Love and Mercy

   “I was standin' in a bar and watchin' all the people there
Oh the loneliness in this world well it's just not fair

Hey love and mercy that's what you need tonight
So, love and mercy to you and your friends tonight”

    Brian Wilson, “Love and Mercy” 

The 2014 movie “Love and Mercy” about musical genius Brian Wilson’s struggles with mental illness starred John Cusack and Paul Dano, both portraying the Beach Boys troubled leader, with Paul Giamatti as Wilson’s tyrannical quack therapist. The flashbacks centers on the making of “Pet Sounds” (1966) after Wilson ceased touring with the band, which cousin Mike Love ridiculed as not having the Beach Boys sound.  Love had a point, but it was unrealistic to expect Wilson to write about being true to your school, long for surfer girls or ruminate about when he grew up to be a man. More realistic was “In My Room,” where “I lock out all my worries and my fears” – in fact, for several years to come Wilson would largely confine himself to his bedroom.  “Sloop John B” has the old Beach Boys sound but ends: “I want to go home, why don’t you let me go home.” “Pet Sounds” was a commercial failure in the U.S. but hailed in Europe. The track “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is one of my favorite songs and describes an ideal world where we could “live together in the kind of worlds where we belong”  -  a pipe dream in the Chinese sense of the word. Two decades later, Wilson meets his future wife, who helps him on the road toward getting his life back again.  As credits roll, there’s a concert performance of Wilson singing “Love and Mercy,” first recorded in 1988, which bemoans violence and pain in the world.  Bono called it “one of the great songs ever written.”   

At bridge Dee Browne and I finished with a 61.81 percent, normally enough to win, but George and Sally Will scored 67.36.  We took two high boards from them or they’d have had a rare 70 percent game.  On the other hand, Lila Cohen and Pam Missman, who finished third, cleaned our clock or we’d have prevailed. Terry Brendel spoke of meeting his wife of 50-plus years at a Purdue computer dance.  The date Terry got matched up with didn’t show and Terry’s wife information wasn’t  computed, so  he took the initiative upon spotting her.  

Bowling opponent Ami Luedke recently retired after delivering mail for 40 years in New Chicago and Hobart.  We took two games from Dorothy’s Darlings; I rolled a 189 in the second one.  Then they got hot, but we held on for series.  Gene Clifford intends to drive to New York City with Dorothy Peterson to visit the maritime history museum by the Hudson River to see the USS Intrepid, a navy aircraft carrier that his brother served on during World War II.  Commissioned in August 1943, the Intrepid participated in several Pacific Theater operations, including the Battle of Leyte Gulf. After being torpedoed and hit by four kamikaze planes, crew members nicknamed it the Decrepit.  Prior to being decommissioned in 1974, the Intrepid participated in rescue procedures for the Gemini 3 crew and several Vietnam deployments. 

Dave and Nicole; below, Traymon Ray

Toni and I were Dave’s special guests at two East Chicago Central Black History Month back-to-back programs, which he coordinated with the assistance of women’s basketball coach Nicole Ford-Moore and teacher Aaron Duncil, the latter, like Dave, mentored by John Bodnar at Portage High School.  When Taymon Ray and Arceli Timajero sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the “Negro National Anthem,” I turned to see if students were standing, as often happens at Gary events. Poetry selections, chosen by Dave, included Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again” and “What If I Am a Black Woman?” by an unknown author. The first show featured African dance (I recognized Taymon Ray from ”Lift Every Voice”) and hip hop in the second hour.  Dave played guitar with students A. Silvas, J. Gutierrez, and K. Sparks on numbers by the Temptations and Bill Withers that he selected and for the finale sang “Johnny B. Goode,” complete with Chuck Berry’s trademark strut, breaking a guitar string in the process but carrying on as if nothing were amiss.  I needlessly worried the broken string would hit him in the face.  In the program he thanked Toni and me for our support, as well as numerous colleagues, Malcolm X, and Randall P. McMurtry of Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” played by Jack Nicholson in the film.  Afterwards, we chatted with School Superintendent Dee-Etta Wright, whom I had met last summer at James’s graduation party.

EC Central students & chaperones

The night before, Dave had chaperoned a school trip to the Chicago Bears training facility.  Friday evening, he participated in a “Dancing with the Stars” fundraiser.  We had planned to watch James’s former teammates bowl next morning and then have lunch at Culver’s like old times, but Daveput it off a week because he was exhausted after three school events within 28 hours. 

At Chesterton library I picked up a double-CD of classic rock selections; most I hear as much as I want to on the radio; but it included, incongruously, Don McLean’s “American Pie,” which I plan to mention during my Munster talk on Rock and Roll, 1960 next week in reference to the plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper (“the day the music died,” as McLean put it). Other tracks that attracted me were the Allman Brothers Band’s “Midnight Rider” (bringing back ancient memories of getting high with late-great artist Larry Kaufman) and “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart (ubiquitous emanating from boom boxes on Wells Street Beach in the early Seventies with the pungent smell of coconut tanning oil in the air).

Tara Westover’s memoir “Educated” didn’t get less traumatic once she enrolled at BYU in Salt Lake City; family crises kept pulling her back into dangerous and humiliating situations that left her badly in need of therapy, as her bipolar father judged her to be a menace in need of redemption for straying from Mormon practices and not submitting to his complete domination.  I started Charles Kuralt’s autobiography, “A Life on the Road” (1990), which contained anecdotes from when he and his CBS Sunday Morning crew logged more than a million miles “on the road.” For example, in Dillon, Montana, he asked a barber sweeping the floor: “Are you free?” “Nope,” was the reply, “I charge seven dollars.” On an Iowa truck stop men’s room prophylactic machine was scratched: “This gum tastes like rubber.” A wizened North Dakota farmer married over 40 years told Kuralt: “Kissing don’t last, but good cooking does.” Roger Welsch explained that the wind blew so hard on the Great Plains that farmers didn’t need weathervanes, “They just look out the window to see which way the barn is leaning.”

Kate Elizabeth Russell received a million-dollar advance for her debut novel, “My Dark Vanessa,” about a high school student’s affair with an English teacher.  When Kate began writing 20 years ago, she thought of it as a romance.  Three years earlier, she had been at dinner with Wallflowers front man Jakob Dylon (her dad was a local deejay) and learned that his favorite book was Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.  She found a copy and for years was attracted to much older men.  When the Me Too movement arose, Kate reread Lolita and realized the exploitative nature of many such relationships.  Nabokov himself told a Paris interviewer who found the protagonist “touching: “Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear ‘touching.”  To New York magazine writer Lila Shapiro, Russell pointed out this passage from Lolita after Humbert first seduced his 12-year-old prey:

    Humbert fantasizes about painting a lavish mural to depict what happened in the hotel room. “There would have been a lake.  There would have been an arbor in flame-flower.  There would have been nature studies – a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat . . . There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday.  There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging, red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

Russell explained: “It’s just gorgeous prose and then the last image of a wincing child.  It’s so easy to skim over.”  How I wish I could discuss Lolita with former IUN English professor George Bodmer, once a good friend, who assigned the book in an upper division course but stopped speaking to me over a university matter.

In researching the history of Gary Roosevelt for a Post-Tribune feature, Carole Carlson discovered that its origins stemmed from the aftermath to the infamous 1927 Emerson School Strike.  After Superintendent William A. Wirt transferred 14 honors students seeking college prep courses from the non-accredited Virginia Street School, approximately half the white students boycotted classes.  The Gary school board subsequently voted to oust both the newly enrolled students and several African-Americans living in the Emerson neighborhood who had already been at the school.  The NAACP represented three students who protested their dismissal, but both local judge Grant Crumpacker and the Indiana Supreme Court ruled against them. Carlson consulted my “City of the Century” as well as publications by historian Ronald Cohen and Dolly Millender, plus interviewed DeLynne Exum, the granddaughter of ousted student Hazel Bratton, and Vernon Smith, the son of victim Julia Allen.  While some classmates traveled to Chicago to continue their education, Smith said that his mother never finished her schooling: “They were spit on, pushed, and called the “N’ word. We always tried to get her to go to night school, but she began a family.  I think the pain [of what happened] continued until death.” How awful.  

Before her death in 2009 at age 96 Hazel Bratton Sanders told a Post-Trib reporter:

    The white students would line upon both sides of the sidewalk and stretch their arms over us.  We had to walk under them like under an arch.  They yelled out, “Go away, darkies.  This isn’t your school.”

Granddaughter DeLynne Exum told Carlson: “It was the indignity of how they were dismissed.  It was inhumane.  These were bright students.  It traumatized her.  When she was dying, she had nightmares of going through that gauntlet; she would relive it.”

above, Laura Gorski & Jeremiah Mellen; below, Reagan Smedley, Gorski, Luke Housman, photo by Ray Gapinski

Toni and I saw the final, sold-out performance of “Mary Poppins” at Memorial Opera House with the Hagelbergs, followed by dinner at Pesto’s.  As always, the production was well done with an excellent cast that included several familiar actors, including Jeremiah Mellen (Quasimoto in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) as chimneysweep Bert, Thomas Olsen as the policeman, and talented seventh grader Reagan Smedley (Susan Waverly in “White Christmas”) as Jane Banks. In the program Smedley revealed that when not on stage she enjoys singing, playing the piano, and hanging out with her friends – and added that now, given that major role, she can cross playing Jane Banks off her bucket list.  When we first saw Reagan on stage, she’d to sob at the final performance curtain call. It was touching watching her bravely fighting to smile and hold back the tears.

Darrow & Bryan, below, Fats Waller

Nicole Anslover invited me to her class on the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial.  She first explained the rise of rural-urban tensions during the 1920s and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.  I brought out how strong the KKK became in Indiana, especially in small towns such as Crown Point and Valparaiso, and that it was anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, not just anti-black.  After she noted that the ACLU sought a test case and described what transpired in the aftermath of the Tennessee legislature passing a law forbidding the teaching of evolution, I noted that the 1920s being an age of urban boosterism, Dayton, Tennessee, business leaders hoped to draw large crowds  that would put Dayton on the map.  Crowds came, but the publicity wasn’t exactly what the city fathers had hoped for.  This was the heyday of daily newspapers whose publishers loved lengthy trials, continuing sagas that could be hyped over days and weeks.  Students gave brief reports on Harlem Renaissance celebrities Cab Calloway (a Cotton Club bandleader who wore zoot suits), Fats Waller (we were treated to a YouTube of “Honeysuckle Rose”), and Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, who played trumpet in Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago before moving on to Harlem.

Near our condo a car bore a license plate beginning with a 3-digit number ending in zero followed by ORV. It sure looked like ORGY.  Dave and Angie refused a plate ending in NRA, the initials of the National Rifle Association.

Educated

“I believe, finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience: that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing,” John Dewey

At bridge in Valpo Vickie Voller and I finished in a tie for first with Dee Browne and Sharon Snyder.  Opponent Jim Bell sometimes bangs on the table when he’s uncertain what to bid.  Vickie jokingly asked if he was signaling to partner Fred Green.  On the final hand Fred opened 4 Diamonds; after two passes I bid 4 Hearts.  Jim raised to 5 Diamonds and I doubled.  We set them 2 vulnerable for 500 points and high board.

 Tara Westover at Cambridge U., 2018

Lila Cohen loaned me Tara Westover’s “Educated: A Memoir,” a 2016 best-seller that she had reported on at her AAUW book club. It’s a harrowing coming-of-age account of breaking away from Mormon survivalists in southeastern Idaho and, specifically, a paranoid, despotic father preparing for the end of the world, who kept Tara from attending school or seeking medical help when needed.  New York Times reviewer Alec MacGillis wrote:

    She learned to read from the Bible, the Book of Mormon and the speeches of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The only science book in the house was for young children, full of glossy illustrations. The bulk of her time was spent helping her parents at work. Barely into her teens, Westover graduated from helping her mom mix remedies and birth babies to sorting scrap with her dad, who had the unnerving habit of inadvertently hitting her with pieces he’d tossed.

In the Prologue Westover introduces herself:

    I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn.  The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt.  The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling.  On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping.  I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.  We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom.

Emboldened by the example of a brother, who read whatever books he could lay his hands on and left for college, Tara did well enough on an ACT test to be admitted to Brigham Young at age 16.  MacGillis wrote:

    There, she is shocked by the profane habits of her classmates, like the roommate who wears pink plush pajamas with “Juicy” emblazoned on the rear, and in turn shocks her classmates with her ignorance, never more so than when she asks blithely in art history class what the Holocaust was. (Other new discoveries for her: Napoleon, Martin Luther King Jr., the fact that Europe is not a country.) Such excruciating moments do not keep professors from recognizing her talent and voracious hunger to learn; soon enough, she’s off to a fellowship at Cambridge University, where a renowned professor — a Holocaust expert, no less — can’t help exclaiming when he meets her: “How marvelous. It’s as if I’ve stepped into Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion.’”

 The 1913 George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion was the inspiration for My Fair Lady. 

Miller's Sullivan St. lakefront illustrating beach erosion and mild winter, by Paul Kaczocha

Bob Seeger’s “Roll Me Away” came on the car radio and I just had to turn the volume way up and sing along.  On the surface it’s such a celebratory “on the road” anthem that the wistful final verse, not unusual in Seeger compositions, always comes as a sobering reality:

I'm gonna roll me away tonight
Gotta keep rollin', gotta keep ridin'
Keep searchin' till I find what's right
And as the sunset faded I spoke
To the faintest first starlight
And I said next time
Next time
We'll get it right

I attended Valparaiso University professor Allison Schuette’s interactive workshop at IUN sponsored by the Center for Urban and Regional Excellence (CURE) and titled “Flight Paths: Mapping our Changing Neighborhoods.”  Allison acknowledged my participation in the Indiana Humanities project and since the featured interactive map was on Gary’s Tolleston neighborhood, she passed out a brief history of Tolleston that I had written for Flight Paths. Allison played excerpts of interviews with three people who grew up in Tolleston.  One man described the ethnic mix prior to the 1960s as a blend of Slovak, Polish, Czech, and German.  His father had black friends; when he drafted Jimmy Scott, a black kid, for his Little League team, people phoned to complain and called him a “nigger lover.”  He recalled:

    Realtors would come into a neighborhood, say to the whites, “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 for quite a while these white 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 or these issues; 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 antisocial, and they were a people that just didn’t understand the needs of the white person.

    When we watched on television the funeral of Martin Luther King, my uncles in particular would say, “Oh, man, we can’t have this, what is going on here? What’s happening to our society?” All they saw was the violence. They did not see the peace. They did not see the change. And the violence, they thought, was going to be widespread. It was going to come into Gary.

And I guess the whole idea of being in the same neighborhood, in the same church, in the same organization with black people was just something that they could not understand or tolerate.

When Karen Freeman-Wilson’s parents moved to Tolleston, it was rapidly becoming a black neighborhood, due to white flight.  Her father was a steelworker and her mother worked for Neighborhood Settlement House, which became Gary Neighborhood Services.  The building housed recent migrants from the South and helped integrate them into the community.  It also offered child day care and activities for teenagers and seniors. Freeman-Wilson recalled:

  I was a 4-H member there. We had a very vibrant program. I learned how to cook and to sew.  I can probably still do a pretty good hem with a sewing machine, and I still slipstitch.  We skated on a floor that was really wobbly, but it made you a good skater.  When you went to a real nice rink, you were a pro because if you could make it through the wobbles and the buckles in the floor at the neighborhood House, you could skate anywhere.

Councilwoman Mary Brown praised the resilience of Tolleston residents:

Just look around at people in my community. Retired doctors, retired teachers, retired professionals who have stayed. They’ve continued to pay taxes and pay into the city because they still believe that we can come back. They believe in the city and believe that it can work.

To illustrate Tolleston’s rapid racial transformation, Allison opened a section on St. John’s Lutheran Church, which predated the Gary’s founding by a half-century.  In 1962 Reverend Norman Brandt became pastor and visited the homes of new African-American residents, urging them to come to St. John’s.  A succession of church confirmation photos dramatically illustrated the rapid transition from all-white to all-black.  Reverend Brandt founded an alternative school in Glen Park that Phil and Dave attended for six years.  Rebecca Brandt was a classmate, as were good friends Clark and Gloria Metz’s girls.

(left; below, confirmation classes: 1962, 1964 & 1974) 

The large crowd included IUN colleagues Joseph Gomeztagle, Kathy Arfken, Lanette Mullin-Gonzales, Chris Young (with son Robert), Ellen Szarleta, Suzanne Green, Sue Zinner (with students from her Ethics class, including Munster clerk/treasurer Wendy Mis), Kay Westhues (from IU South Bend), and people from the community.  Allison posed questions that prompted small group discussions.  When the entire group shared insights, I remained quiet except to note the redlining by banks and government agencies not only prevented minorities from owning homes but also discriminated against black entrepreneurs.  African Americans in the audience shared experiences of growing up in segregated neighborhoods and encountering institutional racism.

Seeking more information about St. John’s Lutheran Church on Google led me to Michelle McGill-Vargas’s website, where I was cited in an article about Gary during the Prohibition era.  McGill-Vargas wrote:

    James Lane’s City of the Century led me to real-life gangster Gasperi (or Gaspari) Monti who ruled the city’s Little Italy section until his violent death in 1923. According to local newspaper reports, Monti is best known as the government’s star witness in a corruption case against more than sixty judges, prosecutors, policemen, and even then-Gary mayor Roswell Johnson, all for violating Prohibition laws. At the time, the Gary Police Department had a special enforcement arm called the Sponge Squad that arrested bootleggers, and then would sell liquor confiscated in the arrests to line their pockets and the pockets of everyone else up the law enforcement chain in Lake County. Monti made a deal with federal prosecutors to expose the corruption, but was gunned down in broad daylight by two unknown assailants on March 13, 1923, just days before he was scheduled to testify.

    Monti was no stranger to violence and attempts on his life. In 1922, he’d been shot through the mouth by a man who’d shot him a year prior. He owned and operated the Black and Tan Club in the 1700 block of Adams Street where shooting deaths were commonplace. Even Monti’s wife, Mary, was into the rackets. After her husband was killed, police found illegal liquor and several pounds of explosives in her home.

So-called “Black and Tan” establishments were saloons where African-American and Caucasian clientele intermingled. Scandalous to blue-blood Northsiders, the Gary “dive” was known for “debauched” activities such as interracial dancing and prostitution.

On a mute TV screen at Hobart Lanes was an ad for Lawless Auto Repair in Valpo.  Love the name.  Terry Kegebein will be attending a sixth family funeral within a year.  Since the price of obits in local newspapers has skyrocketed, many only use funeral home websites.  My great-aunt Ida Gordon, who lived with us when I was growing up, subscribed to the Easton (PA) Express for the obits about people she may have known.  I scan obits for personages of local significance or that illustrate Gary’s former ethnic diversity.  For example, from February 20 obits in the NWI Times I learned that Alice Geraldine Kiefer, 82, worked at USS Gary Sheet and Tin, met husband Carl at the Midway Ballroom, and the two were married at Holy Angels.  Robert Joseph, 96, played tackle for Gary Emerson and at IU, was a member of the 1945 Big Ten champions, and met wife Mabel at Calumet High School, where he taught for many years and founded its football team.  Here’s an excerpt from the obit for Mihailo Kostur, 77, like Robert Joseph a Gary Emerson grad:

    Mihailo was born in Vrlika Dalmatia Croatia.  He immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 15.  He worked as an operator for Arcelor Mittal for37 years. Mihailo enjoyed being outdoors, gardening playing bocce ball, many different card games, making homemade wine following Serbian traditions, and spending time with his grandchildren. Mihailo was a member of St. Elijah Cathedral in Merrillville as well as the Chetnik organization.  He was preceded in death by parents Bozo and Andja Kostur.

Historian Jerry Pierce found a humorous cartoon on Facebook, and Ray Gapinski posted photos of an abandoned asylum near Terre Haute. Larry Bean, who like wife Cindy pseeks out historic ruins, responded, “Looks like it’s worth the trip.”

Keep on Truckin'

Trucker: “Are you a man?”

Dana Rose Gropp: “I used to be.”

         above, Anne Balay by Riva Lehrer; below, Dana Rose Gropp

Jerry Davich wrote a front-page Post-Trib column praising Anne Balay’s forthcoming book“Semi Queer: Inside the Lives of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers.”  Anne put him in contact with Dana Rose Gropp, a transgender woman and co-founder of Rainbow Wisdom Circle who came out three years ago. Anne told Davich that trucking can provide opportunities for safety, a welcomed isolation, and a chance for those discriminated against in their communities to be themselves, even though the work is fraught with regulations, constant surveillance, danger, and exploitation.  “Though it’s dirty, underpaid, and at times demeaning,”Balay wrote,“there's some magic in trucking – such as time alone to think and the feeling of being useful – that fits queer and trans people really well.” 

Underground comic artist Robert Crumb’s “Keep on Truckin’” drawing of men strutting confidently became a famous pop culture hippie image, found, usually without Crumb’s consent, on t-shirts, posters, and eventually mudflaps of truckers themselves, much to the discomfort of the creator, who called it “the curse of my life.”  In “The R. Crumb Handbook” (2005) he wrote: “I didn't want to turn into a greeting card artist for the counter-culture!  When I started to let out all of my perverse sex fantasies, it was the only way out of being ‘America's Best Loved Hippy Cartoonist.’”  

 above, Becca and parents in Wisconsin; below, Liam, James, Andrew, Kaiden

Grandson James and friends Andrew and Liam stayed overnight at the condo as David and Angie took Becca to a music camp in Wisconsin.  Andrew’s dad, John English, dropped the three of them off after they spent a few hours at Porter County Fair.  Liam had won a hermit crab that was in a tiny container.  PETA has decried using hermit crabs as prizes and has successfully put pressure on fairs in Michigan to cease the practice but apparently has failed to achieve similar results in Indiana. In nature the crabs live in colonies, shun human contact, and can live up to 40 years; in captivity they are doomed to a short, horrific life. I made sure Liam didn’t leave the crab behind, but he did forget his 21 Pilots hoodie and leftover food from Culver’s, which James ate for dinner.

After cooking pancakes and kielbasa, I took the teens bowling at Inman’s.  Because they are in a Saturday league, they were entitled to two free games.  The guy behind the counter ignored this information and, calculating four of us at two dollars a game, said, “That’ll be 16 dollars.”  When I questioned this, he asked to see their league cards.  James found his in his wallet and while Andrew was looking for his, the guy said, “OK, four dollars.”  I told Andrew he could stop his search, that the fellow trusted us.  Afterwards, while we had lunch at Culver’s, the three of them filled me in on the premise of The Incrediblesand the special powers of each family member.  

Despite playing solid golf, Tiger Woods finished two strokes behind the British Open winner, Italian Francesco Molinari, who ended the weekend without a single bogie on the final 36 holes.  Tiger, on the other hand, took a double bogie due to a foolish attempt to rebound from a poor shot instead of playing it safe. I commiserated about Tiger by phone with the Logans in California and asked Gaard what she’s currently reading. She highly recommended “Educated” by Tara Westover, a coming-of-age memoir by an indomitable young woman home-schooled in the foothills of Buck’s Peak, Idaho by Mormon survivalists who forbade television, radio, telephones or doctor’s visits.  Atlanticreviewer Ann Hulbert wrote: “Baffled, inspired, tenaciously patient with her ignorance, she taught herself enough to take the ACT and enter Brigham Young University at 17.  She went on to Cambridge University for a doctorate in history.”

 Tara Westover

I am close to finishing Ricard Russo’s “Bridge of Sighs” and trying hard not to rush through the final 60 pages.  Sarah and Bobby are teen soulmates but end up marrying others, in Sarah’s case, Bobby’s best friend Lou Lynch.  The novel reminds me of Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth” (1905), whose two main characters, Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden, are attracted to each other but, bound by the social conventions of their time and class, do not act on their mutual attraction.  Many years later, expressing a hint of regret in a letter to Bobby, Sarah wrote: “Don’t even the best and most fortunate of lives hint of other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too?  Isn’t this why we can’t help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven’t been?”

IU Kokomo emeritus professor Jack Tharp is working on a history of IU’s branch campuses and, having perused Paul Kern and my history of IU Northwest, “Educating the Calumet Region” (Steel Shavings, volume 35, 2004) requested clarification about the relationship between IU’s Calumet Center in East Chicago and Gary Extension.  In particular, he wondered about the years between 1932 and 1948 when Gary College was in existence. I replied with the caveat that it had been 15 years since we had researched the topic and that Kern wrote most of the text while I concentrated on oral histories.  I suggested he consult Ronald D. Cohen’s “Children of the Mill: Schooling and Society in Gary, Indiana, 1906-1960” (1990), which states that IU extension classes in Gary started in 1921 and that a full, two-year program commenced in September 1923. When Gary College was launched in 1932, with night-school director Albert Fertsch heading the program, it shared space with the IU extension program; extension classes were still being taught in 1935, probably as dual credit with Gary College, and perhaps until IU established the Calumet Center in 1939.  Thus, I wouldn’t say IU and Gary College were competitors but rather served each other’s purposes since some Gary College students eventually went to Bloomington. Cohen wrote that in 1948 “the drain on school resources and personnel prompted Gary’s school board to invite Indiana University to return to the city. Gary College merged with the university the following June, and in late 1950 it finally dissolved.”  As to when the Calumet and Gary centers merged into a single entity, I told Tharp I didn’t know the exact date but that when I arrived in 1970, a few classes were still being taught in East Chicago but were apparently being phased out, with IU Northwest and Purdue Calumet both expanding in Gary and Hammond.

Toni arrived home from the Shakespeare Festival in Canada bushed after the ten-hour road trip.  I had just consumed a turkey and mashed potatoes meal and sliced cucumbers she’d left me and went off to a condo owners meeting. President Sandy Carlson moved things along nicely. I was home within the hour and finished “Bridge of Sighs.”  Lou finally revealed the probable cause of his only high school friend David’s suicide:

  David and I took turns walking each other home.  One Friday after the dance, we went to David’s house, and there in the dark driveway he shocked me by kissing me full on the lips, then hurrying inside.  The next day, after a movie he walked me home and did it again, this time in broad daylight, right in front of my house.  I remember thinking my father was across the street watching, and so I shoved David away and told him I didn’t want to be friends anymore.  I can still see the look on his face.

Lou then has this epiphany:

  David was just a boy.  He was frightened to be in a strange new place and terribly grateful I’d befriended him. He felt about me like I’d once felt about Bobby.  “Adoration” is probably not too strong a word to describe that heady mingling of intense affection and dependence.  Back when we were friends, I’d wantedto kiss Bobby.  I had. I’d known it wasn’t permitted, but what, I thought, was so wrong about it?

"Bridge of Sighs" author Richard Russo