Mueller Report

“Attorney General WilliamBarr is not fazed by the demands of Congress. An aspiring autocrat like Trump, a would-be King of America, has at last found a man who understands his need for protection.” Ray Smock

 Robert Mueller and William Barr

After a 22-month investigation and 27 days during which Attorney General William Barr has withheld the report from the public and Congress in order to redact material he deems appropriate, the public finally got a look at the Mueller Report.  Trump has already declared “total exoneration” and Barr weeks ago issued a four-page brief instead of Mueller’s summary putting the best possible spin on things embarrassing to the President.  The primary Republican arguments seem to be that if Trump did things openly, such as pressuring officials to resign, or suggested actions that people under him ignored, these should not be considered collusion or obstruction of justice.  We shall see.

Here is an excerpt from Ray Smock’s essay, “The Barr Blunder.  Or is it a pattern?”:

   Who is William Barr and how has he managed so far to stonewall the entire federal government in his protection of the president? He served for about 18 months as George H. W. Bush’s attorney general back in 1991-92. He is a staunch conservative Republican with the typical views of the Constitution that come from places like the Federalist Society, where the “original intent” of the Founders should determine our views of the Constitution.

    Barr supported Trump’s ban on Muslims entering the country, the one the courts threw out. He claims the Founders didn’t think abortion was a good idea, even though they never wrote or spoke about the issue. Beware of people who tell you what the Founders said and thought unless you can find documentary evidence. Barr says Roe v. Wade is settled law and he was not going to challenge it. But given his views on abortion, why wouldn’t he find an opportunity to open this again, especially if President Trump wants this as a campaign issue in 2020?

    In his earlier stint as AG, Barr took a hard line on criminals and believed the United States, the nation with more people incarcerated than any other, should lock up even more criminals to deter crime. We have seen in subsequent decades the bitter fruit of his position with the massive expansion of incarceration and the rise of a private, for-profit jail system that depends on a steady stream of inmates to make it profitable. Whether we like it or not, this is the prevailing attitude of the Republican Party and most Republican senators, and even some Democrats seem unwilling to buck Barr’s hard-liner positions and his narrow view of constitutional law.

                                          IUN student Iris Contreras and Helen Boothe

above, bridge exhibit at IUN; below, Joe Chin bridge lesson

After a run of bad luck, Helen Boothe and I finished strong in duplicate bridge to finish slightly above average (53 percent).  She mentioned a clip on MSNBC where a Parisian reporter asked Pete Buttigieg a question about the Notre dame cathedral fire, and he answered in fluent French.  We bid and made a small slam, as, holding a Diamond singleton, I got the King of Diamonds to fall on my third lead from the board, making my Queen good.  Against a top couple I held 6 Clubs and 6 Hearts and was doubled in five Clubs.  I made an overtrick for top board. Googling Helen’s name, I came across these photos and an article entitled “Sharing bridge and Oral History” in the Unit 154 “Recap Sheet” edited by Kim Grant in Fort Wayne:

    Bridge players and an IU Northwest Oral Indiana History class have been paired together during this fall semester to share bridge experiences and Northwest Indiana days of yore in a weekly correspondence. The students’ journals will be filed in the IU Northwest Calumet Regional Archives as part of the bridge collection. Dr. James Lane is spearheading this unique plan to involve university students in the bridge experience and bridge players to become more familiar with Indiana’s past.  Joe Chin has spoken to the IU oral history students and has given them a beginning lesson about bridge. Joe’s lessons are sprinkled with humor and always have the participants enjoying his thoughtful and worthwhile presentations. We hope that some students will be encouraged to develop an interest in this intriguing game. We have seen several IU students coming to our games — shadowing their assigned partners from the bridge community.

In “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” Saidiya Hartman used the expression “bull dagger” to describe black butch lesbians.  From Sasha Goldberg’s paper at the Oral History Association conference in Montreal last October I learned that it was Southern slang for what some crudely call bull dikes.  Describing the “beautiful anarchy” on the corner of Seventh and Lombard in Philadelphia, where W.E.B. DuBois did field work for “The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study” (1899), Hartman wrote:

 Slick, fresh-mouthed boys, comely, buxom girls, policy runners, ne’er-do-wells, petty gangsters, domestics, longshoremen, and whores – the young and the striving, the old and the dissipated – gathered. The air was thick with laughter, boasts of conquest, lies bigger than the men who told them.  Idlers loud-talked one another in an orchestrated battle of words.  Pimps crooned, “Hey girl, send it on” to each and every woman under thirty who strolled by. Bull daggers undressed the pretty ones with a glance. . . .  Free association was the only rule and promiscuous social life its defining character. Newcomers refreshed the crowd; strangers became intimates.

 Diana Chen-lin (left) promoted to full professor, 2017

Leaving IUN’s library, I ran into Diana Chen-lin, attending a luncheon honoring faculty whose years of service were multiples of five, in her case 25 years – hard to believe.  Next year will mark 50 years I’ve been associated with the university. I told Diana that if I’m not invited, being officially retired, I plan to come anyway. Coincidentally, Diana had sent me this email earlier in the day:

 Thanks for the latest issue of Steel Shavings! I am going through it slowly and savoring the details about people I know and about the region. It was good to see Toni's picture--she looks really good! And it was good to see Ron Cohen mentioned. I am on a page where you were discussing Tiger Woods' second place finish in the Valspar Championship last year, which seemed to promise Woods would be making a bigger comeback, which he just did. I also found your quote on David Letterman very interesting, having watched Letterman on and off for years. I will continue slowly through the journal and enjoy the reading.

 Kerns at Lake Junaluska, July 10, 2016

Paul Kern, back in Florida after a cross-country drive to see son Colin in California, sent a much longer response; here are highlights:

  I enjoy the references to students from the early days: Jim Reha, Al Renslow, George McGuan, Fred McColly, Dan Simon.  They’re old men now.  I was sorry to see that Tom Eaton died. I didn't know him, but saw him often at Gary high school basketball games in the 70s. He stood out because he never took off his coat, no matter how hot it was in the gym. Lance Trusty was another person I did not get to know, but wish I had.  Every once in a while an event shakes me to the core. Phil turning fifty is one of those events

  McKinney Springs, where your friend Aaron Davis camped on his bicycle trip, is in the Big Bend National Park, our favorite Park. We went there twice and encountered bicyclers both times. Sanderson, where I lived for a few years (first through third grades), is nearby. It was a railroad town and when the Southern Pacific pulled the plug it no longer had any reason to be. Only a few railroad retirees are left. No Country for Old Men was filmed there, but I never watched it because I heard it was very violent. I did read Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.

  I was glad to read that the Gary Public Library is reopening and sad to hear that Wirt-Emerson is closing. Is Westside the only public high school left in Gary? The gutting of public schooling in America is sickening to watch.

  Allow me to come to the defense of Maximilien Robespierre, not the “architect” of the Terror but, as the spokesman of the Committee of Public Safety in the Convention, it did fall to him to defend the policy, something he did very ably. In the 1950s, inspired by NATO, some American historians, most notably R.R. Palmer, rejected the contrast between the “good” moderate American Revolution and the “bad” radical French Revolution and argued that there had been an age of “Atlantic Revolutions” that had established modern western political values. He called Robespierre one of the great democratic prophets of the eighteenth century, pointing to his belief in equality, including for the slaves in the French West Indies (whom the French Revolution emancipated in contrast to you know who), his belief that democracy required some degree of economic equality that anticipated the modern welfare state, and his suspicion of representative democracy, insisting that elected officials had to be held strictly accountable to the people through frequent elections, recalls, etc. Without quite approving of the policy of Terror, Palmer and others pointed to the relatively small number of deaths and cautioned against exaggerating its violence.

  Vic Bubas may have started Duke's basketball greatness, but more important to the ACC was Everett Case who coached NC State from 1946 into the 60s. Case had coached the Frankfort Hotdogs to four Indiana state championships in the 20s and 30s before he went to NC State. He brought Indiana players to NC State, forcing arch rival North Carolina to hire Frank McGuire from New York and Duke to hire Vic Bubas (one of the Indiana basketball players Case had recruited to NC State) to keep pace.

  I'll have to warn Colin about the pick pockets in Barcelona. He and his girlfriend Kelly are going there for a conference in July. Like you, Colin has become quite the international scholar, having attended conferences in Ireland and Australia the last two years. It sounds like you and Dave had a great trip to Finland.  Reading in “Air” Keller's journal that she has a collection of manga reminds me that Chris had a large collection of manga also. When he graduated from Ohio State, he donated them to the library. They cataloged them as the “Chris Kern Collection.”

  You mention the specter of an unaffiliated historian at the OHA meeting and use the words ominous and tragic to describe the tight academic job market. Exactly. Chris is on a treadmill of one-year gigs and is beginning to wonder if he will have to pursue some other career path. No one wants someone in pre-modern Japanese in an atmosphere in which everyone is paranoid about enrollment. He starts a three-year non tenure track appointment at Auburn in the fall and if nothing pans out by that time it could be his last hurrah.

  There was this period of time during the 1970s when the old sexual morality embodied in the concept of moral turpitude had died but the new morality embodied in concepts of sexual harassment had not been born. You attempt to exonerate faculty who married students by saying that the students took the initiative but by today's standards the relationships would have been highly suspect.

Here is part of my reply: “Thanks so much for the comments about Steel Shavings.  It was great reading names I had not thought about in many years, like student Phil Oretsky and English professor Richard Hull.  I’m always interested in how your sons are doing.  I exchanged emails with Chris after the student wrote about manga. Thanks for telling me about North Carolina State coach Everett Case; I’ll have to learn more about him.  Interesting take on Robespierre; I planned to audit Jonathyne Briggs’ course on the French Revolution but he taught it on line, an unfortunate trend in higher education. Did I write about running into our old colleague Mark Sheldon on campus, dressed nattily as always?  He poked fun of my winter coat (“Are you going hunting?”he said); I replied, “Are you wearing a hat because you’ve gone bald?”  He took it off and was indeed bald.  Later I worried needlessly that he had cancer.

Because of bowling, I missed Billy Foster’s Senior College talk on Big Band vocalists and the film noir event at Valpo U that Peter Aglinskas hosts.  He’s showing “Nightfall” (1957), which co-stars the still lovely Ann Bancroft as a model whose life is in jeopardy after she gives someone wanted by hit men her address. According to reviews, “Nightfall” featured innovative work by cinematographer Burnett Guffey and the skillful use of flashbacks by director Jacques Torneur.  The Engineers won just one game but got free beers because we all struck during the fifth frame; I didn’t even know about that since it’s never happened to us before. Terry Kegebein, a Steel Shavingsrecipient last week, asked how I knew Game Weekend host Jef Halberstadt.  They worked together at Bethlehem Steel (now ArcelorMittal). He took my summer Sixties class 40 years ago and invited me.  I’ve been a regular ever since.

 art by Casey King; below, "Norman the Animal"

IUN student Casey King dropped by to pick up Steel Shavings, which includes excerpts from his journal about being an artist and and examples of his work.  When I mentioned the upcoming Dave Davies concert in Hobart, he said his work was on display right next to the Art Theater at Green Door Books (below).  I dropped by there on the way to bowling and was impressed with the variety and cleverness of Casey’s work. The used books all sell for a dollar, and I hope to drop in before the concert with Josh and Alissa. The owner is an IVY Tech professor.

 Bogazici University overlooking Bosporus

Former IUN Chemistry professor Atilla Tuncay joined Mike Olszanski and me for lunch at Little Redhawk Café.  During the 1960s Tuncay received a degree from Roberts College in Istanbul, renamed Bogazici (Bosporus) University in 1971.  I stayed on its campus 19 years ago while attending an International Oral History Association conference.  Each morning I’d walk down a steep incline, buy coffee at a MacDonald’s, and, seated on a bench, look out on the Bosporus Strait.  When a student, Tuncay said, he’d often see Soviet ships passing by from the Black Sea on their way to the Mediterranean.  Every so often a sailor seeking asylum would jump overboard and attempt to swim to shore.  At its narrowest point the body of water was just a few hundred feet wide.

Jeopardy champ James Holzhauer, a sports gambler, won a one-day record $131,131, breaking his own former total. Having accumulated more than $71,000 prior to Final Jeopardy, he could wager $60,000 without fear of being dethroned after nine days.

Hamlet

“Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.” Hamlet

Hamlet refers to a small rural settlement and, of course, is the title of one of William Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Because its hero was indecisive, which prevents Hamlet from acting until it’s too late, the word has been used to categorize those, such as 1952 and 1956 Democratic Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, who procrastinated, in Stevenson’s case, about throwing his hat in the ring. Historian Lance Trusty described early Munster, Indiana, as a hamlet during the 1860s with a general store opened by Jacob Munster with a postal station in back and serving as a gathering place for local farmers.  At bridge Naomi Goodman told me that Lance’s widow Jan is taking her granddaughter, who loves theater, to London and Stratford-upon-Avon to attend numerous plays.

 above, Jimbo, Riley Ash, Charlie, Kody Frasure; below, Savanna Sayiov, Tom Rea, Carre Allen

Oregon-Davis math teacher David Pinkham brought eight high school students to Charlie Halberstadt’s duplicate bridge game at Banta Center in Valparaiso. Most started playing about five months ago as part of a club Pinkham originated and seemed to enjoy themselves – or at least didn’t appear stressed out.  Charlie was initially worried many regulars wouldn’t be there because of a monthly women’s “Assembly” taking place at the same time; but he had enough for eight and a half tables, which enabled the four students pairs to play East-West, switching tables every three hands while the North-South pairs remained stationary.  Most were seniors except for Riley Ash, who was without her glasses, which had been busted, she said, during a game at Bible camp. Shvanna Sayiov plans to attend Miles Community College in Montana; her goal is to take part on rodeos.  Charlie and I finished second to Chuck Tomes and Dee Browne among the nine North-South pairs. After the final round former Portage math teacher Chuck Tomes stated, “Since I have the loudest voice, let me thank the Oregon-Davis students for enlivening the game.”  He received a round of applause from everyone. 

 depot in Hamlet, pre-1911

I had heard of the Oregon-Davis Bobcatas because of my interest in high school basketball but not Hamlet, Indiana, the town where it is located. Like Munster, Hamlet’s origins date back to the 1860s when John Hamlet established a post office.  Located in Starke County south of Valparaiso, the town of Hamlet had 800 residents according to the 2010 census.  In 2014 Oregon-Davis won the girls IHSAA state championship seven years after the Bobcats captured the boys title.

One reason I wanted to play in Valpo was to give the new Shavings to Rick Friedman (above) and Ed Hollander, whom students in Steve McShane’s class had interviewed for an oral history project. Barb Walczak’s Newsletter recently profiled Rick, an ophthalmologist for 40 years who learned bridge while in medical school but then took a break for nearly a half-century although, as he told Barb, he kept up by reading the bridge newspaper column.

At dinner Toni and I were talking about the recent images of a black hole, a phenomenon unknown when I was in school and until now never detected. Albert Einstein paved the way with the assertion that gravity was a warping of spacetime but initially was dismayed by German physicist Karl Schwarzchild’s prediction that when mass becomes too dense, it collapses into a black hole. Photographer Kyle Telechan wrote:“Scientists with the Event Horizon telescope have produced an image of a  black hole, or if we are being pedantic, the shadow of a black hole surrounded by particles in the accretion disk, some moving as fast as the speed of light.Totally ignoring how cool it is that we were able to get an image of a freaking black hole, how incredible is it that they were able to predict, correctly, what it would look like based on our understanding of black holes, without ever seeing one?It might be blurry, but it's the first of its kind. Can you imagine the images that'll be captured in our lifetimes?”

 Daniel Webster letter emancipating Paul Jennings; below, Webster

I finished “A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons.” Jennings finally achieved his freedom from Dolley Madison in 1847 after going to work for Massachusetts Senator (and two-time Secretary of State) Daniel Webster, who had purchased him the year before for $120.  Branding slavery “a great moral, social, and political evil,”Webster had previously helped others attain their freedom.  During the 1840s both Webster and former First lady Dolley Madison threw lavish parties in the nation’s capital that nearly bankrupted them.  In an effort to save the Union, Webster, known as “The great Expounder and Defender of the Constitution,” supported the Compromise of 1850, which abolished the slave trade in Washington, DC, but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act.  Abolitionists branded it the “Bloodhound Law,” and it tarnished Webster’s reputation.  For 14 years until his retirement Jennings worked at the pension office of the Interior Department, earning between $400 and $720 annually.  He died eight years later.

 Terry Kegebein and granddaughter

At Hobert Lanes after two terrible games I rolled a 180, as the Engineers salvaged a game from Frank’s Gang.  After a 170, Terry Kegebein quipped, “Another 60 pounds, and I’d have bowled my weight.”  Opponent Mike Reed, wearing a shirt reading “My mind is in the gutter,”took good-natured ribbing after he actually threw a ball in the gutter in an otherwise outstanding game. When he claimed to have exceeded his weight of 168 pounds, some teammates were disbelieving; but he is in good shape with no pot belly and noted that he has to keep his weight down due to high blood pressure.

 Archives holdings moved for renovation

Anne Balay is en route to St. Louis, where she has a new home and hopes to teach at a local college while beginning research on a third book about sex workers. Steve McShane updated Ron Cohen and me on the latest change of plans regarding what to do with Archives files while workers install new heating and air conditioning: “We had movers in yesterday, taking out all kinds of collections and materials from the CRA and moving them down the hallway to 2 “staging” rooms.   Phase 1 will begin in earnest on Monday, as contractors invade to tear down ceilings and remove lighting from this first half of the Archives:  reading room, large cage, and corner storage/work room.”  Still remaining in the main room are bookcases containing yearbooks and books about the Calumet Region, including Anne Balay’s pathbreaking accounts of LGBT steelworkers and long-haul truckers.

above, Anne's tattoo; below, Toni, Becca, Angie

We were all set to see James shine in the Portage H.S. senior musical, but a small fire that damaged the curtain caused its postponement.  Bummer! The previous evening Becca has honored at a ceremony for outstanding students.  Tomorrow Becca has a solo in Chesterton's talent show.

In the opening chapter of Saidiya Hartman’s “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” is this portrait of a turn-of-a- twentieth-century "ghetto girl" living in Africa Town, the Negro quarters of Philadelphia or New York:

 You can find her in the group of beautiful thugs and too fastgirls congregating on the corner and humming the latest rag, or lingering in front of Wanamaker’s and gazing lustfully at a fine pair of shoes displayed like jewels behind a plate-glass window.  Watch her in the alley passing a pitcher of beer back and forth with her friends, brash and lovely in a low-cut dress and silk ribbons; look in awe as she hangs halfway out of a tenement window, taking in the drama of the block and defying gravity’s downward pull.  Step onto any of the paths that cross the sprawling city and you’ll encounter her as she roams. Outsiders call the streets and alleys that comprise her world the slum.  For her, it is just the place where she stays.

Bent on using fear of immigrants as a primary campaign issue in 2020, Trump recently declared that the United States is filled up and doesn’t need any more newcomers, especially from south of the border.  Earlier he had expressed a preference for Norwegians over those from “shithole countries.”  The Washington Postrevealed that on two separate occasions the White House suggested migrants seeking asylum be bussed to sanctuary cities such as San Francisco, part of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional district, in retaliation for Democrats’ opposition to his draconian policies. When the idea was floated, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials responded that it was not feasible on several grounds.  Perhaps that is one reason Trump, at the advice of diabolical Stephan Miller, ordered a shake-up of top DHS leaders, beginning with Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. I predicted that the President, as Shakespeare once wrote in Hamlet,that he will be“hoisted on his own petard.”

 below, defeat of Spanish Armada

In the New YorkerJohn Lanchester reviewed Philipp Blom’s “Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed and Shaped the Present.”  I learned that for 300 million years the earth was entirely covered in ice and that 34 million years ago, the opposite was true and, in Lanchester’s words, “crocodiles swam in a fresh-water lake we know as the North Pole, and palm trees grew in Antarctica.”  For 110 years beginning in 1570, the temperature dropped almost 4 degrees Fahrenheit, which produced crop failures, disrupted feudalism, caused the Ming dynasty to fall, and contributed to such events as the defeat of the Spanish Armada (due to an unprecedented Arctic hurricane) and the 1666 London fire ( during an ultra-dry summer after a bitterly cold winter).  As Lanchester concluded, “Climate change changes everything.”

Routines

“The nicest thing about fussy people is, they have their little routines,” Anne Tyler, “A Patchwork Planet”

I don’t consider myself a fussy person but do have a normal weekday routine that includes getting dressed, putting coffee on, fixing grapefruit slices and juice, retrieving the Post-Triband Times, having cereal (usually Rice Krispies) and bacon or Kielbasa, and fixing a half-sandwich and veggies for lunch at IU Northwest, where I’d eat with Mike Olszanski on Wednesdays and leave early Tuesday for a nap before bridge.  Routine also means unexceptional, such as a routine fly ball.

Saturdays I’d normally to take James bowling at Inman’s and beforehand cook kielbasa and pancakes (with chocolate bits for him, blueberries for me).  Afterwards, we’d have lunch at Culver’s, using newspaper coupons Toni found for us.  Last week, however, he had play practice, and this weekend is competing in a tournament in Indy.  In the car I usually listen to WXRT’s “Saturday Morning Flashback” show, this week featuring the year 1973, when the Watergate scandal caused Nixon to say plaintively, “I am not a crook.”  Hearing “Ramblin’ Man” and “Dark Side of the Moon” reminded me of getting high listening to the Allman Brothers at Larry Kaufman’s and Pink Floyd at Al Sterken’s. “Long Train Running” was on my favorite Doobie Brothers album, “The Captain and Me,” which Milan Andrejevich would put on for me at his parties.  Many 1973 songs contained long instrumentals jam, such as Steely Dan’s “Bodhisattva.” In Buddhism the word bodhisattva refers to one who delays reaching nirvana in order to help suffering beings.

In Mary Kate Blake’s Urban Sociology class to discuss Gary’s recent history, I passed out  the new edition of “Gary: A Pictorial History” showing photos of Tyrell Anderson and the Decay Devils, whom they will meet at Union Station on their tour Friday.  Then I exhibited the front page Post-Tribstory about Bill Pelke’s Monday IUN appearance, featuring photos of Bill with Paula Cooper and a photo of “Nana” Ruth. They had read about the murder in Glen Park of Pelke’s grandmother at the hands of four Lew Wallace ninth graders including Cooper, initially sentenced to death, and how it contributed to white flight. A student asked whether Richard Hatcher’s election in 1967 caused whites to move to the suburbs.  I discussed contributing factors that took place before Hatcher assumed office, such as passage of an omnibus civil rights ordinance and federally-mandated bussing of black students to Glen Park schools. I described scare tactics unscrupulous realtors used to induce rapid turnover in “changing” neighborhoods.  When I discussed middle class black flight, someone asked if I felt they were abandoning their people.  I replied that families shouldn’t feel guilty about doing what’s best for themselves and that many retain connections with their old neighborhoods and churches.  A Mexican international student asked how long it took to put together Steel Shavingsissues and was incredulous when I answered yearly.  He had not yet found any area authentic Region Mexican restaurants but seemed unfamiliar with East Chicago.  I recommended Casa Blanca, where Lorenzo Arrredondo recently took me.  I told him about “Maria’s Journey” and when he asked the spelling of Arredondo, promised to give him a copy Monday.

At the library I picked up the Weezer album containing covers of their favorite Oldies, including “Africa,” “Take On Me,” and “Billy Jean,” among others. Even though I’m already reading three other books, I couldn’t resist Saidiya Hartman’s “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval,” about young black women living in New York and Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century who found Victorian standards of behavior irrelevant to their lives.  Hartman wrote: 

 Few, then or now, recognized young black women as sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists, or realized that the flapper was a pale imitation of the ghetto girl.

 The wild idea that animates this book is that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise.

Having done lots of walking, I must have grunted loud enough going down IUN’s John Will Anderson Library steps for a student to turn around.  Driving down Broadway, I noticed English professor George Bodmer lugging what appeared to be items from his office as he nears retirement. I felt a pang of regret that this once close friend no longer speaks to me over a university matter that occurred several years ago.  Despite his cantankerous disposition, I’ve missed having lunch with him. He was never boring.

 Gary NAACP leader Jeanette Strong in 1963 Fair Housing protest, virtual museum photo from Calumet Regional Archives

On the front page of the Post-Trib was an article about scholars from Ball State starting a virtual museum about Hoosier civil rights history.  Recipients of a $50,000 grant from the Interior Department, the Ball State team includes professors of history, anthropology, and archaeology and a team of grad students.  Reporter Nancy Webster wrote that representatives met with Steve McShane and me at the Calumet Regional Archives and David Hess at Gary Public Library.  They will be holding a forum in East Chicago in order to solicit community input.  I alerted Lake County clerk Lorenzo Arredondo since his family deserves being featured as in the documentary “Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana” based on the book by historian James Madison.

 Sam, parents, and Sam, Jr.

 

Patrick Chase emailed a couple dozen photos of grandfather Carl, who built a golf course on the grounds of American Bridge, and Patrick’s father Sam, who as a student opposed the 1927 Emerson School Strike.  He recalled his father saying that he and others opposed to the walk-out – perhaps Principal E.A. Spalding or even Superintendent William A. Wirt -  got on Emerson’s roof to speak to the rebellious students, urging them to stay in school.    

Trump supporters love to use the word “snowflake” against the President’s detractors, ridiculing their alleged hypersensitivity toward political incorrectness.  Charles Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” (1996) may have coined the pejorative term when a character says, “You are not special, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Mika Brzezinski, defending Joe Biden against those who have taken issue with his admittedly “tactile” campaign style, claimed not to be a snowflake and would welcome Biden with a big hug.  Fox commentators who ignore Trump’s truly abhorrent behavior have begun calling Biden “Creepy Uncle Joe” after Trump mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway criticized his “creepy” behavior.

                                                

above, Mika Brzezinski; below, Freddie Gray

What a bummer was the final episode of the HBO documentary about convicted felon Adnan Syed, who has spent 20 years in prison for a murder he may not have committed – allegedly strangling a fellow high school student, Korean-American Hae Min Lee, and burying the body in Baltimore’s Leakin Park.  On a related note, a recent New York TimesSunday magazine article entitled “The Tragedy of Baltimore: How an American City Falls Apart” traces the uptick of violent crime (309 homicides in 2018 alone) since the death of 25 year-old Freddie Grey while in police custody.  Stung by criticism and upset over new procedures that restrict their freedom, Baltimore’s men in blue drastically reduced their police presence in high crime neighborhoods.  At a community forum Renee McCray spoke of visiting Baltimore’s tourist-friendly Inner Harbor.  She recalled:

 The lighting was so bright.  People had scooters. They had bikes.  They had babies in strollers.  And I said: What city is this?  This is not Baltimore City.  Because if you go up Martin Luther King Boulevard we’re all bolted in our homes, we’re locked down.  All any of us want is equal protection.

 Lonnie at Kentucky and in West Side uniform

Reporter Chase Goodbread, researching a feature story on University of Kentucky cornerback Lonnie Johnson, Jr., projected to be a first round draft choice, wanted background information on his hometown of Gary.  A two-way star at West Side, in addition to his defensive skills Lonnie rushed and caught passes for over a thousand yards.  Coming from a close-knit steelworker family, Johnson helped West Side win the 2014 state track and field championship, winning the long jump and the 4x100 relay.  What Goodbread knew about Gary came from Wikipedia and a two-day visit that included interviewing his grandmother and parents Nora and Lonnie.  I told Goodbread about Gary’s proud high school football tradition that produced Hall of Fame coach Hank Stram and such NFL players as George Taliaferro, Les Bingaman, Alex Karras, and Fred “The Hammer” Williamson.  During the past half-century basketball has attracted most local athletes, as Gary schools can no longer field gridiron teams that can compete with Region suburban powerhouses with squads 3 or 4 times that of West Side or Roosevelt.  Gary’s public schools have suffered from the state’s funding of charter schools.  Goodbread told me that Nora Johnson had been a track star and praised Mayor Richard Hatcher’s support for youth sports programs.  At his request I mailed him “Gary’s First Hundred Years.”

Mrs. Garrison, Mr. Slave & Big Gay Al

IUN hosted Indiana University’s annual Women’s and Gender Studies Research Conference.  Noticing that Kaden Alexander was presenting a paper on queer stereotypes in the satirical Comedy Central adult cartoon “South Park,” I decided to attend.  He was great, not reading his paper like most undergraduates and speaking in a loud, clear voice about something that obviously interested him.  The enthusiasm was contagious and his observations enlightening.  He spoke about ornery Mr. Garrison who transitions into Mrs. Garrison and receives a “fancy new vagina” as well as breasts but then is remorseful because she doesn’t ovulate or become pregnant like a “real woman.” In a clip Mr. Slave and Big Gay Al (one a body builder, the other a “bear”) ridicule Mrs. Garrison and call her a fag.  I sat next to David Parnell, whose student Emily McLean spoke on religion and LGBTQ identity.  During Q and A I asked Em Beard, who had referred to Simone de Beauvoir in her talk “Defining Gender,” about the use of “lesbian” becoming less common compared to “queer.” The latter, she replied, is more inclusive.  SPEA lecturer Jacqueline Huey lamented the insinuation that “lesbian” was an old-fashioned concept.  Even the honorific Ms. is giving way to Mx. among many millennials.

At lunch I received hugs from former IUN professor Lori Monalbano, presently a counselor at IU South, and IU South Bend Gender Studies professor April Lidinsky, who, like me, testified on Anne Balay’s behalf when she was unjustly denied tenure and promotion.  Kaden Alexander introduced me to his wife Terry, who was wearing a Lambda Delta Xi shirt.  Rather than call the organization a fraternity or sorority, she used the word diaternity. Terry told me that it replaced the LGBTQ group Connectionz disbanded and has ten members of various gender identifications and a campus adviser, Beth Tyler.  It’s only the second such chapter in the country, the Alpha chapter being at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.  A former Valparaiso University student, Terry knew Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette, whom I’ll be in an oral history session with in Salt Lake City in October.

                   Danish women after Niqab banned 

Keynote speaker Sherene Razack, who teaches at UCLA and whose many books include “Looking White People in the Eye,” spoke on the topic “The Racial/Spatial Politics of Banning the Muslim Niqab.”  While I’m opposed in general to government bans on certain types of clothing, Razack condemned Canadian prohibitions against their use by police, teachers or women testifying in court.  Not sure I agree, but I guess the state should not prevent it if those doing the hiring are aware of that beforehand.  In the court case the woman had shown her face when applying for a driver’s license but didn’t wish to confront defendants on trial for raping her. When someone mentioned Niqabs being symbols of oppression and indicator of the plight of women in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, Razack claimed that as a feminist she had little good to say about Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women but equated Niqab bans with western cultural imperialism.