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.

Ramblin'

“Lord, I was born a ramblin’ man

Tryin’ to make a living and doin’ the best I can.”

   “Ramblin’ Man,” Allman Brothers Band

On the cover of Rolling Stone is Obama interviewed by publisher Jann Wenner.  Also is the issue is a tribute to Levon Helm of The Band and an excerpt from Gregg Allman’s “My Cross to Bear.”  A hitchhiker killed Allman’s dad when he was a toddler, and brother Duane died in 1971 in a motorcycle accident.  Gregg admits that his drug and alcohol addiction torpedoed his marriage to Cher.  No mention how they got tattoos from Glen Park’s Roy Boy.  In 1973 “Ramblin’ Man,” written and sung by Dickey Betts, became the Allman Brothers Band’s biggest hit.  Based on a song of the same name by Hank Williams, Sr. The single reached number two, surpassed only by Cher’s lame “Half-Breed.”

On the anniversary of Navy SEALSs killing Osama bin Laden President Obama flew to Kabul to announce victory over al-Qaeda is within reach and that our primary mission will be to train Afghan troops.  Republicans, who had been criticizing Democrats for supposedly politicizing the death of bin Laden, mostly kept their mouths shut.  Nine years ago Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, a gesture he later regretted.   Romney, contrary to statements he made in 2007 that he wouldn’t have violated Pakistan sovereignty to strike at bin Laden, quipped that “even Jimmy Carter” would have approved the mission – a crack that even Republican Joe Scarborough thought unfair and misleading.  In truth both Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had misgivings about giving the OK to the SEALs mission.

Robert Caro’s “The Passage of Power,” covering the years of LBJ’s vice presidency and first months as president, got a big splash in “The Smithsonian” and the Sunday “New York Times Magazine.”  Caro despises Lyndon the person but admires his skill following JFK’s assassination and shepherding liberal legislation through Congress.  Caro is in his mod-Eighties, so one doubts if he’ll ever complete the biography.

Getting my PSA blood work done took about an hour.  An 88 year-old WW II air force guy starving for company started up a conversation.  Delia’s Aunt Elba checked me in.  Last time I hardly felt the prick, but the nurse did three or four unsuccessful probes in my arm before asking if I mined her using my hand.

Proofreading Henry Farag’s “The Signal” in preparing for it to become an eBook renewed my appreciation of his unique talents as a writer, performer, and producer.  His account of growing up in the Tolleston neighborhood of Gary is also great social history, dealing with gangs, teenage haunts, relationships between the sexes, politics, and race-relations.  The program Henry’s son Ryan used to create a word document was remarkably efficient.  Except for mistaking “rn” for “m,” (i.e., tumed instead of turned) and capital “O” for zero (0), the main errors were too many spaces between words.

Angie bought odometers for herself and the kids.  Doctors recommend that adults walk about ten miles a day.  I’m probably good for about half that.

I’m pondering having Fall students keep a daily log of how many miles they drove and to where. Here’s what one of mine would look like: Thursday, May 3, drove to Jewel and back (one mile) for ice cream, beer, and ingredients for tuna and macaroni casserole; took back “City of Fortune” to Chesterton library and picked up a Subway cold cut foot-long before arriving at IUN (total of 20 miles); visited W.E.B. DuBois library on Eighteenth and Broadway (one mile) to peruse a 1942 Roosevelt yearbook for information about William Marshall; drove 16 miles to East Chicago Central for tennis match against Hanover Central (a 3-2 victory for the Lady Cardinals with four of the five matches going three sets and the number one doubles team of Katie Lipa and Jackeline Fernandez winning on a third-set tie breaker); arrived back in Chesterton in time for Flyers OT loss to Jersey Devils (25 miles).

I’m having trouble in my research into Gary actor William Marshall.  His nephew was helpful on the phone but hasn’t answered my written queries.  The FBI has been giving me the runaround regarding my Freedom of Information Act request.  He’s mentioned in a file pertaining to a so-called Communist Front group, the Committee of the Arts Against Repression but for some reason I can’t see the documents.  The Roosevelt yearbook I looked at belonging to the Gary library’s local history room is missing the page containing Marshall’s senior photo.  I did find him, however, in a Men’s Glee Club photo and in a senior play cast photo of “Our Town.”

The May history book club will meet at Gino’s in Merrillville, where I had lunch with the son of former Indiana attorney-general Theofore Sendak’s son. We’ll discuss a biography of Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff.  I found a 1972 scholarly work by Michael Grant that mentions that her lineage was Greek, not Egyptian, a descendent of Alexander the Great.  First married to a kid brother (incest being royal tradition), she had affairs both with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.  Her elaborate spectacles were held not out of decadence but to cement the loyalty of subjects as the earthly embodiment of goddess Isis.  In 33 B.C. Mark Anthony stabbed himself after losing the naval battle of Actium and Cleopatra then succumbed from a self-inflicted deadly bite of a cobra.

Finally emailed Marylander Sam Walker, who wrote a history of the early years of ACC basketball between 1953 and 1972, after finding his address in the sports jacket I wore to Ray Smock’s Distinguished Alumni lecture.   The ACC was formed with football in mind, but in time the basketball rivalries were much more intense.  Sam wrote an excellent account of 1944 Gary Lew Wallace grad Vic Bubas, who played for North Carolina State and then coached Duke for 11 years beginning in 1959.  Bubas started out as assistant at NC State to Everett Case, whom Sam calls “the man who made ACC basketball” because he inherited a mediocre program and made it so competitive that rivals had to up their efforts to keep up.  Bubas was a great recruiter, working on prospects early in their high school careers and snagging such All-Americans as Art Heyman and Jeff Mullins.  His Blue Devils teams won 213 games, and made three Final Four NCAA appearances.  Contemporaries included coaches Bones McKinney at Wake Forest and Frank McGuire at North Carolina.  The 85 year-old Bubas went on to become commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference for some 15 years.

Aaron Pigors taped me at the Archives in connection with the time capsule opening next week.  Jack Buhner, who’s attending the graduation day events, started teaching at the old IU Extension in 1948 and helped secure the present location of the campus in what was then Gleason Park.  While I got in some information about Buhner, most of Chris Sheid’s questions had to do with my memories of Tamarack Hall (originally Gary Main), which was recently razed and whose cornerstone contained the time capsule. I mentioned summer musicals Phil and Dave were in as kids, including “Hello Dolly” and “Finnegan’s Rainbow,” and lively lunch discussions in the lounge adjacent to my office with the likes of George Roberts and Leslie Singer.

Exactly 70 years ago 26 year-old Charles Kikuchi wrote from Tanforan, California: “I saw a soldier in a tall guardhouse near the barbed wire and did not like it because it reminds me of a concentration camp.  I feel like a foreigner in this [internment] camp hearing so much Japanese although our family uses English almost exclusively.”

Vietnam vet Jay Keck sent me a book of poetry put out at IU-PU at Fort Wayne entitled “Confluence.” He liked Jessica Wilson’s untitled poem that contains these lines: “There’s nothing you can do but keep on holdin’ your ground/ Keep your head up and get ready for the next round/ Count your blessings and be thankful for today/ Because we all know tomorrow’s not guaranteed anyway.”

Trip East

“I ain’t gonna stand no foolin’ around.
If I do, well, I’ll be John Brown.”
Huey “Piano” Smith

Setting out to attend Ray Smock’s Distinguished Alumni Lecture, I arose at 4 a.m. Thursday to catch the airport bus from Highland to O’Hare. My American Eagle plane had lone seats on one side of the aisle and two on the other. I couldn’t board with my carry-on bag, but attendants had it for me at the gate shortly after I deplaned. From Baltimore Washington International I zipped down to College Park in less than an hour with the invaluable help of a Hertz GPS device. It was my first time back to the University of Maryland since receiving my PhD in 1970 except at night for a ceremony to dedicate the Sam Merrill seminar room. At first things looked totally unfamiliar. The Marriott Inn and Conference Center was located on a previously undeveloped end of the campus. Walking around, however, I located the Cole Student Union, McKeldin Library where Toni worked, the green at the center of campus, and the Francis Scott Key Building – my old stomping ground. Once inside I wandered around for some time before finding the History Department.

At the Mariott I caught the conclusion of the Cubs opener on local TV since they were playing Washington (relievers Wood and Marmol spoiled Dempster’s stellar outing). I returned to Key Hall and peeked into room 006 where as a T.A. I’d heard Louis Harlan and Sam Merrill lecture. Outside the Merrill seminar room was a spread that included sandwiches, shrimp, and wine and slightly familiar faces that looked like elderly professors but turned out to be contemporaries. Most remembered that I had pitched for the Wobblies softball team. It was great seeing good buddy Pete Daniel. Forty years ago he gave us six German wine glasses. Five got broken, but we still have the lone survivor. Oral history conference mainstays Don and Anne Ritchie greeted me warmly, as did Ray and Phyllis Smock. Both Pete and Don were past distinguished lecturers. Dick Baker, a historian of the Senate for many years, knew me mainly through Smock and Ritchie. Sam Walker, author of “Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan” talked with me about his most recent book, a history of ACC basketball and in particular about Vic Bubas, a 1944 Lew Wallace grad who starred at NC State and brought Duke program into prominence during a coaching career that spanned 11 years, beginning in 1959.

Introducing Ray was Ira Berlin, a leading expert on slavery and author of “Many Thousands Gone,” “Generations of Captivity,” and “Slaves Without Masters,” about free blacks in antebellum America. Ray’s entertaining talk, entitled “I Did It My Way, By Accident: Lessons from an Unconventional Career,” traced his interest in history back to his coin collecting day. Obtaining a Booker T. Washington half-dollar, he did research about the Tuskegee Institute founder. People who saw it often said, “Oh, the peanut guy?” – meaning George Washington Carver. Ray would reply, “No, the guy who hired the peanut man.” Ray gave credit to a junior college instructor for exciting him about the relevance of history and to August Meier, who taught him at Roosevelt University. Ray helped edit the Booker T. Washington papers and overcame opposition when he submitted two volumes in place of a traditional dissertation. His main theme: history departments need to start thinking outside the box in terms of assigning worth to collaborative projects, including areas of public history, rather of than the lone wolf model of how one earns a degree and promotion up the ranks. There was a nice crowd of about 30 but hardly any grad students who could have benefitted from Ray’s sage remarks.

After Ray’s speech most of us moved to the Oracle, a bar located where I was staying that had Yuengling beer on tap. I talked at length to fellow grad student and environmental historian John Wennersten, author of “Anacostia: The Death and Birth of an American River.” He taught at Maryland’s Eastern Shore campus and wrote extensively about the Chesapeake Bay, including a book about oyster wars. His most recent work is “Global Thirst: Water and Society in the 21st Century.” Wife Ruth Ellen was also a Marylander, and we chatted about both being in Hong Kong, where I lectured at Chinese University for a month 20 years ago.

Friday I awoke, thought the clock said 9:20, and went to the lobby to find the dining area and Starbucks kiosk closed. It opens at six, someone told me. It turned out to be 5:30, so I went back to bed and after a leisurely morning drove to the Smocks in Martinsburg, West Virginia. On the way I stopped at a scenic vista that happened to be the site of the Battle of Mononacy. Hoosier general Lew Wallace, who later wrote “Ben-Hur” and has a Gary school named for him, held off a superior rebel force long enough to save Washington, DC, from attack.

After catching up on recent doings and drinking Sam Adams with Ray and Phyllis on their deck and, we dined at a Mexican Restaurant and then watched “War Horse,” commenting wittily during corny scenes. Next morning Phyllis made scrambled eggs, sausages, and grits, and we joked about how Romney tried to win over Mississippians by claiming to like cheesy grits. I looked through Ray’s extensive book collection and noticed photographs on the wall of him with Senator Robert Byrd and other dignitaries as well as one of the two of us at the 1969 antiwar Moratorium rally. I wish we lived closer to each other.

My GPS route took me within a couple blocks of the Harpers Ferry National Park. I got in free with my lifetime senior citizen pass. At the restored town was the engine house where abolitionist John Brown fought it out with U.S. troops. Located where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers come together, Harpers Ferry was important not only because of the armory that John Brown tried to seize but as an early transportation route and area of early industry. Two songs come to mind whenever If think of John Brown, the ditty by r and b pioneer Huey “Piano” Smith and this more famous one that inspired the Union cause: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,/ But his soul goes marching on.”

Around two I arrived at nephew Aaron Pickert’s house in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Three dogs greeted me and then brother-in-law Steve, or Doc, as everyone calls him. Nephew Kyle and his girlfriend Palma had arrived the night before and daughter-in-law Beth arrived shortly after I did from Virginia. She and Aaron are both into Game of Thrones, so they had a fine time trading theories. Beth hadn’t seen 23 year-old Kyle since he was a kid and loved holding Aaron and Kim’s 17 month-old son Nic (Nicodemos), a sweetheart with very observant eyes. Since he says “da” for yes, Steve bragged that he spoke Russian. In his walker he pushed a device that played music and got a kick watching me dance a jig, a routine we repeated several times. Kim and Aaron designed their house themselves, which has a library on two levels and a geothermal heating and cooling system involving pipes set eight feet below the ground. Steve treated at Cozy’s, a buffet place that houses a small Camp David museum illustrating the presidential retreat located nearby. Aaron was an engineering major at my alma mater Bucknell, and Steve told a joke about a baker, shoemaker and engineer sentenced during the French Revolution to be guillotined. The first two were spared when the guillotine stopped an inch from their neck. Just before the guillotine was about to descend on the engineer, he said, “Wait, I think I see the problem.” Aaron, a gamer like me, taught us Fluxx, Unspeakable Words, and Chairman Mao.

All too soon it was time to head to the airport. Normally the route would have been busy, but on Easter morning the traffic was almost nonexistent. I had a couple hours to read chapters on Reagan and Clinton in William H. Chafee’s “The Rise and Fall of the American Century.” Ronnie had astute advisers his first term but stumbled after they left. Truly asleep at the wheel, he didn’t even know the names of some cabinet members and failed to prep for a summit with the Russians because “The Sound of Music” was on TV the night before. Chafee thinks Bill leaned too much on Hillary’s advice at times when his infidelities caused him to be too timid about crossing her.

Back at the Highland parking lot at 3:20, I ran into Donn Gobbe, excited about having been with all nine tennis players who started the women’s professional tennis circuit 30 years ago. He had already interviewed Billie Jean King, Rosie Casals, and a few others, but others he was interacting with for the first time. Home in time for the end of the Masters, won on the second playoff hole by the guy I was rooting for (Tiger being out of it), Bubba Watson, a down-to-earth long shot.

Alan Barr’s Monday movie was “Ju Lou,” a 22 year-old Chinese film set in the 1920s about a woman purchased by a cruel cloth dyer who has an affair with her husband’s adapted nephew. Originally banned in China, it was that country’s first film nominated for an Academy Award.

On April 9, 1865, the Civil War ended. Sergeant Samuel A. Clear of the Irish brigade wrote in his diary: “At 3 P. P. an order was read to the effect that General Robert E. Lee had surrendered. When we knew it to be a sure thing what a loud, long, glorious shout went up. Then the first thing I knew I was rolling in the mud and several Company K boys piled on top and wallowed me in the mud and themselves too pulled one another about. Such confusion and carrying on was never seen in so short a time. Then the artillery . . . belched forth the glad tidings. . . . It was one continual roar for miles and miles.”

Ozzie Guillen, who frequently said provocative things while managing the White Sox, is in trouble now that he’s the Marlins skipper for saying he admires Cuban leader Fidel Castro for staying in power so longer despite CIA attempts to assassinate him and America’s longstanding embargo, among other harassments. The marlins new stadium is in the middle of Little Havana, where 600,000 Cubans live supposedly in exile and one group that is always ready at the drop of a hat to protest vowed to have 20,000 demonstrators demanding punitive action against Guillen. So much for free speech. Suspended without pay for five games by the owner, Guillen has apologized. Most sports jocks have piled on poor Ozzie except for The SCORE’s Boers and Bernstein, who see it as a tempest in a teapot. On the Mully and Hanley show a caller pointed out that the old regime was both dictatorial and racist and that Castro provided schooling and health care for everyone. Some yahoo called in to brand him a moron.