Limber Jim

“All literature is gossip.”
Truman Capote

Calumet Regional Archives buddy Steve McShane took wife Cindy on a surprise vacation to the Keys for their thirtieth anniversary. They had no honeymoon because he was a struggling grad student then. Part-time assistant Peg Schoon was holding down the fort. On sabbatical, husband Ken was on hand researching a book on the dunes. The week before, he had visited Save the Dunes mainstays Herb and Charlotte Read at their house that the government is forcing them to abandon. They are hoping it can be designated a historic landmark because important meetings took place there involving Senator Paul Douglas and other luminaries that led to creation of the National Lakeshore. Meg Renslow and her daughter stopped by. Meg is teaching an intro course for future Elementary school teachers and was considering a field trip for them to the Archives until we told her that eventually they all will be taking Steve’s course on Indiana History, a subject covered in fourth grade. The daughter is doing a documentary on Hoosier Gene Stratten-Porter, the author of “A Girl of the Limberlost” (1909) and many other romantic novels and Anne Balay’s favorite author of children’s literature. A building at Purdue Cal is named for Stratten-Porter, an avid wetlands preservationist (Limberlost was a swamp until drained to make way for “progress”) who died in California in 1923 when a streetcar struck her vehicle. A restoration project begun in the 1990s has reclaimed Loblolly Marsh, covering 1,500 of the original 13,000 acres of Limberlost Swamp. The name derives from a man nicknamed “Limber Jim” who got lost in the swamp. There are two variations of the story: in one the man is never seen again; in the other Limber Jim makes it home. Loblolly is from a Miami Indian word meaning “stinking river.”

Wish I were Limber Jim. I popped something in my right arm bowling and pulled a shoulder muscle from nothing more strenuous than sneezing.

IUN’s cafeteria was serving beef tacos, which went well with Darcy Wade’s potato salad. Chancellor Bill Lowe joined our table and told Jim Tolhuizen that he enjoyed last evening’s Northwest Indiana Symphony Chorus presentation at the Horseshoe Casino. He added, to everyone’s surprise, that he had never been to a casino before. Zoran Kilibarda mentioned that he recently became an American citizen, and I told the group of my plan to get former Faculty Organization chairs, including John Ban, F.C. Richardson, Fred Chary, and George Roberts, to gavel open the monthly meetings. One person at the table groaned when I mentioned Richardson, but F.C. was a real bulldog in fighting for what he believed in, including launching IUN’s Black Studies program (one of the first in the country).

Started Truman Capote’s “Music for Chameleons,” a volume of short stories written during the 1970s. It is dedicated to fellow gay playwright Tennessee Williams and employs elements that Capote used in his so-called nonfiction novels. In the title story dozens of chameleons come out of the woodwork when a lady in Martinique plays the piano. Capote, a true craftsman, characterizes writing as “a noble but merciless master.” I read is “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and started “In Cold Blood” (about a murderer) but couldn’t get through it – too gruesome. “Esquire” during the 1970s published a gossipy piece that later appeared posthumously in “Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel.” Among the Capote quotes on Google, I found this: “Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.”

Sheriff Dominguez flew to south Texas to interview relatives about their memories of when his family came north. The material might make a fitting epilogue to his autobiography, “Spirits from the Fields.” His Uncle Saul brought them to Northwest Indiana a half-century ago in his pick-up truck and felt so lonely on the trip back that he broke down and cried at times, he told Roy yesterday on the phone. Roy wrote a Guest Commentary” for “The Times” taking the town of Winfield to task for reneging on their promise to pay the sheriff’s department $100,000 in return for police protection. Incorporated as a town in 1993, Winfield never created a police force or town marshal as required by state statute, instead depending on county officers to patrol their community for free and boasting that their “tax rate is the lowest in lake County.” Dominquez warned that if his office did not receive the $100,000 good faith payment, all patrols and nonemergency services would cease. Good for him.

Salem Press sent a copy of the published version of my review of “Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town.” Parallels with Northwest Indiana are obvious. As is my custom, I started with a quote:

“I became a union man at my father’s knee, and I’ll be one till they put me in a box,” Manuel Alvarez

Deborah Rudacille, whose previous books dealt with animal rights (The Scalpel and the Butterfly) and transgendered Americans (The Riddle of Gender), returned to her childhood neighborhood in Dundalk, Maryland, a blue collar suburb of Baltimore, and produced an elegy to a vanishing culture. For more than a century Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point plant symbolized the triumph and travail of industrial capitalism. With the advent of unionism in 1941 laborers secured a significant stake in the system. Jessie Schultz, one of over 50 interviewees, recalled: “It was a dangerous job. But if it wasn’t for Bethlehem Steel, I wouldn’t have what I got today.” Workers had to cope with a racial and ethnic pecking order, shift work, asbestos, noxious pollution, and a harsh workplace environment that drove many to drink (as her dad’s sidekick, the author recalls coaxing bar patrons into giving her coins for the jukebox).

Though certainly no utopia, those days seem idyllic to old-timers, who regret the loss of solidarity among neighbors and union comrades. Now, to quote Judy Martin, there is homelessness, overcrowded soup kitchens, and “everyone is afraid of opening doors.” Rudacille blames the “bust” not only on automation but on management shortsightedness and greed. Still it was counterproductive in the long run for unions to have pressed for employer-funded health and retirement plans rather than national health insurance and adequate Social Security pensions. Starting in 2001 with Bethlehem’s bogus bankruptcy, Sparrows Point changed corporate hands five times in eight years, with the inevitable downsizing and huge profits accruing to speculators. When Roots of Steel went to press, the mill, whose patriotic workers helped win two world wars and fueled the mid-twentieth century prosperity, was in Russian (OAO Severstal) hands.

I should have had the last line read, “in the hands of Russian capitalists.”

FACET's Eileen T. Bender

Yesterday I interviewed FACET founder Eileen Bender at her office in the English Department at IU South Bend. Several weeks ago in the cafeteria lunchroom FACET (Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching) director David Malik, who is also interim Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at IU Northwest, said to me, “Since you are an oral historian, how would you like to interview the woman who started FACET?” She is retiring from teaching this year, and he wanted her remembrances recorded for posterity. He offered to pay me but the terms of my retirement plan prevent me from earning any extra money from IU. I was in desperate need of a new computer, however, so I heard him out, and agreed that the interview might become part of a larger project. To learn more about FACET I interviewed Don Coffin, who had been an active member since 1989, as well as current campus liaison Charlotte Reed, and Malik himself. Tome Trajkovski and Aaron Pigars provided camera work and then produced excellent DVDs of the interviews that could possibly be part of a documentary or put on FACET’s electronic Website and/or Newsletter. I contacted Eileen and we set up a time and date.

The weather yesterday was threatening, but we plunged on. Aaron was a recent graduate of IU South Bend and navigated while Tome drove us in his new BMW. We made it to campus in under an hour. I packed ham sandwiches and Fritos for each of us. Eileen proved to be a charming woman with much to say. At one time she was special adviser to IU President Tom Ehrlich, who supported her vision to honor excellent teachers and bring them together as an unofficial leadership cadre to encourage teaching innovations on their respective campuses. The interview went on for nearly two hours. Each year in May new inductees and those already members of the organization go to a weekend retreat. For the past several years this has taken place in French Lick, a former spa in southern Indiana that now boasts a casino. Various sessions and workshops take place that involve teachers having to learn new skills outside their discipline. One such collaborative effort involved making pieces of a quilt. Another involved participants making silkscreen segments. As Eileen recalled, in 1998 her assistant “smuggled out” a snapshot of her, which was enlarged and cut into squares. People worked on and made abstractions from nine little screens not knowing what the larger picture was. The collage was unveiled at the closing session and now hangs in a lounge near Eileen’s office. Eileen said, “It has taken me years to be able to view my abstracted multicolored image with good humor. I’m amused when holding a class in the lounge when a student asks warily, ‘Dr. Bender – is that YOU????’”

Thanks to Vice Chancellor Malik I now have a state-of-the-art MAC (version 10.6.2) 27-inch screen computer with 4 GBs of memory. In the past couple days I’ve worked out most of the bugs and gotten used to it thanks in large part to technician Velate Sullivan. I love it. The old one had been freezing up every half hour or so. So far I have showed it off to Steve, Anne Balay, and other visitors to the Archives. Malik is also going to pay for Aaron, Tome, and me to attend next year’s retreat so we can do interviews and capture some of the highlights on tape. Malik was at today’s Holiday Party (you don’t say Christmas!) and I introduced him to 89 year-old Bill Neil, a surprise guest who mentioned that he, too, had been Dean (as it was called in 1971) of Academic Affairs until an idiot, Robert McNeil, became Chancellor (and Bill was not exaggerating). Chris Young sat at our table. His field, early American History, was the same as Bill’s, so they got along famously. Also at our table were Ken Schoon, who (as I pointed out to Bill) wrote the excellent book “Calumet Beginnings,” which combines his expertise in geology and history. Zoran and Vesna Kilibarda, who moved to the United States from Yugoslavia in the 1980s, were our other companions. Bill recalled some of his former Serbian students (what a memory), and Zoran expressed regret that after Tito’s death his country disintegrated into a half dozen little states with little power or influence. He knew Bill from chairing the 2009 Arts and Sciences Research Conference Committee that approved my Plenary Session on the history of the university featuring Bill, Paul Kern and me. Vesna thanked me for giving them my Retirement Journal and said she found it interesting. I mentioned in volume 40 that Vesna was a Voodoo Chili fan who danced to my son’s band at the Roadhouse, that as Chair of the Math Department she gave Lary Schiefelbusch the Gary Pictorial History and Ron Cohen and I co-edited, and that at grieving session in the wake of Robin Hass Birky being killed in an auto accident, she was so moved she could barely control her emotions (she wasn’t alone).

Next week will be the A & S Holiday Party, and last week was a Retirement Reception for Business Prof Bert Scott (didn’t know him very well) and an Information Technology secretary. Three other retirees failed to attend, including good old Mary Bertoluzzi, who was hired in 1978 to work in a unit that was later abolished and never promoted into a position that would have used her considerable talents. Usually try to provide witty anecdotes at such events, but kept my mouth shut. Have been reading with pleasure Gore Vidal’s “Burr,” told from the point of view of a young would-be biographer who works in the former vice president's law office. As in "Lincoln," the main character frequents a fashionable D.C. brothel. Picked up and skimmed through “Everything’s Changed” by Gail Collins about women’s history since 1960. In that year a judge kicked a woman out of his courtroom for wearing slacks. There’s a photo of a sexy stewardess lighting men’s cigars. How times have changed.

Wednesday ended with a wintry blizzard. It took my son Dave 90 minutes to get home to Portage from East Chicago Central H.S. and he begged out of bowling in place of me. I have been nursing a pinched sciatic nerve but drove through the snow and wind to Cressmoor Lanes and bowled a 509 series (194, 182, and 133 with four splits in the third game). The Engineers won one game and series for three points, and Dick Maloney beat me out for high series above average by a total of four pins to win the five dollar pot. Had two Leinie drafts and then a couple Goose Island 12-ouncers while listening to an Owl City CD and proofreading my forward to the an autobiography I am helping someone put together.