Retirement

“Retire from work but not from life.” Indian homeopathic physician M.K. Soni

Dr. M.K. Soni 

“Calvin and Hobbes” creator Bill Waterson once said, “There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”  When I first retired as a full-time History professor, it seemed an impossible task to fill the waking hours; but before long, that problem vanished.  I am now playing duplicate bridge twice a week with fellow retirees when not at my emeritus office at Indiana U Northwest writing or interviewing people for the Calumet Regional Archives.  When Charlie Halberstadt offered to teach octogenarian Don Giedemann backgammon, which he had expressed interest in, Don told him it would probably have to wait until winter when he wasn’t so busy.  At the Valparaiso bridge game Norm Filipiak noticed my Cancun shirt and mentioned staying at a resort near the Mexican coastal city years ago and renting a jeep to take his family to Mayan sites only to have a sudden downpour ruin the plans minutes after they started out. Banta Canter winners were the Fieldhouses with an impressive 68.5 percent.  Karen Fieldhouse is a retired Grand Rapids teacher."

NWI Times reporter Emily Schnipke interviewed Barb Walczak and 94-year-old Jennie Alsobrooks (above) for an article about duplicate bridge.  “There’s always more to learn,” Walczak said.  Alsobrooks learned to play at age 10 and took it up seriously after moving to Gary in 1948. Now living  in a Merrillville facility for seniors, she still plays regularly, telling Schnipke, “At this age I like the challenge.  And I like to win.”

Paulette LaFata-Johnson retired as IUN’s Director of Alumni Relations, a position legendary Region newsman Tom Higgins held until deemed too opinionated – not enough of a yes-man - for former chancellor Bruce Bergland’s taste. Paulette was a worthy successor and seemed not to age in all the years I’ve known her.  She played a key role in graduation ceremonies.  After the university unfairly terminated English professor Anne Balay, graduating senior Amanda Board attempted to present IU president Michael McRobbie a copy of my Steel Shavingsissue that outlined how she had been unfairly denied promotion and tenure.  As the precession began, Paulette snatched the magazine away from her, claiming students were not allowed to carry things with them on stage. While University Advancement held a small going away party for Paulette, there evidently are no plans for a university-wide retirement ceremony, once an annual tradition.

above, Amanda Marie in 2019; below, Stewart O'Nan

Stewart O’Nan’s “Henry Himself” takes place in 1998, the year, O’Nan reminds readers, that baby doctor Dr. Spock, Cher partner Sonny Bono,singing cowboy Gene Autry, and Cubs announcer Harry Caray died.  The novel is such a realistic account of a 75-year-old retiree’s daily routine that I was surprised to find that O’Nan was only in his fifties.  The author of 20 books, including non-fiction, O’Nan co-wrote with Stephen King “Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season” – when the Bosox broke the so-called Babe Ruth curse, capturing their first World Series since “The Bambino” was traded to the Yankees in 1919.  Led by Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, and Manny Ramirez, they swept the Cardinals after a miracle comeback in the playoffs against the Yankees, winning four in a row after dropping the first three games.  O’Nan’s fiction has been compared to John Updike in terms of capturing the essence of everyday life, an insight I concur with and that O’Nan regards as a compliment.

In a chapter titled “The Birthday Boy” Henry Maxwell asks wife Emily not to make a fuss, knowing that she will.  O’Nan writes: 

 He was going to be 75 – a big one, as they never tired of reminding him. He wasn’t embarrassed by his age, but, like living longer than his mother, neither did he see it as an accomplishment. Birthdays were for children. . . . Like a funeral, a birthday wasn’t yours but for the people who loved you.  Why resist the inevitable?  Better to acquiesce, and yet the prospect depressed him, he couldn’t say why. Seventy-five years was a long time 

Aware that family physician Joseph P. Runco M.D. recently succumbed at age 75 to brain cancer, Henry’s birthday wish was for another. 

In “Side Effects” O’ Nan lists the dozen or more medications Henry and Edith swallowed, in addition to antihistamines, analgesics, and ointments in the medicine cabinet.   Two I also take: metoprolol for blood pressure and Klor-Con as a potassium supplement to counter the side effects of the former.   O’Nan writes: “The size of the crosshatched plastic reminders he and Emily relied on – organized by the days of the week, further divided into slots for morning, noon and night like a tackle box – had become a morbid joke among the children.”  There was no mention of Cialis or Viagra among the many pills – in fact, sex seems to have been a thing of the past between Henry and Emily.  On their anniversary, when Henry gets amorous, Emily firmly puts the kibosh on the idea, more interested in knitting or reading.  After spending years at Westinghouse working on a project ultimately scrapped, he is reduced to using his engineering expertise on mundane household chores.

“Henry Himself” ends seemingly without drama, inconsequentially, on a snowy winter morning, as Henry takes Rufus on a walk to a neighborhood reservoir in Pittsburgh, and they spot a ring of deer lolling beneath an apple tree, who file into the woods when Rufus barks.  O’Nan writes: “Later he would see this as a premonition, but at the time he had no reason to assign it a darker meaning.” “Henry Himself,” it turns out, is a prequel to “Wish You Were Here” and “Emily Alone” that chronicle a widow’s life after Henry’s death, which evidently followed a period of convalescence, not suddenly, as Henry had hoped.  New York Times reviewer Ruth Franklin repeated these lines from “Wish You Were Here” describing Emily tormented by memories of their honeymoon to Niagara Falls when there with grandchildren:

    The sun made the day sharp and promising, as if they might drive forever, only stopping to make love and eat. It had seemed that way, though they must have waited in line like this, and sat at stoplights, and fussed with the luggage. She remembered only the best of them, compensation for the months she'd spent at Henry's bedside, memories that caught her walking across the living room or washing out her teacup at the sink, leaving her useless and fretful for the rest of the day.

June 27 would have been Midge’s birthday number 103.  She lived well into her hundredth year.  At her assisted living facility in Rancho Mirage, California book club members read “Fifty Shades of Grey,” of which she claimed to disapprove when I noticed it partially hidden in her bookcase. Back in the 1970s she got Howard to take her to the X-rated “Candid Camera” producer Allen Funt’s movie “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?” and hinted that my stepfather was not as amorous as she would like.  Of course, I wanted nothing to do with either topic.

VU professor Liz Wuerrfel posted “Just Got the Impression,” on the Welcome Project’s “Flight Paths” website. The unnamed retiree who describes himself as a former history major reflects on the rapid racial turnover of his childhood Gary neighborhood and laments how neighborhoods are no longer tight-knit and people are dependent on the automobile. I’d love to live in a city where driving a car would be unnecessary. Growing up in North Philadelphia, Toni took a streetcar, bus or train everywhere – to school, museums, and later her job at a downtown law firm.  Her mother never learned to drive; everything she needed was within walking distance in their Port Richmond Polish neighborhood.  Here is an excerpt from "Just Got the Impression":

   I grew up in the Tolleston area of Gary which was, at the time, very Germanic and some Polish. I went to St. John’s Lutheran Church and spent much of my time there.  We lived right across the street.  In addition to church activities, we had school activities: the sports programs, the social programs.  All of these made a significant difference in our sense of community. Friends were made and became solidified as a result of the closeness of everything.

   Back in the mid and late ‘60s we had a pastor named Norman Brandt. The neighborhood was changing because of the steel mill and other economic activity. And so he went pretty much door-to-door and started inviting all kinds of interesting people to attend church and eventually become members. He was probably one of the first activists in that area, speaking before the city council and sharing thoughts about how we should be a unified society regardless of our race.  But as the situation, economically and socially, changed and whites began to leave, the church became more and more African American. 

   Realtors would come into a neighborhood and say, “Better move now while your property is still worth something because when this neighborhood starts changing, property values will decrease and you’ll lose out on a lot of money.” And that eventually became illegal, but folks just felt, “Well, I’d better do as they say and turn my house over to the realtor and get rid of it while I move elsewhere.”

   So many people just heard about these problems; they didn’t really experience them. They were watching television, seeing all kinds of marches and rebellions across the country, and they just got the impression that the black culture was one that was antisocial. When we watched, on television, the funeral of Martin Luther King, you know, my uncles would say, “Oh, man, we can’t have this.”You know,“What is going on here? What’s happening to our society?”All they saw was the violence they thought was going to be widespread and come into Gary. And I guess the whole idea of being in the same neighborhood in the same church with black people was just something that they could not understand or tolerate.

     My parents moved from the Tolleston area to the Horace Mann district, which seemed to be changing more rapidly than Tolleston.  Residents were hearing all kinds of news about fights and violence, and they just got a little scared and moved to Merrillville or other suburbs.  In Merrillville, there was a black family living next door. My parents were fine with that, but they didn’t really communicate or socialize with that family. We’d say, “Hi,” over the fence and ask how things are going but not invite each other to a social event, you know, a marriage or birthday party. That was just not something we would do. Some of our former friends from St. John’s moved into that subdivision and we’d celebrate events with those families; but in terms of actually visiting the neighbor next door, that wasn’t done. The community was more outside of Merrillville. It was still at the church. It was still at the school for the kids.  And I see that still today. A lot of people just don’t have the neighborhood relationship that was once there forty, fifty years ago.

   It used to be that people could walk to downtown Gary or take a bus.  A car was not as prevalent as it became later on, but now it’s a car to the doctor’s, a car to the shopping mall, a car to an auto repair shop. And the use of the car, I think, has dramatically changed the way people live in a way that would be totally alien to previous generations.    

Widespread Panic

“I just spent sixty days in the jailhouse
For the crime of having no dough, no no
Now here I am back out on the street
For the crime of having nowhere to go”

    Robbie Robertson, “Shape I’m In” 

I heard a Widespread Panic song from their cleverly named live album “Light Fuse, Get Away” on WXRT’s Lin Brehmer morning show on the way to IUN.  A Southern rock band from Athens, Georgia, formed in 1986, Widespread Panic is famous for extended jams and often compared to the Grateful Dead.  At the first Bonnaroo festival in 2002, the band performed for 70,000 fans.  Their cover of “Ophelia” and “Shape I’m In” by the Band is a staple of live shows.  The opening lines of “Shape I’m In” go:

Go out yonder, peace in the valley
Come downtown, have to rumble in the alley
Oh, you don't know the shape I'm in

Dame Emma Thompson and the great American actor (“The World According to Garp,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Footloose”) John Lithgow star in the comedy drama “Late Night.”  Mindy Kaling wrote the screenplay and plays an Indian-American who joins the white male staff of a seemingly over-the-hill late-night hostess as a diversity hire. She reinvigorates the show and saves it from being cancelled.  Kaling’s character is fetching, original, and believable; she is initially insecure and cries frequently but has an iron will and loyalty to the truth.  Widespread panic ensues when a story breaks that the Thompson character (Katherine Newbury) has cheated on her husband (Lithgow as a professor emeritus suffering from Parkinson’s)) and had an affair with a staff member.  She is about to accept her show being cancelled when Molly Patel (Kaling) intervenes. Katherine’s confession speech reminded me of when David Letterman had to fess up to copulating with numerous underlings.

I’m 175 pages into Stewart O’Nan’s new novel “Henry Himself,” set in Pittsburgh and about a 74-year-old former Westinghouse engineer and World War II veteran who vacations yearly at Chautauqua with a wife and two married children with offspring of their own.  Taking place in the late 1990s, there’s mention of a Chevy Lumina, Ford Explorer, and the family Oldsmobile.  On rainy summer evenings at the family cabin, family members work on multi-piece puzzles or watch movies from Blockbuster while Henry’s wife Emily knits or reads. Each person has his or her favorite genre: science fiction, English dramas, old classics, comedies, even westerns. The first night they settle on “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  Henry’s mother, who’d been dead nearly 20 years, loved silly sayings such as “Lead on, MacDuff”(a misquote from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”) and “I see said the blind man”(one I say, including the punch line, “as he picked up his hammer and saw”).

Henry drinks Dewar’s (same brand of scotch as our friend Herb Passo), remembers eating animal crackers as a kid, and has a bum knee, arthritis in the hips, occasional back spasms, and frequent nighttime bathroom visits due to prostate problems, yet plays golf and is a gifted handyman around the house. When Emily forbids him to ascend to the cabin roof on a ladder to remove an obsolete antenna, his son botches the job.  So far everything is humdrum but charming, but one senses widespread panic lurking in the pages ahead.  Henry’s fingertips, for example, often go numb at night, as do mine.  Dr. Ostroski diagnosed my condition as carpel tunnel, but Henry frets that it is one of five signs of an impending heart attack. 

NWI TimesEditorial writer Marc Chase, partly responsible for Gary mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson’s recent primary election defeat, is continuing his misguided vendetta against her.  Why? Perhaps to play to the former Hammond Times’suburban readership. Chase ridiculed the Mayor’s reasonable plan to balance the city budget as hare-brained, only he misspelled the word as hair-brained.  He’s a lightweight as a muckraker with a flawed sense of proportion.

Over the weekend we played party bridge with our monthly group of eight (Toni was the winner), first dining at iconic, 90-year-old Teibel’s Restaurant in Schererville (Herb Passo ordered a Dewar’s. I had a Three Floyd’s IPA). Next evening Charlie Halberstadt and Naomi Goodman invited us to her place in Valparaiso; Charlie made a delicious pie that resembled cheese cake.  In between I met Ron and Nancy Cohen at Miller Beach Farmers Market, where we traded his old copies of New York Review of Booksfor the Tracesissue containing my article about “The Champ” Joe Louis.  He included a couple items for archivist Steve McShane, including a Post-Tribunearticle about the death of environmentalist Charlotte Read.

Jerry Clemons and Zeke Ronders

At Miller Beach Market entertainment was provided by the Nick Danger Band, a great blues/rock group featuring guitarists Jerry Clemons and Zeke Rongers and drummer Lannie Turner.  The band often plays with vocalist Nicole Jamrose and keyboardist Chris Wander. They jammed on such numbers as “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash, “Down Under” by Men at Work,” “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits, and an extended jam on “Cold Shot” by Stevie Ray Vaughan, which showed off virtuoso guitar playing by Clemons and Rongers. The first verse goes

Once was a sweet thang baby, held out love in our hands
Now I reach to kiss your lips the touch don't mean a thing
And that's a cold shot baby, yeah that's a drag
A cold shot baby, I let our love go bad

Band members kept repeating “Cold Shot, Cold Shot” between musical interludes.  What an unexpected delight to watch three professionals honing their craft.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Nick Danger Band included a Widespread Panic number or two in their impressive repertoire, perhaps “Pigeons” or “Can’t Get High.”

Loose cannon Trump vows utter destruction of Iran one day and an offer to meet with President Hassan Rouhani with no preconditions the next.  Either would probably end in a complete disaster. Rouhani called Trump, who caused the mess by pulling out of a nuclear agreement, retarded.

In a recent New York Review appeared Sean Wilentz’s essay on Michael Tomasky’s “If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved.”  Wilentz wrote:

 At least some of the current mess derives from the undemocratic apportionment of the US Senate – in which Wyoming, with just a half a million people, and California, with 40 million, each have 2 seats – and the hyperpartisan gerrymandering of House districts.

Tomasky quoted Franklin D. Roosevelt as remarking in 1944: “We ought to have two real parties, one liberal and one conservative.”  That’s what we’re stuck with today, which Tomasky regards as a serious problem. Wilentz prefers a statement FDR made in October 1936 at New York City’s Madison Square Garden when facing a Republican rightwing not unlike today:

 I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match.  I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.

Wilentz adds: “That’s the spirit.”

New York Review of Books Personals are always worth a read, although sadly less erotic as Baby Boomers have become senior citizens.  These appeared in the May 9 issue:

   NYC woman seeks young-at-heart gentleman (70s) with similar sensibilities for one more fling.

   Sarasota Florida man, 75, no children. Passions: long walks and talks, holding hands, sharing life.  Let’s meet.

   NYC attorney, well read and well-traveled, vigorous, eclectic, good listener.  Francophile.  But life is more.  Seeks woman to share the adventures.

History professor David Parnell, who taught an experimental freshman seminar last semester that he and Mark Baer had developed and had me speak about the history of IUN, announced that the class is now mandatory for freshman Arts and Sciences students.  Five sections are on the Fall schedule, including one taught by historian Jonathyne Briggs.  I wouldn’t mind contributing, perhaps assigning a journal or history project in the form of an interview.  Hopefully neither would induce widespread student panic, as oral presentations often do (I’ve had a student nearly faint on me, others clam up, and one literally left a puddle of sweat).  We shall see. 

James registered for Fall classes at Valparaiso University.  I’ll have to check if I know any of my grandson’s professors. During orientation parents were told, better if students not go home on weekends for at least the first month.  Toni has given James the same advice. He was considering bowling one more season at Inman’s, enabling me to take him to Culver’s afterwards, but it looks like that won’t happen - maybe for the best.

 James Wozniak

At Quick Cut in Portage for my bimonthly (every other month) haircut from Anna I ran into James Wozniak, who used to bowl in the Sheet and Tin league at Cressmoor Lanes on a team with Randy Marshall and his dad (“Big Randy”). The same age as Dave, James works shift work at U.S. Steel and has recently been putting in 56 hours a week. A third Jim was having his hair cut in a chair near me, telling the barber to be careful not to touch an area where he feared he was going bald.  A guitar player, he claimed to have played backup for Styx.  When he learned his hair stylist’s son played guitar, he recommended that he watch Carlos Santana play “El Farol” on YouTube (the live version), vowing that it would change his life. When he started mimicking the guitar sounds, Anna said, “We’re being entertained.”  I told him I’d seen the Nick Danger Band on Sunday; he knew them and said, “They started in the Eighties.”