Burned Again

“We must make our choice.  We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” Justice Louis Brandeis

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrants from Prague, Bohemia (now the capitol of the Czech Republic), Brandeis, known as the “People’s Lawyer,” served on the Supreme Court for 23 years beginning in 1916.  In the course of a distinguished legal career, he championed the rights of workers, social justice, freedom of speech, and the right to privacy.

 Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke

I learned about Ben Fountain in a New York Review of Books essay by Adam Hochschild entitled “American Deviltry.” Best known for the novel “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (2012), Fountain has written “Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution.” The first half is his reportage of the tragic 2016 election, filled with telling character studies.  Here’s Fountain’s take on slimy Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who, when bettered in a debate with Beto O’Rourke, “could only smile with a pants-around-the-ankle sort of squinch to his face.” Fountain continues:

  [Cruz speaks] in urgent, breathy tones of preacher sanctimony, his voice dropping as it nears the end of every thought, digging for the tremble, the hushed vibrato of ultimate virtue.  You’d think he gargles twice a day with a cocktail of high-fructose corn syrup and holy-roller snake oil. . . . There’s a schlumpy fleshiness to him, a blurring of definition in his face and neck, the little knob of his chin dangling like a boiled quail egg.  His skin reads soft, smooth, the skin if an avid indoorsman.

“American Deviltry” then analyzes the obscene transfer of wealth to the super-rich, resumed during the 1980s after a half-century of relatively progressive times but not really questioned under Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and greatly accelerated under Trump.

 Chris and Nancy Brown look over remains of their home in Paradise, CA; photo by Josh Edelson

Victims of the tragic California fires received scant sympathy from our clueless leader, who remains a climate change denier and in his proposed 2018 budget recommended cutting $300 million from the forest service’s wildfire fighting programs. Blaming state officials for mismanagement, he claimed they should take their cue from Finland, a welfare state whose pine forests are nothing like the areas ablaze in the Golden State and yield needles rather than leaves.  Internet postings of Finns ridiculing Trump by raking pine needles have gone viral.  With rain forecast, there’s now a threat of massive flooding, with the parched fire zones deprived of underbrush that could absorb the water.

 Tamara O'Neal (above) and Dayna Less

Four people died after a man shot E.R. physician Tamara O’Neal, who had broken off her engagement to him, then ran inside Chicago’s Mercy Hospital and fatally shot pharmacy resident Dayna Less, who was exiting the elevator at the time.  In a subsequent shoot-out, the man took police officer Samuel Jimenez’s life before evidently taking his own.  Both women were from Northwest Indiana.  Deeply religious and idealistic, O’Neal grew up outside LaPorte, while Less was a Lake Central grad. Dr. John Purakal said of Tamara: “I knew her, trained with her, saved lives with her and tonight, tried to save her life. Tonight, I broke down in front of my coworkers when we lost her, and tonight I held hands with her mother in prayer. Tonight, we lost a beautiful, resilient, passionate doc. Keep singing, TO.” Less was engaged to her high school sweetheart and worked for a time in Kenya.  Music teach Dennis Barunica wrote: “Dayna Less was in the first Serbian group I taught. She learned brac and cello, so that tells you how talented and into it she was. We would go over her house with whoever could make it and just play until our fingers were sore, then her mom, Teena, would make us all the palacinke we could eat and send me home with some. Dayna was one who made teaching easy and fun. Only 25 and gone.” 

Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Stone starred in the film “In the Name of the Father,” about the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, two Irish groups convicted of playing a role in the 1974 Guildford Pub bombings.  Even though an IRA terrorist confessed to carrying out the deed, authorities kept that information from the defense team until the confession was unearthed and the victims were freed after serving over 15 years in prison.  Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four, subsequently married Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter Courtney. 

Cynthia Shank, front center, with producers and next to brother Rudy Valdez

The HBO documentary “The Sentence” unveiled another case of injustice.  Due to draconian mandatory sentencing laws Cynthia Shanks, received a 15-year sentence for conspiracy five years after her onetime boyfriend was murdered for dealing drugs, even though she had taken no active part in his crimes. Meanwhile she had married and was raising three young daughters.  Cynthia served nine years until granted clemency during Obama’s last days in the White House, one of just 1,600 out of 33,000 applicant whose cases had merit. Had her younger brother Rudy Valdez not brought the injustice to light with his documentary, she might still be incarcerated.

A most interesting section of Babbitt is when Sinclair Lewis’s creation begins acting on his midlife longings. With BFF Paul Riesling in jail, having shot his nagging wife, Babbitt goes alone to their woodsy Maine retreat but realizes he is incapable of making a clean break from Zenith, Ohio, or married life.  While Mrs. Babbitt is away, however, he is itching for an extramarital affair.  His pathetic attempts to seduce fetching secretary Miss McGoun, worldly manicure girl Ida Putiak, and flirtatious neighbor Louella Swanson get rebuffed, but he finds real estate client Tanis Judique more compliant.  

Champs

“Huh! That’s nothing.  So do I – American, baseball, and poker!”  George F. Babbitt, responding to praise of a neighbor who spoke three languages, in Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt”

In “Babbitt” novelist Sinclair Lewis described how in 1921 residents in cities such as Zenith, Ohio, could track the progress of hometown baseball games on huge newspaper bulletin boards.  One afternoon, Lewis wrote, Babbitt “stood in the thickest and steamiest of the crowd and as the boy on the lofty platform recorded the achievements of Big Bill Bostick, the pitcher, Babbitt remarked to complete strangers, ‘Pretty Nice!” Good work!”  Babbitt also enjoyed silent films at the Chateau, a palatial 3,000-seat theater featuring a 50-piece orchestra.  Babbitt’s favorites were cowboy and cops-and-robbers shoot-em-ups and movies with fat comedians AND bare-legged bathing girls.

In “The Diagnostician and the National Pastime: Baseball as Metaphor in Sinclair Lewis’ ‘Babbitt,” Joe Webb viewed the novelist as an urban  anthropologist who documented why America’s most popular sport was so popular with sedentary businessmen.  Webb wrote: “Baseball ballparks became a symbolic link to the nation’s pastoral past in the midst of the modern, urban, technological city, but the game was symbolic of conquest.”  Babbitt’s Zenith Athletic Club exemplified the ailment of the tired businessman – inactivity: “It is not athletic and not exactly a club, but it is Zenith in its perfection; it is a place for men to gather and talk about the manly, sporting exploits of others.” Babbitt considered baseball one of the society’s pillars, like the Republican Party.  A fellow club member branded Babe Ruth a “noble man” due to his on-field exploits, never mind his less than reputable lifestyle. Speaking to the Zenith Real Estate Board, Babbitt read these lines from shallow pet/ad man Chum Frink:

          All the fellows standing round 

          a-talkin’ always, I’ll be bound

 About baseball players of renown

 That nice guys talk in my home town

The Boston Red Sox are World Series champs for the fourth time in 14 years since breaking the so-called curse of Babe Ruth having been traded to the Yankees a century ago.  I paid little interest in the playoffs after the Cubs were eliminated but did watch parts of Friday’s 18-inning marathon that lasted almost 8 hours, until 3 a.m., the lone Dodger victory. I hardly knew any players on either team except for ex-White Sox Chris Sale, who struck out the side to clinch the final game, and L.A. pitchers Clay Kershaw, Rich Hill (a former Cub), and  Walker Buehler (whose name announcers delighted in mimicking the nerdy economics teacher, played by Ben Stein, in “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off”).  

 Rich Hill in 2006

After game 5 Trump criticized manager Dave Roberts for going to his bullpen prematurely, tweeting: “It is amazing how a manager takes out a pitcher who is loose & dominating through almost 7 innings, Rich Hill of Dodgers, and brings in nervous reliever(s) who get shellacked. 4 run lead gone. Managers do it all the time, big mistake!” Referring to the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, Hill responded: “There was a mass shooting yesterday.  The focus, in my opinion, of the president is to be on the country, and not on moves that are made in a World Series game.”

 participant in White House vigil for Pittsburgh synagogue victims; below, Bob and Niki Lane

An anti-Semitic gunman armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle mowed down a dozen Tree of Life worshippers in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. This just days after a Trump supporter mailed packages containing bombs to a dozen Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as the offices of CNN.  Neither caused our heartless President to cancel campaign appearances.  Instead, he faulted the synagogue for not having armed guards and continues to rant against all critics.   One tweet stated, “The Fake News is doing everything in their power to blame Republicans, Conservatives and me for the division and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Country.” Mayor Bill Peduto called the senseless atrocity the “darkest day of Pittsburgh’s history.”  Nephew Bob Lane, whose brother Dave works just two blocks from Tree of Life synagogue, wrote:

This is not the first time I’ve been affected by gun violence but this is the first time it happened in my childhood neighborhood. To know this happened just two blocks from my childhood home in a place where I had countless dances and celebrations sickens me. I was a paper boy on that corner, grew up there, walked by there a thousand times. Even in our darkest hour, I remember that love is a basic human instinct that will prevail.

Prior to bridge, eight of us dined at Wagner’s, known for having the best ribs in Northwest Indiana.  In 1988, David Wagner purchased a boarded up tavern off the beaten track in Porter and opened the restaurant, which now does a booming business.  Mike and Janet Bayer introduced us to Wagner’s shortly before they moved to Vermont; Alice Bush and Ken Applehans took us there while we were living with them after the 2000 home invasion, where I had my first beer in over a month.  Saturday, for 20 bucks, I ordered a meal with two entries, a half-rack of ribs and steak shish kabob (the latter became Sunday dinner).  Toni and I had the best round of the night, making three game bids in four hands, and she won the 4-dollar first prize.  Eating delicious chocolate cake afterwards, Dick Hagelberg, knowing it came from Jewel, repeated his standard quip that Toni must have spent most of the day baking it.

The reigning Superbowl champion Philadelphia Eagles evened their record at 4-4 with an exciting victory over the Jaguars in England.  The game aired at 8:30 a.m. Chicago time.   Hours earlier, four Jacksonville players were detained by police after refusing to pay a $64,000 bar tab at London Reign nightclub. It’s hard to imagine how they could have incurred such a large bill short of treating the entire house to free drinks or having exotic dancers pleasure them.  Perhaps management was simply stiffing four naïve African-American jocks in a strange environment.  All told, it was a good NFL day, with the Skins, Bears, and Eagles all triumphant. The only sour note  was my Fantasy team, again garnering the second most points but losing to Pittsburgh Dave when Todd Gurley, after a 25-yard run, took a knee rather than cross the goal line, knowing time would expire, giving the Rams the victory, while a TD might conceivably have allowed Green Bay to tie the score in the final minute. What he did crushed many bigtime NFL high-rollers, the Rams being 71/2-point favorites.

Anne Weiss, photos by Jerry Davich

Post-Trib columnist Jerry Davich profiled high school history teacher Anne Weiss, 73, whose Andrean career spans 50 years. Several former students claimed she was their best teacher ever.  Joking about her bossy personality, Weiss remarked: “Some boys find it difficult to deal with a loud woman. Some girls, too.”  Lamenting that there were only two remaining blackboards at Andrean, Weiss joked: “Take me away before you take my beloved blackboard.”  While chair of IUN’s History Department, I observed Anne in the classroom to assess whether the course was worthy of AP (Advanced Placement) status, earning students college credit.  She was very knowledgeable, interacted well with students, but forced them to think, reason, and participate.

 "Merciless" Mary McGee

Brad Miller from Indiana Landmarks requested information on North Gleason Park clubhouse, a 1941 WPA project.  It served a nine-hole golf course that frequently flooded in the spring and was inferior to the whites-only 18-hole course across the Little Calumet River in South Gleason Park. The site became Police Athletic League training quarters for local boxers, and Miller found walls lined with fight posters.  One touted Gary’s own “Merciless” Mary McGee, who began competing professionally in 2005.  Presently unused and suffering from considerable roof damage, the building once contained a restaurant and was, Archives volunteer Maurice Yancy recalled, the site of dances  In “Gary: A Pictorial History” is a photo (below) of visiting celebrity Joe Louis, the heavyweight champ, at a 1948 Par-Makers golf tournament.  

Louis-Schmeling, 1938; two minutes later the German was on the canvas

The most popular black celebrity of his time, Joe Louis Barrow was born in 1914 in east-central Alabama, the seventh child of sharecroppers Monroe and Lillie Barrow.  The family moved to Detroit at age 12 where Joe, a shy kid with a stammer, first observed streetcars, electric lights, and indoor toilets.  One story, probably apocryphal, claims he went by his middle name to avoid his mother discovering that he was using money for violin lessons to learn boxing.  His pugilistic career took off during the Depression under the tutelage of John Roxborough, Detroit’s black rackets   boss.  To drum up fan interest, urban newspapers, including both the Chicago Tribuneand the Chicago Defender, billed the “Brown Bomber” as wholesome and nonthreatening, in contrast tothe previous generation's controversial black champion Jack Johnson.  Under strict orders from handlers to, unlike Johnson, avoid white women, Louis wed comely Marva Trotter in 1935.  Throughout his career, however, he reveled in Gary’s nightclub scene, visiting such Midtown establishments as Mona’s Lounge, Mae’s Louisiana Kitchen, the Wonder Room, and the Playboy Club, whose owners treated him like royalty.

In 1938, when Louis knocked out German Max Schmeling in just 124 seconds to avenge his only previous loss before 70,000 fans in Yankee Stadium and millions more radio listeners, celebrations erupted in African-American neighborhoods across the nation.  In Gary a tragic confrontation erupted when Black celebrants ventured into segregated Glen Park and found themselves engulfed by an angry mob, resulting in the accidental death of a white woman and the murder conviction of civil rights leader Joseph Pitts.  I wrote about Pitts and palpably unfair trial in “Gary’s First Hundred Years.” Here’s David Margolick’s account in “Beyond Glory”:

  Two Gary residents a white woman named Florence Nehring and Joseph Pitts, a black barber, had listened to the fight – she at her home, he at his barbershop.  Each then went out to reconnoiter.  Whites near one commercial strip began pelting the car carrying Pitts and two of his friends with tomatoes and eggs.  Pitts got frightened, opened the door, and brandished a revolver, which went off accidentally.  After ricocheting off a wall, the bullet hit Nehring in the abdomen.  Hundreds of angry whites swarmed around Pitts’s car; cries of “Lynch the nigger!” filled the air.  A policeman pulled him to safety, but whites turned the car over with the other men still inside; one rioter tried puncturing the gas tank with an ice pick and setting the car on fire.  Fearing he’d be lynched – the crowd had swollen to more than two thousand people - authorities took Pitts to a remote jail. 

In 1951, the Par-Makers joined the United Golf Association, a black organization (at the time the PGA restricted its membership to whites only), and sponsored a tournament that Joe Louis agreed to participate in.  Due to the Champ’s promised appearance, parks department administrators were shamed into agreeing to make South Gleason’s course available. That year, a dozen Par-Makers members signed up to play in the annual Post-Tribunecity tournament.  Publisher H.B. Snyder, President of Gary’s Urban League Board, made sure they weren’t turned away.  Even so, the match play flights were rigged against the black entrants.  By the quarterfinals Nolan “Jelly” Jones was the only remaining black golfer.  His semi-final opponent was the tournament favorite.  On one hole Jones witnessed his opponent hit a ball under a tree only to have a spectator kick it back onto the fairway.  Jones won the match anyway.  The following week, black fans parked adjacent to the course to watch Jones compete for the championship.  When he clinched the victory on the sixteenth hole, the tournament director left rather than to acknowledge the new champion.  A week later, according to Par-Makers president Thomas Moxley, a “puny” little trophy arrived at North Gleason clubhouse for Jones, who continued to play the South Gleason course.  As club champ, officials didn’t dare turn him away.  Most Par-Makers, on the other hand, continued to use North Gleason. In 1991, Moxley explained why: “You knew that you were not welcome.”  In 1952 Louis participated in a PGA event, the San Diego Open, as an amateur, paving the way for black professionals to follow in his footsteps.

The Champ’s final years were not happy ones.  Following his retirement and an unsuccessful comeback that ended with a humiliating loss to Rocky Marciano, the IRS continued to hound him for back taxes, He had a short career as a professional wrestler and became a fixture at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, greeting tourists. Many a Gary resident posed for a shot of them with Louis.  Plagued by dependence on drugs and a paranoid fear of plots to kill him, he died of heart failure in 1981.  At President Ronald Reagan’s insistence he was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors; Max Schmeling, who had befriended old rival, served as a pallbearer.  Responding to frequent eulogies that Louis was a credit to his race, New York Postcolumnist Jimmy Cannon wrote: “Yes, Joe Louis was a credit to his race – the human race.”

On a lighter note, this from Jim Spicer:

   Last week a passenger in a taxi heading for Midway airport leaned over to ask the driver a question and gently tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention. The driver screamed, lost control of the cab, nearly hit a bus, drove up over the curb, and stopped just inches from a large plate glass window. For a few moments everything was silent in the cab. Then, the shaking driver said, “Are you OK? I’m sorry but you scared the daylights out of me.”
    The badly shaken passenger apologized to the driver and said, “I didn’t realize that a mere tap on the shoulder would startle someone so badly.”

    The driver replied, “No, no, I’m the one who is sorry, it’s entirely my fault. Today is my very first day driving a cab. For the past 25 years I’ve been driving a hearse.”

Got my overgrown toenails clipped at L.A. Nails.  A year ago, the cost was seven dollars, and I’d tip the person three.  Last time, the price went to $10, and I left a two-dollar tip. This time the manager wanted $20.  I didn’t leave any tip.  Petty? Perhaps. As I entered our condo, the pungent aroma of Polish golumpkis greeted me.  Toni was watching acid-tongued “Judge Judy,” the best of the many imitators benefitting from the popularity of Judge Joseph Wapner’s “The People’s Court,”  that ran for 12 seasons beginning in 1981.  “Wapner”was a famous Dustin Huffman line in “Rain Man” (1988).  Wapner had been a municipal court judge in Los Angeles, and Judge Judy Sheindlin, 76, whose show debuted in 1996, once was a family court magistrate in Manhattan.  

There were 6 full bridge tables at Chesterton Y due to a sanctioned bridge tournament. We played pre-arranged hands simultaneously used at other Unit 154 sites.  Charlie Halberstadt and I held our own against some of the best Region pairs.  Director Alan Yngve and Joel Charpentier won, with the Carsons and the Tomes tying for second.  I invited Chuck Tomes to IUN’s Homecoming basketball games, and he noted with sadness the death of IUN assistant women’s coach Ken Markfull, 64, five-time Post-Tribunehigh school coach of the year during a 30-year career at Hobart and Andrean, with both Sectional and regional championships on his resumé.  Terry Bauer, reading a Wendell Wilkie biography, couldn’t get over Republicans nominating a longtime Democrat as their 1940 presidential candidate.  Henry Luce of Timemagazine had a big hand in that, I noted.

My best hand  came against stellar opponents Barb Walczak and Trudi McKamey. Holding 17 points and 5 Hearts, I opened a Heart.  When Charlie bid 2 Hearts, indicating a weak hand with 6-8 points but at least 3 Hearts, I jumped to game.  With a 4-I trump split against me and only one clear entry to the board, I was not able to finesse the Heart King twice, which Barb held, along with another trump. With four cards left, three of them trump, including the Ace, I deliberately trumped a good trick on the board and led what Barb assumed was a good Diamond.  When she trumped, I played a higher Heart and then led out my Ace, making the contract for a high board, as nobody else bid and made game.  As we were leaving, Trudi said to me, “I’ll remember that 4-Heart bid.” Like me, she probably broods over hands she scored poorly on rather than the good ones. My biggest regret: against Judy Selund and Don Giedemann, with 4 Hearts out, including the Queen, I had to choose between a finesse and leading  my King and hoping the Queen dropped.  I finessed, and Don took the trick with a bare Queen.

life masters Anna Urick, Charlotte Abernathy, and Trudi McKamey; photo by Barbara Walczak

Ida Sain at her home; Huffington Post photo by Doug McSchooler

An article on Gary’s “hyper-vacancy” crisis (25,000 lots, 6,500 abandoned buildings) appeared in today’s Huffington Post by David Uberti, who interviewed me a couple weeks ago.  Glen Park resident Ida Sain, 75, told him that her parents moved to Gary around 1940 and her father quickly found work at U.S. Steel.  At the time African Americans were restricted to the Midtown area, and most suburban communities were off limits.  “When I was a kid,”Ida recalled, “they didn’t even want to serve you out there.”Uberti wrote:

    Following in her father’s footsteps, Sain landed a job driving trucks at the mill before eventually settling into office work. As a single mother in 1972, she bought her three-bedroom home in the mostly white Glen Park area, where she still lives today. It was an ideal neighborhood to raise her daughter, Marviyann Brown, but the signs of economic collapse had already begun.

    It started as a trickle of upper- and middle-class whites leaving. They took advantage of federally backed home mortgages to buy newer, larger houses in the suburbs connected to downtown by a burgeoning highway system. Many black families were denied such federal aid and were explicitly not welcomed in the suburbs by real estate firms and community groups. After Gary came under black political leadership in the late 1960s, this out-migration exploded into full-on white flight, with major stores and businesses also moving outside city limits.

    To Brown, it was clear that certain kids in the neighborhood were moving away while others weren’t ― or, to be more precise, couldn’t. Brown’s family stayed while her best friend, Julie, a white girl who lived nearby, left with her family. “I always wondered what happened to her,”Brown said.

I had talked with Huffington Postwriter Uberti about the devastating effects to Gary of middle-class black flight to previously all-white suburbs in the past40 years, but he chose not to bring that up.

Friends with You

“i ain't lookin' for you to feel like me,
see like me or be like me.
all i really want to do
is, baby, be friends with you.”

         Bob Dylan, “All I Really Want to Do”

Listening to World Party’s 1986 debut album “Private Revolution,” which contains “Ship of Fools,” I was surprised to hear Karl Wallinger doing a dead-on Dylan impression on the 1964 classic “All I Really Want to Do,” successfully covered by Cher and The Byrds.  One line goes, “I don’t want to define you or confine you,”as Dylan playfully claims to reject possessiveness or machismo.  Good luck with that. 

Near the end of her extended visit to Indiana, Toni’s sister Marianne dropped in with daughter Lisa, back from a twentieth-anniversary tour of the Canadian Rockies.  She and Fritz were the youngest couple by 20 years (about a third hailed from the Chesterton-Valpo area).  They hiked about six miles per day (Lisa wears an odometer) and were especially impressed with Calgary, located in Alberta province, which boasts a population well over a million and a modern skyline.  Chicago sports jocks who cover Blackhawks games there disparage the place (Les “The Grobber” Grobstein insists on pronouncing the name Cal-GARY) as a cow town. It’s famous for its annual rodeo, the Calgary Stampede.

At Culver’s with James after he bowled at Inman’s, we discussed Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt,” which he is reading for senior Advanced English.  He’s finished the first couple chapters and recognized its satirical intent.  One way to look at the novel is to analyze similarities and differences between the 1920s and now.  More interesting, however, are the changes Babbitt undergoes during the 46-year-old’s midlife crisis.  Before awakened by his ultra-modern alarm clock with cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and phosphorescent dial, Babbitt dreams of being gay and valiant, not stuck in a stale marriage, boring job, and dull routine.  As he admits to himself, “Oh, Lord, sometimes I’d like to quit the whole game.”  I didn’t have to explain to James that to Babbitt, gay meant carefree and fun-loving.  He got a kick out of Babbitt’s annoyance at his two teens for immature behavior similar to his own.

My fantasy is to live on a Hawaiian beach with Toni (she once wanted to be a beachcomber) and friends nearby.  As World Party put it, “don’t wake me ‘cos I’m dreaming of my Hawaiian Island world.”  While a grad student at the Mãnoa campus, I loved to dance to Hawaiian music, body surf, and explore new beaches.

Thinking back a quarter century, I cannot recall experiencing anything akin to a midlife crisis.  I sometimes flirted with women but never students.  Nor was I tempted to indulge in an affair, unlike a straight-laced former marine we knew in grad school who left his wife for a grad student. Aside from teaching and research, I channeled excess energy and urge for adventure into sports and world travel.  Phil and Dave were off to college and the wild parties of the Seventies (the years of the “Private Revolution,” to quote World Party) were, for the most part, a thing of the past.  On a train ride to Paris, I turned down an invitation from Aussies to join them at a sporting house but did attend an X-rated variety show in Amsterdam.  At a softball teammate’s bachelor party, I was disappointed when the groom’s father paid for two strippers and moved elsewhere when they strapped on a hose-like two-headed dildo.

Reverend Pfleger at IU Northwest, May 2012

Weather was seasonally cool but sunny with low humidity for the condo picnic hosted by Mary and Ray Garza. In addition to chicken and pulled pork provided by the board, on hand was delicious lasagna plus numerous salads and tasty desserts.  Neighbor George Schott, who performs weekend mass at Holy Angels and brought both salad and a cherry pie, mentioned that charismatic Chicago priest Michael Pfleger recently spoke at a large revival in Gary.  A community activist, Pfleger has frequently clashed with the church hierarchy for supporting the ordination of women and priests marrying and adopting several boys, including a tragic victim of gun violence.  I told George about hearing civil rights leaders Jesse Jackson and James Farmer talk at IU Northwest.  During Q and A I got Farmer to describe being a Freedom Rider in 1961 facing a mob in Jackson, Mississippi.  My hope was that, like in the series “Eyes on the Prize,” he’d sing the verse that steadied the bus passengers’ nerves: “Hallelujah, ain't it fine? Hallelujah I'm a- travelin' down Freedom's main line.”  His fine baritone voice still powerful, he did not disappoint.

“The People vs. Larry Flynt” (1996) starred Woody Harrelson and Courtney Love as Althea Leasure Flynt, a former stripper and tragic figure; Flynt himself appeared as an uptight judge in an obscenity case.  The film concentrates on a lawsuit brought by the Reverend Jerry Falwell for a satirical Hustler magazine cartoon suggesting the evangelist had carnal relations with his mother in an outhouse. The only hint of Hustler’s primary porn breakthrough – wide open beaver – was a camera shoot when Larry urges Althea to spread her legs.  More compelling was “Darkest Hour” (2017), with Gary Oldman portraying Prime Minister Winston Churchill squaring off with conservatives Neville Chamberlain and Viscount Halifax, who sought to enter peace negotiations with Hitler in the spring of 1940.  The Western European continent was being overrun by the Nazis and an America not yet willing to come to Great Britain’s aid.  The fate of the world may well have rested on Churchill’s decision to hold on to the bitter end whatever the consequences.  Like the film “Dunkirk, it concludes with Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech to the House of Commons.”

 Times photo by John J. Watkins

A lawsuit brought by transgender Carmen Carter-Lawson claims Gary police harassed her while she was in the police department women’s room.  Evidently, an officer banged on the door demanding she exit on the grounds that she had not yet undergone full sex change.  According to Carter-Lawson, “I told him, ‘Are you seriously saying this? This is sexual harassment. You can get in trouble.' And he really didn’t care. He made a big scene trying to justify why he was pulling me out of the bathroom. People were all around, and he’s literally making a scene of my personal business.” Previously, Carmen had successfully sued the police for arresting her and impounding her vehicle while a police recruit for claiming, in a call to the Lake County dispatcher after her car broke down, that she was a reserve officer. In that case, her suit claims, “the Gary Police Department and officials within, purposefully colluded to disqualify me from becoming a Gary Police officer. However, without justifiable explanation, Gary Police Department disqualified me.”

Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson hosted a City Rebirth Round Table geared toward reconnecting former residents with their hometown.  Not surprisingly, most participants were African Americans since it has been nearly a half-century since most prominent whites moved away. Many ex-pats in attendance were eager to re-establish ties and become friends of the city.

Steve Hannagan with actress Ann Sheridan in 1951, 2 years before he died at age 53 

Michael K. Townsley’s informativeTraces contribution, “Steve Hannagan: ‘The Prince of Press Agents,’” describes the Hoosier publicist’s career as an advertising genius, unequaled at understanding the tastes and longings of American consumers. As promoter for Carl Fisher’s Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Hannagan perceived that the general public preferred reading about the lives of drivers than race cars.  He associated Fisher’s Miami Beach resort with bathing beauties and high society celebrities.  He devised the unlikely name Sun City for Averell Harriman’s Idaho ski resort, and promoted Coca Cola through catchy jingles and songs (i.e., “Rum and Coca Cola”) and having the soft drink turn up in movies, taking advantage of connections with Hollywood stars and moguls.  Among his clients: Daryl Zanuck, Tom Mix, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Gary Cooper, and Jack Benny.  Townsley summarized the so-called Hannagan method:

  Tell the truth, be bold but use finesse when appropriate, place your product in front of the audience, find a compelling theme that tells a story, help others who will help you sell a product, get out of the way of a story, and write like a journalist.

A Traces article on physicist Melba Phillips, a collaborator with J. Robert Oppenheimer on developing the atomic bomb and renown educator, concentrates on her undergraduate years at Oakland City College in southeastern Indiana but briefly notes her ouster from Brooklyn College for standing up to “the congressional bullies of the Joe McCarthy era.”  Examining the matter, I discovered that she refused to testify before New York’s Security Activities Control Board regarding so-called communist infiltration of the Teachers Union and thereby violating a law mandating termination of any New York City employee who invoked the Fifth Amendment. Brooklyn College subsequently apologized for its action and created a scholarship in her name.

Pleased with my three NFL teams (Skins, Eagles, Bears) all winning, as well as the Cubbies, my sports highlight of the day, nonetheless, was Tiger Woods, 42, winning his eightieth PGA tournament after a five-year hiatus marred by injuries.  Afterwards, Woods said that the low point was not being able to walk or lie in bed without pain.  Evidently pain-free, he proclaimed himself just happy competing at something he loves and that winning was simply icing on the cake.  Asked if players on the tour fear him, he replied that most only remember him from TV and are delighted to be competing against him.  I rehashed highlights with Chuck Logan in California. Sam Snead, winner of a record 82 PGA events, made the U.S. Open cut at age 61 and continued to play well into his eighties.

 

Jim Spicer (above, with Elaine) asked: Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during his root canal?  He wanted to transcend dental medication.

Chief Wayne James; NWI Times photo by Kale Will

IU Northwest Police Chief Wayne James has been named to the 40 Under 40 list of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.  The honoree’s grandfather, St. John Baptist Church pastor Julius James, was a close friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. and hosted the civil rights leader during visits to Gary.  During the 1960s Rev. James helped organize the Combined Concerned Citizens on Open Occupancy (CCCOOO) and the “Gary Freedom Movement,” the latter after City Council initially voted down an Omnibus Civil Rights bill.  A shopping boycott and demonstrations against groups  opposed to the ordinance, including the Chamber of Commerce and Gary National Bank (whose branch manager Paul Guist had cast the decisive Council vote) resulted in its ultimate passage. Chief Wayne James recalled that his grandfather was one of the first African Americans to move into Glen Park and faced discrimination but weathered the storm. Reverend James died when Wayne was just 14 but was a huge influence.  “I’m the man I am today because of him,”he told Sarah Reese ofThe Times: “He was just always giving, always serving, doing it because you want to do it, not because you have to do it.”

At bridge Charlie Halberstadt and I started slowly, being unfamiliar with each other’s bidding tendencies, but got high boards on each of the final three hands, culminating with making a small slam. My partner overcalled Judy Selund’s 2-Diamond preempt with 2 Hearts, and Mary Kocevar on my right said 3 Diamonds.  Holding King spot of Hearts, King Jack x x in Spades, 4 little Diamonds, and a Club Ace, I went 3 Hearts, mainly to keep the bidding open but afraid to mention Spades. Instead of going to game, Charlie raised to 6 Hearts.  I gulped and, using a Dick Hagelberg line, joked, “Well, it’s the last hand.”  Charlie took every trick.

 damage in Hong Kong from Typhoon Mangkhut, Sept. 17, 2018

Terry Bauer’s daughter’s family survived Hong Kong’s worst typhoon in 30 years. The top floors of their 33-story apartment building were swaying back and forth.  One of his grandkids made his international school soccer traveling team and will compete in Thailand, Singapore and, in the spring, Sweden. While he takes public transportation to practices, many teammates arrived in chauffeured Ferraris.  Terry’s stories remind me of letters Joanell Ackerman wrote when she and Dean moved to Hong Kong.  Back from a family reunion in West Virginia, Helen Boothe suggested that a relative with arthritis try marijuana and got this reply: “I plan to in January when medical marijuana becomes legal.”

 1929 Hammond High seniors, Lester Cornwall top row, second from left

Barbara Mort donated a 1929 Hammond High Yearbook called “The Dunes” to the Archives.  It contains an account of the school year in diary form, employing slang and the contemporary tendency to capitalize for emphasis in that hopeful time before the Wall Street Crash and great depression.  Here’s how it begins and ends:  

  September 4: My, I was ALL-of-a DOOah about coming back to school and it seems everyone was WHIFfling and BURBLING with JOY at the prospect and no less!  Everything has been perfectly SWISS, especially since this perfectly FAScinating Les Cornwall accepted the presidency of the Association at the first auditorium session.  Oh, how we girls adore presidents, but he is so inDIF’rent, sort of, to our GIRLISH BLANDISHMENTS – can you cope with it?

  . . .

  June 11: The juniors can CERtainly THROW A MEAN prom.  Gosh, the orchestra was so hot, it sizzled. But, my DEAR, Nobody WAXed so kittenish all of a sudden as the DIGnified SENIORS, no less!  It was simply KILLING to be HOPping GIDdily about all evening tho, so when it all ended and “Home, Sweet Home” was played, we were SIMply defunct on our feet.

  June 14: “Teacher let the MONkeys out, and etc., etc. ____.”  Anyways, EVERYbody is making RAZoo and my job is DONE.  AU REVOIR.

Bucknell roommate Rich Baker won’t be joining me in Montreal as we had hoped.  He expressed disappointment at not being able to “see me in action,” so I sent him this copy of my prepared remarks on “Talking to Strangers: Teaching Ethical Oral History Methods to Undergraduates” for a roundtable organized by Anne Balay:

  My oral assignments have usually involved family members, not strangers, and dealt with such themes as ethnic roots, school memories, work experiences, race relations, and stories from past eras, such as the Great Depression, the World War II Homefront, the Postwar Age of Anxiety, the Teen Years of the 1950s, and the like.  The Eighties issue was titled “The Uncertainty of Everyday Life.”  For a project dealing with Vietnam veterans, students had surprising success with strangers they located at American Legion halls.  Contrary to popular belief, veterans were often, especially after a few drinks, eager to share their stories with someone truly interested who was recording the testimony for posterity.   The final product, they were told, would become part of an Archives collection, be published in a future issue of Steel Shavingsmagazine, and therefore constitute an important social history source for the blue-collar Calumet Region of Northwest Indiana.   

  A recent Indiana History class interviewed strangers who bowled in a mixed senior league (containing men and women). I suggested students accompany their subjects to a local alley and inquire how bowling experiences had changed over time. For example, I competed in a Sheet and Tin League once composed of 16 steelworker teams representing different Gary Sheet and Tin Mill departments.  My team, the Electrical Engineers, was the last vestige of an era when the steel industry was labor intensive.  Some elderly bowlers started as pin setters and kept their own score without aid of a computer. Mid-century hard rubber and polyester bowling balls were gradually replaced by modern polyurethane and hybrid models.

oral historian Michael Frisch, author of "A Shared Authority"

  My methodology begins with the assumption that, ideally, oral histories become shared experiences. I draw on the proven insights of mentors Studs Terkel, Michael Frisch, Ronald Grele, Alessandro Portelli, Donald Ritchie, and, more recently, Anne Balay, who started as a protégé and taught me that intimate oral exchanges sometimes require a degree of flirtation (for lack of a better word).  Having students interact with active seniors often counteracts misconceptions about the elderly. My participation forty years ago in an East Chicago, Indiana, mental health center “Life History” oral history project was an eye-opening experience, and students of mine researching the history of Portage, Indiana, similarly benefitted from a visit to Bonner Senior Center.  Expecting to find codgers in wheelchairs, folks were participating in an exercise class and playing ping pong and pinochle.  In fact, several students, both male and female, were hit on.

  In Jyväskylä, Finland, for the 2018 IOHA conference, I was conversing with scholars from Australia, Ireland, and South Africa who had interviewed trauma victims of molestation and Rwandan genocide survivors.  “What are you working on?” one asked.  Senior bowlers and duplicate bridge players, I replied with just a hint of hesitation.   In my defense, there is considerable scholarly interest in the decline since World War II of volunteer associations as well as in the contemporary lifestyle of aging Baby Boomers. Virtually no college students play bridge nowadays, but since many subjects were retired teachers, several gave lessons to their interviewers.  On my advice, students visited bridge games, where they were warmly welcomed.  Several lasting inter-generational friendships resulted.

  Most non-American cultures wouldn’t question the validity of learning from old people, and hopefully students will have that insight re-enforced.  They asked Northwest Indiana bowlers and duplicate bridge players about ethnic roots, places where they’ve resided (in some cases, Flight Paths to suburbia), school and work experiences, and about their social lives in retirement.  Future scholars may legitimately ask, “What, no questions about sex and gender roles?”  Actually, some interviews breached that subject, discovering, for example, that romances, not surprisingly, have blossomed at the lanes and card tables.  All-male male bowling leagues often use erotic playing cards for side poker pots.  End-of-season banquets now frequently include family members but once featured strippers. One bit of Electrical Engineers folklore concerns a 75-year-old who succumbed to pneumonia soon after the bowling banquet.  Teammates blamed an exotic dancer named Tonya for getting him over-heated after she thrust her bare breasts into his face steaming up his spectacles and who knows what else.

Baker jokingly inquired whether he’d met Tonya during his and Susan's last visit, referring, I think, to a well-endowed waitress who served the four of us at Miller Bakery Café.