The Sit-In

“You can cage the singer but not the song.” Harry Belafonte

A new documentary titled “The Sit-In” discusses a week in February 1968, when Harry Belafonte substituted for Johnny Carson (at Carson’s suggestion, a brave gesture) as host of the “Tonight Show.” Belafonte had made numerous guest appearances on the “Tonight Show,” as had black performers Sammy Davis, Jr., Bill Cosby, and many others. In the 1950s Jamaican-American Belafonte, born in Harlem in 1927, was known as the “King of Calypso” and had scored huge hits with “Matilda” and “The Banana Boat Song.” Growing up, Belafonte lived eight years with his grandmother in Kingston and knew the work songs well. In the early 1960s, at the height of the folk music craze on campuses and in coffeehouses, Belafonte was a bigger star than Bob Dylan. Handsome, articulate, and comfortable on camera, Belafonte not only hosted but secured the distinguished guests for five shows that combined entertainment and serious discussion of race-relations and world events. This was a time when the Tet Offensive was undermining American confidence in the Vietnam war and urban unrest was calling into question the efficacy of LBJ-style liberal reform. Among Belafonte’s “Tonight Show” guests were Dr. Martin Luther King, New York senator Robert F. Kennedy, comedians Nipsy Russell and Bill Cosby, singers Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, and Lena Horne, actors Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman, and formerly blacklisted performer Leon Bibb, once good friends with Paul Robeson. Both Bibb and Belafonte had recorded “Rocks and Gravel,” a traditional black work song first recorded in 1928 by Peg Leg Howell. The chorus goes: “It takes rocks and gravel, baby, to make a solid road.” Sadly, copies of the Belafonte “Sit-In” shows do not exist, as in those days tapes were commonly reused.

Producer Norman Lear recalled: “Only Belafonte could have pulled that off. He was an ambassador in both directions – to his own people and to the Caucasian community. There wasn’t anyone else like him.”Belafonte was a deeply committed civil rights activist who had attended marches and rallies and was friends with movement leaders, not only King but Julian Bond and other veterans of Freedom Summer. In fact, in 1964, after the murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, Belafonte and Sidney Poitier flew to Alabama with $76,000 to provide funding for the movement. The Nation’s Joan Walsh wrote: “Chased by armed Klansmen leaving the Greenwood airport, they almost didn’t make it our of the South alive.”

In 1968 blacks on TV was a rare event, other than in subservient positions, such as Jack Benny’s servant Rochester or “Amos and Andy.” Just three years before, Bill Cosby had broken TV’s racial glass ceiling by co-starring with Robert Culp in “I Spy.” Not until the Fall of 1969 would a black woman have a starring role – Diahann Carroll in “Julia.” My favorite that Fall season was “Room 222,” about a high school with a diverse student body and two black middle-class role models a male teacher (Lloyd Haynes) and female counselor (Denise Nicholas). Historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., had just turned 18 when he learned that Belafonte would be sitting in for Johnny. He later recalled: “Night after night, my father and I stayed up late to watch a black man host the highest-rated show in its time slot – history in the making.”Belafonte, alive and kicking at 93, is still keeping the faith and contributing toward getting that arc to bend toward justice.

State Representative Vernon Smith (on left with Tracy Lewis and Charlie Brown) is one of the most principled people I know and a great champion of Gary and IU Northwest, where he is a professor of education.  Four years ago, he was at the Glen Theater, which he was renovating, when a 20-year-old armed robber named Keith Sanders forced him onto the floor and stole his wallet, keys, and cellphone.  Smith had almost no money with because, as he told Sanders, he’d given it to a woman in church who needed help. When a roofer arrived, Sanders stole possessions from him, too. Apprehended not long after the incident, Sanders has been in jail since 2017 awaiting trial, which finally took place in Lake Criminal Court in front of Judge Samuel Cappas.  Speaking directly to the defendant Vernon Smith told him he believed God has work for him to do, adding, as reported by Times correspondent Sarah Reese:

    Things do not happen by chance or happenchance.  Everything happens for a reason.  Some of us have to go to the school of hard knocks before we see the light.  It doesn’t matter where you came from, it matters where you’re going.

As part of a plea bargain, Judge Cappas sentenced Sanders (below) to eight years in prison but ordered that he receive credit for the three-plus years already served.  Sanders vowed to obtain a GED while incarcerated.

Froebel School

“Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the expression of what is in the child’s soul,” Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852)

Gary School Superintendent  William A. Wirt had the city’s kindergarten through 12^thgrade “unit” schools named for admirable educators, beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson and continuing with Friedrich Froebel and Horace Mann.  Once known as the immigrant school, Froebel attracted visitors from all over the world intrigued by Wirt’s progressive educational “work-study-play” philosophy.  During the 1960s its graduates included future educator and State Representative Vernon Smith, responsible for a historical marker at the site where the historic school was demolished, and jazz pianist Billy Foster, who will appear on the cover of Steel Shavings,volume 48.  In its editor’s note I wrote:

  On March 19, 1965, Billy Foster (playing sax) and his Royal Imperials won a citywide talent show at Gary’s Memorial Auditorium representing Froebel High School. Famous as the home town of Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five, Gary has a long, proud musical tradition even though the Gary Conservatory “Music Man” professor Harold Hill claimed to have graduated from in never existed.  From its earliest years, music was an integral part of Superintendent William A. Wirt’s work-study-play curriculum.  Gary’s many ethnic groups produced a rich variety of musical strains, from Mexican mariachi bands to Serbian choral and tamburitza groups.  Metropolitan Opera tenor James McCracken, a Gary native, sang in a church choir as did the Spaniels and other doo wop groups recorded on Vivian Carter’s Vee-Jay label that originated in Gary.  The city’s rich jazz tradition dates to dance halls and nightclubs that sprang up during the “Roaring Twenties” and flowered during the 1940s.  At a young age jazz pianist Foster became familiar with local bandleader Tom Crump and horn player Art Hoyle.  In addition to teaching at Gary schools (primarily Charles R. Drew Elementary) for over 30 years as well as Valparaiso University, Foster performed with his own group, the Billy Foster Trio, as well as with such distinguished luminaries as Art Farmer, Slide Hampton, Tommy Harrell, Clark Terry, Bobby Watson, and many others. At present Foster hosts the WGVE radio show “Billy Foster Jazz Zone” and teaches a Senior College course at IU Northwest, whose Calumet Regional Archives recently started a collection in his name.

Froebel School gained notoriety in 1945 when many white students went out on strike just a month after World War II ended, protesting the policy of sending African Americans to their institution while most other Gary schools remained segregated.  In an effort to reduce tensions a liberal organization, Anselm Forum, invited singer Frank Sinatra and heavyweight champion Joe Louis to participate in a Tolerance program.  Sinatra’s appearance made national news, but Louis was unable to come due to other commitments.  I mention the incident in a forthcoming Traces article titled “Joe Louis and Gary.”  In “Gary’s First Hundred Years” I wrote that football coach Johnny Kyle became interim principal while Richard Nuzum was temporarily forced to step aside in the face of student pressure and school board cowardice.  Future IUN Performing Arts chair Garrett Cope was a student at Froebel at the time and could perform in musical programs but not in theater productions.

Twenty years ago I published a Steel Shavings issue (volume 27) titled “Froebel Daughters of Penelope,” about five Greek-Americans who attended Froebel during the 1940s, in some cases starting in elementary school, including Constance Girasin.  She recalled:

  At Froebel we were exposed not only to the three r’s but to sewing, cooking, orchestra, band, swimming, foreign language classes, wood shop, machine shop, a college-bound curriculum, and a whole line of business classes  such as shorthand, bookkeeping, and typing. The “Work” part of “Work, Study, Play” consisted of getting students ready for “life.”  Shops on the far west part of our building were for boys only, and girls didn’t so much as enter the.  However, we would pass them on our way to the band room.

  Twice Mrs. Jones was our history teacher, once in eighth grade and again in eleventh.  She was very soft-spoken and did 98 percent of her teaching sitting behind a desk.  She was a little too nice for us adolescents.  We were forever asking to be excused for band practice.  One day she came up with an expression I’ll never forget: “Constance, you are not going to earn your living baton-twirling.”  That’s true, but at the time I thought baton twirling was very important.  In my senior yearbook Jim Taneff jokingly wrote, “Constance, you are not going to earn your living by baton-twirling.”  

Randy Roberts’ “Joe Louis: Hard Times Man” (2010) begins with this quote from “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” by novelist Ernest J. Gaines: “When times get really hard, really tough, He always sends you somebody.  In the Depression it was tough on everybody, but twice as hard on the colored, and He sent us Joe.  Joe Louis was to lift the colored people’s heart.”  Roberts described the jubilation in 1938 among black people in all walks of life, from Harlem intellectuals to Gary steelworkers, listening on the radio and rejoicing when Louis defeated German Max Schmeling by knockout in the first round.  In Plains, Georgia, several dozen cotton and peanut field hands gathered on the front lawn of their boss Earl Carter, who had positioned his radio near an open window for their benefit.  Roberts wrote:

  Young Jimmy Carter remembered that they had listened to the fight without a word spoken or a cheer uttered, then filed away quietly, crossing a dirt road and a railroad track and entering a house out in a filed.  “At  that point pandemonium broke loose inside the house, as our black neighbors shouted and yelled in celebration of Louis’ victory.  But all the curious, accepted proprieties of a racially-segregated society had been carefully observed.”  Mister Earl’s “boys” knew “their place,”but in some way and for some period of time, Joe Louis had liberated them.  He had taken then to another place.

Roberts pointed out that in 1941 the three sports that mattered were horse racing (with Seabiscuit and Triple Crown winner Whirlaway, baseball (with Joe DiMaggio hitting in 56 straight games and Ted Williams batting .406), and boxing (with Gary’s “man of Steel” Tony Zale middleweight champ and Louis heavyweight champ).

Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin eulogized Bob Einstein, who played Funkhouser on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and, years before, “Super Dave” Osborne, “the master of not landing on his feet.”  I laughed out loud reading about bits I’d seen on Letterman.  With a deadpan delivery and mock seriousness, Einstein’s character became a parody of contemporary stuntman Evel Knieval whose feats always ended in failure, with Super Dave crushed, squashed or flattened like a pancake.  Rushin wrote:

  Osborne didn’t suffer the foolish questions of sports journalists.  When he fell off Toronto’s CN Tower, then the tallest man-made structure in the world, and landed face-down in a parking lot, sportscaster Mike Walden asked him how he felt. “Why are you talking to me?”Super replied.  “I’ve got a minute to live. I need an ambulance.  Help me, putz.”  An ambulance arrived, only to run Osborne over.

 Super Dave Osborne shortly before shot three times in 1980 bit

Portage English teacher Mr. Downes loved James’ paper on “Babbitt,” assigning it a grade of 98%.  His only criticism concerned verb tenses when quoting from the novel, something that I know from experience can be tricky.  At present the class, reading several chapters a day, is critiquing “Great Expectations” (1860) by Charles Dickens from Marxist and feminist perspectives.  Sounds like a great class.

A 16-letter crossword puzzle clue asked who was the lone American to win Pulitzers for both fiction and poetry. Toni had the first name, Robert, which enabled me to get Robert Penn Warren, author of two volumes of prize-winning poetry, “Promises” and “Now and Then,” and “All the King’s Men,” based on the career of Louisiana demagogue Huey Long and one of my favorites.

As I entered Jewel’s parking lot, Chesterton police were questioning a woman who evidently had broken into one of the cars in the lot.  Either someone spotted her in the act or she was caught on the store’s surveillance cameras.  Maybe an alarm went off.  Inside the employees were all abuzz.  As I left, the woman was being taken away in a fire department  vehicle.

Jeffery in middle

The Eagles jumped out to a 14-0 lead against favored New Orleans but got blanked the rest of the way.  With two minutes to go and down 20-14, Philadelphia was 30 yards away from pulling off an upset when a pass went through the hands of former Bears receiver Alshon Jeffery, enabling the Saints to run out the clock.  No miracle this time from QB “St. Nick” Foles, last year’s Superbowl MVP. There’s a statue of him (below) outside the stadium.  The Eagles bowed out like champions, barely losing  to hall of famer Drew Brees.

fast food for Clemson Tigers

As the government shutdown enters its fourth week with no end in sight, Trump served fast food to the NCAA champion Clemson Tigers during their trip to the White House. Also in the news: 13 year-old Jayme Closs escaped an abductor who killed her parents and held her capture for three months.  A 21 year-old in now in custody.  Locally, the trial of Portage mayor James Snyder commenced; he allegedly accepted $12,000 in return for awarding a contract to a towing company.

Broke in two

“The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” Willa Cather

“Born into a life with no control

Being thankful and grateful for the flow

A fool tries to control what he did not make

Deceiving others about who he is”

         “I Owe You,” Hollis Donald

For the “Lost Generation” that came of age in the wake of World War I, Willa Cather’s assertion has a certain validity.  Anthropologist Margaret Meade, in a reference to the dawning of the nuclear age, separated the generations into those born before and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For millennials, the 2001 World Trade Center attack was a defining moment. For untold millions, the breaking point is realizing the impossibility of realizing their hopes and dreams coming true. Looking back, 2016 may be the time when our political system broke in two.

 Miss DuPont

Robin Hood poster

In 1922, the dawn of the “Roaring Twenties,” over 500 American radio stations began broadcasting. Songs signaling a “New Era” regarding manners and morals included Paul Whiteman’s “Three O’clock in the Morning” and Trixie Smith’s “My Man Rocks Me (with a steady roll).”  F. Scott Fitzgerald published “The Great Gatsby” and coined the phrase “Jazz Age.”  A best-selling Christmas present was “Playing Doctor” kits. The discovery of King Tut’s tomb helped popularize eye liner for women and Art Deco design style. Popular silent movies included “Foolish Wives” starring Miss DuPont (AKA Patricia Hannon) and Douglas Fairbanks in “Robin Hood.”  A riot broke out in New York City over the wearing of straw hats (boaters) past September 15, after young toughs tried to knock the hats off dock workers wearing them.

 D.H. Lawrence

Novelist Willa Cather’s quote introduces William Goldstein’s “The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature” (2017).  It explores the lives and literary careers of modernist English writers associated with the so-called Bloomsbury Group (although a St. Louis native, Eliot became a British subject, renounced his American citizenship, and cultivated an English accent).  They (and Irish writer James Joyce, author of Ulysses) profoundly affected the course of American literature in their sexual candor and use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.  I recall babysitting at a young couple’s house while a college freshman home on semester break, coming across D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and searching for the dirty parts.  Though the scenes between Lady Ottoline Morrell and a young stonemason were quite explicit, they paled in comparison with the salacious passages in Peyton Place by Grace Metalious.

I was babysitting kids before I turned 13, hard to believe that parents would trust children to someone that young and a male, to boot. In a married grad student dorm at Maryland, there was a baby-sitting exchange system in place based on the number of hours the children were awake and asleep.  Some couples would put kids in bed as early as 6 or 7 only for them to emerge from the bedroom soon after the parents left. 

 Perry Wallace blocks shot by LSU's "Pistol" Pete Maravich, circa 1970

Andrew Maraniss’ biography of Perry Wallace, Vanderbilt’s first black basketball player, notes that there was no “Pee Wee Reese moment.” Seemingly oblivious to his discomfort and peril, Wallace’s white teammates failed to stand by him in the face of racist taunts, threats, and assaults heaped on him at Ole Miss and Mississippi State. Though he persevered, Wallace later declared that had he known how lonely his ordeal would be, he’d have attended a different school.  Walking past fraternities on Saturday nights, he could hear black bands performing at parties where he was not welcome.  Sometimes drunken revelers would bring dates back to the dorm, and he’d be careful to avert his eyes.

In a chapter about a 1967 Vanderbilt “Impact” symposium, featuring such disparate speakers as Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, poet Allen Ginsburg, and segregationist Strom Thurmond, I found quotations by historian Paul K. Conkin, who taught American history at Maryland.  In 1985 Conkin published “Gone with the Ivy: A Biography of Vanderbilt University.”  When riots erupted in Nashville on the night of Carmichael’s Impact speech, the Black Power advocate became a convenient scapegoat.  As Conkin concluded: “It is impossible to relate Carmichael’s Vanderbilt speech to the riots except insofar as publicity about him increased racial tensions.” The incident almost cost the Vanderbilt’s progressive chancellor Alexander Heard his job.

 Paul Conkin

Paul Conkin had a profound influence on my intellectual development.  I still recall his insight about the Puritan ideal being to steer a middle path between piety and spirituality.  Though I l loathed John C. Calhoun, Conkin explained how the South Carolinian conceived a political system that would have kept the Union together, albeit with the “Peculiar institution” intact. In a book about FDR, Conkin characterized the effect of one New Deal program as solving some problems, ameliorating others, and causing new ones but added that it was about the most the American people could expect from their political representatives. In “Big Daddy from the Pedernales,” Conkin described President Lyndon Baines Johnson as a larger than life figure who, due to the Vietnam War, transformed into a helpless, pitiful giant.

 Alissa and Josh at Grand Canyon

Werewolf players

euchre players

Thanksgiving at the condo occurred a day late although Toni, Beth, and Angie spent much of Thursday baking pies.  Despite Alissa and Josh away at the Grand Canyon, we had well over a dozen guests, including Angie’s dad John Teague, who brought champagne for mimosas and two plates of shrimp as appetizers.  The feast included a ham and turkey, as well as two types of vegetables (baked beans and corn), cranberries (canned and homemade), potatoes (sweet and mashed), and sliced cucumbers (with and without onions).  That evening we played cards (euchre, pitch, and a new game Phil called 331) and the role-playing game Werewolf. I got Tori and Miranda on the phone with nephew Bob, wife Niki, and daughter Addie in San Diego, whom they’ll be visiting the first week in January.    

Saturday morning, I took James to Inman’s and bowled two games with Phil and Dave after the completion of youth league play.  Kevin and Kaiden Horn stayed around to watch, and I told James’ teammate that 20 years before, I had been on a first-place team with his dad, Uncle Tom, grandfather, and Dave.  Phil rolled a 200, doubling in the tenth and then picking up 9 pins on his extra shot.  Dave stayed right with him even though he hadn’t bowled in so long that there were cobwebs were on his bag and a spider scurried awau when he retrieved it from the garage. My ball was curving more than at Hobart Lanes, but I managed to hold my own with a 129 and 156.  That afternoon, at Jef Halberstadt’s gaming party I played the Ticket to Ride expansion version Pennsylvania with Jef (the winner) his brother Charlie, daughter Sheridan (with nine-month-old baby Sloane crawling under the table), and Naomi Goodman.  In touch with her former Purdue Northwest colleagues whom I know, including Bernie Hollicky, Lance Trusty, and Rich Gonzales, she filled me in on how they were dong health-wise.

above, Sheridan and Sloane; below, Vernon Smith

Gary State Representative and IUN Professor Vernon Smith again provided a free holiday meal at Shiloh Baptist Church in honor of his mother, the Reverend Julia Smith. The Post-Trib’s Carole Carlson wrote:

      Smith and a small band of volunteers fed more than 100 people during the Harvest Feast, which featured an altar laden with cabbages, squash, carrots, onions and potatoes to signify the bounty of the harvest, which Smith said is proclaimed to Israelites in the Old Testament as a celebration.  They dined on chicken, roast beef, potatoes, greens, mostaccioli and a variety of pies.  The feast serves as a preamble to a free Spirit of Christmas dinner that draws about 600 people to Gary's Genesis Center. Besides the meal, each guest receives a Christmas gift that Smith shops and plans for all year.

      Faith and his mother's legacy are at the center of Smith's service.  His mother planned the first harvest dinner at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, a Gary church that no longer exists, where she served as pastor.   “When she did the first one, I was 10 or 11. She and other church members did all the cooking in my house. Back then, food could sit on the back porch,” Smith said.

      When Smith's mother died in 1991, he knew she'd want her tradition to continue.  “Her death was very traumatic for me because I was momma's boy,” said Smith, her tenth child. “I knew how much this meant for her.”

 Rachel Carson

Appearing on Face the Nation with John Dickerson was a panel of distinguished historians who had chronicled the lives of FDR, Winston Churchill, Leonardo da Vinci, Ulysses S. Grant, and Rachel Carson.  The latter was born in Springdale Pennsylvania, and began her academic career at the University of Maryland.  A marine biologist and environmentalist, Carson completed the path breaking book Silent Spring (1962) while battling cancer and being caretaker for an ailing parent and a guardian to orphaned children. . 

The Eagles improved their record to 11-1 by slaughtering the lowly Bears 31-3.  The NFL has begun to allow end zone celebrations.  After Alshon Jeffery scored, his ten Philadelphia teammates on offense pretended to be bowling pins and fell down when he simulated rolling a strike. On another score, they lined up for a pretend group photo.  After an interception, the defensive backs did a soulful version of the electric slide.  I was the winner of the weekly CBS poll, successfully picking 12 of the 13 pro games, including Arizona’s upset of Jacksonville, plus I only put 5 points on Kansas City, which has stumbled after winning its first four games.

The title of Ken Schoon’s Art in Focus talk in Munster was “Duneland Dynamics.” As advertised by Jillian Van Volkenburg, Schoon described “controversies, struggles, battles, and scams that have come along with having this natural wonder in our region’s back yard.” Had I been asked to introduce Schoon, I would have mentioned that his years as a high school teacher before joining the IUN Education division, where he mentored future teachers.  Trained as a geologist, he has written “Calumet Beginnings,” about the origins of area towns and cities. Like me, he is a recipient of the Indiana Historical Society’s Hoosier Historian award. His talk was well received, and he donated profits from book sales to the Center.

Ray Smock has completed a book called “Trump Tsunami” and will publish it through Kindle unless he gets a better offer.   In “An Apology to Native Americans” Smock wrote:

    Today I apologize to all Native Americans for the gross insensitivity of the President of the United States, who met with Native American's who served as code talkers during World War II. This was supposed to be a ceremony honoring them for their great service to the nation in a time of war.   The President chose to stand before his favorite portrait, that of Andrew Jackson, who led the removal of Native Americans from the Southeastern part of the United States, especially during the Trail of Tears, when thousands of Cherokee died.

    During his remarks President Trump went out of his way to use his old campaign attack on Senator Elizabeth Warren who he calls "Pocahontas." This belittles the Senator but what is far worse is that it used the honorees, representing the last three living code talkers from World War II, who served this nation with distinction, as a mere backdrop for a presidential insult. Our president has no sense of decency on any subject.

    Twice in the past year and a half I have felt compelled to apologize to Muslims worldwide for totally gross and insensitive remarks and actions made by the President of the United States. I am sure I have not apologized to all the groups that this president has insulted. I feel compelled to speak out because we all must speak out against the obscenity that currently occupies the White House. He does not represent the best interests of the American people and he certainly does not speak for most Americans with his racial, ethnic, and religious slurs, and worst of all his actions against whole peoples for their skin color or their religion. 

    Trump's next gambit will be to remove from the United States thousands of Haitians who came to America after the devastating earthquake of 2010 that killed more than 230,000 people and left Haiti in shambles. Trump has no feelings whatsoever that he will break up families, destroy careers built in the United States, and create yet another kind of Trail of Tears.