Being Charlie

“A day without laughter is a day wasted.” Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Rose

Until forced off the air after being accused by eight women of making unwanted sexual advances, CBS co-host Charlie Rose was my favorite morning newsman.  In a New York Reviewessay about David Friend’s “The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido,” entitled “Being Charlie,” Laura Marsh concluded that the 1990s were a time of sexual fads and experimentation, when many powerful men believed that to be sexually daring was their prerogative and even part of their appeal.  Marsh wrote:

“That’s just Charlie being Charlie,” a senior producer reportedly told an employee on The Charlie Rose Showwho complained of harassment,  “Being Charlie” was perhaps an essential part of his professional persona: a profile of Rose in Newsdaytitled “The Love Cult of Charlie Rose,” was one of many to note his “famously seductive gaze.”  The seductiveness may be why many people thought at the time that a lot of the behavior now being called out and condemned was not so bad, and why some of the men accused made little effort to hide it.

I’ve always been fond of the name Charlie – it seems to imply a genial and unassuming person, less formal than Charles and more intimate than Chuck.  It’s been used effectively as the name of the “Peanuts” cartoon character Charlie Brown, John Steinbeck’s canine companion in “Travels with Charley,” Edgar Bergen’s puppet Charlie McCarthy, detective Charlie Chan, and silent movie star Charlie Chaplin.  In high school Vince Curll and I befriended the dour iconoclast Charles Thomas and got him to loosen up by calling him Charlie, as in “good time Charlie.” During the mid-Fifties my favorite baseball player was Tiger Charlie “Paw Paw” Maxwell.  Later I had a good-natured brother-in-law nicknamed Charlie that fit him to a T.  One of my closest friends is Charlie Halberstadt.  Retiring Indiana State Representative Charlie Brown  believes using that nickname was a political asset.

Laura Marsh wrote:

In her book The Hearts of Men (1983), Barbara Ehrenreich traces this change in masculinity through the twentieth century, detailing the dissatisfactions many men felt at having to marry early and support their wives, who secured what Playboy sourly called “an Assured Lifetime Income”through marriage. To be a husband and a father in the 1950s meant being a provider—getting a job and, in order to keep it, submitting to the conformity of the office. A successful man was the one who could mold his personality both to the corporate culture at work and to domestic ideals at home. For such men the promise of sexual liberation was that separating sex from the responsibilities of traditional marriage would release him from crushing expectations, freeing him to be whoever he wanted to be.

In sixth grade a classmate’s mother called the house and told Midge that I had deliberately brushed against the her daughter’s breasts, as we called them then.   I was floored since I had no idea what she was talking about and had no interest in the girl or her newly sprouted tits, as we referred to them then.  Now had it been farmer’s daughter Thelma Van Sant, the accusation would have been more plausible, albeit untrue.  My mother believed me, and nothing further came of the matter, other than my being wary not to get too close to the girl.  Years later, as a college professor, I never took advantage of my positon nor was ever accused of improper sexual behavior but knew enough to keep my office door open after an incident involving a colleague.

I offered to send my latest Steel Shavings to former Post-Tribunecolumnist Jeff Manes and he replied, “If you hand deliver Shavings, I'll fry us some fish. Let me know. Bring McShane. The levee broke on Feb 22. Went 42 days without NIPSCO. I put up a sign: ‘Welcome to Ramsey Road. We are the Puerto Rico of Jasper County.’ - The Kankakee Ki.”  Great nickname for the sage of the Kankakee River.

Coach Vic Bubas with Duke players

1944 Lew Wallace grad Vic Bubas passed away at age 91. The high school basketball star, who helped Wallace win its first sectional and regional championships, played for North Carolina State and between 1963 and 1966 coached Duke to 3 Final Four appearances.  He is credited with transforming the ACC into one of the top conferences in the county and being one of the first coaches to scout high school prospects prior to their senior year.  In 1969, after ten years at the helm, Bubas retired from coaching and became an administrator.  In 1976 he became the first commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference.

Post-Tribune photos of IUN hearings by Kyle Telethon

Area lawmakers Charlie Brown, Vernon Smith, Lonnie Randolph (East Chicago) and Eddie Melton (Merrillville) held hearings at IUN on the dwindling number of African-American students (down to 17 percent) and faculty. Approximately  80 people attended, including former Labor Studies professor Ruth Needleman, who pointed to the lack of relevant programs.  A partial explanation for the problem is that many qualified minority students obtain scholarships and go away to college and that the market for black faculty is tight.  I would also argue that the shabby treatment of former vice chancellors for academic affairs Kwesi Aggrey and Mark McPhail, both sensitive to the problem but unable to convince others to make minority hiring and enrollment diversity a top university priority, is also responsible.

 George and Betty Villareal at IU Day

At bowling the Pin Chasers swept the Electrical Engineers to finish the season ahead of us in the standings.  In the crucial game, all we needed was for our lefty anchor Dick Maloney to mark.  After leaving the 3-6, he seemed to have it covered, but his ball flattened and went straight at the 3-pin and left the 6-pin – chopped wood, as the saying goes.  I told aviation buff Gene Clifford that my bridge buddy Tom Rea had recently attended an air show in Florida.  “It must have been the Lakeland Sun’n Fun Fly-In,”he replied.  Opponent George Villareal, who the day before had attended IUN Fun Day.  One of the attractions was a six-ton steam-whistle-playing calliope located outside Hawthorn Hall, which could be heard in my Archives cage and acted sort of like a pied piper.

Toivo Pekkanen 

I have started Toivo Pekka’s 1953 autobiography about his Finnish Childhood, “Lapsuuteni,” which contains this elegiac fantasy:

One of these mornings

One spring morning

When the sun rises in the sky

I will mount my steed

           . . . . . 

Only for a moment

Shall his hoofs thunder over the rooftops

Only for an instant

Shall my shadow flash against the skies

Already I shall be far away, set free.

 Mathew Brady

Samuel A Love and I had lunch at Flamingo’s and worked on captions that will go with his photos of Gary poetry projects that Ron Cohen and I plan to include in the third edition of our Gary pictorial history. V Sam told me that when he was a kid, the first edition that his parents bought was one of his favorite books, along with one about the Civil War photos of Mathew Brady.

Strange Roads

I just returned from East Lansing, where Toni and I attended granddaughter Alissa’s senior art show, entitled “Strange Roads” and featuring nine large photo compilations that seamlessly grafted together several landscape scenes. As she said, none are real places but imaginary blendings of fond memories of the past. One of them, entitled "New Water," for example, combined a scene of Niagara Falls (where we all went a year ago) with a waterfall we took her and Miranda to the summer before. Two of the photos contained scenes from near our house, one of the woods (entitled "Between Trails") and the other of the Lake Michigan dunes. She managed to get each of her three siblings in a piece. She also made use of photos that she took while in Scotland. Her four housemates were all there and happy to see us. They are hoping to tour Europe together this summer. I talked with three of Alissa’s professors, who were very complimentary about her talent, and several of her friends, including a guy named Sean, who told Toni and me that we reminded him of his own grandparents, who he had been very close to while they were alive.

Before the show I looked through one of housemate Bree’s (same name as the Jane Fonda character in “Klute”) textbooks, an anthology entitled “Race, Class and Gender in the United States.” It included an interview that my favorite oral historian Studs Terkel did with C. B. Ellis, a former Klansman who came to admire Martin Luther King and worked on behalf of poor Black people. Ellis, who died in 2005, said, “It finally came to me that I had more in common with poor black people than I did with rich white ones.” Terkel later said that the Ellis interview confirmed his optimism about the human condition by showing that people can change their minds.

On the way to IU Northwest for a pre-tenure meeting (a new yearly procedure the university has set up to weed out underachieving faculty) I heard Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” on the car radio. I am a big fan of the Detroit rocker, and his music especially lends itself to being played loud while driving. Two of my favorites are “Hollywood Nights” and “Roll Me Away.” "Night Moves" conjures up images of making out at the drive-in, a favorite pastime of teenagers of my era.

Out past the cornfields when the winds got heavy
Out in the back seat of my '60 Chevy
Workin' on mysteries without any clues
Workin' on our night moves
Tryin' to make some front page drive-in news.

Until the summer after I graduated from Upper Dublin High School in 1960 most of my drive-in exploits were either with a bunch of guys or with girls who didn’t want to move to the back seat. I tended to ask younger girls out and was too insecure to try to date people my age that I would have preferred such as Gaard Murphy, Judy Jenkins or Pam Tucker. One time Ronnie Hawthorn and I tried to sneak in by hiding in Pete Drake’s trunk. Pete opened the trunk in sight of the ticket booth, so we were busted. They tried to make us pay double but settled on just charging us regular price. After I started dating Toni in the summer of 1962 (having met her at a Philadelphia law firm where she was a secretary and I a “mail room boy”), I recall taking her to the Paul Newman movie “Hud” at the 309 Drive-In and missing much of the action. When Patricia Neal won an Academy Award, I could barely remember what role she played. One time we parked in a long driveway leading the the Van Sant farm, and Fort Washington’s Chief Ottinger, the father of high school class mate Alice, interrupted us. Since Toni lived in Philadelphia, I found it difficult to find out-of-the-way places near her neighborhood. Once we were cuddled up and heard a train whistle getting louder and louder. The locomotive passed within a few yards of where we were in my ’56 Buick.

I awoke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain't it funny how the night moves
When you just don't seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in.

With autumn closing in and I was due back in school at Bucknell, Toni and I had one last date. On the car radio came Jimmy Charles’ “A Million to One,” and I got Toni to get out of the car and dance with me. Two years before I had gone off to college and promptly forgot my summer girlfriend. This time I missed her terribly, exchanged letters several times a week, and knew I was truly in love.

Ron Cohen loaned me “Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture” by Alice Echols, whose book “Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75” I read with interest several years ago. I was not into disco but have to admit I loved John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever” and the BeeGees songs and the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” from the soundtrack. Two of the six chapters in Echols' book deal with the popularity of disco among gays, including “The Homo Superiors: Disco and the Rise of Gay Macho.”