Crash, Sonny, Clarkie, and Dr. J

 “I’ll play first, third, left.  I’ll play anywhere – except Philadelphia.”  Dick Allen

I loved watching Dick Allen play baseball with flair and authority.  Before joining the Philadelphia Phillies, he was the first Black player on Little Rock’s Arkansas Travelers; segregationists not only booed him but held protests demanding his ouster.  When Allen joined the parent club in 1964, sportswriters dubbed him Richie, like Whiz Kid Richie Ashburn despite his objections that Richie was a kid’s name and he’d always been Dick.  He enjoyed a stellar season, earning Rookie-of-the-Year honors for a half dozen slugging honors. I attended many home games before heading off to Virginia Law School.  With 12 games left, the Phils had a six and a half game lead in the National League, then dropped ten in a row despite Allen batting over .400 during that harrowing stretch.  Listening from Charlottesville on radio, I sensed doom when Chico Ruiz stole home in the ninth for a Reds 1-0 victory. The following year in the clubhouse, Allen stood up to Frank Thomas, known to be a racist and bully, and Thomas hit him with a bat.  Management released Thomas the following day but refused to allow anyone to divulge details.  Some fans blamed Allen and threw fruit, ice, and flashlight batteries at him when he took the field.  He began wearing a batting helmet both on offense and defense, acquiring the nickname “Crash,” short for “Crash Helmet.”  After Allen hit several 500-feet-plus HRs that left the ballpark, Willie Stargell joked that folks booed him because he hits the ball so far, there are no souvenirs. The situation got so dire that Allen began writing “Trade me” in the dirt.

 

Allen had a sweet tenor singing voice and recorded soul tunes with a group called the Ebonics.  Asked to perform at halftime of a Philadelphia 76ers game, Allen drew boos as he began but got a standing ovation after the Ebistonics completed their short set. Ah, The City of Brotherly Love, whose fans famously booed Santa but fell in love with Charles Barkley and Alan Iverson, and eventually came to appreciate Dick Allen.

In 1970 Philadelphia traded Allen to the Cardinals for Curt Flood, who refused to report and sued (unsuccessfully) to be a free agent.  Instead, the Phillies obtained Willie Montanez, who became a fan favorite nicknamed “Willie the Philly.” Two years later, Allen came to the White Sox in a trade for Tommy John and had an MVP season that probably saved the Chicago franchise from moving to Florida. I became an instant White Sox fan and attended several games.  Once, sitting in leftfield, I watched a line drive off Allen’s bat appear to be rising as it landed in the stands ten rows above me.  In one game in spacious Comiskey Park he had a record two inside-the-park home runs. It was a glorious year to be a Dick Allen fan.

 

In 1975, amazingly, Allen was back on the Phillies, thanks to lobbying by All-Stars Mike Schmidt and Larry Bowa. I began an evening practice of trying to pick up the Philadelphia radio station (WFIL, I believe) on the car radio dial while in phone contact with Philadelphian Fred Chary, doing the same thing. Once, in the ninth inning, Allen shocked everyone, including this listener, by laying down a bunt single to drive in the winning run. The Phils finished second that year and first in 1976 before bowing in the playoffs, the club’s first in a quarter-century, to Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine” with Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Tony Perez. When incompetent Phillies manager Danny Ozark had left off the playoff roster Tony Taylor, who had been a Philly since 1961 through all the hard times and had a quite good .261 batting average as a pinch hitter, Allen had raised a ruckus.  Management decided he was expendable. 

 

In 1977, playing for the Angels, Allen opted to retire in midseason and return to his Pennsylvania horse race farm.  Hearing the news, I called Sox owner Bill Veeck to suggest bringing Allen back to the “Windy City,” where he was beloved. Veeck’s secretary put the call right through; Veeck told me he made Allen a generous offer; Allen thanked him and declined.

 

When Allen and Tim Whitaker put together Allen’s autobiography, he decided to title it “Crash,” a nickname that he embraced.  Regarding artificial turf, he quipped that “if a horse can’t eat it, I don’t want to play on it.”  Famously averse to batting practice and hitting pitches that in no way resembled game conditions, he noted: “Your body is just like a bar of soap.”  It gradually wears down from repeated use.” While some setbacks were self-inflicted, more often the pressures came from management, sportswriters and fans who, in his opinion, took the fun out of baseball.

In recent years the Phillies have honored Allen and sportswriters once his nemesis have endorsed his enshrinement in Canton. Last year he fell one vote short of entering baseball’s Hall of Fame.  Let’s hope “Crash” lives to get in, he’s more than earned the honor.  Allen was popular with fellow players and had their respect.  White Sox teammate Rich “Goose” Gossage said, “I've been around the game a long time, and he's the greatest player I've ever seen play in my life.  He's the smartest baseball man I've ever been around in my life. He taught me how to pitch from a hitter's prospective, and taught me how to play the game right.”  Manager Chuck Tanner concurred: “Dick was the leader of our team, the captain, the manager on the field. He took care of the young kids, took them under his wing. And he played every game as if it was his last day on earth.”

 

My favorite football player, Hall of Famer Sonny Jurgensen, was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1934 and in high school starred in the three major sports as well as tennis.  At Duke he played defensive back as well as quarterback.  Drafted in the fourth round of the1957 draft by my Philadelphia Eagles, he backed up QB Norm Van Brocklin during the 1960 championship season.  I attended the final game since a friend’s uncle was athletic director at Penn, hosting the game Philadelphia’s Franklin Field when tickets weren’t hard to come by.  In 1961 with Van Brocklin retired Jurgensen set NFL records for passing yardage and touchdowns.  The Eagles finished 10-4 but lost the deciding game, 28-24, to the 10-3-1 Giants when punter Don Chandler faked being roughed, drawing a 15-yard penalty. 

 

By 1966 when I started grad school at Maryland, Sonny had been traded to Washington, and I got to watch his heroics and root for the team then known as the Redsskins. In 1969, legendary Packer coach Vince Lombardi became took over the team, and skeptics doubted they’d get along; but they were dead wrong.  Washington had its first winning season in years and Lombardi, forced to retire when stricken with cancer, called Jurgensen the best quarterback he’d ever seen, who “hangs in there under adverse conditions.”   When Jurgensen was injured the following year, new coach George Allen signed journeyman Billy Kilmer, who, much to my chagrin, remained the starter in 1972.  In the Superbowl against the undefeated Miami Dolphins, Allen stubbornly kept Kilmer in despite the offense producing zero points until less than a minute to go. In 1974, Sonny’s final year, he won the passing title despite spitting time with Kilmer. He then commenced a career as a color commentator until his retirement just last year. His gentle Carolina drawl, good sense of humor, and unchallenged expertise made him a natural.

Because Philadelphia did not have a professional ice hockey team until 1969, my first introduction to the sport came when my family moved to a Detroit suburb in the mid-1950s at a time when the Red Wings were dominant led by Gordie Howe, Alex Delvecchio, Glenn Hall, and Ted Lindsey.  Saturday evenings, the Canadian TV station broadcast a game featuring either the Maple Leafs or the mighty Canadians. Though I couldn’t ice skate very well, my brother and I would compete in our rec room with tennis balls. Moving to Northwest Indiana in 1970, I began watching Chicago Black Hawk games and cheered for Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, and goalie Tony Esposito. The 1971 Stanley Cup finals got my attention, as Chicago went up 3 games to 2 before bowing to the mighty Canadians due to the heroics of Montreal goalie Ken Dryden.

 

Before long, however, my loyalties belonged to the Philadelphia Flyers, thanks in large part to Bobby Clarke. Born in 1949 in Flin Flon, Manitoba, Clarke, despite growing up with diabetes and undersized compared to most teammates, played with the flair of an crafty veteran and the heart of a lion. Not yet 21, he was an NHL All-Star his rookie season.  In 1974 the Flyers reached the Stanley Cup finals against heavily-favored Bruins led by center Phil Espisito and Bobby Orr, perhaps the greatest defenseman of all time. After losing game one in Boston, Clarke scored an overtime goal in game 2 to even the series. In game 3, I was at a party and listened to the final minutes of the Flyers victory in the host’s bathroom. By game six the Flyers needed to clinch at home or play game 7 in hostile Boston Garden.  It happened that we were in New Jersey watching with brother-in-law Sonny, an ardent fan who had taught his youngest daughter to shout “Bernie-eee,” the first name of goalie Bernie Parent. Management brought singer Kate Smith in as a good luck charm to sing “God Bless America.”  The game was scoreless until Clarke and Orr got in a fight; while both were in the penalty box, Flyer Rick MacLeish scored the only goal of the game. With a minute left, Clarke stole the puck and was pulled down from behind by Orr, drawing a penalty and clinching the victory.  Philadelphia became the first NHL expansion team to win the Stanley Cup.  Clarke had won 48 of 66 face-offs from Esposito during the series and pretty much neutralized Orr. The following week, one of the largest crowds in history attended the victory parade.

 

The Flyers would repeat in 1974-1975 and reach the finals in 1976, during which time they became known as the Broad Street Bullies for their rough style of play personified by “enforcer Dave “Dutch” Schultz.  By then I had purchased an official Flyers jersey with Clarke’s number 16 on the back.  Though Black Hawks home games were inevitably sell-outs, Milan Andrejevich managed to obtain 2 standing-room-only tickets, and I naively showed up wearing the Flyers jersey. Less than a minute into the game, Keith Magnuson gave Clarke a hard check into the boards.  Coach Freddy Shero immediately sent Schultz into the game, who made a beeline for Magnuson and began pummeling him as someone near me yelled, “Get him, Schultzie.” Eyes turned to our section, and there I was, standing with my Flyers jersey in full view.  After someone almost spilled beer on my head, I spent the rest of the game wearing my trench coat.

Clarke in 2011

Clarke played his entire 15-year career with the Flyers and over 30 years as the franchise’s general manager and senior vice president.  In 1,144 games he scored a remarkable 1,210 points; and his grit and crowd-pleasing charisma, punctuated by a boyish, toothless grin and wink, made “Clarkie” by far my favorite hockey player ever.

 

Julius Erving, my favorite basketball player and a class act, revolutionized his sport by turning slam dunks into pure artistry and in addition was a consummate team player who brought Philadelphia its first and only NBA title since Wilt Chamberlain left town with the city’s Warriors franchise.  Born in 1950 in East Meadow, New York, he claimed a friend started calling him “the Doctor” after he nicknamed his buddy “the Professor.” When onlookers on a Harlem playground called him “Houdini” and the “Black Moses,” he told them his nickname was “the Doctor,” which morphed into Dr. J.  After two years starring a UMass, Erving turned pro and played for the Virginia Squires and New York Nets in the expansion ABA, whose teams adapted an exciting, offensive-minded style in contrast to the more traditional NBA.  Dr. J, though not the first player to slam dunk the ball, invented acrobatic moves, often starting 15 or 20 feet from the basket, that were unprecedented.

When the ABA and NBA merged in 1976, the Philadelphia 76ers acquired Erving from the Nets, and the franchise immediately went from cellar-dweller to title contender. Teamed with former ABA star George McGinnis, future Hall of Famer Lloyd Free, Doug Collins, and Darryl Dawkins, a colorful big man known as “Chocolate Thunder,” the 76ers reached the NBA finals against the Portland Trail Blazers coached by canny Jack Ramsey and featuring Bill Walton, Maurice Lucas, and Lionel Hollins. The Sixers took a two-game lead, but momentum swung after Dawkins and Maurice Lucas got in a brawl.  Portland won the next two at home and then stole game 5 in Philly despite Dr. J’s 37 points.  In game 6 at Portland Erving scored 40 and the game was tie, 107-107.  I was at Paul Kern’s Miller apartment on a warm June day.  With less than 20 seconds to go, Lloyd Free literally got mugged attempting a shot but no foul was called.  Portland scored at the buzzer to deny the Sixers the championship.

 

Dr. J in "The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979)

Starting in 1980, with Larry Bird joining Celtics, Boston and Philadelphia vied in the Eastern Division finals four out of five years. In 1980 and 1982 the Sixers prevailed only to lose to the talent-laden L.A. Lakers led by Magic Johnson and Kareen Abdul Jabbar. Then the Sixers acquired dominant big man Moses Malone and came within one game of fulfilling Malone’s prediction of “four-four-four” – winning every playoff game but one.  Erving showed his versatility by setting up teammates Maurice Cheeks, Anthony Toney, Bobby Jones, and Malone.

 

Dr. J proved to be a gentleman on and off the court and paved the way for superstars such as Michael Jordon, who strove to emulate Erving’s demeanor as the face of his franchise. By the time he retired after the 1987 season, Dr. J had broken almost all team records and is considered one of the two dozen best players of all time.  I recall his final All-Star game appearance when he showed off all his moves and scored 22 points.  I teared up as he accepted the MVP trophy, knowing an era was ending. On my Glen Park Eagles softball team Terry Hunt nicknamed me Dr. J and had “Doc” inscribed on my jersey.

Murals

by David McShane

There's a mural on my dining room wall of the railroad tracks at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I love having my hometown with me out here in California.” Jill Scott

Asked to list the ten athletes I most enjoyed watching, number one in terms of chronology is Philadelphia Phillies centerfielder Richie “Whitey” Ashburn, who batted at the top of the order for the pennant-winning 1950 “Whiz Kids.”  Disparaged as “the foul ball king” who couldn’t hit for power, Ashburn often led off a game fouling off pitch after pitch to wear down the pitcher and coax a walk. Like many teammates, the two-time batting champ and Hall of Famer played the entire decade of the 1950s with my home town team, and I can still name at least a dozen core players, starting with pitchers Robin Roberts and Curt Simmons, catchers Andy Seminick and Stan “Stosh” Lopata, colorfully-nicknamed infielders “Granny” Hamner and “Puddin’ Head” Jones, and frequently booed home run hitter Del Ennis. Grandpa Elwood Metzger took me to many home games; we’d get off the train at 30^th Street station. Ashburn played two years with the Cubs before ending his playing career with the expansion Mets, whose games he’d go on to announce until his death in 1997.  He was a class act.

Murals serve many purposes, from purely decorative to propaganda. Often they commemorate celebrities (such as Gary’s Jackson Five and Seymour’s John “Hoosier” Mellencamp) or victims (i.e., George Floyd, murdered by a Minneapolis cop). Two famous muralists, Mexican communist Diego Rivera and American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, were contemporaries who attempted to capture historic trends between the world wars.  Rivera’s most controversial mural was “Man at the Crossroads,” commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation for New York City’s Rockefeller Center.  Contrasting capitalism and socialism, Rivera included a portrait of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, which Foundation director Nelson Rockefeller ordered to be painted over; the entire mural was ultimately replaced.  Rivera subsequently installed a similar mural in his native Mexico.

Thomas Hart Benton is perhaps most famous for murals depicting the history of his native Missouri, but he also designed a series of Indiana murals for the Century of Progress exhibition at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.  One showed Ku Klux Klan members in full regalia along with images on behalf of freedom of the press, which exposed the venality of Klan leaders of the hate group.  Benton’s Indiana murals found a permanent home at Indiana University in Bloomington.  In 2017 students petitioned to have the one depicting the Klan removed from a large lecture hall.  Provost Lauren Robel called the mural a national treasure and opposed its removal, issuing this statement: “Like most great art, Benton’s murals require context and history.  Many well-meaning people, without having the opportunity to do that work, wrongly condemn the mural as racist simply because it depicts a racist organization and a hateful symbol.” Since then, things have remained at a stalemate, with the mural not removed but with classes no longer held in the lecture hall. What an opportunity for a teachable moment squandered.

 

In Northwest Indiana the leading muralist is Felix “Flex” Maldonado, who started as a graffiti artist and whose portraits have been exhibited at Gary Public Library and other local venues.  I’ve met Maldonado on several occasions, and he truly is committed to capturing the diversity of life in the Calumet Region. His works have helped beautify numerous neighborhoods, including Miller and his home town of East Chicago.  His current effort, commissioned by the East Chicago Parks Department for its greenhouse, is a beautiful depiction of the wonders of nature.

Intolerance

“Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice,” Somalian feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali (above)Alfred Paget as Belshazzar in "Intolerance"

“Intolerance” was a three and a half hour 1917 epic silent film by D. W. Griffith, who denied he was seeking redemption for the racist glorification of the Ku Klux Klan in “The Birth of a Nation” (1915). “Intolerance” consists of four parts, including the Persian King Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylonia, the religious persecution of Jesus, the massacre of French Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572, and the exploitation of American mill workers in Griffith’s own time.
Janet Bayer and grandson Nick at protest

A Catholic priest in the wealthy Indianapolis suburb of Carmel, Theodore Rothrock, branded Black Lives Matter organizers “maggots and parasites feeding off the isolation and addiction of broken families and offering to replace any current frustration and anxiety with more misery and resentment.”  This outrage caused a thousand protestors to gather at St. Elizabeth Seton Church demanding that Father Rothrock be suspended, including Janet Bayer and grandson Nick, eagerly chanting “Black Lives Matter.”  A small number of counter-demonstrators defended the priest.  Bishop Timothy Doherty not only suspended the offender, who subsequently half-heartedly apologized, but ended the announcement by saying, “Black Lives Matter.”Times photo by Kyle Telechan

Vandals spray-painted a racial slur on a bakery and café that Black entrepreneur Sameka Coaxum was attempting to launch in a predominantly white neighborhood in Hammond.  Mayor Tom McDermott denounced the act of racism and had city officials remove the ugly remark without delay. The Times obtained this statement from the victim: “In order to make a change, someone has to be a trailblazer and take a hit and I feel I have taken that hit,” Sameka Coaxum said. “There’s no other African American businesses in this district and Hammond needs to change with the times. It’s time to transition over to 2020.”

The Chesterton Tribune received letters to the editor denouncing the peaceful Black Lives Matter (BLM) march that I participated in, claiming the BLM organizers are Marxist revolutionaries.  Answering this rubbish in “Voice of the People” was Rich Hawksworth in words less diplomatic and more sarcastic than I’d have chosen but no less effective:

    Heaven forbid black folk – Marxists no less! – descend on Chesterton and threaten that snuggly-safe feeling that white folk have come to expect.  I’m sure the angst experienced by local residents during the recent Juneteenth rally was awful, just awful.  Surely, George Floyd, in his last moments on Earth, would have empathized with your discomfort.  No doubt, Ahmaud Arbery, as he was being hunted down and assassinated by white vigilantes, would have identified with your fear. And surely, Breonna Taylor, in the moments before she was murdered in her own home by police officers would have recognized the utter terror you experienced as “leftists” gathered in Thomas Park.  Perhaps it is time to shelve the pathetic white privilege and strive for the equality that our founders promised, but never delivered.
circa 1922

IU historian Jim Madison appeared on the radio program “All In” in connection with 1925 Ku Klux Klan records from Hamilton County recently made available to scholars. Found in a trunk 25 years ago, they include dues receipts from about a thousand Klan members from the Noblesville area. Madison has a forthcoming book titled “The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland” that will document how powerful this hate group was in Indiana during the 1920s.  He quoted the book’s first line: “The Klan was as dark as the night and as American as apple pie.”  Members, both men and women, considered themselves good, God-fearing, 100% Americans whose enemies were Catholics, Jew, immigrants, and African Americans in that order.  He debunked the idea that many were coerced into joining or that Klaverns (local chapters) quickly faded away after Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson was convicted of murdering a young woman he’d raped. Several Klan members were on the jury that found him guilty. Americans want “comfort history,” Madison stated, but the truth is that Hoosier history isn’t always noble.  Unlike a century ago, the modern Klan consists of a few misfits, white supremacists who nonetheless can cause mischief.

Four years before, in the summer of 1963, 15 Blacks girls in Americus, Georgia, attempted to buy tickets at the front entrance of a movie theater and got locked up for 45 days in a Civil War-era structure. The so-called Leesburg Stockade Girls were discovered a month into their captivity by photographer whose photo alerted their parents to where they were captured public attention.

RIP: Chesterton resident Bobbie Dean “Injun Bob” Gajdik, 77, whom I knew as the friendly bouncer at Leroy’s Hot Stuff when Dave’s band Voodoo Chili played there. Tim “Voodoo Daddy” Brush won him over and he loved the classic rock songs they played.  Even though there was officially a cover charge, anyone who told him they were friends of the band he’d let in free.  Leroy’s was a biker bar; and, as Dave once told me, bikers are great supporters and don’t start fights but know how to finish them.  The obit mentioned that Gaidik was an avid motorcycle rider and that “his stories will be missed.”  Sadly, I never heard those anecdotes but recall that he was a tolerant man and proud of his Native American ancestry.  I wish I’d known him better and was happy to learn that longtime companion Carol Mitchell and many close friends, including Dave Shivalec, were with him when his health declined. I first went to Leroy’s with Mike Bayer to see Hoosier blues artist Duke Tomatoe.  Stevie Van Zandt played an incandescent set there.  Their Mexican food is so good Kevin Horn often orders it for the Horn’s New Year’s Eve parties.  It’s a friendly place, and something will be missing with Bobbie Dean gone.

Reading about the antiwar protests against Dow Chemical Company at the university if Wisconsin in October 1867 in “They Marched into Sunlight” by David Maraniss, I was saddened by the enmity between protestors and police, who were ordered to clear a building as a result of administrators’ incompetence.  Maraniss mentioned English grad student Michael Krasny, who was disgusted by Johnson’s escalation of the war but who had grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Cleveland and had friends and relatives who were soldiers and cops. Music major John Pikart, who opposed the war but feared his friends obstructing the building might be arrested and expelled, felt conflicting emotions in the heat of the confrontation.  Maraniss wrote:

    He was furious about the police attack, by their use of nightsticks, by the fact that the administration had allowed the confrontation to take place, yet he was also disturbed by the mass psychology of the angry crowd. That night he wrote a friend: “It was a terrible sight.  Than the students by the door starting spitting on the police and screaming at them.  The police charged with their clubs. . . . I have never seen such hysteria and hatred in so large a group of people. On my way out, I looked back to se the whole crowd screaming “Dirty Fascist Honky” at the police.

Readable History

"No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.” David McCullough

Historian Ray Boomhower has been sharing quotations from distinguished members of his profession, including David McCullough (above) who has written acclaimed biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams and, my favorite, “The Path Between the Seas,” about how the Panama Canal came about. Another statement I subscribe to that Boomhower referenced is by Samuel Eliot Morrison: “With honesty of purpose, balance, a respect for tradition, courage, and, above all, a philosophy of life, any young person who embraces the historical profession will find it rich in rewards and durable in satisfaction.”

Historians I most admire, such as Doris Kearns Goodwin and David Maraniss, write for a large audience rather than just specialists in a particular field.  When my Maryland PhD advisers Sam Merrill and Louis Harlan said that my dissertation, “Jacob A. Riis and the American City,” was very readable, I took that as a compliment. The only boring chapter, in my opinion, albeit necessary, was the one analyzing “How the Other Half Lives” (1890), the urban reformer’s famous study of New York City Tenement House Conditions and their immigrant dwellers.  My history of Gary, “City of the Century,” was based on weekly newspaper articles intended to reach a wide readership and elicit feedback. Nothing against journal articles (I’ve written my share of monographs), but I believe that serving Clio, the muse of history, includes striving to educate an informed citizenry.

 

One of the striking characteristics of the era of Coolidge Prosperity was the unparalleled rapidity and unanimity with which millions of men and women turned their attention, their talk, and their emotional interest upon a series of tremendous trifles -- a heavyweight boxing-match, a murder trial, a new automobile model, a transatlantic flight.” Frederick Lewis Allen, “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s”

F. L. Allen

The Gold Standard of contemporary popular history is Frederick Lewis Allen’s “Only Yesterday,” published soon after the “Roaring Twenties” ended.  The title is a perfect encapsulation of the belief that anything in the past – even seconds ago – is worthy of study by historians even if dissecting a larger perspective must wait.  “Only Yesterday” remains a pathbreaking example of the importance of social history, covering manners and morals, Prohibition and the rise of gangsterism, sports, advertising, automobility, and entertainment as big business, plus fads, dance crazes, and headline-making trials  such as Sacco-Vanzetti, Leopold-Loeb, the Scopes “Monkey” Trial and the most widely covered – Hall-Mills, about the murder of two lovers, a minister and his choir director.

Flappers

As a practitioner of contemporary history from the bottom up who is writing a blog, I ask myself how best to cover this plague year of pandemic, an unhinged president, economic disaster, and total disruption of one’s daily routine.  A believer that the personal is political, I try to describe the effect of this “new normal” on myself (a senior citizen to whom Covid-19 could be a death sentence), my family (including grandchildren still in school), my university, community, region, and, by extension, the country and world. Wish me luck.

Kaiden Horn (above), the former bowling teammate of grandson James made The Times by virtue of winning a state USBC scholarship.  The 2020 Wheeler graduate told Karen Callahan that he grew up in a bowling family and that was something he and his dad Kevin bonded over: “He’s coached me my whole life. We always talk about bowling and watch bowling. Without that, a major part of myself would be missing.”

 

Post-Tribune correspondent Carole Carlson wrote about the legacy of Richard Gordon Hatcher as a civil rights leader and urban mayor for 20 years beginning in 1968. She interviewed some of his most faithful supporters, including former adviser Carolyn McCrady and Dena Holland Neal, daughter of Deputy Mayor Jim Holland, who recalled passing out lollipops with Hatcher stickers in 1967 on her school bus at age 14.  Hatcher instilled Gary’s black citizens with a sense of pride but could not prevent the city’s economic decline despite obtaining millions of federal dollars for programs that benefitted the poor. By setting an example and encouraging others to seek public office at a time after Martin Luther King’s death when many Black intellectuals were despairing of the political system, Hatcher was responsible for inspiring many Black elected officials who emulated his example. I spent over a hundred hours interviewing Hatcher, my political hero and intellectual mentor.  I wanted the final product to be his autobiography, but, ever a humble man, he preferred it to be guideposts on how Blacks should proceed in the face of systemic racism, a phrase Hatcher never used.  A devout Christian, unlike me, he never gave up believing that all souls were redeemable.

 

I’ve been binge watching the Showtime series “Homeland.”  Discovering that it was about to embark on a ninth season, I started at the beginning.  When the original storyline didn’t end after 12 episodes, it seemed the denouement was imminent, but it seems further from the end as I approach the midway point of season three.  Nonetheless, I love the main characters, CIA agents Carrie (Claire Danes) and Saul (Mandy Patinkin), and the peripheral one as well. And each episode features unexpected twists and turns.

 

Former IUN colleague Don Coffin, whose field was economic history, believes that the current pandemic will be most devastating on middle-tier colleges. Elite institutions such as Harvard and Yale will have the prestige and endowment resources to ride the situation out, while affiliates of public universities and community colleges, in his words, “are about access and affordability; they’re the Honda Civics of higher ed. There’s always a market for that.”  Four-year schools in non-metro areas with regional reputations and high tuition, he predicts, may face widespread closures: they were fragile before the pandemic, often offering discount rates of 50 percent or more; the pandemic simply removed what little cushion they had left.”  To make matters worse Trump is threatening to cancel student visas and deny them access to online courses.  Coffin wrote:

These rules are unconscionable. Students should not be used as hostages to force colleges to be complicit in accelerating the spread of a pandemic, either to enhance somebody’s perceived shot at re-election or to satisfy a lust for racism. It’s wrong. Colleges have to protect their students -- all of their students -- as best they can. In a pandemic, that’s hard enough already. Now we have to add “political predators” to the list of dangers. But is in decent financial shape.

 

I responded: IUN has been developing quality on-line (distance education) courses for almost a decade (too much so I’ve argued).  On the other hand, wonderful middle-tier schools like Valparaiso University are suffering, and 45 (I won’t repeat his name) is making the situation worse by fucking around international students, the lifeblood of many universities since, in most cases, they pay full tuition.

 

As the temperature again exceeded 90 degrees, power went out in Dave’s Portage subdivision and his family spent the night.  That evening James won a close Space Base game, his second in a row.  Next morning, he was trying to adjust his fall VU schedule in the face of one cancellation and the other class now on-line.  I got my first haircut in four months at Quick Cut.  Longtime barber Anna gave 20-year-old James his first haircut.

Beds Are Burning

“How do we sleep

While our beds are burning

The time has come

To say fair's fair”

    Midnight Oil

Every time I hear Australian band Midnight Oil’s anthem on behalf of aborigine peoples I think back 25 years ago to an oral history conference in Brisbane where I learned that in my lifetime Native Australians were forcibly taken from their parents be the Aussie equivalent of Americanized by families free to treat them like servants. Just a generation or two before that native American children were shipped off to “Indian schools” like one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where many died of tuberculosis and other contagious diseases while others were stripped of their long hair and native dress.

Bubba Wallace

The recent actions of Trump seem politically suicidal – what pundits said about many things he did four years ago.  Then he branded Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, now he’s defending Confederate statues, calling the noose found in Black NASCAR racer Bubba Watson’s garage a hoax, and ridiculing as “political correctness” the efforts to change the nicknames and logos of the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians.  As a Washington football fan, I agree with the fan who thought the new logo could be the skin of a red potato.  Ray Smock worries that Trump’s strategy of holding onto his base could work if he can convince another 20 percent to stay home through smear tactics against his opponent or otherwise deny them the vote through various nefarious means. Trump has gotten away with so many lies, and like totalitarian rulers everywhere tries to brainwash followers into believing that any critical story in the mainstream press is suspect a HOAX.




Post-Trib contributor Jerry Davich wrote a column headlined: “Trump versus Biden, a disappointing decision for voters.”  I replied: “Wrong! It’s an obvious choice at a time when we need steady at the helm.  Trump will use any smear tactic to make people believe the candidates are equally “disappointing.”  It worked in 2016.

 

In the “Forum” section of the Sunday, July 5, Northwest Indiana Times appeared a column by Inez Feltscher Stepman (above) titled “Revisionist history tries to discredit rich legacy.” As a historian who holds the U.S. Constitution in high esteem, has no quarrel with July Fourth patriotic celebrations, and bemoans the excesses of those defacing monuments honoring George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, I must take exception to her mischaracterization of revisionist historians who have attempted to redress gaps in the story of the American experience.  Stepman admits that the Founding Fathers, like men in all eras, were flawed and at times made terrible mistakes. Yet to claim, as she does, that the American Revolution was fought simply for liberty and independence is to ignore the complexities of history.  Foremost among the colonists’ grievances against Great Britain prior to 1776, along with taxation without representation and the quartering of foreign (Hessian) troops on American soil, was the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which prevented colonization beyond the Appalachians and reserved that territory for Native American tribes. So far as whether or not the Constitution was a slave document, one need look no further than the three-fifths compromise than gave slave states representation in the House of Representatives by counting their human property as that percentage of a human being.

 

In the 1960s I visited Monticello and Mount Vernon, as did thousands of tourists, and saw no evidence that Thomas Jefferson or George Washington were slaveholders.  School textbooks made no mention of Christopher Columbus having enslaved indigenous people and tended to emphasize States Rights rather than slavery as the underlying cause of the Civil War. Rather than disparaging educators and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies responsible for pressuring states to remove Confederate Battle flags and statues of rebel leaders from government property, including military installations, we should be celebrating this belated recognition that justice too long delayed is justice denied.  We can still celebrate the Fourth of July while finally acknowledging that Juneteenth is a more appropriate “Independence Day” for African Americans.  And, parenthetically, for the President to go the sacred (for Lakota people) Black Hills and label protestors looters and fascists while not even consulting with tribal leaders whose land, according to a 1980 Supreme Court decision, they are rightful guardians, and uttering nary a word about a pandemic that especially threatens poor people living in nearby areas is beyond obscene. Little wonder his pledge, if re-elected, to create a monument park honoring 25 American heroes contained not a single Hispanic or Native American.

 
I concede that the USA may have been a land of opportunity for Inez Feltscher Stepman, a self-described first-generation American; but I wish she showed a measure of compassion for the ancestors of people brought to our country in chains who still endure police harassment or understanding of acts by which our Founding Fathers, and Trump’s favorite President, Andrew Jackson, stole our land from the original inhabitants.

18th birthday

With the coronavirus spreading due to Trump’s incompetence, educators are grappling with how to deal with fall classes.  Unlike many private universities, IUN is in relatively good shape, having launched quality online “distance education” courses almost a decade ago. Granddaughter Becca missed the final month of her senior year and wonders whether she’ll be able to go off for college. Her friends at Chesterton H.S. have made due with, for example, a mini-prom outside with about 2 dozen classmates. She’s done other group activities and even held an outdoor party at home when unable to have her open house at the American Legion Hall.