Elsewhere

"The mechanism of human destiny – that intricate weave of chance and fate and free will, as distinctly individual as a fingerprint - is surely meant to remain life’s central mystery, to resist transparency, to make blame a dangerous and unsatisfactory exercise.” Richard Russo, “Elsewhere”

“Elsewhere” is a memoir about the relationship between favorite author Richard Russo and his mother, Jean, who sought to escape the upstate mill town of Gloversville and lived either with him or nearby her entire life.  By turns hilarious and sad, the book contains events and personality traits similar doings and characters found in Russo’s novels.  Taking away his mother’s huge pill supply while she was in the hospital, Russo felt “like the parent who’d disposed of the weed he discovered in the back of his kid’s closet.” After his mother dies and her ashes are scattered at sea, Russo belatedly realizes that she exhibited the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and that he was not so different from her as he once imagined.  Fortunately, Russo’s adult compulsion – fiction writing - enabled him to make a comfortable living.

Russo wrote that, unlike many university-trained novelists, he valued plot, paid attention to pacing, and had little tolerance for literary pretention. His literary references- to Kafkaesque nightmares, Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic, Jim Thompson’s crime fiction characters helpless in the grip of relentless forces, Melville’s Bartleby saying, “I prefer not to” – are easily grasped. And, finally, as per Thomas Wolfe’s acknowledgement, Russo realized that he couldn’t go home again, not even for Jean’s family memorial service.  He described his final sighting of the house on Helwig Street where he grew up:

    The hazardously sloping back porches, up and down, had been amputated, and nobody had even bothered to paint over the scars. The back door I was in and out of a hundred times a day as a boy now opened into thin air, a four-foot drop to a rectangle of hard brown earth that the house’s new owner couldn’t be bothered to seed.  After that, I no longer had the heart, or maybe the stomach, to bear witness, so strong was my sense of personal failure.

I enjoyed returning to my home town of Fort Washington every five years or so, when best friend Terry Jenkins and I would retrace neighborhood haunts. For many years our old homesteads were in decline.  In my case a German couple whom I expected would be model owners took more interest in building a second home in the Poconos.  Once, Terry talked them into letting us inside; the rooms seemed smaller and shabby, and I spotted a photo of some relative, surely, in a Nazi uniform.  On our last tour new owners had spruced up the lawn and garden, painted the side fence and garage, and left the magnolia and Japanese trees in their full splendor.  The Jenkins estate now had two houses on it, but we copped an invitation to come inside the 150-year-old original (at least as far as the first floor) and were impressed with the new décor with several doors removed and the screened-in porch now the main family room. Terry recalled that his old man had arranged for one screen door to face out and the other in so their collie, Taffy, could exit and enter at her pleasure.

Many former Gary residents share Russo’s reluctance to visit the neighborhoods of their youth, at some point having become determined to live elsewhere.  That was not the case with former Catholic priest and longtime Gary teacher John Sheehan, who nonetheless wrote a volume of poems titled “Elsewhere, Indiana” (1990).  The title poem goes:

Gary
a tenuous misshapen T

gerrymandered for planners

who live elsewhere

your streets torn up by heavy trucks

that make money for peopl

who live elsewhere

your “urban renewal”

twenty years old

only just begun

high-paid planners

mostly gone elsewhere

profits gone elsewhere

ain’t nobody here to say

enough money where their mouth is

how you can really be

a good place to live

for those who can’t very easily

go no elsewhere

         except maybe somewhere even worse

than this here where


like high-rise Chicago
one thing Gary
your kids growing up
if they can dodge bullets
that enrich profiteers
elsewhere
can look out their windows
and walk out their doors
to somewhere

Gary, Indiana
where
in spite of mammoth trucks
bisecting tri-state expressway
and abandoned buildings
they can see trees and squirrels and birds
and every manner of God-given beauty
in the trash-lined dunes and swamplands
 
but they can’t see the lake
unless they get out to Miller
and it’s hard to find the river too. 

Ray Smock responded: “Gary's story is the story of American exploitation and capitalist greed.  Far too many places in this country are just like Elsewhere, Indiana. The whole damn country is Elsewhere."

Muralist Felix “Flex” Maldonado described a labor of love in honor of the Region first responders that now exists in Gary’s Miller beach neighborhood:

    10 days.. 10 days of scorching sun, sweating so profusely it burned eyes while i painted, sweaty masks, ankle breaking rocks, rain storms disrupting my flow, mosquitos biting so bad i couldn’t stand it.... but i carried on because, knowing all this, i knew i would finish one day.... but not for these individuals who CHOOSE to struggle through worse conditions EVERYDAY.. This mural is a tribute to ALL first responders who put their lives on the line so we can try and live a little better life- my “heroes”, as I like to call them... i dedicate this one to you.

    Thank you Pat and Karen Lee, of Lee Companies for allowing me to bring this long awaited vision to life. you have made the community and this world a better place...

    if you see a first responder, tell em “FLEX” said “thank you”.. @ Miller Beach Indiana

Squeeze Inn

“The hourglass has no more grains of sand 

Little red grains of sand

My watch has stopped no more turning hands

Little green neon hands”

    “Hourglass,” Squeeze

Steve Spicer posted a photo of a century-old cottage at Miller Beach known as Squeeze Inn that Chicagoans used in the summer. “When the original Squeeze Inn was cobbled together is unknown,” Spicer wrote, “but it was located somewhere between the mouth of the Grand Calumet, quite possibly where the Aquatorium is today.” When the City of Gary began developing Marquette Park, the building was ordered razed, but a sorority purchased a lot further east for 500 dollars and a New Squeeze Inn opened on July 4, 1921. Spicer found a hundred-year-old article by Edith Heilman in the Forest Park Review, written upon returning from chaperoning sorority sisters for two weeks during the final summer of the original shack’s existence.  Here is an excerpt, thanks to Miller historian Spicer:

 “Squeeze Inn,” in cold, geographical terms, is a shack-and-porch a mile from Millers Beach, Millers, Ind.

Practically speaking, it’s a little bit of heaven dropped from out the skies. Sunny days and star dotted nights and the lake breeze make it so. Sand flies and a giant species of mosquito are the rift in the lute. But let us dismiss them!

As before stated, they call this place “Squeeze Inn.” But whoever presided over the christening rites missed his guess. It should have been called “Squeeze Out!” We are heaps more out than in, and some of us bubble over even from off the porch and sleep on the sand with the stars for our canopy.

Picture if you can a shack 18 by 10 feet with a complement of a porch 18 by 18 feet; porch bigger than the house, you will note. The house proper holds cooking utensils and clothing and at present is so crammed with both that a human being hasn’t room to more than wiggle into and out of her bathing suit.

The cooking is done out of doors on an improvised stove, and I want to say right here that if you are finicky or “set” in your ways, stay away from the “Squeeze Inn!” Sand and charcoal is the basis of most of the menus, but what cares youth for such trifles?

And the girls themselves! Tall, short, black heads and blond – with a charming red head thrown in for spice! And when they all line up in their gayly colored bathing suits they’re a sight for sore eyes.

Fifty weeks out of the year they are stenographers, bookkeepers and general office girls. Out here for two carefree weeks that are Dryads of the Woods and Belles of the Beach!

Spicer discovered that the origin of the unofficial sorority Tau Omega Tau Sigma (TOTS) was an organization the young women joined during World War I, the Girls Patriotic Service League and that Edith Heilman had been their sponsor. The TOTS girls, as they called themselves, and their families used the second Squeeze Inn until the 1950s.

 

Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb, the main places to vacation were the Jersey shore and the Poconos. My parents preferred the Poconos; and after two bad experiences using a tent began renting a cabin at Lake Minneola along with the Jenkins family. It wasn’t a shack, but it was not very luxurious either. What I recall most vividly was the open porch where we’d play cards and flypaper hanging up to which were attached its victims. Most of our excursions to the shore were day trips, but after my freshman year at Bucknell, my fraternity rented a place for a week that became as crowded as Squeeze Inn. I recall sleeping on a couch with a coed I had met earlier in the day. We were both pretty drunk and didn’t do any heavy petting. I saw her once after that but otherwise we went our separate ways.

 

In “Rabbit at Rest” Harry drove by his childhood neighborhood (something Terry Jenkins and I did the last time we were together) and recalled his bedroom, with tinker toys, rubber soldiers, lead airplanes, and stuffed teddy bears lined up on a shelf. I shared a bedroom with my younger brother and recall that on one shelf were adventure books on cowboys and the wild west by someone with the strange name of Holling C. Holling. We also had numerous board games, including Parcheesi and Chutes and Ladders, and sometimes we’d combine them so you’d have to have your tokens go onto the second one after completing the route on the first.  Updike wrote:

 On the radio Harry hears that Mike Schmidt, who exactly two years ago, on April 18, 1987, slugged his five hundredth home rum against the Pittsburgh Pirates, is closing in on Richie Ashburn’s total of 2,217 hits to become the hittingest Phillie ever. Rabbit remembers Ashburn.  One of the 1950 Whiz Kids who beat the Dodgers the fall Rabbit became a high school senior.  Curt Simmons, Del Ennis, Dick Sisler, Andy Seminick behind the plate.  Beat the Dodgers the last game of the season, then lost to the Yankees four straight.

I was in third grade when the Phillies played the Yankees in the 1950 World Series. The games took place in the afternoon, and Miss Worthington let us listen to them on the radio.  My dad had tickets for game 5, which never took place because the Yankees swept all four games.  I watched the final one on a Saturday at the Jenkins house; we didn’t have a TV until a year later.

 

Final Jeopardy in one of the college tournament semi-final rounds was impossibly hard.  The category was Presidential geography and the clue was, birth place of a nineteenth-century president named for another president.  All three contestants wrote Lincoln, Nebraska, but the answer was Cleveland, where James Garfield is buried.  The two leading players bet almost everything, enabling someone far behind them to win.  An IU student also made the finals.

 

Chancellor Bill Lowe announced that there would be no annual “Years of Service” luncheon due to the university being closed due to Covid-19.  Even though my name was not on the list of honorees, I emailed that I had planned to attend since I’d been associated with IUN for 50 years (having been hired, along with Ron Cohen in 1970) and that I had hoped to congratulate my friends Kathy Malone, Suzanne Green, and Tim Johnson, on their 40 years of service. Bill emailed back, congratulating me on 50 years of service and lamenting all the campus events that faculty and students are missing.

Do the Right Thing

“Don’t worry be happy was a number one jam

Damn if I say it you can slap me right here.
    Public Enemy, “Fight the Power”

 

I vaguely recall seeing Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1989) at IUN but observed many things watching it again that I had missed or forgotten.  It opens with a saxophone rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and stars Spike Lee as pizza delivery man Mookie (after 1986 Mets hero Mookie Wilson), first seen wearing a Dodger uniform with 42 and Robinson on the back. Samuel L. Jackson is spot-on as a mellow, hip deejay who plays everything from jazz and soul to hip hop. Throughout the movie we hear Public Enemy on Radio Raheem’s boom box, which provokes the climactic riot, during which the crowd chants “Howard Beach,” a white neighborhood where a black man was murdered in 1986. There’s also references to Michael Stewart, killed while in police custody after being arrested for spray painting graffiti on a New York City subway wall.

 

“Don’t Worry be Happy,” referenced by Public Enemy, was a surprise number 1 hit in 1988 for Bobby McFerrin, who claimed the slogan came from Indiana guru Meher Baba (1894-1969), who was in vogue in the 1960s and whose following included the Who’s Peter Townshend.

 

Self-isolated for the better part of a month, I’ve been averaging a movie a day OnDemand. Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” was disappointing except for a brilliant performance by Jack Nicholson as a Boston mob boss and strong performances by Matt Damon and Leo DiCaprio, who have such a resemblance to one another it was hard at first to tell them apart.  Much more moving was “Blinded by the Light,” about a young Pakistani immigrant, Javed Khan, living in England during the 1980s whose life is transformed after someone introduces him to Bruce Springsteen.  Set, like “Do the Right Thing,” in the late 1980s, it shows the racism Muslims encountered in Great Britain.

 

Two good movies about lonely people are “The Station Agent” with Peter Dinklage (of “Game of Thrones” fame) and Bobby Cannavale (so good in “Boardwalk Empire”) and “The Yellow Handkerchief” (2008) starring William Hurt as an ex-con and Kristen Stewart before the “Twilight” series.  I first saw Hurt in “Altered States” (1980), and he played a scarred Viet vet in the 1983 classic “The Big Chill.”   I’ve looked forward to any movie he’s in ever since although for the past dozen years he’s mainly wasted his talent in “Avenger”-type flicks.  Born in 1950, Hurt’s only eight years my junior.

 

In addition to TV watching, I finished John Updike’s “Rabbit Is Rich” and am deciding whether to tackle the sequel, “Rabbit at Rest” or start a 700-page Tom Wolfe novel that takes place at the end of the century, “A Man in Full.”  Updike summarized the Texas culture of “money, booze, and broads” with these words: “God didn’t go west, He died on the trail.”  Describing Harry’s elderly mother-in-law, Ma Springer, looking shrunken and bent at the Philadelphia airport, Updike wrote, “Her former look of having been stuffed tight with Koerner pride and potential indignation has fled, leaving her chin collapsed in random folds and bloodless.  Deep liverish gouges underscore her eyes, and her wattled throat seems an atrocious wreck of flesh.” Ma Springer uses a Pennsylvania German word, ferhuddled, that means confused or befuddled.

“What you lose when you age,” Updike wrote, “is witnesses, the ones that watched you from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.” My dad, Vic, died at fifty, Midge lasted till age 99.  Last year best childhood pals Terry Jenkins and Wayne Wylie died.  Grandstand nearly empty.

Through the magic of Facebook I’ve been getting likes on my posts from Kimberley McGrath, the daughter of high school classmate Susan McGrath and the sister of Maria, whom I met at a history conference in Montreal and have been friends with since.  Recently Maria posted an Alfred Camus quote that accompanied photos taken during a walk in the woods.  I commented: “As Camus wrote, even if the world is absurd, we must proceed as if our lives are meaningful.”  Kimberley responded, “Exactly.”

 

Robert Blaszkiewicz forwarded a post from Doug Ross recommending that people keep plague journals, something I’ve already been doing with my blog. Buying groceries at Strack and Van Til, I noticed disinfected shopping carts were ready for use, and additional hand wipes were by the door. The aisles were marked so as people would only go down them one direction. While there was a limited toilet paper supply, I did find a roll of eight and a three-pack of facial tissues.  About half the customers and staff were wearing masks, and shoppers were keeping a good distance from one another.  Tom from Toyota called with an offer to pick up my Corolla in regards to the airbag recall, then called to say my oil change was due in 800 miles and if I wanted them to do that plus rotate the tires.  Another call to suggest new tires, which I agreed to since a sale was going on and I trusted Tom, who’s been wit the company for over 30 years.  Next day I was able to pay the cashier by Discover card over the phone, and an hour later the car was back in the driveway. 

 

WW II vet James Forsythe, 95, of Crown Point passed away two weeks after his wife of 73 years Marge.  Growing up during the Great Depression from a family of eight that barely scraped by, he was drafted in 1944 at age 19 after failing to get into the navy and merchant marine. He served in England as a dental technician, met Marge while at Camp Atterbury in 1946 where he was a medical photographer, and served again in the Korean War.  He worked for many years for Indiana Bell and became active in veterans groups and Crown Point politics, serving two terms as mayor (1984-1991) after retiring from the telephone company. He was especially proud of leading efforts for the restoration of Crown Point courthouse (the Archives came into possession of nineteenth-century Land County land records when it had been scheduled for demolition).  Forsythe often dressed up as Abraham Lincoln for Fourth of July parades and, dressed as “Honest Abe,” recited the Gettysburg Address in front of the Indiana General Assembly.  Year ago, I was at the Portage library listening to a talk on Lincoln when a man arrived dressed as Abe and sat in the front row.  He never said a word and got up and left silently when it was over.  Could have been Forsythe.  NWI Times reporter Mary Freda wrote:

    James Forsythe always had a corny joke or silly song at the ready for any occasion, his children recalled. “There was always music, whether he was playing his guitar or music on the radio, or whistling – he whistled all the time, his daughter Margaret Wood said.

The obit added that Forsythe’s first job was delivering milk from a horse-drawn carriage at age 15 and that 77 years later, James, 92, was still jamming on guitar at Crown Point farmers market.

What a Guy!

"What a guy!   Buddy Guy!”

    Inside joke of Phil and Jimbo

 

Ever since the family saw Buddy Guy live in Merrillville, whenever Phil or I use the phrase “What a guy,” the other says “Buddy Guy.” We have other expressions that only we find funny, such as saying “dirty rubber” when a policeman drives by, a reference to something my buddy Paul Curry said in Terry Jenkins and my presence when a cop pulled over and accused him of muttering “Dirty copper” as he drove by.  Paul claimed he had said, “Dirty rubber,” which made no sense but the cop drove off. When one of us makes pancakes, we inevitably say, “nobody doesn’t like hoecakes,” which we (and nobody else) finds hilarious.

 

Though in his mid-80s, Buddy Guy is still performing, often in his own club, buddy Guy’s Legends.  The son of Louisiana sharecroppers, he moved to Chicago in 1957 and became a session musician for Chess Records.  The last of an era, Buddy’s 1991 CD, “Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues” leads off with his so-named biggest hit and includes the Willie Dixon classic “Let Me Love You Baby,” the Eddie Boyd standard “Five Long Years,” Buddy’s own “Remembering Stevie,” a tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan, plus “Mustang Sally,” the Louis Jordan hit “Early in the Morning,” and more – even a John Hiatt number “Where Is the Next One Coming From?” - all made unique due to Buddy’s guitar solos.  In 2012 Guy played at the White House and persuaded Barack Obama to sing along to “Sweet Home Chicago.”

 

B.B. King’s chapter “Heavenly Music” describes services at a sanctified church that his family, complete with hand-clapping, foot-stomping, shouting, and rocking back and forth in time to the music, as Preacher Fair played a guitar and a relative the piano.  When B.B’s Mama had Preacher Fair over for a Sunday dinner of fried chicken (which B.B. had caught, wrung its  neck, and plucked off the feathers earlier that day) and chocolate pie, he let B.B. play it.  Mama had a cousin, Bukker White, who recorded for RCA Victor and called himself “king of the slide guitar.” B.B. loved visiting his Aunt Mima, who owned a crank-up Victrola and had records by Lemon Blind Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson.  Their Blues numbers, such as Johnson’s “Bow-legged Lady” (“who wears her dress above the knees”), constituted excitement, emotion, and hope for future possibilities.

 

Another important person in King’s life was Uncle Major, virtually blind from cataracts and with a stutter so bad few folks could understand him.  He’d take B.B. fishing, bolster his confidence, and teach him patience.  On the way home Uncle Major would lean of him as B.B. described the fields, birds, and other things near them.  B.B.’s mother and grandmother died, leaving him alone at age 10.  He became the plantation owner’s houseboy and bought a Stella acoustic guitar for $15, two month’s wages.  As he wrote, “My guitar gave me a new life.  It helped me cope.”

 

The season finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” reminded me of how “Seinfeld” ended, which critics panned but appropriately made the cast pay for its selfish past actions. In other words, you get what you deserve, reap what you sow. Mocha Joe and a secretary Larry mistreated in season ten have the last laugh as Funkhouser’s F to M transgender former daughter’s big penis wreaks havoc with a watch Larry borrowed and intended to have repaired and causes a fire that consumes the “spite store” he opened in competition with Mocha Joe.

 

Ray Smock wrote about Trump’s erratic leadership during the pandemic:

    The only part of the stimulus package that seems to appeal to the president is the half-trillion dollars that will go to corporations. He said in a news conference that he would personally oversee how this money is dispersed. Congress thought differently and set up a review process and an inspector general with subpoena power. Can you imagine Donald Trump having control of a half-trillion dollars to dole out to billionaires—like himself?

    The  president’s top priority in this pandemic is to save business, and, of course, in the process to save jobs. This is a legitimate priority. But it is not Priority Number One. All humans on the entire planet are threatened with a plague of historic proportions and it must be stopped before workers and businesses can get back to what will pass as the new normal. This is a health crisis first and an economic crisis second. They go together, for sure. But nothing will be right until the virus is gone. Trump keeps talking about opening the nation by Easter. It should be criminal for him to even suggest such blind optimism in the face of scientific knowledge and of the dire crisis faced by our healthcare system nationwide. His false optimism encourages some governors to be reluctant to act, leaving it to mayors and other local officials to make important heath decisions, like social distancing and home confinement.

After D.T. called for things to reopen by Easter to save the economy, Dr. Fauci said, "You don't make the timeline.  The virus makes the timeline."

Trump seems to infect everything he touches.  During the 1980s, unable to buy an NFL franchise, he became an owner of a USFL team, the New Jersey Generals.  After two seasons Trump convinced the owners to move from a spring schedule to the fall, then sued the NFL, claiming it was a monopoly.  He was hoping for a merger but instead the ploy destroyed the league. Houston Generals owner Jerry Argovitz told author Jeff Pearlman: “Donald didn’t love the USFL. To him, it was small potatoes. Which was terrible, because we had a great league and a great idea.  But then everyone let Donald Trump take over.  It was our death.” Since that experience, Trump has disparaged the NFL at every opportunity.

 

IUN’s HELP desk staff, now working from home, has enabled me to get into my blog and Facebook with a minimum of trouble.  Paul and Julie Kern arrived back at The Villages after a cross-country trip from California.  He wrote: “On the final lap, restaurants were open only for drive-through so their restrooms were inaccessible, no small matter for traveling old people.”  Lois Reiner, commenting on Trump’s impatience to end social distancing, wrote: “Old people, Unite.  Tell D.T. we will not die for the economy unless he volunteers to be the test case.”

 

Country pop singer Kenny Rogers died.  Most famous as “The Gambler” in TV movies, the song of that title includes the line, “Know when to hold them and know when to fold them.”  Dave sang “Coward of the County” on Facebook that got many likes and comments.  It’s contains the line, “You don’t have to fight to be a man.”  Behind him was a poster of his former band, Voodoo Chili and a photo of guitarist Big Voodoo Daddy.

 

Funny Man

“My mind is a raging torrent flooded with rivulets of thoughts cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.” Hedley Lamarr, “Blazing Saddles”

The inside jacket for Patrick McGilligan’s new biography of comedian Mel Brooks, “Funny Man” reads: “He was born Melvin Kaminsky on his family’s kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928. Mel was a mischievous child whose role was to make the family laugh.  But beyond boyhood, and after he reinvented himself as Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily in the Kaminsky home proved more elusive.”  Brooks is perhaps best known for a string of hilarious movies, including Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein(both released in 1974), and the smash Broadway hit (a favorite of Toni and me) “The Producers” (2001-2007).  Gary football star Alex Karras played Mongo inBlazing Saddles and uttered the line,“Mongo only pawn in game of life.”  Brooks was a writer for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” during the 1950s and still getting laughs on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” 60 years later.

 Alex Karras in "Blazing Saddles"

My wittiest friend I had was David Malham, who, like Mel Brooks, could imitate others’ facial expressions and gestures.  He often told endearing stories about his Assyrian-American mom, and his personal anecdotes often poked fun at itself.  In one he made a TV appearance on the Jerry Springer show as a grief counselor and discovered his pin-striped suit’s coat and pants didn’t match. Terry Jenkins had a great sense of humor, and on the day friends were attending a service celebrating his life I thought of him often.  In IUN’s library lobby a girl was imitating her little sister’s funny way of waking. I said, “I can do that, too” – something Terry would have done – and got them to laugh.

In the car I heard a long set from 1972, when WXRT first came on the air and the year of the Watergate break-in.  I have been tuning in to 93.1 FM since the early Eighties, which qualifies me as a long-time listener. In quick order came songs by Jethro Tull, Little Feat, Todd Rundgren, Loggins and Messina, Harry Nilsson, plus two with drug references, the Allman Brothers Band’s “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More (leave your mind alone and just get high)” and “30 Days in the Hole” by Humble Pie. I can’t recall ever hearing Nilsson’s “Coconut,” about a brother and sister getting a belly ache from a lime and coconut concoction.  On a.m. radio that year, top hits included Don McLean’s “American Pie” and the soul classics “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers and “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green. My favorite White Sox, Dick Allen, had two inside-the-park home runs in the same game!  “Joker’s Wild” debuted in 1972. Three year-old son Dave loved hearing Jack Barry yell “Joker, joker, JOKER!”with increasing excitement.  Before long Dave actually understood how the game was played and got good at it.

Mike Olszanski insists on calling May 1 Labor Day, as around the world it is commemorated as International Labor Day. On May 1, 1886, workers in Chicago and other industrial cities demonstrated for an 8-hour day.  Spring celebrations date back to Roman times and often feature dancing around a maypole.  Old girlfriend Suzanna Dienna Murphy wrote:

Who is old enough to remember May Day traditions? We hung little so-called nosegays of flowers on our neighbors’ front door handles made of bouquets put through a doily and then ran so it would be a surprise. There were also of course Maypole dances with colorful ribbons extending out for girls in beautiful flowing dresses to hold and dance. It was very dreamy and sweet. The college where my Grampa taught Philosophy and Religion classes, Beaver College, always had such a celebration. That was in Glenside Pennsylvania. There was always a reception afterwards. I remember wearing a pastel dress and while gloves and a hat, even when I was very little. For some reason I also remember little decorated sugar cubes that had flowers on top. I have not seen those in many years.

Bishopstone Church, Sussex, England

Reacting to a photo of my bowling team (Electrical Engineers) on Facebook, Ray Smock wrote, “You can fix my wiring anytime.” It took me a few seconds to get the joke.  Jef Halberstadt, who worked at Bethlehem Steel with Terry Kegebein (their lockers were next to each other), asked about our name.  When the team formed 60 years ago, all charter members were electrical engineers at Gary Sheet and Tin, the name of the Cressmoor Lanes league where we bowled until three years ago, when we switched to Mel Guth’s Seniors at Hobart Lanes. At the bowling banquet I managed to get daughter-in-law Delia’s Uncle Phil Vera to take a selfie with me; he also sent one with uncles Larry Ramirez and Eddie Lopez, plus Jaime and Melody Delgado and jokester Angel Menendez.

NWI Times correspondent Joseph Pete sought information about Gary’s Memorial Auditorium, which opened in 1927, closed in 1972, and was badly damaged by fire in 1997. Scheduled for demolition to make way for a 38-unit senior and middle-income housing project, the five thousand-seat facility housed high school basketball games and graduations, wrestling matches, concerts, and speaking engagements by visiting celebrities. I compared its sad fate to the still functioning, 80-year-old Hammond Civic Center. Pete used this quote from our interview:

 Truman gave a “give ’em hell” speech there in 1948.  Frank Sinatra sang there for a Tolerance concert during a famous school strike over integration in 1945.  Half the white students had walked out of Froebel High School, and he performed to get them to go back to school.  Bobby-soxers came in from Portage and other outlying communities to hear him.  It was a big national story that was covered in Life magazine.

Joe Van Dyk, Gary’s director of redevelopment and planning, vowed that historic features will be preserved, including limestone, cornices, the keystone, and other ornamental hallmarks.

 Times photo by Kale Wilk

After I posted the article on Facebook, Paul Kern noted that he attended his first basketball sectional there in 1969; and George Sladic commented that his late wife’s graduation ceremony took place there.  Connie Mack-Ward had this warning:

 Demolishing what remains of this building & disturbing the soil immediately around it will release microscopic histoplasmosis spores into the air--the building was found too dangerous to enter by a feasibility consultant at least 30 years ago, because it contains a large amount of bird excrement, which contains the spores, as does soil which has contacted it.
  Histoplasmosis in humans is very minor, like a little cold, so rarely diagnosed and treated, but the scars it often leaves in the eyes (not visible without special examination) can leave one blind, and the scars can become active or bleed years & even decades later, again causing blindness.

 

Mayor Pete Buttigieg made the cover of both Time and New Yorkmagazine.  The unlikely gay presidential candidate named a dog Truman inspired by the thirty-third President’s quip: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”He told Time: “The idea that we just sort people into baskets of good and evil ignores the central fact of human existence, which is that each of us is a basket of good and evil.  The job of politics is to summon the good and beat back the evil.”  Trump, who unfailingly does the opposite, blasted the decision of the Kentucky Derby stewards to disqualify apparent winner Maximum Security for endangering other horses and riders by an illegal lane change, calling it an example of “political correctness.”  Grumpy Trump is unhinged.

After many days of rain, the weekend was glorious.  I did some bush trimming and eradicated numerous dandelions.  When I was a kid, Vic paid me a dime for every 50 dandelions I pulled up by the roots.  More fun was capturing night crawlers before fishing trips, especially after a downpour. Using a flashlight, I’d pounce on those popping out of the ground before they could wiggle back into their holes.  You could feel them struggling to get free from your grip.

At Memorial Opera House we saw the delightful musical comedy “La cage aux Folles,” starring Andrew Brent and Thomas Olsen as an aging gay couple who perform in a review as drag queen and owner/master of ceremonies.  Old friend Patti Shaffner played Jacqueline, a café owner hoping to perform in the gay revue. Seeing guys dressed as female dancers reminded me of seeing “Kinky Boots” in Chicago.  Originally a French play, “La Cage aux Folles” opened on Broadway in 1983 and enjoyed another successful run 28 years later.  Dick Hagelberg knew Olsen from the Northwest Indiana Symphony Chorus; afterwards, Olsen was with an entourage at Pesto’s Restaurant. 

New York Times Sunday magazine highlighted 25 songs“that matter right now,” beginning with Bruce Springsteen’s oft misconstrued “Born in the U.S.A.,” which he performed without accompaniment in “Springsteen on Broadway.” Beforehand, he told of grooving at shows starring Walter Cichon and the Jersey Shore band the Motifs and that Cichon got drafted and never returned from Vietnam. When the selective service board summoned Springsteen, he succeeded in evading being drafted, certain he’d meet the same fate. He told the audience: “I do sometimes wonder who went in my place. Because somebody did.”