Cinco de Mayo

"Nothing to show but this brand new tattoo

But it’s a real beauty

A Mexican cutie

How I got it, I haven’t a clue”

    “Margaritaville,” Jimmy Buffet

For Cinco de Mayo (fifth of May) son Dave performed “Margaritaville” on Facebook and received over a hundred likes or comments.  I told him that while he nailed it, “La Bamba” (popularized by Ritchie Valens, Trini Lopez, and Los Lobos) would have been my choice.  The traditional Mexican folk song originated among African slaves imported into Veracruz who were referencing the MBamba peoples of Angola. “Margaritaville” was also appropriate, however, given that the unofficial holiday was popularized during the 1980s by beer companies and sales supposedly surpass even those during Superbowl weekend.  Cinco de Mayo commemorates a Mexican victory over a much larger French force at the 1862 Battle of Puebla under the leadership of General Ignacio Zaragoza.  After President Benito Juarez declared a moratorium on Mexico’s foreign debt, Napoleon III had used the default as an excuse to invade the Central American country at a time when the U.S. was unable to enforce the Monroe Doctrine due to the Civil War. After Zaragoza’s death, Mexican forces suffered setbacks, Mexico City fell, and Napoleon III installed a Frenchman, Emperor Maximillian, as his puppet. By 1867 the ill-fated Maximillian was ousted and President Juarez back in power. Historians have speculated that without the Mexican victory at Puebla, the French probably would have recognized the Confederacy and the American Civil War might have had a different outcome.

Tom Wolfe’s novel “A Man in Full” (1998) takes place, for the most part, in Atlanta, and the African-American mayor bears a large resemblance to Mayor Maynard Jackson, who served between 1974 and 1982 and again in the 1990s. Both were members of the city’s black elite, graduates of Morehouse State and members of the same fraternity.  Jackson, son of a preacher and a university professor, is credited with expanding Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport into the nation’s busiest and establishing affirmative action guidelines that led to more minority policemen and other municipal workers. As I learned from the “Atlanta Child Murders” documentary, however, the vast majority of Atlanta’s black residents found the quality of their lives, if anything, deteriorating in the past half-century as a result of gentrification and the construction of freeways that destroyed viable black neighborhoods.

Wolfe’s most appealing, albeit tragic, character is blue-collar worker Conrad Hensley.  His parents were old hippies who raised their son in a squalid domicile that reeked of pot and unwashed dishes piled high in the sink.  A high school teacher convinced Conrad to attend college, where a prof poked fun at a bourgeois lifestyle that sounded idyllic to Conrad.  Forced to quit school when a Catholic girlfriend got pregnant and refused to abort the fetus, he went to work for a food conglomerate, filling out meat orders in a refrigerator car dubbed “the suicide freezer unit.”  The job conditions were deplorable, but the pay adequate.  He was saving toward a down payment on a house in the suburbs when laid off on the very day he saved a coworker’s life – one of the many self-described crash ‘n’ burners.  When the flunky assistant night manager delivered the news, the man whose life Conrad had saved told him:
    Who’s the shit fer brains, Nick?  You’re laying off the best man in this whole fucking Place?  He was gonna buy a condo, Nick.  He’s got a wife and two kids!  He’s worth more’n the whole buncha you fuckin’ neckties put together!”
No matter. The die had been cast.

In an HBO documentary the great Studs Terkel claimed he didn’t consider himself an oral historian but rather an intimate interviewer and conversationalist.  Blacklisted while hosting a successful TV program during the McCarthy Red Scare for failing to say he had been duped into signing petitions against racism and economic inequality that had the endorsement of the Communist Party, he went on to have a 45-year career on a Chicago radio station and write acclaimed books on American history from the bottom up on the Great Depression, World War II, and many other subjects.  When a school board attempted to censor “Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do,” he attended a jam-packed school board meeting and convinced the board to change its position.  He told one critic he was interested in understanding why someone would read a 700-page book simply looking for so-called dirty words. Born in 1912, the year, he said, that the “Titanic” sank and he rose, he died at age 96 and expressed the wish that his epitaph read: “Curiosity did not kill this cat.”  

Margaret Bourke-White

“Work is something you can count on, a trusted, lifelong friend who never deserts you.” Margaret Bourke-White

below, Margaret Bourke-White in Tunis, 1943

A star photographer for Lifemagazine, Margaret Bourke-White did a cover feature for a 1943 issue portraying women defense workers in Gary, which I showed on the screen to Nicole Anslover’s students.  Bourke-White (1904-1971) also followed the troops to Tunisia and other combat zones. With General George S. Patton she toured the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald.  Referring to those in her profession, she once said, “We are in a privileged and sometimes happy position. We see a great deal of the world. Our obligation is to pass it on to others.”During the 1950s she traveled to South Africa and captured the inhumanity of apartheid.

boundary of Moroka Township in Johannesburg by Margaret Bourke-White

Born in the Bronx of Polish and Irish descent and growing up in New Jersey, Margaret Bourke-White attended many colleges, including Purdue, before graduating from Cornell in 1927 after a failed two-year marriage, whereupon she added her mother’s surname, Bourke, to her maiden name.  Her big break came in 1929 when Fortune magazine hired her as an associate editor and photographer.  A year later she became the first foreigner permitted to take pictures of Soviet industrial workers.  In 1936 she joined Life as its first female photojournalist, a relationship that continued for 21 years and then, despite the onset of Parkinson’s disease, occasionally until 1969. One of her most famous shots was of flood victims in 1937 standing in front of a sign reading “World’s Highest Standard of Living.”  In 1948 she photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi just hours before he was assassinated. 

 John Bushemi

Wearing a sweater given to me as a subscriber of Sports Illustrated with SI on the front (for supplemental instructor, I joked), I began Nicole’s class by showing a two-minute YouTube trailer for “See Here, Private Hargrove” (1944), based on Marion Hargrove’s account of basic training at Fort Bragg.  One of his best friends was Gary private Johnny Bushemi, who went on to work for Yank magazine and died under fire on an island in the Pacific.  Next I provided this summary of Gary during wartime, which I titled “From Depression to Boom Times”:

 Almost 80 years have gone by since America’s participation is what oral historian Studs Terkel called “The Good War.”  Among those Terkel interviewed for his 1984 history of World War II was journalist Mike Royko, who grew up in one of Chicago’s ethnic, working-class neighborhoods similar to many in Gary. Royko recalled newsboys shouting “extra, extra” in the streets, ration coupons and Victory gardens, white-helmeted wardens threatening to report blackout violators to the F.B.I., his sister becoming a “Rosie the Riveter,” names of dead soldiers being added to a flagpole marker, and listening attentively to radio broadcasts about such faraway places as Bataan, Anzio, Guadalcanal and Normandy.  As vivid as those memories were to the so-called “Greatest Generation,” events of that critical era have faded in the nation’s collective memory.  All but a few Americans are too young to remember Pearl Harbor or to have heard President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech. Riding through Gary, it is hard to imagine how vital its once bustling industrial plants were to the fate of the planet at a time when the Northwest Indiana homefront was the world’s leading steel producer.  Almost overnight, it seemed, the lean years of the Great Depression disappeared  as Region mills began producing for war.  Accompanying the economic boom were social transformations, especially in race-relations and relationships between the sexes.

 pan man Rosalie Ivy; below, transfer car operator Mae Harris; photos by Margaret Bourke-White

All-Out Americans summer camp at Dunes State Park

I showed about 20 Bourke-White photos of Region “Rosies” that were easily accessible on the Internet.  When I first tried to use some of them in “City of the Century” Time/Life wanted an arm and a leg that Indiana Press declined to pay. I followed them with photos depicting activities of the All-Out Americans, Gary students under the supervision of Mark Roser who organized scrap iron drives, Clean Plate campaigns, and other homefront efforts.  Students enjoyed a pin-up photo of U.S. Steel war worker Shirley Anne Franzitta, which she described during a 1992 interview conducted by IUN student William Kehoe:

 I wrote about 17 guys in the service.  I always wrote different letters for each person, all hand-written.  I have pictures of all these guys; one from Oklahoma reminded me of Tarzan. One named Frank thought I was in love with him, so I had to stop writing him.  They all thought I cared for them and wanted to meet me after they got home.  One of the guys, Don Nelson, made a grass skirt and top out of parachute strings.  It must have taken a lot of time.  The skirt was beautiful, and he wanted a picture of me in it.  It wouldn’t go all the way around my waist.  I was a little bit chubbier than what he thought.  I had to have a piece added in.  Everyone I was writing got a picture.  

 The Gary YMCA held USO (United Service Organizations, a military support organization) dances downstairs.  Several of us girls would go and dance or talk to the G.I.s There were no camps around here, so they’d mainly be boys on leave.  If you went to Chicago, you’d find G.Is and sailors especially. There were no silk stockings to buy.  Some girls painted their legs.  If it rained, you had runny legs.  Gas was hard to come by.  If you had a car, you’d go in groups, like to a skating rink in Chesterton; then afterwards we’d go out and eat something and maybe dance to music from a juke box.  We used to have parties at home and play post office.  Aunt Dorothy, who was about 40 years old, used to be post mistress.  She loved the part.  Everyone had a number,  If it was called, you’d go to the post office and be kissed.  Then another number would be called and someone would come in and kiss you.  
  One night at a party a guy pulled me up and we started dancing to “Don’t Wanna Set the World on Fire.”  I just went crazy; I just loved dancing.  Five or six of us from the mill would catch the old Shoreline bus and go to Madura's Danceland by Lever Brothers in Hammond.  Married girls, single girls we all went there and danced. No one went home with anybody unless they would take us all home.  Otherwise we’d come home on the bus.  They served soft drinks at Danceland.  You never drank – well, hardly ever.    

 In those days you just flirted.  I didn’t feel I had to wiggle anything.  Men didn’t expect a kiss on the first date and were lucky to get one.  You knew when was enough.  You did some things but not enough to sweat it out monthly.  You could pet, even heavy pet, but that was it. We kissed with our mouths closed.

I met Shirley when she worked for the Hobart Gazette at a time when the company printed my magazines.  She showed me her World War II scrapbook that contained many priceless photos including a U.S. Steel Halloween party and a mill bowling banquet, as well as the grass skirt pin-up.

Tom Harmon, middle, back row

I showed the class covers of Traces magazines that featured Gary sports heroes Tom Harmon (“Old 98,” the “Galloping Ghost”) and Tony Zale (Gary’s “Man of Steel”).  A four-letterman at Horace Mann, Harmon was a two-time All-American running back at Michigan and then joined the air force.  Shot down over China, he was missing for a month and feared dead until escorted to safety by Chinese villagers who rescued him. Zale became world middleweight champ a year before Pearl Harbor and joined the navy when war came.  With championship prize fights banned, Zale was inactive in the ring during what would have been his peak years physically. Joining the navy, he became a physical education instructor and good will ambassador on war bond drives.  He went on to have three brutal title fights with Rocky Graziano, winning the rubber match that nonetheless took a heavy toll on his health.  In 1949 he retired after a loss to Frenchman Marcel Cerdan. I met him several times in his later years and found him to be charming and self-effacing; in fact his second wife hoped I’d ghost-write his autobiography.  He died in 1997 at age 84.

 Zale knocks down Graziano

I discussed with the class four short readings from Steel Shavings, volume 47, and mentioned that I had no war memories, having been born in 1942. I did relate old friend (and IUN colleague) John Haller’s anecdote about being with his parents on a military base at a service marking war’s end.  His parents, like other adults, bowed their heads in prayer; upon opening their eyes they were horrified to discover that little Johnny had several wads of gum in his mouth that he had discovered under folding chairs.  I ended with a YouTube video of “Ration Blues” by Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five that featured people dancing wild versions of the jitterbug. If I’d had a few more minutes, I’d have shown a cartoon making fun of Hitler for the satirical Spike Jones number “Der Fuhrer’s Face.”  In a recent Jeopardy tournament nobody recognized that he was the band leader of the City Slickers.  Listening to their wacky compositions, such as “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” was my first musical memory. 

Spike Jones

Meanwhile, Trump was in Hanoi, meeting again with Kim Jong Um, fruitlessly it turned out while former “fixer,” Michael Cohen told a Congressional committee headed by Elijah Cummings about dirty deeds undertaken on behalf of the president.  Here is Ray Smock’s reaction:

  The most significant point of Michael Cohen’s 7-hour testimony before the House Government Oversight Committee was that it was in public. It was televised for all to see and its purpose was public education about the president of the United States. Michael Cohen pulled back the curtain on Donald Trump and revealed an ego-driven con man, a racist, and a man who has covered up crimes of one kind or another most of his life.  Many of us concluded this on our own long ago from other evidence. But hearing it from one of Trump’s most trusted lieutenants, a man convicted of crimes of his own making and crimes committed on behalf of President Trump, will be fresh news for millions of Americans who do not follow politics and national affairs closely.

  This is the way we begin to check the president. We begin by shedding light in dark places and letting the American people see for themselves the extent of the damage Trump is doing to the nation and the extent to which he is destroying government institutions and the Republican Party. Whatever comes from the Mueller investigations or the cases underway in the Southern District of New York that are focusing on Trump’s businesses and financial matters, it is important for Congress to help educate the public about matters of vital importance to us all. Today the education began in earnest.

Over the Rainbow

“Someday I'll wish upon a star
Wake up where the clouds are far behind me.
Where trouble melts like lemon drops,
High above the chimney top,
That's where you'll find me.”

         “Over the Rainbow,” E.Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen

Vera (left) and family at Linda birthday celebration, circa 2010

At the wake for their Granma Linda Teague, James and Becca sang “Over the Rainbow” and Linda’s favorite lullaby with Dave accompanying on guitar.  It was very moving.  Linda’s mother Vera Kalberer, 93, who lost husband Tom not long ago, was especially touched.  Sung by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), “Over the Rainbow” was nearly deleted from the film because MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer thought it slowed down the action.  The American Film Institute has ranked it the greatest movie song of all time.

Arlene J. Heward

Michael Katz, son of former Gary mayor A. Martin Katz (1964-1967), donated to the Calumet Regional Archives a framed picture of Horace Mann School that had been in the possession of Arlene J. “Sue” Heward, who recently passed away, showing swans swimming in the nearby man-made lagoon that was ultimately filled in. A 1956 Mann graduate, Heward graduated from IU and went on to a 35-year teaching and coaching career at her high school alma mater.   

A. Martin Katz and Mahalia Jackson in 1963; Katz signs 1965 Civil Rights Ordinance as Cleo Wesson, Jessie Mitchell, Richard Hatcher and Bishop Andrew Grutka look on

Michael Katz reminisced about getting to know the city’s leading political lights.  Due to his relative youth, he was, in his words, a “fly on the wall” when Mayor George Chacharis visited the Katz home on the eve of serving a prison sentence on corruption charges dating to when “ChaCha” was city controller.  Chacharis allegedly told Katz he’d be throwing his support to John Visclosky in the 1963 mayoralty election because he doubted Gary voters would accept a Jewish mayor.  Katz prevailed, but his brave support of a 1965 Civil Rights Ordinance alienated many white residents.  When he ran for re-election against Richard Hatcher, supporters of spoiler Bernard Konrady circulated anti-Semitic flyers in all-white Glen Park neighborhoods.  Michael asserted that his dad never burned political bridges, unlike Mayor Hatcher, whose principles and pride prevented him from being more flexible and forgiving of those who crossed him.  I invited Katz to our next book club meeting since he knows presenter Rich Maroc and World War II buff Lee Christakis.

The series finale of “The Americans,” after six seasons was totally awesome.  An excruciating parking garage confrontation between FBI agent Stan Beeman and Philip, Elizabeth, and Paige Jennings lasted a full 11 minutes; reason prevailed although the entire time Elizabeth was looking for an opening to kill Stan.  One memorable line from Philip to Stan: “I wish you’d have stayed in est.”  Then there was hardly any dialogue during the final segments, as “Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits, U-2’s “With or Without You,” and Tchaikovsky’s “None But the Lonely Heart” provided background music. At a McDonald’s for carry-out, Philip notices a family of four in a booth enjoying their meal. In a shocking and heatbreaking scene, Philip and Elizabeth are about to cross into Canada only to see Paige on the train platform, having made up her mind to stay behind.  In Moscow, Elizabeth, whose real name was Nadezhda, delivers the final line, “We’ll get uses to it,”in Russian. Variety’s Caroline Framke wrote:

  The finale’s subversion of expectations is representative of its sly brilliance. It takes everything we came to know about these characters — their wants, their dreams, their red lines, their darkest shames — and finds a way to make their fates completely wrenching without spilling a single drop of blood.

Mike Hale of the New York Timesput it this way:

The show’sending was happy only in the sense that everyone survived. Death took a holiday, but sadness was everywhere, hanging in the air like the Moscow fog in the final shot. As Elizabeth and Philip fled America, their story felt very Russian.  In scene after scene, we saw characters — often for the last time — sitting down, shell-shocked and silent. Henry in the hockey bleachers, abandoned by his parents. Paige at Claudia’s table, totally alone. Oleg on the floor of his cell and Elina in their apartment, not knowing if they’d ever see each other again. Stan in a chair beside his bed, staring at the wife he’d never be able to trust. Most unbearably, Igor Burov on a bench in a Moscow park, slapping his knees in his helplessness, bereft of a second son.

Son Henry cut short a final parental phone call on the excuse that he needed to get back to a ping pong tournament at his school. When Philip told him he loved him, the 17-year-old thought the Old Man had been drinking.  The scene reminded me of getting a phone call from Vic from the Baltimore airport while I was at Maryland, wondering if I wanted to meet him during a layover.  I told him I was busy, never imagining he’d soon drop dead at age 50 from a heart attack.

In New York Review of Books Garry Wills titled an article on oral historian and fellow Chicagoan Studs Terkel “The Art of the Schmooze,” a perfect description of the consummate conversationalist.  Wills wrote: “I considered him a saint, by the only definition that makes sense to me: a man or woman whose company you leave feeling that you should become a better person.”  Although an agnostic, the broad-minded Terkel appreciated ritual and would encourage religious dinner guests to say grace.

Pat McKinlay sent me a Thank You note for sending her a copy of a recent Steel Shavings that praised her late husband Arch, a Region historian and expert on early Hammond and East Chicago.  She wrote: “Arch appreciated your work and your friendship.”  Perhaps because he was a Republican whose interests were different from mine (he had little use for recent history), I did not embrace him as much as I should have. Studs Terkel would have been more tolerant, realizing he could learn much from Arch.  While living in Miller, he entertained Ron Cohen and me and our wives. Then 20 years later when he and Pat moved from their Miller cottage, he threw a party and invited everyone to leave with a bottle of expensive wine.  Toni was in Michigan but Beth went with me, first insisting I change my socks, which didn’t go with my shorts and shirt.

Monkey Man

    “I hope we’re not too messianic

Or a trifle too satanic

But we love to play the blues.”   

   “Monkey Man,” Rolling Stones

On the 1969 Rolling Stones album “Let It Bleed,” “Monkey Man” was a tribute to Italian pop artist Mario Schifano, whom Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met on the set of Schifaro’s “Umano Non Umano” (“Human, Not Human”).  The Specials, a ska group, recorded a different “Monkey Man” (“Tell you baby, you huggin’ up the big monkey man”), and the Traveling Wilburys put out “Tweeter and the Monkey Man.”  Peter Gabriel had a 1982 hit with “Shock the Monkey.” “Bite the monkey” is slang for giving someone a hickey, usually on the neck.

Samuel A. Love at Gary City Hall, May 2016

In researching his ancestry Samuel A. Love discovered that his great-grandfather was John Barnak, in all probability a Slovenian immigrant who died in Gary during the 1910s and that during the 1920s his grandpa Gus changed his surname from Barnak to Barnett.

IUN retiree William K. Buckley passed on “From the Edge of the Prairie,” a 2005 volume of poetry, short stories, and sketches from the Prairie Writers’ Guild.  In “The Monkey Man Dance” Eileen Kerlin wrote about Jimmy, a repairman from Crown Point whose index finger got stuck in Kerlin’s garage door. When she expressed shock at how it looked, Jimmy said, “Well, this is nothing.  If I had been doing the monkey man dance, then you would have known I was really hurting.”  Then he demonstrated:

    His wiry body mimicked someone being electrocuted.  He put a panicked look on his face, his legs flailed and he pretended that his left hand was caught in something.  He made his body jerk as he yelled through a rounded mouth, “Oooh Oooh, Aaah Aahh! Oooh Oooh, Aaah Aaah!.”

Kerlin concludes:

    Every time I tell this story I laugh.  I describe that little muscled man swinging down from the ladder holding his hand in the air, released from the hinge that flattened his finger like the proverbial pancake.  Then I do the Monkey Man Dance. “Oooh Oooh, Aaah Aahh!”  Some things in life are just plain funny.

Cubs catcher Winston Cabrera took one in the gonads and did a monkey man dance halfway to third base.  In the dugout players were laughing.  Broadcaster Len Kasper noted that one didn’t have to guess where the ball got him.  Sidekick Jim Deshaies added: “Most guys who get hit there just lie down until the pain is less intense.”  

Eileen Kerlin’s “Honey Birch” described being diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer.  The first week she relentlessly stripped and refinished a plethora of kitchen cabinets, singing along to old songs she knew by heart.  Her daughter asked that she wear a “Raquel Welch” wig when friends visited but in time got used to Eileen’s bald look. When she frowned upon learning prior to a stem cell procedure that the cure rate was just 20 percent, the oncologist said, “It’s better than zero.”   Apparently having beaten the odds, Kerlin concluded: “Like my restored honey birch cabinets, my soul feels solid and strong, and I can marvel at my own ability to withstand these tests of time.”

Eileen’s husband Charles Kerlin (above), an English professor at St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, contributed “River Voices,” about Curly, a nine year-old whose summer fun fishing on the river with his Daddy comes to a sudden interruption with news that his parents are splitting and that his mother wants him to stay with an aunt and uncle while she gets a divorce in Reno. Daddy promised to take him fishing on weekends but only did so once  Kerlin, who later expanded the memoir into the book “Fishing’s No Good Without You,” wrote:

Daddy had to quit college to take over the [grain] elevator after grandpa went blind and Uncle George couldn’t make it go [after returning from WW II].

Daddy is shy and quiet.  Before he went to college, though, he went to California with a friend, the two of them alone.  Grandma gave me a picture of him.  He is smiling a cocky smile and wearing a camel-hair blazer and spats, and two-toned, pointy, wing-tipped shoes.  A pretty, young girl is holding on to his arm.

Excerpts from William K. Buckley’s “Lake Diary” appeared in “The Raw Seed Review” (1999).  Here is a summer entry:

So it’s a slate-blue night with clean stars

and clouds rolling to a bright moon – waves high –

loud … against a soft dune in the wind I hold

Darlene   her loneliness brimming full as a

cargo hold, a soft carol in her throat, like dove.

              until we walked in our boots

  to a formal roar and knew this lake

would keep secrets  /like Chicago-lips/

       /Pressed tight on the street/

 Justice William O. Douglas

I knew the Jeopardy answers for the category “Supreme Court,” including the surnames of Felix and Warren that one might serve at a cook-out.  Easy: Frankfurter and Burger.  To my surprise no one knew the name of the longest serving justice, William O. Douglas, despite seeing photos of him when he started his tenure in 1939 and retired in 1975.  In 1970 Jerry Ford tried to have Douglas impeached for writing articles that appeared in magazines the House Minority Leader deemed pornographic.  The grandstanding gimmick went nowhere. 

I watched an HBO documentary on Studs Terkel, who preferred to be called a guerrilla journalist rather than an oral historian.  Like Kurt Vonnegut, he died shortly after falling down a flight of steps.  His epitaph: "Curiosity didn't kill this cat."  When a school board attempted to ban his book "Working" from a high school curriculum, Terkel attended an open meeting and said he'd like to interview a critic to find out what makes her go through books looking for so-called dirty words.  Studs claimed he got the idea for "Working" from a Richard Scarry's children's book.  

A record number of travelers are flooding American airports despite the threat of a terror attack following a massacre at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul.  I fear the country is one such disaster away from boosting Trump's chances.                   (cartoon from Jim Spicer)