrika); photos from Verlaine Wright

Schoon’s bibliography lists my Portage Shavings and a 1974 Post-Tribune article titled “Swedes started new church” about Miller pioneer Syena “Svanti” A. Nordstrom, who learned of the area from friends in LaPorte and Baillytown.  He wrote idyllic, albeit, exaggerated accounts of Miller’s scenic beauty and job opportunities that convinced former neighbors to join him.  He was acting pastor of Bethel Lutheran Church.  In October 1874 the congregation met for the first time in a one-room log schoolhouse.  A minister from Baillytown came periodically to preach and conduct communion; in his absence Nordstrom performed emergency baptisms.  Ruggedly handsome with yellow, curly hair and a long, flowing beard, Nordstrom, one parishioner recalled, “had the bearing of a man that you could not help but respect.”  Wife Fredrika died in 1888 at age 70, but Svanti, three years younger, lived another 22 years.

Cindy inside abandoned Horace Mann School 

Photographer Cindy “Cupcake” Bean sent Ron Cohen and me shots taken inside abandoned Horace Mann, including one of a letter from a Japanese visitor back when the K-12 “unit school” was implementing the vision of progressive educator Superintendent William A. Wirt.  The Gary school, in decent shape when it first closed, has been reduced to the scrap heap of history.  I told Cindy about the upcoming “Gary Haunts” South Shore exhibit in Munster featuring work similar to hers.

I picked up a needed win in Fantasy Football over nephew Bob to improve to 5-4.  Bob’s QB Mitch Trubisky threw only one TD pass, to Bears tight end Trey Burton, whom I had in the lineup because the Eagles’ Zach Ertz was on a bye week.  Trubisky earned Bob just 8 points; my backup QB (for Carson Wentz), Ben Roethilsberger got me 24, including a TD on the ground while Trubisky’s similar end zone effort ended a half-yard short.

James Lane voting for first time

George Van Til and Jimbo; photo by Jim Lazarus

On election day former Lake County Surveyor George Van Til invited me to lunch at Old Chicago Restaurant in Merrillville.  At the table were county auditor John Petalas and wife Karen, Lake County Democratic chairmen Jim Wieser, former Timesreporter Jim Lazerus (who came from California to volunteer for Senator Joe Donnelly, North Township Board member Peter Katic, writer Douglas Simmons, and current Lake County surveyor Bill Emerson.  They were pessimistic about Donnelly’s chances but otherwise guardedly confident.  Katic recalled election day gatherings at recently demolished Old Mill restaurant.  Wieser recalled former Lake County politician Andy Holinga inviting party members to his house, where he’d bang his huge fists on the kitchen table with such emphasis that things on it would fly into the air.  Petalas, a former student whose father owned a shoe repair shop on Broadway, first near Thirteenth and then in Glen Park, invited me to Rep. Peter Visclosky victory celebration that evening at Croatian Hall, but I was playing duplicate bridge. 

Barbara Walczak’s bridge Newsletter contained a photo taken at the Gary game of participants dressed in Halloween costumes, including Barbara Stroud, Charlotte Abernethy, Barb Walczak, Helen Miller, Daryl Fraley, Carolyn Potasnik, Alta Allen, and Trudi McKamey.  Pretty cool.

Charlie Halberstadt and I finished in the middle of the pack with 51.37%. Charlie told me about a player with a new partner who was asked what happened with her previous one.  “Bridge divorce,”she replied.  We edged out Terry Bauer and Dottie Hart, who usually clean our clock.  In one hand playing 3 No Trump against them, I had eight sure tricks but needed a finesse to make the contract.  If it failed I’d go down two.  It worked!  I was very disappointed in the results in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee; but, asMichael Moore said, Democrats swept the races in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, the three states whose electoral votes in 2016 elected Trump, a tumor on the body politic that hopefully is receding in influence.

At lunch, Miller resident Douglas Simmons had told me I could find his books on Amazon.  His bio states: “Read, so that you may know. Write, so that you may tell what you know. Tell, that others to come may also know: The written word is the light that leads us all through the darkness that is ignorance.”  Well put. He continued,“Having been, over the years (along with lesser pursuits) employed as soldier, postal worker, carpenter, caterer, photographer, professional musician, a millwright, an overhead crane operator, and last to this day an adventurer who sometimes pauses to muse about his wanderings,without fail, no matter the diverse undertakings of my life, I have been a writer.”  In “Reluctantly Collected Poems” (2013) – Simmons would rather have his poems read one at a time - is one I particularly like titled “I Spoke”:

Thinking that I had no words;
I spoke no more.
Thinking I had done it all;
I closed the door.

Thinking I had heard the world;
I closed my heart.
Thinking to escape the pain;
I drew apart.

Then you were there laughing
At a voice I didn't hear.
Hoping I might laugh again;

               I spoke: to draw you near.  

As days shorten with winter in the air and snow predicted in 48 hours, I thought of “Homecoming” by Romanian-born Jew Paul Celan (1920-1970), who survived a Nazi work camp but intentionally drowned in the Seine River:

Snowfall, denser and denser,
dove-colored as yesterday,
snowfall, as if even now you were sleeping.

White, stacked into distance.
Above it, endless,
the sleigh track of the lost.

Below, hidden,
presses up
what so hurts the eyes,
hill upon hill,
invisible.

On each,
fetched home into its today,
as I slipped away into dumbness:
wooden, a post.

There: a feeling,
blown across by the ice wind
attaching its dove- its snow-
colored cloth as a flag.  

Going the Distance

“All I knew was that you had to run, run, run without knowing why you were running, but on you went through fields you didn't understand and into woods that made you afraid, over hills without knowing you'd been up and down, and shooting across streams that would have cut the heart out of you had you fallen into them.” Alan Sillitoe, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner”

Seventy-year-old Kathrine Switzer completed the 2017 Boston Marathon in 4 hours and 44 minutes, 50 years after officials tried to remove the Syracuse University student from the then males-only event.  Her finishing time that year was 4 hours and 20 minutes.  I first learned of Switzer in Nicole Anslover’s Women’s History class.  Not until 1972 was the Boston Marathon officially open to women.  In 2013, feminist pioneer Switzer said, “When I go to the Boston Marathon now, I have wet shoulders—women fall into my arms crying. They're weeping for joy because running has changed their lives. They feel they can do anything.”

above, Ryan Shelton; below, Anna Villanueva

Hooray!  IUN has named Ryan Shelton as its new Athletic Director.  For the past ten years, while predecessors have come and gone and the men’s team has generally foundered, Ryan, a 2000 IUN graduate, has guided the Lady Redhawks to six stellar 20-win seasons, in addition to being head graphic designer for the Office of Marketing and Communications.  IUN grad Anna Villanueva, who lettered in both basketball and volleyball, will serve as assistant athletic director. So often, rather than rewarding people familiar with the campus, the university chooses someone from the outside looking to move on after a few years.  Hiring Shelton will bring stability to the program.

Jose Bustos speaks airport protest

In a Post-Tribune SALT column titled “East Chicago man advocates for immigrants” Jeff Manes wrote about 65-year-old army veteran José Bustos, manager for the Immigrant Support and Assistance Center (ISAAC).  Manes interviewed Bustos at the Gary Airport, where the Mexican-born American citizen was protesting the deportation of undocumented residents rounded up by immigration officials. Bustos told Jeff:

There are some horrific stories of parents getting deported and their American-born children getting taken by the state and being put up for adoption. At today's protest, I was here to speak for Linda, a 9-year old girl who is living in anguish since her family was separated because of our unjust system. I was here to speak on behalf of Robert, a 15-year old who was forced to quit school to look for a job so his mom and younger brothers and sisters could have a roof over their heads and something to eat. I was here to speak for the thousands of families being separated.

  Supposedly, ICE (Immigrant and Customs Enforcement) looks for people with criminal backgrounds regarding drugs, alcohol or domestic violence. But that's not entirely the way it is. For example, ICE is going after the person who had a DUI five or six years ago. Even if that person did community service and paid his or her fines.

  Some of these people have been here for 20 or 30 years. Many of these people were in the process of adjusting their status to become legal permanent residents, but when 9/11 occurred, all that (stuff) went out the window. Excuse my language. People say get in line, do it the right way. What freaking line? There is no line. Many of the undocumented are in limbo now.

Clifton Boone leaving prison in 2015 and two years later with mother Myrtis Boone (P-T photo by Jim Karczewski)

Jerry Davich wrote about Clifton Boone, Jr., released from prison after serving 38 years for the crime of kidnapping, committed while a teenager.  In 1976, when he was convicted, the crime carried a life sentence with no possibility of parole.  Soon afterwards, kidnapping no longer carried a life sentence. Nonetheless, as Davich put it, Boone “was stuck in prison purgatory.”  Davich added:

       Boone was raised at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, where his hair turned gray, his skin wrinkled and his odds of dying behind bars seemed likely. He was rightfully convicted but wrongfully sentenced, and exceedingly so, officials agreed.  While numerous supporters worked to get his release — including the former prison superintendent and the judge who initially sentenced him — it didn't come until April 14, 2015. That's when I watched him walk out of the correctional facility a free man.

        He works at Lake County Jail in Crown Point as an early morning supervisor in the facility's kitchen area. After his release, Boone spoke about his experiences at an NAACP banquet, where Lake County Sheriff John Buncich first heard his story. He offered Boone a job the next day.

Boone resides on Gary’s West Side with his mother Myrtis and wishes that more employers gave ex-felons a chance.  He told Davich: “There are too many preconceived notions about ex-felons and still a lot of roadblocks out here for us.  How are ex-felons supposed to prove themselves if they're not given a chance to do it?  Employment is crucial for those men, but jobs are hard to find.”

In “Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy” Nicholas Reynolds asserts that the friendship between novelists Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos ended during the Spanish Civil War when communists executed Republican translator José Robles as a spy, probably because he wasn’t a comrade and knew too much. After that, Dos Passos, whom I met at the Library of Congress when I was researching Jacob A. Riis and he was perusing the Woodrow Wilson papers, became disillusioned with big government.  Once Eleanor Roosevelt’s guest at the White House for a screening of a documentary, “The Spanish Earth,” the macho Hemingway found Franklin D. Roosevelt “all Harvard charming and sexless and womanly.”

 Phyllis Smock

Ray Smock wrote:

Yesterday Vice President Pence went to the DMZ to issue a stern warning to North Korea not to mess with us. I hope he is half as successful as was my wife Phyllis's trip to the DMZ on August 17, 1989, when she showed American resolve to the North Koreans. While tensions have been high over the years, Phyllis's visit to the DMZ almost 28 years ago, ushered in more than a quarter of a century without war with North Korea and with the safety of South Korea protected. I hope Vice President Pence can say the same 25 years from now.

On a more serious note, Ray stated:

        Of all the many, many tons of bombs used in Afghanistan in our 16-year-long war there, the Trump administration drops one big bomb on a remote encampment of caves and tunnels and now he is the bold Commander-in-Chief. This seems to have emboldened him to talk tough to the North Koreans and to enter an escalating game of chicken with North Korea. The Washington Post cartoon today by Toles sees this action as two characters, Kim Jong Un and Donald John Trump, entering the ring of a wrestling match both wearing shirts with the same name MADMAN. Ask yourself how you feel about the United States starting a pre-emptive war with North Korea that at minimum will cost a million lives, including many of our 28,000 soldiers there? Who is the real madman, the guy that puffs and blusters war, or the guy who starts one? 

        In Trump’s first 100 days I see nothing but incompetence, embarrassment, massive lies and contradictions, and extremely dangerous behavior. He is still campaigning and not governing. He is still promoting himself and the Trump brand over the real needs of the American people. I see nothing to like and much to fear. I see signs of incredible corruption in the continued high profiles of Trump’s family members as presidential advisers and as the operators of the Trump financial empire.

NWI Times reporter Ed Bierschenk wrote about Gary Redevelopment Commission proposals to move the city forward. One calls for luxury apartments near IUN; another makes the case for university housing.  Several proposals have to do with the Miller area, including a full-service hotel adjacent to Marquette Park.

In “I Am Not Your Negro,” a documentary film about James Baldwin directed by Raoul Peck, actor Samuel L. Jackson reads Baldwin’s eulogy to teacher Orilla Miller, whom students called Bill, in “The Devil Finds Work” (1976):

      She gave me books to read and talked to me about the books, and about the world: about Spain, for example, and Ethiopia, and Italy and the German Third Reich; and took me to see plays and films, plays and films to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year-old boy. I loved her, of course, and absolutely.   It is certainly partly because of her, who arrived in my terrifying life so soon, that I never really managed to hate white people – though, God knows, I have often wished to murder more than one or two.  From Miss Miller, therefore, I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason, and I began to try to locate and understand the reason.

Dottie Hart called in need of a duplicate bridge partner, as Terry Bauer is occupied with grandfather duties.  A couple weeks ago, Dottie suffered a mild heart attack, and this was her first time back.  One woman asked if she’d brought cookies, like she usually does.  No, but she’d baked a batch right before falling ill that ended up with her at the hospital. We didn’t play many game bid hands until the final round, when there were three straight five-bids.  In one, sitting South, I opened a Diamond with a six-card suit headed by the Ace-ten, two singletons, and five Clubs, Ace-King-Jack.  When East overcalled mu one Heart, Dottie, holding four to the Jack and five other points, raised to two Diamonds.  The opponents went to 4 Hearts, but I bid five Diamonds, figuring that if I went down one or two, it would still be a good sacrifice. I got set one, as East held the other two Aces plus King-Queen of Diamonds.  To add insult to injury, other East-West pairs playing four Hearts went down one.  The final hand, however, we took top board.