End of an Era

“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.” Arthur Miller

I’ve begun to organize what to tell the Valparaiso University Urban Sociology students in Mary Kate Blake’s class next week when I distribute my 1980s Steel Shavings,“The Uncertainty of Everyday Life” in the Calumet Region. I’ll identify myself as a regional, rather than a purely local, historian and define the Calumet Region as the Great Lakes basin geographic area drained by the Grand and Little Calumet rivers in northwest Indiana and northeast Illinois.  I’ll distinguish among the four main Lake County cities, Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, and Whiting, all of which grew rapidly as a result of industrialization and largely unrestricted immigration at the turn of the twentieth century.  I’ll contrast the memoirs and oral histories that constitute most of the issue’s contents with the essay by Lance Trusty, “End of an Era: The 1980s in the Calumet,” based largely on census figures and other written sources. Finally, I’ll explain the title, “The Uncertainly of Everyday Life,” especially in connection with the Ronald Reagan presidency, the 1986-87 U.S. Steel lockout, and the drastic decline in mill employment due to automation.  The phrase, though true to some extent in every decade, was inspired by misfortunes that affected adolescents as well as such unexpected tragedies as the slaying of elderly Glen Park Bible teacher Ruth Pelke, the Cline Avenue Bridge collapse, and the sudden death of 47 year-old stalwart First District Congressman Adam Benjamin, Jr.

Sandra L. Barnes

A book on Mary Kate Blake’s reading list by urban sociologist Sandra L. Barnes, “The Cost of Being Poor: A Comparative Study of Life in Poor Urban Neighborhoods in Gary, Indiana” (2005), contains an interesting interview with Tamara Davis (it isn’t clear if that is her real name) who grew up in Gary, graduated from IUN, lives in a Merrillville apartment, and is a caseworker in LaPorte.  Her parents were staunch Baptists and stressed the value of family and education. Thirty years old when interviewed some 30 years ago, Tamara told Barnes, now a professor at Vanderbilt, that her dad was illiterate but worked for American Bridge Company until the Gary plant closed at the end of the 1970s.  Barnes recorded Tamara’s recollections:

 I remember when I was real little, my mother was working at the bank and my father got laid off. At first I really couldn’t tell that things had changed, but as I got older, we used to collect aluminum cans for money and recycle newspaper, so then I knew that [father’s layoff] had affected our finances.  They used to argue about the division of labor.  My mother said that if she came home from work, the dinner should be ready and that type of thing.  I do remember him cooking occasionally but only one or two things so I’m not sure he really could cook.  I know he did not clean.  But he did do a lot of babysitting even if it was just dragging the kids around wherever he was going.

  Once I got older, I knew that we were poor. One time, these jeans came out that had like, fake leather on the front, and everybody had some.  And I was gonna lose my mind if I didn’t get any. All my friends wanted to take these pictures together in school with these same jeans on. My mother didn’t have the money and I was just screaming and crying, so she borrowed the money from my aunt.  And I remember her on the phone talking to my other aunt about what my aunt puts you through to borrow money from her and I felt bad that I had put my mother through that just for a pair of jeans.

Tamara told Barnes that she would consider living in Gary but only if she could live in a good neighborhood.  She added:

  Gary is my home, probably because I grew up there.  And the people I work with are from Gary.  I still have close community ties with people from Gary – and it’s the one area here that has the most Black people. 

  I try to show as much support for Gary as I can, but I try not to be stupid either. Things like groceries would be too expensive to get in Gary.  But I bank at a credit union in Gary.  If you look at young people in Gary, they’re wearing one hundred dollar gym shoes and outfits where the pants alone were one hundred dollars, so it’s how you choose to spend your money. I think there’s a lot of money to be spent in Gary, but unfortunately it’s not being spent in Gary.

  I work with White people all the time, and they always say, “You go to Gary?" – as if people are just falling down dead on every corner.  When it’s not that.  If you’re engaged in the wrong types of activities, which could happen in Valparaiso, Hammond, Portage, Merrillville or where ever, then you run the risk of, you know, murder or whatever. But unless you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – and you just never go to those places – then you are relatively safe.

In a New Yorker profile David Remnick wrote that Chicago Blues legend Buddy Guy feared he might be the last of his ilk. When a teenager, Guy paid 50 cents to see Guitar Slim (1926-1959) at the Masonic Temple in Baton Rouge.  When the band started playing “The Things I Used To Do,” the headliner was nowhere in sight.  Remnick wrote:

 It was only after a while that anyone could see Slim, his hair dyed flaming red to match his suit, being carried forward through the crowd by a hulking roadie. Using a 300-foot cord to connect his guitar to his amplifier, he played a frenzied solo as his one-man caravan inched him toward the stage. And, once he joined the band, Slim pulled every stunt imaginable, playing the guitar between his legs, behind his back.  He raised it to his face and plucked the strings with his teeth.  As Guy watched Slim, he made a decision: "I want to play like B.B. King, but I want to act like Guitar Slim.”

A quarter-century ago, I saw Buddy Guy at a Star Plaza House Rockin’ Blues concert produced by Henry and Omar Farag.  He pulled off some of the same stunts he'd observed Guitar Slim doing that evening, including strutting up and down the aisles and up in the balcony while playing a guitar solo.

Former IUN colleague Ed Escobar sent this response to my piece about the Concerned Latins Organization (CLO) that referenced our book “Forging a Community” that mentions the Latino Historical Society, to which we both belonged, and two of its presidents, Jesse Villalpando and David Castro:

 The CLO was before my time there but I certainly remember being regaled with stories from David Castro and to a lesser extent from Jesse Villalpando about its accomplishments.  Among the many joys I had while I was in Indiana was hanging out with them when we were building the Historical Society.  

 Both Gayle and I continue to be active historians.  She is having an article published by a journal affiliated with the Ninth Circuit Court on her book on the California women’s suffrage movement and gave a presentation before the L.A. History Group on her new work on women journalists in the early 20^th century.  I continue to work on my second book on relations between Chicanos and the LAPD (1945-2000) which is now about 80% completed.  After totally lapsing into inactivity due to the disruption of moving, I’ve joined a writing group of historians at Berkeley and am picking up steam again.  Wish me luck.

While completing World War II homefront unit, Nicole Anslover told the class about the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, one the central events in Escobar’s “Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945.”   During a discussion of Japanese internment, justified at the time as a military necessity.  I mentioned that in Hawaii, where the threat of Japanese invasion was more plausible than on the West Coast, Japanese-Americans were not interned, except in exceptional cases.  For one thing, it would have been impractical, considering it would have applied to 40 percent of the population.  When Nicole brought up the Tuskegee Airmen, I noted that black officers were arrested at Fort Freeman near Seymour, Indiana, for trying to desegregate an all-white officers’ club. Most military training camps being located in the South, a series of ugly attacks on servicemen caused essayist James Baldwin to conclude that many parents of black soldiers were relieved when their sons left the South to be shipped overseas into combat. 

above, arrested Tuskegee Airmen; below, Anne Balay with Stephanie and Brandie Diamond

Despite two nationally acclaimed books, on LGBT steelworkers and long-haul trucker, Anna Balay does not have a full-time position in the Fall and may leave academia.  What a disgusting commentary on the current state of the profession and the gutless, faint-hearted professors who claim to be her supporters.  Here’s her latest post as she embarked on a trip to Oxford, Mississippi to speak about her book “Semi-Queer.” On the way Anne reunited with trucker buddies Stephanie and Brandie Diamond:

 I'm trying to give myself permission to be angry and sad that I'm leaving academia because no school has hired me, but also hold on to the real value of my writing and activist scholarship. SO, out this morning for an early run, trying to face the future with joy, I tripped and fell full length smashing both knees, an elbow, and my face. Icing now.

 below, Ray Smock and historian Richard Rector

At a talk and book signing for “American Demagogue,” an audience member asked Ray Smock if Trump could be re-elected.  Ray admitted its possibility and afterwards composed these reflections:

 We learned the hard way in 2016 that a blatant demagogue can win the highest office in the land. Not only did Trump beat Hillary Clinton, he first had to beat 11 other Republican nominees and five more that dropped out before the primaries got underway. This should alert us to the power to sway voters that is contained in the tactics of fear, hate, ridicule, smears, lies, bombast, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. 

  Whoever emerges from the Democratic Party to take on Trump in 2020 will have to be a strong, self-assured individual who can stand up to Trump’s nuclear blasts of demagoguery. And the Democratic candidate cannot afford to take the low ground of demagoguery to fight Trump the Demagogue. I wonder if there are enough American voters who can set aside their own fears and anxieties long enough to see through the dark forces of Trumpism.

The Democratic candidate who can defeat Trump will have to be able to use humor rather than outright ridicule to challenge Trump. It is the rare politician that has a natural ability to use humor. Humor can be an important political tool, and it can be a hopeful, positive tactic to de-fang demagogues. Trump has no sense of humor. It takes empathy to be funny. It takes a broader understanding of human nature to use humor than it does to appeal to fear and hate.

  A Democratic challenger to Trump needs to be a good story teller who can tell stories about America and the promise of America. The Democratic challenger needs more than a slogan like “Make America Great Again,” which is nothing but a dog whistle for keeping America white. Americans love a good story, one with a moral. Trump is not a story teller. He tells stories only about himself. His concept of humor is ridiculing his enemies.

While at Inman’s watching James bowl, I read a few pages of “I Am Malala,” given to me by former student Terry Helton. Malala Yousafzai’s childhood in Mingora, Pakistan was unimaginably different from American adolescents, yet she listened to Justin Bieber and enjoyed Twilight Saga movies. Her mother was illiterate and her father, reared to value education, the founder of a school for girls.  The youngest Nobel Prize laureate, Malala at age 12 was shot in the head while on a bus by a Taliban gunman because she was an advocate for women’s education.  During my grandson’s third game I started paying close attention as he flirted with a 200, needing a strike in the tenth for a double. Instead he calmly spared and settled for a 196.

Christina Thompson’s “Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia” documents centuries-old efforts to understand a seafaring people who colonized islands stretching more than half way around the world.  As New Zealand ethnologist Elsdor Best wrote, “Could the story of Polynesian voyageurs be written in full, then it would be the wonder-story of the world.”  4,000 years ago, during the Ice Age the sea level was several hundred feet lower, and a continent existed where the Southeast Asian nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, and New Guinea are today.  Beginning around 2000 BC and ending around 1100 A.D. Polynesian settlement spread from New Zealand north to Hawaii and southeast to Easter Island. Contact with Europeans (and contagious diseases) decimated Oceana, threatening some native populations with extinction.

Captain James Cook

Having lived in Hawaii for 18 months, I was intrigued by Thompson’s account of Captain James Cook’s death on February 14, 1779.  According to legend, the Hawaiians believed he was the god Lono and killed him when they realized he was human and ate his flesh.  Thompson explained that Cook arrived while a festival honoring Lono, the god of fertility and peace, was underway, and Cook was honored not as a deity but simply as the human embodiment of Lono. Cook sailed away but returned several days later after a ship’s foremast broke during a sudden storm with gale force winds.  Since the festival had concluded, Cook and his men were now met with distrust.  When repairing the mast, the crew encountered hostility, and thefts began occurring, including the disappearance of a cutter vessel. During the subsequent standoff, a Hawaiian chief was shot, causing angry natives to attack Cook’s party, killing the Captain.  The Hawaiians were not cannibals and cooked part of Cook’s body, not for food but because they believed that his power lay in the bones.

Meagan Flynn of the Washington Postwrote about the conviction of six Beatrice, Nebraska, outcasts (including one named James Dean), some of whom were tricked by a police psychologist into confessing to the 1985 rape and murder of an elderly woman.  The shrink convinced three of them that they were suffering from “memory repression.”  Several were involved in the porn industry, which originally brought them to the attention of authorities.  Police interrogators would tell suspects details of the crime and suggest that the truth would be revealed to them in their dreams. DNA tests eventually exonerated the so-called Beatrice Six, and recently the Supreme Court upheld a 28.1 million dollar judgment for wrongful conviction.

Remarkable Hoosier

“I had the good fortune to be able to right an injustice that I thought was being heaped on young people by lowering the voting age, where you had young people that were old enough to die in Vietnam but not old enough to vote for their members of Congress that sent them there.” Birch Bayh

Former Senator Birch Bayh passed away at age 91. Moving to Indiana in 1970, I was proud that he was in Congress representing the Hoosier state.  During a remarkable 3-term career beginning in 1962 at age 34 with an upset win against Sen. Homer Capehart, he championed civil rights legislation, helped make the 25th and 26th amendments a reality regarding presidential succession and lowering the voting age to 18, and sponsored Title IX, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded educational and sports programs.  The father of 13 year-old Dianne Murphy (below) from Valparaiso, a national wrestling champion in a competition that included boys, credited Birch Bayh for making possible sports opportunities for females of all ages. 

   Sen. Bayh in 1968 on Coast Guard cutter investigating alewives infestation of Lake Michigan with mayors Frank Harongody (Whiting), John Nicosia (East Chicago), Richard Hatcher (Gary), and Joseph Klen (Hammond)

In 1964 Bayh was traveling with Senator Ted Kennedy in a small plane that crashed near Springfield, Massachusetts.  Kennedy suffered a broken back, and Bayh helped pull him out of danger. In 1972 Bayh called off plans to run for the Democratic Presidential nomination when his wife Marvella was diagnosed with cancer.  Bayh successfully led the opposition to  confirming Nixon’s racist Supreme Court nominees Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, paving the way for Justice Henry Blackmun’s elevation, and unsuccessfully supported ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and abolition of the electoral college.  

I first met Bayh in 1974 when he was in a tough re-election battle against Indianapolis mayor Dick Lugar.  In the morning he addressed the IU Northwest Young Democrats.  Shaking hands with him afterwards, I noticed Bayh’s intense blue eyes, how comfortable he was interacting with everyone in the room, and that he seemed to give each well-wisher his total attention.  From the Terre Haute area, he was down to earth without phony folksiness.  That evening at a house party in Miller, after campaigning all day in Gary, he still looked energetic and spoke passionately about the need for Congress to stand up against executive overreach.  When he shook my hand, Bayh said, “Hi, Jim, good to see you again.”  I was impressed. 

On Facebook Connie Mack-Ward wrote: “I campaigned for him when I was in college. It broke my heart when he was swept out during the horrible Reagan election. His fundamental decency as a human being was reflected in his political service. He was arguably the best federal elected official Indiana has ever had.”  Local Democrats Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson, George Van Til, Charlie Brown, and Roy Dominguez effusively praised him, as did Republican Governor Eric Holcomb and Sen. Todd Young.  Congressman Pete Visclosky noted: “He lived a life dedicated to serving others.”Tennis great Billie Jean King called him “one of the most important Americans of the twentieth century.”

The Remarkable Book Store on Taft Street in Merrillville is closing on the fortieth anniversary of its birth.  Pretty much a one-man operation through the years, Ken VanderLugt started out in 1979 stocking both new and used books, but during the time I’ve known him, the concentration, with a few exceptions, has been on the latter.  He sold dozens of Ron and my “Gary: A Pictorial History,” however, and always was willing to take 5 or 10 copies of new Steel Shavingsissues.  When I’d stop in, I’d pick up science fiction novels for Toni and a history book or two for myself.  Lately VanderLugt  saw just a handful of customers a day, but after Jerry Davich wrote a laudatory column, old customers began returning, nostalgic and saddened by the looming closure of such a welcoming place.

“This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women” (2007), edited by NPR producers Jay Allison and Dan Gediman, contains contributions by both the famous (novelist John Updike, feminist Gloria Steinem) and relative unknowns– a part-time hospital clerk, for example, and a member of a state parole board.  In 1951 distinguished journalist Edward R. Murrow hosted a five-minute series by that name on CBS radio with appearances by such scholars as anthropologist Margaret Mead and scientist Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of the famous naturalist. Allison and Gediman revived “This I Believe” a half-century later.  These words of praise come from a Publisher’s Weeklyreview

  “Your personal credo”is what Allison calls it in the book’s introduction, noting that today’s program is distinguished from the 1950s version in soliciting submissions from ordinary Americans from all walks of life. These make up some of the book’s most powerful and memorable moments, from the surgeon whose illiterate mother changed his early life with faith and a library card to the English professor whose poetry helped him process a traumatic childhood event. And in one of the book’s most unusual essays, a Burmese immigrant confides that he believes in feeding monkeys on his birthday because a Buddhist monk once prophesied that if he followed this ritual, his family would prosper. This feast of ruminations is a treat for any reader.

High school teachers often assign some form of “This I Believe” essays, and questions in a similar vein often show up on college applications.

I’m not very adventuristic when it comes to taking care of my body or automobiles. In my 49 years living in Northwest Indiana, I have had just two head mechanics (Frank Renner and Tom Klaubo, head of Lake Shore Toyota service), two barbers, two regular doctors, and four dentists (including one who committed suicide and another who I nicknamed “the gouger”)  I’ve been a patient of dentist John Sikora’s for probably 30 years.  He grew up in Glen Park, is an IU grad and big Hoosier sports fan, loves the White Sox, and plays music to my liking when cleaning teeth and fixing cavities.  

While replacing a filling and waiting for the area to get numbed up, Dr. Sikora asked what I thought of the college admissions scandal that involved rich folks paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their kids into elite universities.  The scheme included bribing coaches and administrators and having  ringers take the applicants’ SAT or ACT exams.  I hope they throw the book at both the parents and the fixers behind the racket and told Dr. Sikora that under-achieving teens would be better off at institutions such as IUN.  Undergraduate diplomas at elite schools, in my opinion, are overrated compared to graduate degrees, especially if a student makes mediocre grades.

 Don Coffin

Over 50 people have been charged with federal crimes, and some ringleaders have pleaded guilty and are looking to plea bargain.  Coaches have been fired, and adversely affected students are bringing class-action suits. Former IUN professor of Economics Don Coffinoffered this perspective on what he termed “the bribing-your-kids-way-into-college thing”:

It all feels like morbid and unwelcome confirmation of my oft-repeated line that community colleges struggle because they’re trying to create a middle class for a country that no longer wants one.  The wildly wealthy live in their own world; what Christopher Lasch called “the secession of the successful”has so desiccated our sense of community that colleges for whom community is their middle name are left aside.

Electrical Engineers moved into first place by one point by taking two games and series from Just Do It Again while Duke Cominsky’s Pin Heads swept Pin Chasers to move within 6 points of us.  When I thanked Duke for helping the Engineers get into first, he said,” Not for long.”  I rolled a 440 series, just a point from my average, while Joe Piunti got hot and ended 90 pins over his.  After I picked up a 1-3-5-6 spare, opponent Wanda Fox commented, “Show off.” In the very next frame Wanda converted the exact same pins.  Of course, I said, “Show off”as she left the alley. Marge Yetsko, carrying a 137 average, threw a good ball but so slowly she rarely got a strike and more often a split. She picked up four straight 10-pins, a feat befuddling some 200 bowlers.  Husband George’s ball has good velocity but goes straight and inconsistent, befitting his 125 average.  Just Do It Again is one of the few teams the Engineers spot pins.

Jim Spicer’s weekly witticism:

  A teacher asked her 6th grade class: “Who can tell me, which human organ becomes 10 times bigger when it’s stimulated?”
  Maria stood up, bright red and angry, and said “How can you ask such a question? I’m telling my parents and they’re going to get you fired!”
  The teacher was shocked by the outburst, but decided to ignore it. She asked the class again, “Who can tell me, which human organ becomes 10 times bigger when it’s stimulated?”
  This time Thomas responded, “The answer is the iris in the human eye.”
  “Very good, Thomas. Thank you,”replied the teacher who then turned her gaze on Maria.
 “Maria, I need to tell you three things. First, you obviously have not done your homework. Second, you have a dirty mind. And third, I fear that one day you will be very, very disappointed.”

Chilling News: An Australian gunman mowed down 49 Muslims worshipping in two nearby mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, one of the most peaceful nations in the world.  Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern (above) vowed to change her country’s gun laws.  Were such progress possible in the U.S.?  The assassin, a Trump admirer, claimed he chose new Zealand to show that Muslims weren’t safe anywhere in the world.

Marianne Brush got me four tickets to see Dave Davies and his band on April 19 at the Art Theater in Hobart, of all places. Voted one of the hundred best guitarists of all time by Rolling Stone, Davies and brother Ray founded the Kinks, and Dave was responsible for the distorted power chord on the Kinks’ first hit, “You Really Got Me,” by slitting his speaker with a razor blade.  The two brothers had a stormy relationship. Toni, Phil, Dave, and I saw the Kinks at the Star Plaza 30 some years ago.  “Lola” (1970), about a young man and a transvestite, became a classic. When we saw them, they teased the audience by starting the first chord and then morphing into another song before finally performing it as an encore.

Barbara Walczak’s bridge Newslettercongratulated Barbara Larson and Carol Miller for their remarkable 76.39 % at a recent Dunelands Bridge Club event.  Barb stared the article by stating: “This is not a typographical error.”  Both are very friendly people.

I finished “Unexampled Courage,” about a recently discharged soldier beaten so badly by a South Carolina sheriff in 1946 that he was permanently blinded. Author Richard Gergel concluded: 

 In the midst of what seemed to be an unsolvable crisis in American government and character, courageous citizens, recognizing the demands of the times, stepped forward to challenge the racial status quo.  Most had little to gain and much to lose.  Although to the modern observer the collapse of the Jim Crow world may be viewed as the inevitable consequence of a growing and prosperous postwar nation, the truth is that in 1946 America’s racial future was uncertain.  This band of diverse, courageous citizens, some prominent, others from humble backgrounds, altered the course of American history, displaying what Judge J. Waties ascribed to the Briggs plaintiffs, “unexampled courage.”

Briggs v. Elliottbegan in 1947 as a challenge to the school segregation laws in South Carolina. It ultimately became combined with other cases as part of brown v. Board of Education.  Plaintiffs Harry and Eliza Briggs, a service station attendant and a maid, both lost their jobs and moved away from South Carolina.  Reverend James De Laine, who led the fight in Clarendon County, was fired from his teaching job, had is church burned to the ground, and survived an assassination attempt before leaving the Palmetto State.

The flags at IUN are at half-staff.  At first I thought it might be for the Muslims slain in new Zealand but then remembered that the Governor had ordered it in honor of Birch Bayh’s death.

Jim Crow

“Three-fourths of the 900,000 African-American veterans who served during World War II were coming home to communities in the old Confederacy.  This was the world of Jim Crow, where black citizens were relegated to the margins of American democracy and expected to be the bootblacks and mudsills of the nation’s economy.” Richard Gergel, “Unexampled Courage”

A recent Washington Post Sunday magazine carried a lengthy article adapted from Steve Luxenberg’s “Separate: The Story of Plessy V. Ferguson and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation” titled” The North, the South, and the Origins of Jim Crow.”  During the 1830s numerous white entertainers donned black face and sang in a parody of what they claimed was black dialect.  The most famous, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, dressed in mismatched shoes and threadbare gold pants and billed himself as the “Original Jim Crow.”  “Daddy” Rice performed a ludicrous off-balance jig during a ditty called “Jump Jim Crow” that contained the lines,“Weel about and turn about and do jis so/Eb’ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.” By the end of the decade “jumping Jim Crow” became a synonym for compromising one’s principles and Jim Crow a synonym for separate accommodations in public facilities, such as locomotives.  Historian Luxenberg found an October 12, 1838 notice in the Salem Gazettereferring to the “Jim Crow car at the end of the train.”  Even after the Civil War, in the North as well as Dixie, African Americans were often segregated on trains and steamships; as Luxenberg wrote, “the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson ruling [was] written by a New England-born justice for a 7-1 majority dominated by Northerners.”

Prudence Crandall

In 1832 Canterbury, Connecticut schoolteacher Prudence Crandall, the wife of a minister, admitted 17 year-old African-American Sarah Harris to her private school for girls.  When white parents withdrew their daughters, Crandall, with the support of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, turned her institution into exclusively a boarding school for young women of color until retaliatory actions by townspeople, including nuisance lawsuits and the poisoning of the school’s well, forced the Crandalls to leave town.

Growing up in Fort Washington, PA, I was aware of a small cluster of homes three blocks from us inhabited by black folks who took in foster children from Philadelphia. Some went to my elementary school, and I’d see them wearing clothes my brother and I had outgrown that Midge had given to our cleaning lady Ada Jenkins. In fifth grade my safety patrol corner was a block from where they lived, and I knew many by name.  Bernard Johnson was a playmate. My first encounter with racism, I believe, was when the principal left Charlie Gaskins, the best player in our class, off the softball team.  In seventh grade at Upper Dublin were classmates from the black community of North Hills, and I became friends with Percy Herder and Bernell Nash and had fantasies about five-foot-ten, full-breasted Beatrice Addie Green (even the names seemed exotic, given my white bread suburban upbringing). In the gym locker room I gaped upon spying Percy’s silk, yellow briefs with tiger stripes.  My first epiphany regarding Jim Crow realities was a year later when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.  A neighbor from Alabama blamed outside agitators, but scenes on TV exposed that as a lie.

 C. Vann Woodward

In grad school at Maryland, C. Vann Woodward’s “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” (1955), based on lectures delivered at the University of Virginia, was must reading and led many of us to Woodward’s more substantial “Origins of the New South, 1877-1913” (1951). In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education(1954) Woodward traced the history of Jim Crow laws, which until the 1890s were more common in the North than in the South, where racial separation in public places was custom rather than law.  Then when Populists began looking to bring African Americans into their movement, conservative “Bourbon” Democrats passed legislation to create, in Woodward’s words, “legally prescribed, rigidly enforced, state-wide Jim Crowism.”

Photographer of urban ruins Cindy C. “Cupcake” Bean, whose shot of a Lake Michigan sunset with steel mills in the background appears in “Gary: A Pictorial History,” wrote: “Crouching in the darkness of an abandoned house, I sat in the middle of a room filled with toys. The sun was sinking casting ominous shadows in the room. I sat next to the horse on springs and looked at it…it sadly stared into nothingness as I photographed it. I felt lost…lost in a room full of toys.”  At first glance the horse on springs appears quite lifelike.

abandoned Glen Park church; photo by Cindy Cupcake

In the Jeopardy category “the 1870s,” I knew four of five answers, including Boss William Marcy Tweed and cartoonist Thomas Nest as the first to  draw images of a donkey for Democrats, but fanned on one about a botanist who developed the russet potato, so-named due to its reddish-brown color.  It was Luther Burbank, but I guessed George Washington Carver.  Known as the “Peanut Man,” Carver also did research on sweet potatoes at Tuskegee Institute but not russet potatoes.  One contestant guessed “Russet.”  Along with Boston Massacre victim Crispus Attucks and educator Booker T. Washington, Carver was extolledduring the Jim Crow era as a nonthreatening Negro, but that should not detract from his remarkable discoveries.

At Chesterton library Steve Luxenberg’s “Separate” was in the New Books section, but I opted for Richard Gergel’s “Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sergeant Isaak Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring.”  On February 12, 1946 (“The Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln’s birthday), Sergeant Isaak Woodard, wearing his army uniform, was returning on a Greyhound bus to his home in Augusta, Georgia upon receiving an honorable discharge after three years of military service as a longshoreman in the Pacific and came under intense fire in New Guinea.  Sitting with a white G.I., passing a bottle back and forth, and talking too loudly to suit a passenger nearby, he was removed by the driver and arrested by Batesburg, South Carolina police chief Lynwood Shull.  While having him in custody, Shull and other police beat Woodard severely with nightsticks, and later Shull jabbed him in the eyes with a billy club for answering “Yes” rather than “Yes sir.” The beating permanently blinded Woodard.    

Isaac Woodard after beating; below, Julian Bond

The outrage mobilized black veterans and led to President Truman desegregating the military by executive order.  After an all-white jury acquitted Shull, conscience-stricken Federal Judge Waring began issuing landmark decisions that challenged Jim Crow laws.  His dissent in a 1951 case pertaining to segregated schools became the model for the unanimousBrown v. Board of EducationSupreme Court judgment overturning the Plessy “separate but equal” precedent  and ordering the Topeka, Kansas school board to desegregate its schools.  The role of the NAACP was crucial in publicizing and litigating the Woodard case.  In “We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal team That Dismantled Jim Crow” (2018) Margaret Edds highlights the role of two NAACP attorneys who developed a legal strategy that found a receptive audience in federal judges in key civil rights cases.

Similar atrocities against returning World War I veterans occurred without such dramatic repercussions.  Woodard’s blinding was not an isolated incident.  In a chapter titled “Reign of Terror” Gergel documents horrendous occurrences in Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee. In the course of his research Gergel came across a statement by Julian Bond that the Isaac Woodard incident triggered the modern civil rights movement. Interviewing the civil rights icon and University of Virginia History professor, Gergel wrote:

 Bond recalled from memory the story of Woodard’s blinding and described a photograph he remembered from his childhood. As Bond described the image, he began to weep openly.  Composing himself, he apologized for the tears but stated that after all the years, “I still weep for this blinded soldier.”

A decade later, a photo of Emmett Till’s mutilated body would shame the nation and provide propaganda for the Soviet Union.

Gergel’s use of the word mudsills, meaning those at the lowest social level, led me to this quotation by Abraham Lincoln, whose background was not far removed from those whom he described:

 By the 'mud-sill' theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be -- all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous. In fact, it is, in some sort, deemed a misfortune that laborers should have heads at all.

Before being inducted into the army Woodard had laid railroad tracks, delivered milk, took construction jobs for two dollars a day, and got hired at a sawmill, Doolittle’s Lumber.  Gergel wrote: "He worked as a 'log turner,' a backbreaking and dangerous job that earned him but $10 a week.  Because they faced such dismal employment options, it is not surprising that despite the perils of service in the armed forces, Woodard and many other African Americans residing in the rural South viewed military service as a promising alternative."

Bill Hudnut

In the Winter 2019 Traces Editor’s Note, Ray Boomhower described his 28-year association with the magazine, including playing a role in soliciting reader opinion on what to call it, finally settling on a name similar to Steel Shavings.  Pictured are numerous past covers, almost half of which contain articles of mine, including my one cover story on Gary pugilist Tony Zale.  My most recent pays tribute to Gary civil rights pioneer Reverend L.K. Jackson, the self-styled “Hell-raiser from the East,” “Servant of the Lord’s Servant,” and “Old Prophet.”  A current article describes the civil rights contributions of Republican Bill Hudnut, who served as mayor of Indianapolis for 16 years, beginning in 1976. At a time when most downstate politicians shunned Gary mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher Hudnut embraced him as a valuable ally and in 1980 supported Hatcher’s successful bid to become president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Several African Americans compete in Unit 154 duplicate bridge events, though not commonly in Chesterton, including Richard Hatcher’s wife Ruthellyn, and the Gary game has far more tables than ours.  In 1932 blacks formed the American Bridge Association (ABA) due to being barred from American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) events, especially in the South. In 1967 the ABCL included in its by-laws a rule stating that nobody could be denied membership on the basis of race, color or creed.  The ABA still exists and holds biannual tournaments.

At Chesterton YMCA I played duplicate for the first time in over a month, partnering with Charlie Halberstadt.  Director Alan Yngve said, “Welcome back,”and sassy Dottie Hart quipped, “Where have you been?”  When I commented on Sally Will’s green outfit being early for St. Patrick’s Day, she said she decided to wear green all week and pointed to her earrings shaped like leprechauns.  In the hand I wish I could play over, Dottie Hart opened a Heart, Charlie overcalled to 2 Clubs, and Terry Bauer and I passed.  Dottie bid 2 Hearts, and both Charlie and Terry passed.  I held 8 high card points, Queen, spot, spot of Clubs, and King, Jack, spot, spot of Spades.  Aware that Charlie sometimes overcalls light, I took Terry’s pass as a sign that my partner either had a strong Club suit or opening count and figured that even going down one would produce a better score than if Dottie made 2 Hearts.  I bid 3 Clubs and Charlie went down three. Result: low board.

photos by George Sladic, above, and Paul Kaczocha

George Sladic and Paul Kaczocha posted photos of the Lake Michigan lakefront, reminding me that visitors still don’t have free access to Mount Baldy due to possible sinkholes and that this is a dangerous season for intrepid or naïve visitors wandering onto ice formations that often break off from the shoreline.  In fact Paul’s dog had to swim to shore when trapped that way.