Peaceful Easy Feeling

“I got a peaceful easy feeling,

And I know you won’t let me down

‘cause I’m already standing on the ground.”

         “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” Jack Tempchin, recorded by Eagles

Toni flanked by granddaughters Alissa and Miranda

-->

The family celebrated Toni’s 72^nd birthday at Applebee’s Saturday and with spring rolls Sunday, joined by Alissa and Miranda as well as Marianne and Missy Brush, who brought a cake and bottle of wine.  Missy went through albums that Dave and I didn’t want and picked out several, including one by the Eighties L.A. punk band X.  I learned that Missy’s dad Tim Brush (Big Voodoo Daddy) liked Jim Croce and the soft-rock group Bread (he and Marianne danced to “Make It with You” at their wedding).  Missy is a huge David Bowie fan, and she got so excited when I showed her my “Ziggy Stardust” album (“The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”), that I gave it to her.  She was quite overwhelmed; when Dave told her she could get lots of money for it, she replied touchingly, “I’ll be buried with it.” 

I called Terry Jenkins to tell him I used a quote from “Stories of the Street” by Leonard Cohen, one of his favorite singers, in my blog and urged him to watch the Grammy tributes to Glenn Frey, Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire, and David Bowie.  He told me that he took his daughter Lorraine to see him at a concert in Philadelphia.  Sporting a garish red pompadour, Lady Gaga did a ten-song Bowie medley, beginning with “Space Oddity,” and complete with psychedelic effects.  It was impressive, but I was hoping for a surprise appearance by Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Bono or Iggy Pop.  The Grammy highlight for me was ageless Jackson Browne singing “Peaceful Easy Feeling” with the surviving Eagles, including Don Henley on drums.  If Browne was 21 in ’69, as the “Running On Empty” lyrics indicate, he’d be just six years my junior.

Rapper Kendrick Lamar won five Grammys and performed “The Blacker the Berry (the sweeter the juice)” dressed as a jailbird in chains.  The final lines go:

So don't matter how much I say I like to preach with the Panthers

Or tell Georgia State "Marcus Garvey got all the answers"

Or try to celebrate February like it's my B-Day

Or eat watermelon, chicken, and Kool-Aid on weekdays

Or jump high enough to get Michael Jordan endorsements

Or watch BET cause urban support is important

So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street?

When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?

Hypocrite!

-->

Conspiracy theories have sprung up over the death of reactionary Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a luxury Texas hunting resort.  Donald Trump couldn’t resist telling rightwing radio host Michael Savage, “They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.”  Some crazies are pointing the finger at Obama, while others suggest the Bush family poisoned him because he was about to implicate George W. in the September 11 attacks.  What hogwash.  Republicans vow to block any SCOTUS appointment until after the November election, even should Obama nominate a moderate.  They may regret the strategy.  Indian-American B.N. “Sri” Srikrishna, below, is a leading candidate.

Valerie Abalos Pettovello came across my blog and sought my help in corroborating a family story about her grandfather, a Mexican immigrant living in Indiana Harbor during the 1920s.  I told her that her best bets were two contemporary newspapers, the East Chicago Calumet News and El Amigo del Holgar.  With her permission I’m disseminating her email.  She wrote:

    My grandfather was in a bar when he got in an altercation with an off-duty police officer. Supposedly the officer pulled out his revolver and shot my grandfather in the stomach. He survived the gunshot. The family story is that the officer lost his badge over this. I would assume that this made the newspaper.

  My grandparents moved to Detroit after this and my grandfather died of pneumonia in 1942. My father was 6 years old when he died and remembers the gunshot wound very vividly.  

  The only record of this is family lore. I want to try to find an article or police report to find out what actually happened. 

  It had to have happened before 1930 because he is listed as living in Detroit in the 1930 census. The earliest he could have immigrated would have been 1924, because my aunt was born in 1924 and my grandmother stayed in Mexico until 1927. My guess is that this incident happened after she arrived (but I am not sure).

  My grandfather went by several names: Louis or Joseph Abalos or Avalos.

Seeing Kathi “Kat” Wellington at Portage Library on Saturday reminded me of a book she and 14 other steelworkers contributed to called “The Heat: Steelworker Lives and Legends” (2001).  In “Remembering What’s Important” she wrote about descending into a greasy pit under the roll line to wrestle pieces of scrap steel that had slipped off the conveyor belt with an old-timer nicknamed Moe.  Two other guys with them puked, the smell was so bad, but Moe had stuck earplugs up his nose, and a childhood accident had taken away Kat’s sense of smell.  Kat’s story concludes: “We all made it through our first turn in the mill. As we came out of the pit and into the sunshine, squinting from the dark, Moe laughed out loud and said, ‘Mole People!’”

In “The Heat” Joe Gutierrez (above), who appears in several Studs Terkel oral history volumes, authored “Alan Kepler,” which reminded me of John A. Fitch’s century-old article about steelworkers entitled “Old Age at Forty”.  Gutierrez wrote:

  Alan was 55 years old, but with his white receding hair and his slow walk, he seemed much older. His hands were gnarled with arthritis. He said he soaked them for hours in hot paraffin wax. Then he'd laugh and say it didn’t help much, but it took his mind off his knees, which weren’t much better. 

His back ached like all the old backs in the galvanize line, especially when he had to skim the heavy hot slag off the surface of the molten zinc melted to the 850th degree. The long, 90-pound iron spoons wreaked havoc on old tendons and weak, calcium-deprived bones 



  It all added up to pain, but Al never really complained. The guys who worked with him never complained either. Al did his job the best he could. But there was a lot he couldn’t do, and most everybody went out of their way to help him. He told me once that we go as far as we can go, then God takes us the rest of the way. 



  I never thought about that too much, until later.

-->

Ron Cohen and I took over Steve McShane’s Indiana History class while his wife Cindy was having an operation.  Beforehand, Jonathyne Briggs saw me in a tie and dress shirt and quipped, “I see you got the dress code memo.”  For a split second I thought maybe he was serious.  Briggs is participating in an upcoming program at Northwestern.  I fear he has too much on his plate, having taken over the chairmanship of the History and Philosophy Department from Gianluca DiMuzio.

Before students arrived, O made preparations to show a 15-minute documentary on early Gary’s world-famous unit schools.  I began by talking about Gary’s antecedents, such as removal of the Potawatomi, the coming of the railroads that gave birth to Tolleston and Miller, the migration of Swedes, the Aetna Powder Plant, and the decision by US Steel to buy up 9,000 acres, including seven miles of shoreline, for Gary Works and an adjacent town.  I talked about remarkable progressive Tom Knotts, elected Gary’s first mayor despite the opposition of Steel forces, and his defeat in 1913, the result of bribery, intimidation, and character assassination.  After describing working and housing conditions for blacks and white ethnics, I discussed early residents I interviewed, including sports hero Johnny Kyle and the sons of pioneer Italian-born Antonio Giorgi and Serbian grocer Jovo Krstovich.  After I brought up the activities of Gary Neighborhood House, Ron explained how he and I rescued valuable settlement records after a fire gutted the abandoned building and water damage threatened to ruin documents dating back to Gary’s pioneer era.  In the second half of the class Ron discussed School Superintendent William A. Wirt, who had a rare opportunity to design, virtually from scratch, the Gary schools.  

 Dr. William A. Wirt

-->

Ron Cohen loaned me Robert J. Norrell’s “Alex Haley and the Books that Changed a Nation.”  The reference is to “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which Haley put together from interviews, and “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” which allegedly traced Haley’s family history back to Kunte Kinte, from a Gambian village in Africa, and spawned the most-watched mini-series in TV history.  Norrell wrote: “Haley taught us that families’ experiences actually composed the nation’s history.”  I agree.

Stories of the Street

“The stories of the street are mine, the Spanish voices laugh.

The Cadillacs go creeping now through the night and the poison gas . . .

The cities they are broke in half and the middle men are gone.

But let me ask you one more time, O children of the dusk,

All these hunters who are shrieking now, oh do they speak for us?”

         Leonard Cohen, “Stories of the Street”

Northwest Indiana Urban League is overseeing a “Water for Flint” campaign.  Roger Haywood, one of the coordinators, sent out a plea and offered to pick up any donations of bottled water or money to purchase the items.  Haywood is founder of a group called It’s Gary’s Time, dedicated to rebuilding the city “one home, one block, one community, one life at a time.”  It’s Gary’s Time has been active in boarding up vacant properties.  Homeless at 13 and once a drug addict and criminal, Haywood has trained and employed former convicts, helping many to turn their lives around.

The origin of the Flint water tragedy lay in Michigan state officials assigning an incompetent emergency manager to run the bankrupt city.  In 2014, allegedly to save money, he arranged switching Flint’s water source from the Detroit water system to the polluted Flint River.  Within six months things were so bad that General Motors stopped using Flint River water because it was corroding engine parts.  Nonetheless, residents keep getting assurances, despite complaints of rashes and hair loss, that what came out of their faucets was safe to drink, never mind how bad it looked.  After Detroit offered to reconnect Flint to its water system at no cost, Emergency Manager Jerry Ambrose overruled a city council proposal to do just that.  As late as September 2015, Republican Governor Rick Snyder, echoing the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, claimed the water was drinkable and that readings of high lead levels were due to faulty plumbing in individual homes.  Finally last month, Snyder declared a state of emergency and apologized for his administration’s negligence, stating: “No citizen of this great state should endure this kind of catastrophe.”  At least 10 people have died from a rare form of Legionnaires Disease, and the long-term effects of lead poisoning on children might indeed be cataclysmic.  Some see this as an example of environmental racism.  It’s inconceivable that such a fiasco could occur in an affluent community.

 above, Skipper and Hester; below, Nakia Hester with photo of son, by Carmen McCullum

NWI Times photo by Jonathan Miano

On his seventeenth birthday Kasreeyal Hester was in a car near his home on the 800 block of Burr Street in Gary with Hammond Morton football teammate Mark Skipper, 15, when someone shot both young men to death.  A police officer discovered the bodies around 8:30 p.m.  Wha a senseless act.  At a vigil Hester’s friend Ronald Williams told Joyce Russell of the NWI Times: “He wasn’t in the streets.  He was trying to get good grades.  He was athletic.  He was trying to get out of Gary.  Things like this make it hard for us to make it out of Gary.”  Could someone in the neighborhood have resented Hester for that, or for having a white friend?

At Hobart Lanes I bowled a 212, my first 200-game of the year, and a 501 series.  The Engineers would have swept We’re Here except that opponent Gene Clifford rolled a 655 series. The former brick mason and Valpo High School bowling coach is related to Chad Clifford, my former student and Crawpuppies’ lead singer, but, oddly enough, on his mother’s side.  Clifford opened game two with seven straight strikes; it ended in a tie when lefty Dick Maloney converted a seven-pin for a spare and then again left just the seven-pin on his extra ball to finish with a 192, well above his average.  In fact, we all were.

photo by Rachel Dabertin

-->

After delivering the finished product of Steel Shavings on a CD, volume 45, to Valerie Quadlin at Home Mountain Printing, I drove to Valparaiso University to locate VU’s Center for the Arts, where Anne Balay will be speaking on Thursday.  While there, I checked out IUN professor Neil Goodman’s sculpture exhibit at Brauer Museum of Art.  Entitled “So Small between the Stars, So Large against the Sky: Studies for a Monument,” – the title a line from Leonard Cohen’s “Stories of the Street” – the exhibit featured small abstract structures, prototypes for major works similar to what Goodman, son of an area dentist, so superbly designed for IUN’s “Shadows and Echoes” sculpture garden.  Goodman meant the title to address, in his words, “the ambiguity of scale, how at once we are large and small, significant and insignificant.”

IU Hoosiers upset the number 4 ranked Iowa Hawkeyes, remarkable considering that Yogi Ferrell made just two of 12 field goal attempts and dished out only a handful of assists.  I fell asleep but caught the game next day on the Big Ten Network in a format that caught all meaningful action but, minus timeouts, halftime, and bringing the ball up court, lasted just one hour.  It reminded me of visiting Pat and Ruth Tyler in Birmingham, England, and watching an NFL game cut down to 45 minutes.

Jeff Manes sent me a transcript of his 2009 SALT column for me to read with him at Portage Library.  Because it deals with the publication of my “Retirement Journal” (Steel Shavings, volume 40, 2009) I gave away copies to those purchasing Jeff’s book and wore the same shirt and tie as in the cover photo.  Here’s how the interview ends:

Manes: What’s on the cover of "Out to Pasture but Still Kickin’?"

Lane: A photo of me in front of Hawthorn Hall the day I retired.

Manes: Surely a somber shot of you shuffling through IUN’s parking lot for the last time with slumped shoulders, while dragging an ancient attaché case.

Lane: Actually, I’m standing in front of a microphone along with my son’s band Voodoo Chili while covering Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” And I’m really bringing it. We jammed for [what seemed like] hours. Earlier that day, IUN had a retirement ceremony for me. They gave me a clock, of all things.

I was delighted to see Kathi “Kat” Wellington in the audience.  My former Labor Studies “Swing Shift” student now teaches at Ivy Tech and a carpenters apprentice school.  In “Lake Michigan Tales” Steel Shavings (volume 28, 1998) Kat wrote about getting trapped in an undertow that dragged her a hundred yards off shore until, mercifully, she came upon a sandbar.  She also interviewed Michigan City native Brain Malwin about being caught in a squall in his sailboat and smelting with his brother and a friend.  Malwin told Kat:

  We had been fishing off Lighthouse Pier and had lost track of time.  It was about ten p.m. when we went to call for a ride home.  An overzealous harbor guard spotted us out after curfew.  He pulled his gun on us and made us get in his car while he called the Michigan City police.  Because we all were carrying sheath knives, he claimed we had concealed weapons.  The police realized we were kids out smelting, not dangerous criminals, and just gave us a warning.

In an 2007 interview with Manes Kat Wellington described hiring in at Bethlehem Steel in 1978:

  After my divorce, I applied for a clerical job and passed the typing test.  I said, “Okay, when do you think I’ll start.”  She said, “I don’t know.  We’re not hiring.  We’re just taking applications.”  I had a baby to feed.  I needed a real job that would pay me a man’s wage.  I said, “Listen, what jobs are available?”  She said, “Labor.  The 160-inch plate mill.”  I said, “Sweetheart, I’ll shovel shit, and I’ll never look back.”  The only reason I got my foot in the door was because of affirmative action; they had to hire blacks and women.

A union rep for 17 years, Kat recalled:

  They told me that when we are in the grievance procedure we are all on the same level.  This one superintendent decided he was going to show me who was boss.  I walk into his office; he’s sitting halfway across the room behind this huge desk with his arms crossed.  Without speaking he points to a chair.  Like, sit.  I dragged that chair around to his side of the desk and sat next to him. . . .  He turns bright red.  Never dealt with a woman griever in his life.  He just stared at the grievance without reading it.  I said, “Well, since you don’t seem to be very talkative, are you going to sign this and pay those three guys?”  He signed it, then pushed the grievance toward me and said, “Get away from my desk.”  I smiled [and said], “Really gonna like doin’ business with you” and walked out.  I took him to my level – real quick.

Les Klein; NWI Times photo by Jonathan Miano

Manes and a Portage librarian recited a 2007 interview with legendary Portage High School coach Les Klein, reared on a 110-acre Lake Village farm that his dad purchased during the 1930s for $2,500.  Klein told Jeff:

            We raised a lot of cane.  Literally.  Sugar cane.  We made sorghum molasses from it and sold it in gallon jugs.  We always raised at least three acres of pickles and sold them at the pickle factory in town. Pickles put my brother Ken through college.  We’d pick pickles from mid-July until it was time to go to school.  Actually my older brothers didn’t even attend school until about the third week because that’s when we were making molasses.  Dad would say, “We need you here in the fields.”  Blueberries, asparagus, if you could pick it, we picked it.  If you could sell it, we sold it.

A cousin of Rufus Reyes was in the audience, so Jeff added his interview, only he read Rufus’ part and I his.  Reyes grew up in Lake Village and presently sells flowers at Chicago farmers markets.  Jeff wrote:

  We sat together on Stanley Madison’s school bus the year Rufus entered first grade.  Rufus [whose parents were born in Mexico] didn’t say much.  When he did speak, it was in a language I was not familiar with.  Still, we connected. By the time second grade rolled around, third for me, Rufus could speak English as well as any of us ragamuffins raised south of the Kankakee River – not that great a compliment, I suppose.

When Rufus was in sixth grade he asked Jeff’s dad if he’d play in the school father/son basketball game because his own dad was unfamiliar with the game.  Here is how Manes ended the 2006 column:

  Let it be known, my old man scored that night; he scored a few points indeed. The second he stepped out on the floor of Lake Village gymnasium with my friend, Rufus Reyes, he scored points with me.

Flawed Justice

“It’s an old time tradition when they play their drums at night in Congo Square.” "Congo Square," Sonny Landreth, Mel Melton and Dave Ranson

 Congo Square sculpture by Nigerian Adewale Adenele

-->

For Mardi Gras (French for “Fat Tuesday”) WXRT featured New Orleans music as a tribute to the celebrations taking place on the eve of the Lenten season.  I heard Sonny Landreth’s “Congo Square,” also the name of an area now within Louis Armstrong Park where slaves once gathered to sing and dance on Sundays, their lone day off from their labors as mandated by the 1724 Code Noir.  Congo Square is considered the birthplace of America’s most important indigenous music and dance traditions and for years the site of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

 Robert and Carrie Blaszkiewicz celebrate Mardi Gras at Yats Cajun Creole in Valpo; 
below, Timmy Donald with mother Lillie

-->

Willie T. “Timmy” Donald, 47, was recently released from prison 24 years after falsely convicted of carrying out robberies and a homicide in Glen Park.  After one of the victims was shown his photo, Donald was put into a police lineup and identified by two woman as the culprit. Later one recanted her testimony after seeing the actual killer near her home, but Donald’s defense team was not notified of this revelation.  Even though Donald had an alibi as to his whereabouts at the time of the robberies, the jury did not believe those testifying on his behalf.  Jerry Davich wrote: “Three years ago, prosecutors offered to drop the robbery charge if Donald would drop his challenge to the murder charge. Donald rejected the offer, which would have set him free immediately.” Describing his decision to act on principle at the price of freedom, Donald, the nephew of IUN poet laureate and Physical Plant employee Hollis Donald, said, “I knew I was innocent and I have my faith in God.”  Last month, wrote Davich,  “Donald’s convictions were overturned, his charges, dropped, his name cleared.”  Defense attorney Thomas Vanes, Donald’s advocate for over 20 years, told Bill Dolan of the NWI Times: “These kind of victories are rare, and I savor them when they occur.”

When the Chicago Innocence Center announced on Facebook that Donald was free, hundreds replied with expressions of both thanks and outrage.  Nasuf Cunningham wrote: “It’s a shame how the system gets away with ruining a man’s life.  If I were him, I would sue the pants off the state.  I would have the state so broke that they would not be able to afford to lock up any more [innocent] black people.”

As expected, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders won big in the New Hampshire primaries.  Republican John Kasich finished a strong second.  Chris Christie, who hurt Marco Rubio by calling him the “boy in the bubble” and ridiculing him in debate for repeating a canned comment about Obama four different times, finished sixth and suspended his campaign, as did Carly Fiorina.

In duplicate bridge Charlie and I finished at the top despite my blowing a slam bid of six Diamonds.  My hand consisted of six Diamonds (Ace, King, Queen, and three little ones), Ace spot of Clubs, one small Spade and Ace, Queen, Jack, spot of Hearts.  Charlie had Jack and two little Diamonds, two small Clubs, four Hearts to the Ten, and the Ace, Queen and two little spades.  Using a two-Club “steps” bid, I learned he had 7 to 9 points and then using Gerber found out that he had the fourth Ace.  Opening lead was a Diamond.  After a second round of trump I should have tried the Spade finesse, leading from my hand to the Queen, which would have worked.  Even had it failed, I could have thrown off my losing Club on the Spade Ace.  As it was, I first tried a Heart finesse, and when it failed and Rich Will, sitting to my left, led a small Spade, I panicked and put on the Ace rather than the Queen, leaving me with no chance to get rid of the losing Club trick.  That others also went down in six Diamonds was no consolation.  At home I set up the cards for Toni, and she played the hand properly.

My best bridge maneuver came holding only three high card points, a Queen and Jack of Hearts, part of a six-card suit.  When Charlie bid one Spade, I was void in that suit and passed, but after the person to my left bid two Diamonds and Charlie passed, I bid two Hearts.  Everyone passed, I took nine tricks, and we got top board. 

With gas at $1.25 a gallon, I filled up the Corolla for less than 12 bucks.  The price slump has saved American consumers billions and, hopefully, scuttled the Keystone Pipeline scheme.

I’m watching the seven-hour “Godfather Epic” on HBO, which edited the first two “Godfather” films into chronological order, adding scenes cut from the original movie versions.  As always, Brando is unbelievably compelling as Don Vito Corleone, both the ruthless patriarch and the doting grandfather.  Controlling judges, legislators, and police chiefs, mobsters like Corleone perverted he American justice system.