Sandy

“And Sandy, the aurora is risin' behind us
This pier lights our carnival life forever
Oh love me tonight for I may never see you again
Hey Sandy girl

My, my baby

. . .
I just got tired of hangin' in them dusty arcades 

bangin' them pleasure machines
Chasin' the factory girls underneath the boardwalk 

where they all promise to unsnap their jeans”

Bruce Springsteen, “4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”

Within the first 30 minutes WXRT’s Saturday flashback show on the year 1973 featured great songs by Bruce Springsteen (“Sandy”), The Who, Patti Smith, Faces, Jackson Browne, and Elton John (“Grey Seal” from the double album “Beyond the Yellow Brick Road”).  I can’t recall ever hearing “Sandy” but the others were familiar.  Four-year-old Dave loved seeing Elton John, a great showma, on TV.  At an IUN History Department meeting Bill Neil referred to “the yellow brick road,”meaning from the movie, and Paul Kern said afterwards, “I was surprised Bill knew the Elton John album.” 1973 was an eventful year, with the Watergate hearings exposing Nixon’s criminality, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigning in disgrace, the Vietnam War ending in ignominy, the CIA overthrowing Chilean President Salvador Allende on behalf of international business interests, and the Supreme Court ruling on the controversial abortion case Roe v. Wade.

With Dorian in the news all week, finally wreaking havoc on the Carolina coast, I heard numerous references to Hurricane Sandy, which in 2012 battered the Jersey shore after first leaving destruction in its wake in the Caribbean. Dorian caused massive flooding in Nag’s Head, NC, not far from Kitty Hawk, where we spent a weekend while I was in grad school at Maryland.  I recall on the way trying to follow Dave Goldfield as he drove at high speeds beyond the capacity of our VW bug. One-year-old Phil ran into the Atlantic Ocean surf, got knocked down, and wanted no part of the beach the rest of the day, so we stayed by the motel swimming pool. In the news back then was an incident still vivid in my mind where a motel manager dumped chlorine in a pool when African Americans attempted to use it.

Hearing Bruce Springsteen’s“4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” reminded me of Sandy Sanders, softball teammate Ivan Jasper’s girlfriend during the 1970s.  She was blond, beautiful, a former high school track star, and warm and friendly. Sandy and Ivan eventually broke up because she wanted kids and he didn’t, having taken care of younger siblings most of his life after his mother deserted the family. In 1979 Ivan and Sandy took one last trip together to the Bahamas (last week devastated by Dorian) along with several other Portage Acres couples, including the four Lanes. Phil and Dave, then 10 and 11, loved Sandy, as did all of us. One afternoon by the pool she was lying on a beach chair when Ivan noticed them looking their way and briefly unsnapped and lifted her bikini top.

Steve Rushin of Sports Illustratedcan make any subject interesting.  Writing about the phasing out of tickets to sports events, as most folks receive them on mobile devices, Rushin admitted the technological advancement has its advantages but also, “like Dylan going electric, its drawbacks and consolations.”  Soon, Rushin quipped, nobody will know the meaning of,“I’ll take a rain check.” Collectors wax nostalgic over such items as tickets shaped like pineapples or catchers’ mitts.  Quite valuable would be one from Sandy Koufax’s last game as a Dodger in the 1966 World Series.  Koufax went 27-9 that season despite suffering from a sore arm that hastened his retirement as age 30.  I got a good laugh reading this paragraph:

  One U.S. Open golf spectator was given a replacement ticket after persuading officials that his dog had really eaten his pass. But the Michigan State season-ticket holder who inadvertently threw his tickets into his fireplace while burning old files was SOL.  His tickets did not rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes.

It took me a few seconds to realize that SOL stood for “shit outta luck.”Toni got it immediately.

Bob and Rhea Laramie

I cheered when Phil’s former soccer coach Bob Laramie, who identified himself as 49-year Portage resident posted this raffle ticket and wrote:“I hope these weapons being raffled off by the FOP do not come back to haunt the department or the citizens of Portage. In the future when they come wanting donation, they will be reminded about this. The Mayor supporting this will also lose my vote in the upcoming election. I have no problem with guns just weapons of war that people use to slaughter others.  Robert Laramie, 49-year resident of Portage

John Fraire, who I’ve known for many years and whose brother Rocky is a good friend, sent me this email:

  Some of my research on the Mexican community in NW Indiana was the collection of oral histories of some of the original Mexican residents in the East Chicago. They were collected under IRB guidelines at Western Michigan University and then were approved for use by the IRB office of Union Institute and University where I completed my doctorate. The narratives have all been transcribed and printed. I would like to donate the following to the Calumet Archives:  print copy of the transcribed narratives, release forms from the individuals interviewed, original transcriptions with handwritten notes, flash drive with all the interviews.

What a treasure trove! I responded: “I’m very excited at your choosing the Calumet Regional Archives as the repository for your valuable collection.  By the way, I see your brother Rocky when our book club meets every two months at Gino’s in Merrillville.” He emailed back: “Thank you Jim. And thanks for all your help over the years. I will let you know when I am headed back to Crown Point with the materials. It will be great to go over them with you.”  Fraire has written extensively about women’s baseball teams in Indiana Harbor and California.

photo by Marty Bohn

At Gardner Center in Miller Marty Bohn’s exhibit “Definitive Moments,” featured striking photos taken in Nepal, India, Morocco, and Cuba.  I’d love to visit Nepal and Cuba, not so much India or Morocco. This from Anne Balay, who misses living in Miller but was denied tenure at IUN due to blatant discrimination on the part of her immediate superior:

  My face is on this truck. The couple who drive it designed the truck to represent trucking as it was and at it is now. They wanted my book and the stories it tells represented. Given the number of closed doors that I have met with, this recognition feels so affirming. The audience I really care about gets it and I am so damn grateful.

Froebel School

“Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the expression of what is in the child’s soul,” Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852)

Gary School Superintendent  William A. Wirt had the city’s kindergarten through 12^thgrade “unit” schools named for admirable educators, beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson and continuing with Friedrich Froebel and Horace Mann.  Once known as the immigrant school, Froebel attracted visitors from all over the world intrigued by Wirt’s progressive educational “work-study-play” philosophy.  During the 1960s its graduates included future educator and State Representative Vernon Smith, responsible for a historical marker at the site where the historic school was demolished, and jazz pianist Billy Foster, who will appear on the cover of Steel Shavings,volume 48.  In its editor’s note I wrote:

  On March 19, 1965, Billy Foster (playing sax) and his Royal Imperials won a citywide talent show at Gary’s Memorial Auditorium representing Froebel High School. Famous as the home town of Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five, Gary has a long, proud musical tradition even though the Gary Conservatory “Music Man” professor Harold Hill claimed to have graduated from in never existed.  From its earliest years, music was an integral part of Superintendent William A. Wirt’s work-study-play curriculum.  Gary’s many ethnic groups produced a rich variety of musical strains, from Mexican mariachi bands to Serbian choral and tamburitza groups.  Metropolitan Opera tenor James McCracken, a Gary native, sang in a church choir as did the Spaniels and other doo wop groups recorded on Vivian Carter’s Vee-Jay label that originated in Gary.  The city’s rich jazz tradition dates to dance halls and nightclubs that sprang up during the “Roaring Twenties” and flowered during the 1940s.  At a young age jazz pianist Foster became familiar with local bandleader Tom Crump and horn player Art Hoyle.  In addition to teaching at Gary schools (primarily Charles R. Drew Elementary) for over 30 years as well as Valparaiso University, Foster performed with his own group, the Billy Foster Trio, as well as with such distinguished luminaries as Art Farmer, Slide Hampton, Tommy Harrell, Clark Terry, Bobby Watson, and many others. At present Foster hosts the WGVE radio show “Billy Foster Jazz Zone” and teaches a Senior College course at IU Northwest, whose Calumet Regional Archives recently started a collection in his name.

Froebel School gained notoriety in 1945 when many white students went out on strike just a month after World War II ended, protesting the policy of sending African Americans to their institution while most other Gary schools remained segregated.  In an effort to reduce tensions a liberal organization, Anselm Forum, invited singer Frank Sinatra and heavyweight champion Joe Louis to participate in a Tolerance program.  Sinatra’s appearance made national news, but Louis was unable to come due to other commitments.  I mention the incident in a forthcoming Traces article titled “Joe Louis and Gary.”  In “Gary’s First Hundred Years” I wrote that football coach Johnny Kyle became interim principal while Richard Nuzum was temporarily forced to step aside in the face of student pressure and school board cowardice.  Future IUN Performing Arts chair Garrett Cope was a student at Froebel at the time and could perform in musical programs but not in theater productions.

Twenty years ago I published a Steel Shavings issue (volume 27) titled “Froebel Daughters of Penelope,” about five Greek-Americans who attended Froebel during the 1940s, in some cases starting in elementary school, including Constance Girasin.  She recalled:

  At Froebel we were exposed not only to the three r’s but to sewing, cooking, orchestra, band, swimming, foreign language classes, wood shop, machine shop, a college-bound curriculum, and a whole line of business classes  such as shorthand, bookkeeping, and typing. The “Work” part of “Work, Study, Play” consisted of getting students ready for “life.”  Shops on the far west part of our building were for boys only, and girls didn’t so much as enter the.  However, we would pass them on our way to the band room.

  Twice Mrs. Jones was our history teacher, once in eighth grade and again in eleventh.  She was very soft-spoken and did 98 percent of her teaching sitting behind a desk.  She was a little too nice for us adolescents.  We were forever asking to be excused for band practice.  One day she came up with an expression I’ll never forget: “Constance, you are not going to earn your living baton-twirling.”  That’s true, but at the time I thought baton twirling was very important.  In my senior yearbook Jim Taneff jokingly wrote, “Constance, you are not going to earn your living by baton-twirling.”  

Randy Roberts’ “Joe Louis: Hard Times Man” (2010) begins with this quote from “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” by novelist Ernest J. Gaines: “When times get really hard, really tough, He always sends you somebody.  In the Depression it was tough on everybody, but twice as hard on the colored, and He sent us Joe.  Joe Louis was to lift the colored people’s heart.”  Roberts described the jubilation in 1938 among black people in all walks of life, from Harlem intellectuals to Gary steelworkers, listening on the radio and rejoicing when Louis defeated German Max Schmeling by knockout in the first round.  In Plains, Georgia, several dozen cotton and peanut field hands gathered on the front lawn of their boss Earl Carter, who had positioned his radio near an open window for their benefit.  Roberts wrote:

  Young Jimmy Carter remembered that they had listened to the fight without a word spoken or a cheer uttered, then filed away quietly, crossing a dirt road and a railroad track and entering a house out in a filed.  “At  that point pandemonium broke loose inside the house, as our black neighbors shouted and yelled in celebration of Louis’ victory.  But all the curious, accepted proprieties of a racially-segregated society had been carefully observed.”  Mister Earl’s “boys” knew “their place,”but in some way and for some period of time, Joe Louis had liberated them.  He had taken then to another place.

Roberts pointed out that in 1941 the three sports that mattered were horse racing (with Seabiscuit and Triple Crown winner Whirlaway, baseball (with Joe DiMaggio hitting in 56 straight games and Ted Williams batting .406), and boxing (with Gary’s “man of Steel” Tony Zale middleweight champ and Louis heavyweight champ).

Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin eulogized Bob Einstein, who played Funkhouser on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and, years before, “Super Dave” Osborne, “the master of not landing on his feet.”  I laughed out loud reading about bits I’d seen on Letterman.  With a deadpan delivery and mock seriousness, Einstein’s character became a parody of contemporary stuntman Evel Knieval whose feats always ended in failure, with Super Dave crushed, squashed or flattened like a pancake.  Rushin wrote:

  Osborne didn’t suffer the foolish questions of sports journalists.  When he fell off Toronto’s CN Tower, then the tallest man-made structure in the world, and landed face-down in a parking lot, sportscaster Mike Walden asked him how he felt. “Why are you talking to me?”Super replied.  “I’ve got a minute to live. I need an ambulance.  Help me, putz.”  An ambulance arrived, only to run Osborne over.

 Super Dave Osborne shortly before shot three times in 1980 bit

Portage English teacher Mr. Downes loved James’ paper on “Babbitt,” assigning it a grade of 98%.  His only criticism concerned verb tenses when quoting from the novel, something that I know from experience can be tricky.  At present the class, reading several chapters a day, is critiquing “Great Expectations” (1860) by Charles Dickens from Marxist and feminist perspectives.  Sounds like a great class.

A 16-letter crossword puzzle clue asked who was the lone American to win Pulitzers for both fiction and poetry. Toni had the first name, Robert, which enabled me to get Robert Penn Warren, author of two volumes of prize-winning poetry, “Promises” and “Now and Then,” and “All the King’s Men,” based on the career of Louisiana demagogue Huey Long and one of my favorites.

As I entered Jewel’s parking lot, Chesterton police were questioning a woman who evidently had broken into one of the cars in the lot.  Either someone spotted her in the act or she was caught on the store’s surveillance cameras.  Maybe an alarm went off.  Inside the employees were all abuzz.  As I left, the woman was being taken away in a fire department  vehicle.

Jeffery in middle

The Eagles jumped out to a 14-0 lead against favored New Orleans but got blanked the rest of the way.  With two minutes to go and down 20-14, Philadelphia was 30 yards away from pulling off an upset when a pass went through the hands of former Bears receiver Alshon Jeffery, enabling the Saints to run out the clock.  No miracle this time from QB “St. Nick” Foles, last year’s Superbowl MVP. There’s a statue of him (below) outside the stadium.  The Eagles bowed out like champions, barely losing  to hall of famer Drew Brees.

fast food for Clemson Tigers

As the government shutdown enters its fourth week with no end in sight, Trump served fast food to the NCAA champion Clemson Tigers during their trip to the White House. Also in the news: 13 year-old Jayme Closs escaped an abductor who killed her parents and held her capture for three months.  A 21 year-old in now in custody.  Locally, the trial of Portage mayor James Snyder commenced; he allegedly accepted $12,000 in return for awarding a contract to a towing company.

Making His Bones

“I made my bones when I was 19, the last time the family had a war.”  Sonny Corleone in “The Godfather”

The phrase “making his bones” essentially means establishing one’s credentials or bona fides.  The expression gained popularity when James Caan as Sonny Corleone in “The Godfather” (1972) uttered those words as a euphemism for making his first kill.  In that same movie Alex Rocco, playing a Jewish casino owner in Las Vegas, told Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), “I’m Moe Greene.  I made my bones when you were banging cheerleaders.”

above, Alex Rocco as Moe Greene; below, Nathan Cobbs

I almost didn't vote in the Chesterton election because we’re in the fourteenth district and, according to my favorite Chesterton Tribune reporter Kevin Nevers, the only contested race was for fourth district councilman, where Democrat Scot McCord, 61, squared off against 31 year-old Nathan Cobbs.  Nevers wrote:

McCord has been a municipal official for a quarter of a century, serving a short time on the Park Board and a very long time on the Utility Service Board.  Cobbs is only beginning to make his bones.

Unbeknownst to me beforehand, I could cast a ballot in all district contests, not just my own.  At Brummitt Elementary School election officials swiped my driver’s license and had me sign a device similar to one used by IU Credit Union rather than a big book like in the past.  As usual, I voted straight Democrat. McCord lost by a single vote, 399-398.  Had the squeaker gone the other way, the sticker, “My vote counted,” would have had added meaning.  McCord was gracious in defeat but lamented that over 92 percent of Chesterton residents didn’t bother going to the polls.

 photo by Samuel A. Love

Samuel A. Love attended a rally protesting Agri-Fine Corporation, manufacturers of livestock feed from vegetable oil and water discarded by oil refineries, polluting the Calumet River and spreading petcoke dust throughout a residential neighborhood.  The area often smells like rotten eggs or decomposing corpses.  Resident Liz Morua called the situation “unbearable – you really don’t want to be outside when you smell it.”

Jeff Manes interviewed 77 year-old Salvatore “Sam” Rizzo, owner of Ono’s Pizza in Miller.  In 1953 his mother and aunt bought the place when it was a hamburger and hot dog joint called the Beach Box.  Rizzo’s dad, the son of Sicilian immigrants, grew up in Glen Park and worked in a Gary Works metallurgical lab. His mother, Rizzo recalled, “worked in the fish department at Goldblatt’s.  Later she worked in the produce department at the A & P at Ninth and Massachusetts.  She also worked at the ammunition factory – Kingsbury – during the war years.  Yeah, Ma was a worker.”  In 1962 the family converted the Beach Box into Ono’s Pizza, named for Sam’s Uncle Onopio Penzato.  Rizzo told Manes: “We were going to name it Sam and Ono’s Pizza, but we didn’t have enough room on the sign.”

Cleaning out her mother’s house, Judy Ayers discovered a box containing her old Tiny Tears doll and a photo of herself at age six in front of Dr. Walfred A. Nelson’s Lake Street office – where Judy subsequently worked as a nurse for 31 years.  Suffering from a sore throat and ear-ache, Judy had taken her doll to Dr. Nelson hoping he’d check her ears and throat, too.  On the back of the photo was this note:

  Never doubt the intentions of a strong-willed little girl.  Those intentions plus steadfast encouragement from Dr. Nelson surely has something to do with you doing just what you always said you were going to do – become his nurse.  I don’t know why we had a camera with us on this day, but I remember you insisted on having your picture taken as we left the office after an appointment and before we had to go back the same day after the garage door came down on your head.

 New Zealand’s All Blacks, led by Dan Carter, won the 2015 Rugby World Cup, dispatching the Australian Wallabies, 34-17.  Prior to the match the All Blacks, as has been their custom since 2005, performed the haka, an ancestral Maori dance involving grunts and facial contortions.  Once a traditional war cry, the haka also has been part of welcoming ceremonies and occasions such as funerals, with women and children joining in. Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin tweeted from rugby’s ancestral home: “Lots of research at Cabbage Patch pub in Twickenham.”  Rushin’s SI article began:

        At first glance the Rugby World Cup is the greatest celebration of national stereotypes since It’s a Small World opened at Disneyland.  Italian fans came dressed as pizza slices, Welshmen wore sheep’s clothing, Aussies arrived in striped prison jumpsuits, and every French fan was reduced to a beret and a baguette.  Step up to a stainless-steel urinal trough at a stadium in England or Wales over the last six weeks, and you saw English knights dropping chain-mail trousers, Tonga supporters parting grass skirts, and kilted Scotsmen farting through tartan.

 photo by Steve Rushin

Neil Goodman will be retiring in a year or two and moving to California.  The new Arts and Sciences Building Fine Arts quarters will lack a casting furnace, much to his chagrin since he won’t be able to teach what he knows best without a furnace.

Cara Lewis

Around campus posters touted a spring Queer Studies offering, Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Literature.  The notice claimed it will count toward fulfillment of IUN’s Diversity requirement, something new to me.  Instructor Cara Lewis, whose field is twentieth-century British literature, was a magna cum laude Harvard graduate who majored in History and English.  Her University of Virginia PhD dissertation was titled “Beyond Ekphrasis: Visual Media and Modernist Narrative.”  The word “ekphrasis” originated in ancient Greece and refers to a literary description of a work of art.  Lewis has written about the novel “To the Lighthouse” (1927), based in large parts on author Virginia Woolf’s examination of her parents’ relationship.

The latest Calumet Regional Archives acquisition, “Record Paradise,” is a fictionalized memoir by IUN grad Joni Jacques, who grew up in Gary during the late 1960s.  On the dedication page she thanks professors Lori Montalbano, Robin Hass, Cynthia O’Dell, and Regina Jones for their help and encouragement. Joni referenced The Border Gary’s red light district:

  Some of the most beautiful women I ever saw were on the Border.  My mom said they were working girls.  I didn’t know what that was but I told her if she ever wanted to work, I was pretty sure she could get a job down there because she was pretty, too.  She looked like I had slapped her.  I asked my grandmother why my mother got mad at me for telling her where she could secure gainful employment.  She explained to me what a working girl was and she and my grandfather had a big laugh about it.

Joni Jacques frequented the State Theaters, where Roy Dominguez worked as a teenager after being hired by a Greek lady named Tula Kalleris.  Both Dominguez and Jacques went to West Side in 1969, the year the school opened.  In “Record Paradise” (the name of a record store) Jacques wrote:

  The State Theater was on Sixth Avenue; its design was Art Deco.  It was owned by a mysterious little white lady who always wore black head to toe, smoked incessantly and had the most beautiful gold charm bracelet I ever saw.  It looked like it weighed a ton.  She would walk through the lobby before each movie and then would disappear into her office like a little ghost.  She was fascinating.

 1936 Gold medalists; Joe Rantz, second from left; kneeling is coxswain Bobby Moch

 I’ve been reading Daniel James Brown’s “The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.” The crew, from the University of Washington, defeated elite Ivy League squads before besting the British, Italians, and favored Germans. The author met Olympian Joe Rantz, whose daughter Judy took Joe’s gold metal from a glass case and let him handle it.  Brown wrote:

  While I was admiring it, she told me that it had vanished years before.  The family had searched Joe’s house high and low but had finally given it up as lost.  Only many years later, when they were re-modeling the house, had they finally found it concealed in some insulating material in the attic.  A squirrel had apparently taken a liking to the glimmer of the gold and hidden the medal away in its nest as a personal treasure.  As Judy was telling me this, it occurred to me that Joe’s story, like the medal, had been squirreled away out of sight for too long.